Adventure Forge

Adventure Forge A Role Playing Game by Stephen Gordon 1 Adventure Forge RPG © Copyright 2009 by Stephen T. Gordon. Some rights reserved. Reproduction for personal, non-commercial use is permitted. 2 ADVENTURE FORGE Part 1: The Player's Guide INTRODUCTION The year is 650 A.D. Your father has united several tribes in southern Europe to become a popular and powerful warlord, but he now realizes that he will never live to become a king. He hopes that you will succeed where he has failed. You have trained since early childhood to be a powerful fighter. There are stronger men in your central European region of Rhaetia, but none come close to your martial skills in close combat. Your people see greatness in your future, but you have much to learn. Your best friend has trained alongside you for as long as you can remember. He is a berserker. His gift is blazing speed. In the time it takes for you to kill one adversary, he can do moderate damage to three. The two of you would happily venture forth alone into the world seeking adventure, but wisdom demands that your party include two more members: a monk so skilled at healing that he can treat injuries in the midst of combat, and the best marksman in the community - a ranged warrior who must be protected from close combat but who can deal out serious damage from a distance. The next few years are critical. Your party must gain battle experience, knowledge, and wisdom. You must build reputations as formidable and powerful men. You must gather wealth. Accomplish all this, and you will have the power to build a nation out of the ashes of the Roman Empire. A world of adventure awaits. The World of Adventure Forge Adventure Forge is set in Europe a century after Rome fell to Germanic invaders. Roman tyranny is dead, but so too is civilization. Much of what was known before is rotting away in musty books. Treasures lie dormant in forgotten ruins. There is no magic, but the idea of magic has overtaken the world as superstition has spread. This setting is different in one major way from historical Europe. Small bands of Neanderthals have survived in remote places. They stay away from large groups. Their appearance is rare enough that people from larger towns are mostly unaware of their existence. The people who do know of them call them “brutes.” Occasionally they attack remote villages for food and weapons. They are powerful enemies individually, but they don't fight in a coordinated fashion like other humans. 3 Role Playing Games The first modern role playing game (or RPG) was introduced in 1974 by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Their game, Dungeons and Dragons, was published as a boxed set of three small booklets. Now in its 4th edition, the core rules of Dungeons and Dragons fill about a dozen hard back volumes plus many other supplements. Another RPG, the Hero System, tried to keep their core rules in a single volume. But at a phone-book-sized 592 pages, some players have joked that the 5th edition Hero manual is bullet-proof. Those games are very fun, but I believe that many potential table-top role players are discouraged by the learning curve and expense of games that size. There is a place for smaller, inexpensive games like Adventure Forge. This game is an ideal RPG for young and novice players. It is a simple and complete system fully realized within this single short book. In creating Adventure Forge I assumed no prior RPG experience. Adventure Forge is easy to learn, but there is sufficient complexity to hold the interest of veteran RPG gamers. What is a Role Playing Game? Role Playing Games are different from other games in a couple of important ways. Most games have clear winners and clear losers. Players play in direct opposition to one another. What's good for the other player is bad for you, and vice-versa. Game theorists call such games - which include everything from checkers to football - zero sum games. In contrast, RPG's are played cooperatively by players who control Player Characters (PC's) against Non- Playing Characters (NPC's) that are controlled by a Game Master (GM). But even the GM and the players are not in direct opposition. The GM's job is not to beat the players. The GM's job is to challenge the players sufficiently with scenarios, opposition, puzzles, traps, and plot twists to keep play fun and exciting. For a player, even the death of his character isn't necessarily defeat. In many RPG's there are ways to cheat death, but even when death can't be avoided a memorable end for a heroic character should be considered a victory. The player has helped create an epic tale. And the player can always create a new character and rejoin the adventure. The second difference between RPG's and traditional games is demonstrated by the “my-character- wouldn't-do-that” test. If the phrase “my character wouldn't do that” could ever be logically spoken during a game, its a RPG. A RPG is an exercise of collaborative, improvisational theater. Instead of just having a token on a board, a RPG player has a role to play. He plays a character that might, if he chooses, have a significantly different personality from his own. 4 Kids have been playing primitive RPG's like Cops and Robbers as long as there have been kids. But modern RPG systems provide structure and rules that allow the outcome of a battle to be conclusively determined. You will never experience the interminable “I got you!” “No you didn't!” argument when playing Adventure Forge. The Use of Masculine Pronouns Throughout this book masculine pronouns such as “he” and “him”are used generically. This is not intended to be chauvinistic. Rather, I'm avoiding the awkwardness of saying “he or she” constantly. Male and female characters - and players - are completely equal in Adventure Forge. What you will need to play As part of my simple-is-better game building philosophy, I've tried to keep the materials necessary for playing Adventure Forge very basic: • This book, • Six sided dice (at least 3 per player), • Ten sided dice (at least 2 per player), • Sharpened pencils with erasers, • A battle grid with 1-inch squares, • A 12-inch ruler, • Miniatures suitable for use on a battle grid with 1 inch squares, • Square graph paper (¼ inch squares is great), and • Plenty of character sheets (for both player characters and non-player characters), and • An Adventure Forge game building form. It is recommended that each player, including the GM, have 2 ten sided dice and 3 six sided dice. You may already have six sided dice, pencils, and a ruler around your house. The character sheets and Adventure Forge game building form can be photocopied from this book or downloaded from the Adventure Forge website: http://www.adventureforge.blogspot.com You can also download free printable graph paper. 5 A Quick Word on Dice Notation Role playing games like Adventure Forge typically use more than one kind of die. Adventure Forge holds the types of dice used to 2: standard six sided dice, and ten sided dice. Other games use 4 sided, 8 sided, 12 sided, and 20 sided dice. When referring to dice, the convention in role playing and other hobby games is to use this notation: 1d6, or 2d10, or 2d6+1 Within the notation, the first number represents the number of dice you are meant to roll. The “d” stands for dice. The number after the “d” represents the sides of the dice. There might also be a + or – modifier number. If the GM instructs you to roll “2d6+1,” pick up two six sided dice, roll them, and then add one for the result. Ten Sided Dice For both game building and game playing Adventure Forge requires the generation of random numbers between 1-100. The most obvious way to do this is with two 10 sided dice. The two 10 sided dice need to be different from each other so that you can determine which die represents tens, and which die represents ones. Often ten sided dice are sold in pairs with one die having 10's on it, the other 1's. But different colored dice (perhaps green for tens, red for ones) work fine too. Practically any hobby store carries ten sided dice, and you can buy them cheaply online. Because you are rolling for numbers between 1 and 100, rolling straight zeros is considered 100, not 0. The Percentile Success Roll Different RPG's have different dice for the basic success roll. D&D (and many other successors) use D20. 3d6 is another popular choice used by GURPS and many other systems. Adventure Forge uses 2d10 - percentile dice. One advantage of using 2d10 is that it is really easy to know the percentage likelihood of success or failure. Assume, for example, that after adding in all modifiers a particular action has a difficulty of “25,” that means that player must roll 26 or higher to succeed. That roll has a 25% chance of failure, 75% chance of success. Usually there will be modifiers. If an action has a base difficulty of 25, but the character has a trait that grants a +20, the chance of success shoots to 95%. 25 – 20 = 5. Any roll, 6 or better, would be a success. 6 The Battle Grid Adventure Forge requires the use of a battle grid and miniatures or markers to represent the player characters and the non-player characters.

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