I've been itching to share what's been going on here, but I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the Captured by Adventure Tips series. I want to make my task list and current goals more public, both to help the community understand where we're going, and partially to hold me accountable!

As of the last post I had just started a playthrough of that adventure, and as of last week we finished! Telothar, Birbin, Vulmar, Jorlaug, and Looge all escaped the Dankwood jungle and defended the frontier town of Gotian from the orc raid they inadvertently brought upon it. We played for three-hours every Saturday, and finished the adventure in just six sessions. You can check out the games broken down to individual encounters on the Captured YouTube Playlist.

I've also continued to run weekly games of the Riverford Freelancers, which are no-commitment one shots open to the public. We've had a good number of new people show up over the past month, including two who were completely new to RPGs and virtual tabletops. As I talked about awhile back, the tools we use to run our games help new players jump right into the action. A party with two greenhorns and one veteran were able to get through four encounters their first night, from not knowing what a d20 was to killing their first troll in three hours. All of the sessions and encounter videos are archived on the Riverford Freelancers YouTube Playlist.

Coming up with interesting quests for the Freelancers to choose from every week has been a good deal of work, but I've enjoyed statting up some of the character ideas I've had floating around in my head as NPCs. I've also introduced new encounter tables and "ongoing events" that persist between sessions, so the choices made by one group of adventurers affect those that play in the following weeks. All in all it's been a rewarding creative effort, and the people playing every week seem to like it! Let me know if you'd like to join!

a single CR-appropriate enemy.

multiple enemies of a single type.

multiple monsters of different type.

an event, which cause effects on creatures in adjacent rooms.

an environment change, which cause effects on all creatures in the dungeon.

nothing.

I made some progress on the "GMless Murderdungeon" I mentioned in my last post, but it's still not in a solid enough state to share. Currently it takes a CR range and an "enemy theme" like "undead" or "orc", and generates rooms by picking two random tiles from our library and then rolling randomly on a table to decide if it generates:

It works… mostly. The open items for it are tweaking the tile-picker code to initially favor tiles that will open up the map better, passing over the various "dead end" tiles for at least the first few rooms generated, and to create the interfaces so that users can add their own events and environment changes into the system. I'm hoping to have it completed by the next time I do one of these posts.

Finally, I've recently did a fresh import of the latest community bestiary. You may have noticed more of those blank-faced tokens on the site, and that's because the number of monsters and NPCs available more than tripled overnight! We're working with members of the community like MartinHeZ to get everything matched up with art as fast as we can! If you'd like to help, shoot Joe a message or head over to the SyncRPG Google+ community!

Previous "What I'm Working On" Posts:

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