Running published RPG adventures. Or not.

I've been thinking about RPGs and I've noticed that I mostly run my own adventures. And when I say mostly, I mean almost exclusively. And certainly, since I came back to roleplaying from the wilderness, they have all been my own adventures.

An aside: I'm fairly late to the awesomeness that is John Harper’s Lady Blackbird. But the second thing I thought was "How can I do something similar?" Not "I want to run this," but instead how can I make my own copy... (My first thought was "I want to play this.") Thinking about it now, that seems a bit odd. But it's clear that my desire to run my own stuff is clearly deeply ingrained.

So which published adventures have I run?

I've had a good think about this, and the only published adventures I can ever remember running are:

• Annic Nova
• Murder on Arcturus Station
• Chamax Plague

And I think that's it - three Traveller adventures. I can't remember running any published Call of Cthulhu scenarios. I played in a couple, but all I can remember of my own scenarios is stuff that I created myself. (I may have run The Haunting - I can't remember. I have memories of that as a game, but I can't remember if I was a player or the Keeper.)

Making it my own

While Annic Nova didn't require any Referee input, I still added a rival band of adventurers to add some conflict. (Otherwise it's just wandering around some empty rooms.)

The other two adventures are interesting in that they both require some Referee input.

• Murder on Arcturus Station is a murder mystery - but it gives you the suspects with motives, and lets you decide who the culprit was.
• The Chamax Plague is an Alien/Aliens scenario - a crashed ship with a strange alien beasty to hunt. But the adventure gives you the deckplans and explains the creature's biology and lets you decide where the creature is hiding.

Early DIY Traveller scenarios

That's a common theme among many of the early Traveller scenarios - the idea that the Referee will do some of the work to turn it into a full adventure for the players (see Kinunir, Twilight's Peak or Leviathan). Similarly, one of the most popular features of the GDW in-house magazine (Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society) were the Amber Zones - short adventure seeds that required a fair bit of work (or improvisation) before hitting the table.

Over time Traveller's scenarios became more precise and structured. But I have fonder memories for the early scenarios that required me to put some effort in. (The sunk-cost fallacy may be at work here, making me value those scenarios more precisely because I put the effort in.)

The effort I put into those early Traveller scenarios did mean that I owned them, and probably led me to creating my own scenarios (as it turns out to be really easy).

Another aside: Thinking about, most of the games I've played have been created by the GM. I don't remember playing through many published scenarios. My sample size is very small though and I've no idea which is more common though - creating your own or using published adventures.

So why buy adventures?

I am aware of the hypocrisy in writing RPG adventures (and having some published) but only ever running my own, however. But of all gaming material, I prefer to read adventures - partly for ideas, but also because they give a clear demonstration of how a game is meant to be played. (One of the challenges I find with PbTA games like Urban Shadows is that I can't visualise how they are meant to be played.)

But yes - why buy adventures if you're never going to run them? Because they're chock full of ideas to steal and often they're a pleasure to read.

(That approach was one of the drives that led to Tales of Terror, as I explain here.) 

A new goal for 2020

So now that I've identified this blind spot, I'm going to try and run a couple of published scenarios before the year is out.

Looking back at Tales of Terror

I first published Tales of Terror in 1990.

Tales of Terror was put together using an Amstrad PCW 8512. I had bought one in 1986 or 1987 to write my dissertation. While I did use it for that, I also discovered a joy in writing that I didn’t know I had. That eventually led to Tales of Terror (and many things beyond).

The idea from Tales of Terror came from my delight in Call of Cthulhu’s elaborate handouts. For me, Call of Cthulhu was the first rpg that made good use of handouts, but one thing that I found slightly irritating was that it was always clear when you found a handout - you could tell from the fact that it had been copied from the book.

As a Keeper I liked the idea that you could drop other handouts into a scenario that might lead to other places. I envisaged a product that was almost entirely handouts (newspaper cuttings, extracts from books, letters, and so on), with some simple ideas for where the handouts might take you. (When I look back on that now, I wonder if that was really a sensible idea. As a player I might have found it very frustrating.)

From there, that lead me to the Tales of Terror format. (The idea of three different variations I took from Traveller’s 76 Patrons.)

That’s why the first edition features so many newspaper cuttings and book extracts. Over time, I realised that they weren’t necessary, and they’re rarer now.

Garrie Hall was my co-conspirator with Tales of Terror, and he helped with the printing. Garrie had produced a small-press fiction fanzine called Tales After Dark. As luck would have it, Garrie lived in Loughborough, where I was studying at university. I liked the feel of Tales After Dark; its glossy card covers gave it a veneer of quality that was lacking in many rpg fanzines of the time. We used the same printer for Tales of Terror and printed 250 copies.

I did the art in the first edition, inspired by Lynn Willis’ silhouettes in Call of Cthulhu. I didn’t like later editions of Call of Cthulhu that had detailed picture of the entities. Silhouettes left plenty to the imagination, and let me fill out the details. So I took the same approach with Tales of Terror.

Pulling it all together and getting it into print was one thing. Selling it was another. I’m not very good at selling. I sold a few by post, I sold a few at Convulsion, and I sent a whole bunch to John Tynes to sell via Pagan Publishing.

I sent a couple to Chaosium, just out of courtesy. I got a nice letter from Lynn Willis, followed by a scary letter from Greg Stafford telling me I’d infringed their trademark. That caused me a sleepless night or two before it was resolved, but it seemed that Chaosium thought that Tales of Terror was a professional publication, rather than the not-for-profit small press zine it most definitely was. (Mark Morrison suggested I should consider it a compliment.)

Pagan Publishing persuaded me to edit two more volumes, one in 1996 and one in 2000. All I had to do this time was put the words together. They took care of the layout and the sales. That was easier, but looking back I’m not sure if that was a good thing or not.

In 1994 I got my first web-space, and one of the first things I did was create a Tales of Terror website. That’s now defunct, as is the website that followed it. I am now slowly populating a new Tales of Terror website using Blogger, here. If you want to keep up you can follow it via RSS, or my Tales of Terror Google+ collection.

I still write the occasional Tale, but only two or three a year, just to keep my hand in. My most recent was The Old Quarry.

As for the future, I will continue to populate the new website with all the old Tales, and I will continue to write new Tales now and again, as the mood strikes me. But a new collection? I’m not so sure.