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Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Twelve Months of Tome of Adventure Design

For 2018 I am going to be utilizing Matt Finch's Tome of Adventure Design for my One-Page Adventures.

During the holiday season I received two physical copies of this book and so I gave one to my daughter for her to use. So after she received her copy I was able to sit down and look through my copy of this book. And I love it! I'm a huge fan of random tables and anything that adds randomness to a game that no one is expecting (including the GM). And this book is just full of tables and tables and tables and tables and etc. There's a lot of tables!
This massive book is divided up into four mini books.
Book 1 - Principles and Starting Points (Locations/Missions/Villain's Plans/etc.)
Book 2 - Monsters (Monsters...duh)
Book 3 - Dungeon Design (Maps/Tricks/Traps/etc.)
Book 4 - Non-Dungeon Adventure Design (Wilderness/Cities/Planar/etc.)

So what this means for my One-Page Adventures is that I will use this book each month to help with creating my One-Page Adventures for 2018.
I played around with Book 2 - Monsters some and here is an example of a monster that was created using Method 1.
I believe there was a total of 7 tables I had to roll on. And I will now use a random name generator to give this monster a name.

Name: Bomul
Type: Fey - Mist Form
Bomul dwells within the abandoned mines of Ghunzle. Given that she is in mist form she could expand throughout the entire mines if she chooses. She has a powerful Giant Bat (Greater), Nil, as her companion. She can summon and command a mist that isn't part of her mist form. She can cause a creature to have a protective adoration for an object that's in their hand. Also, she can summon a swarm of bats at her command. Upon her death the mist form dissipates and what remains is a female creature that no eye has ever seen.
Items: Bat Ring of Swarming - Wearing this ring allows the owner to summon and command a swarm of bats (if not in a cave-like structure then it can only be used at night).
Rirthrar's Necklace - Whenever anyone puts this necklace around their neck the spirit of Rirthrar will attempt to possess the creature. If successful the creature will lose it's natural form and turn into a mist form creature.

I was able to create the idea of Bomul just through the random tables that took not even five minutes to roll on. It gave me a skeletal structure that I was able to flesh out (as I wrote this blog post). So this is just an example of what kind of monster you could get from using the tables in the Tome of Adventure Design.

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