The Adventure Crafter

by Tana Pigeon, Jorge Muñoz (Illustrator)

Create Adventure outlines, seeds, and events for any RPG, in advance or on the spot! The Adventure Crafter adds to the Crafter series of Game Master tools a system for randomly generating an unfolding story that you can use as the framework for a custom built adventure or for solo role-play. Using a system of randomly generated story tropes, combined with Character and Storyline management and creative interpretation, the Adventure Crafter can create the structure for an entire adventure, the idea for an adventure that you can develop, an opening scene to an adventure to get you started, or it can be used as a tool to generate inspiration and ideas for your own adventures. Unlimited worlds of adventure await!

Genres: Role Playing Games, Games

124 pages, Paperback

Published March 5, 2019

Reviews

[Ramón Nogueras Pérez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Otra herramienta tan útil e imprescindible como el Mythic Game Master Emulator, pero aplicado al diseño de aventuras. Puede ser una buena combinación para desarrollar una aventura, y luego usar el MGME en la aventura. De hecho, el MGME tiene ideas para usarlos en combinación, pero eso con un grupo de jugadores (que es como lo uso yo) puede ser muy lento.

100% recomendable

[Hess]

First impressions - the Adventure Crafter is a stand-alone GM tool that can be used with or without Mythic, in group play or solo play, and as part of a game or as a stand-alone story generation tool. How well it plays will depend on your style (if you're solo) and/or your preferences (if you're a GM). Tana includes an example of using the Adventure Crafter to generate backstory for e.g. a region or city if you haven't a tool for that, but personally I think I'd rather opt for something like Ex Novo or I'm sorry did you say street magic to do this. The system includes a character generation tool too, but right now I can't provide a good read on how it would be different or better than something like say, U.N.E.

What Adventure Crafter does well is:
• generating tense (and unexpected) scenes using dice and tables
• connecting dice rolls to tone, e.g. social, adventure, tense, etc.
• tying these scenes together sequentially using lists, enabling an overarching narrative

I could see it being incredibly useful for GMs who are trying to set up tense and interesting scenarios for their groups.

Where I am (presently) reserving judgement is in its application to solo play. The Adventure Crafter creates scenes by telling you who is in the room, what they want, and how they might interact. You then use your system of choice to navigate these challenges. The strength of this approach is that the scenes are coherent - or, at least - tie together in some sense. The weakness of this approach is that there aren't any surprises left within the scene. True, you may still get a bad dice roll and injure a body part, but it is unlikely that a new person / reinforcements will suddenly shake up your combat unless you explicitly roll for this with an Oracle. This may or may not work depending on your roleplaying style.

I have added AC to my to-play list, and will update this review once I have dabbled more with it.