The Kitchen

The Kitchen is what I call my works in progress when it comes to tabletop RPGs. These are either adventures I'm working on, published adventures I'm assimilating (studying, re-studying, and re-writing published adventures so completely that they feel like as if I had written them), or RPGs I'm reading.

This post goes hand in hand with a post I made earlier about my Big & Little 5. The overall idea is to refine all of my diverse RPG gaming tastes down into something manageable, so that I'm not spinning my wheels studying RPGs I'll never play, writing adventures I'll never run, or otherwise inefficiently spending my nerd time. I'm publishing this to simultaneously create accountability, and to formalize my thought process in hopes of it creating a lasting infrastructure in my brain.

So without further ado, the current projects are cooking in the kitchen:

-Assimilate D&D Starter Set: My Boardgames at Work event has now changed into an RPG at Work event, beginning next Thursday. I want to have the Starter Set's beginning adventure, The Lost Mine of Phandelver, down cold, and broken into hour-long chunks for the long haul.

-Assimilate Masks of Nyarlathotep: Easily the biggest, most ambitious adventure I've ever seen, Masks is a Call of Cthulhu adventure that is a campaign in and of itself. For those of you unaware, Masks of Nyarlathotep is, essentially, a tabletop RPG version of a game of Eldritch Horror. PCs travel the globe unraveling an epic mystery. Finances are tracked, a calendar is used to keep track of time, and numerous red herrings and side quests open up throughout the course of the game. As if all of that weren't enough, the adventure has an open structure; PCs could go literally anywhere in the world, right from the opening hours of play, if they wanted. Assimilating this game into my brain could be the project of a lifetime...and if I pull it off, being able to have something this epic on tap could last me years.

-Assimilate the Dark Spiral: This is a big adventure/mini-campaign for The Strange. It, too, follows an open structure, and can be a great starting point for people new to the game.

-Assimilate the Devil's Spine: See above, but for Numenera instead of The Strange.

-Assimilate the Gathering Storm: This Warhammer adventure is every bit as premium/deluxe an experience as the game itself, complete with customized cards for new abilities, encounters, and magic items! It's an interesting adventure from what I've read so far. Getting it down cold in my head will allow me to run Warhammer on a moment's notice, something I'd greatly love to be able to do.

-Assimilate Splintered State: The first major adventure released for the fifth edition of Shadowrun is an awesome showcase of what's great about the system, plus a great segue into the bigger "plotline" of the game. It also has a great, logical progression to it. I've already read it twice, so assimilation of this beast is almost complete.

-Continue work on “The Right to Know” Campaign: My own idea for a modern Cthulhu epic is approximately one-fourth of the way done. The first chapter, "The Digital Tome," is an adventure I've run several times and am happy with how it turned out. The second chapter, "The Sudden Knife," is complete and ready for play but hasn't gotten to the table yet. The third through eigth chapters have yet to be written.

-Re-tool, rewrite “The Longest Game”: My crazy God Machine Chronicle adventure landed with a dull thud when I brought it out a few months ago, proving that GMing while stoned on pain medication following a tooth extraction is about as bad an idea as it sounds. However, in the months since, I've re-read The God Machine Chronicle, and with my new love of Demon: the Descent, I'm ready to rework this adventure into something truly bizarre and amazing.

-Read Mindjammer: This huge transhuman sci-fi game runs on Fate Core. I want to read it in the hopes of finding something a little heftier than Nova Praxis, but not quite as hefty as Eclipse Phase.