After running two sessions of The Riverford Freelancers and tweaking things a bit, we’re excited to make the campaign files available publicly! Running Riverford Freelancers sessions yourself is as easy as opening the campaign file, starting a server, and using quests, macros, maps, and NPCs from SyncRPG to generate encounters on the fly.

Loading a campaign and starting a server was covered in GM Academy #4: How To Run Escape From Fort Nurovd. If you have any questions or problems, let us know on the SyncRPG forums, or in our Google+ Community. There are multiple members of the community who are happy to help!

“Home base” for the adventure is the Riverford Freelancers map, a small building where the PCs are given quests by the retired halfling adventurer, Sibit. If you click over to “Select Map”, you’ll see all of the other ones are grayed out, indicating that they are hidden to the players. When all the players are connected to your server, they should automatically snap to the Riverford Freelancers map, as it's the only one visible. Instruct them to drag in their tokens and sync them while you begin the session.

As mentioned in my post about the first Freelancer session, I generally open with some flavor about the building and Sibit himself before letting the PCs describe themselves to each other, while I take some time to review quests tagged Riverford. Drag the quests you want to offer your players into the object layer. They’ll be able to click on them and read a little bit about the quests, while you check out the GM-only notes that explain everything you need to know to run the encounters.

When the party has expressed interest in a few quests and is ready to leave you can switch to another map. Generally you will want to go to the hex map of the Three Rivers Valley and start adventuring, but if you and your PCs are more interested in urban adventures and exploring the town, the map of Riverford is provided, complete with notable landmarks and NPCs from The Rescue of Doniert Ironvale.

Feel free to add your own NPCs and make the town your own! If you do, share them on SyncRPG and tag them “Riverford” so others can make use of your creations!

To move the players’ tokens to another map: select all their tokens, and cut them with CTRL+X. Switch to the desired map, hover the mouse where you would like to put the PCs, and then paste them with CTRL+V. Then, set the map to player visible if it wasn’t already by going to Map > Player Visible or by hitting CTRL+H. Pan and zoom in the window until you’re happy, and then go to Tool > Enforce Players to Current Map (CTRL+E) and Tool > Center Players on Current View (CTRL+F).

There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts flying around! The most important one to remember is how to snap your PCs clients to your view: CTRL+E, CTRL+F.

Once on the hex map of the three Rivers Valley, I typically make a token for the party by copying of one of the party members tokens and shrink it down by right clicking on it and changing its size, and then place it in the hex with Riverford in it near the center of the map.

At this point, it’s time to set the PCs loose! My last Tech Tuesday post has some tips for running hexploration adventures, including explanations of how to use the different tools and macros to speed up the sandbox exploration rules from Paizo’s Ultimate Campaign. Allow them to move around the map however they wish, fully exploring tiles or just passing through them en route to some quest. Roll random encounters, and let the PCs clean up the Three Rivers Valley.

Whenever a random encounter, hazard, or quest objective comes up, drag in a map for the event to take place in, cut/paste the PC tokens and snap them to the map with CTRL+E, CTRL+F, and drag whatever NPCs or macros you need straight in. They’ll all work with the provided macro framework!

Rinse and repeat until it’s time to stop! In our second session, we were able to get through six encounters in under three hours, on top of lots of exploration and some light roleplaying. And we were able to do all that with almost no prep time, with free-to-use, community-created quests and VTT assets.

We will continue to run the bi-weekly session on Tuesdays, and are planning more sessions soon!

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