Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Designing an Epic Campaign for TARPG - Part 3: Adventures!

 

Over the last few weeks, the Thaumaturgical Workshop has distilled the mathematical essence of Talisman Adventures to begin building the fundamental structure of a Campaign for the Crown of Command.

 

We have a campaign of Three Acts, each Act taking place across one of the three iconic regions of the Talisman game board. The Acts take players from 1st to 10th level, in a 100 hour campaign.

 

We'll now get down to the adventures themselves - the Chapters of each Act of the Campaign. 

 

I would like each of these chapters to be about 6 hours of play. This allows the Three Acts of the adventure to be neatly broken down to three 2 hour sessions.

 

At approximately 30 hours for each Act of the campaign, we're looking at each Campaign Act consisting of Five Chapters. Hammering my sums to fit neatly to this, requires about 10-12 XP-worthy  encounters for each chapter. This seems a bit high, and probably undermines a whole bunch of my earliest assumptions - but might mean players expecting to earn 3 or 4 XP from a single session of play, which I figure is reasonable. Going back to my "average of 1.5XP per encounter", this now suggests 6 to 8 encounters to make up a Chapter (ie, an Adventure). Keeping things neat to all my previous made-up assumptions and guesses, I'm going with six encounters per chapter. I.e. one encounter per hour of play, which seems about right.

 

Here is what we have so far:

 

The Campaign for the Crown of Command will comprise three Acts. Each Act will comprise Five Chapters. Each Chapter will comprise Six Encounters. 

 

Entirely destroying the Three Act structure, the mind-bending, gods-enraging Chapter 4 will dare to speculate about what those Adventures might be... Be sure to return to the Thaumaturgical Workshop Next Week!

 

Image: a prince a lute player a maiden a glowing orb treasure and a dragon in the style of a Tenniel illustration (OpenAI)

 

***HOT OFF THE PRESSES***

 

The pdf of Talisman Adventures is  FREE TO DOWNLOAD until the end of March! That's about 300 pages of top-notch RPG - for nuttin'!

 

What, you still haven't booked a ticket to play Talisman Adventures at AireCon? Three weeks to go and you're sitting on your hands? Crimminy, you is laid back! I shouldn't be telling you this, but if there are any tickets left, you can get them HERE

 

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