I have put Mothership RPG aside for the last day to work on a One Page Dungeon for a book called Dissident Whispers. The project exists to raise bail money for protesters.
In addition, I have lent 3Deep to the DriveThruRPG Black LivesMatter charity bundle. 3Deep has been in the Australian Bushfires Bundle, Médecins Sans Frontières/Covid-19 bundle and the other charity bundles.
It is one of the easiest things in the world for game creators to lend or donate products to charity bundles, or even as in this week to create something new. Games are just ideas put into words. Most game designers for RPGs, and adventure writers, are long term players and Game Masters. Creating adventures is pretty much second nature. All we are giving away is time.
My contribution is called Snake Temple Abduction and is a classic ‘rescue the hostage’ adventure. I have made it system neutral and to some extent power level neutral. I have done this by using and naming classic monsters, you may guess from the title that there are snakes involved. For the numbers encountered I use multiples of the party size. So there could twice as many as the party in one encounter, for example. It means that a GM with three players does not end up with a TPK whereas a GM with seven players ends up running a stroll through with no challenge.
NPCs tend to be described in relative power. Taking the strongest player character in the party you can say whether the NPC is of equal, lower or higher power than the character. For games with levels that could directly relate to level, for games, like Hero System, it could mean total points used in the build.
I have always been a fan of these scalable adventures. I like to provide alternative monsters, what could be a succubus at high level could be a medusa at mid level. You can frequently find power level appropriate monsters to scale something up or down, giving adventures a wide appeal.
When Dissident Whispers is released I will be sure to let you all know.
Until then, I am back to writing for Mothership RPG.