Level 2
As I have said, the plan was always that the Adventure series would get upgrades rather than expansions. So when I:embarked on the first set of updates earlier this year, I had three aims.
The first was to fold back in anything I had improved on when writing the new editions. So there’s the new covers, the new formats for the tables, proper titles on the QRS so you can remember which is which if you have more than one, purely cosmetic stuff. Then there’s tweaks to the rules like how to pick up weapons off incapacitated friends or adversaries, becoming disarmed in hand-to-hand, having a roll when throwing grenades, little things that improve what we have rather than changing them. The only big change was to do away with “uncovering story arcs” and moving the completely random scenario picker to an Optional idea.
The second was to introduce some new rules. I’m wary about doing this though, so what you’ll find this time around is some additional ideas in the Optional sections of the rules and in the first four it’s only small stuff, like giving players permission to assign experience instead of randomly deciding who gets it. When I got to Guild and Squad though I was already toying with adding more RPG like elements to the games, so I’m trialling a couple of small things so to see if there’s appetite for more. One is a different look at injuries, that gives a roll for where the injury is and then the concept that if you get injured twice in the same way that creates a lingering term niggling effect (or immediately if the character took a major injury). The other is defining experience in terms of gaining skills instead of just a bland +1 on a stat. I’ll be interested in feedback on these once you see them. If they go down well then the next round of updates can improve on them and roll them into the whole set
The third, and main, plan was to keep adding story arcs. The Arcs are the “big thing” that differentiates the Adventure Series from other solo games as far as I know, so that needs to keep being the hook. A funny thing happened though. As soon as I started on the new ones I realised that the 5 special and 10 random formula was limiting me. The original idea was that writing arcs would be easier if I only needed 5 new scenarios each time, but instead it became more difficult trying to work in the more superficial random scenarios into a complete story. I also had the thought I’ve expressed here already, that players are more likely to run a different arc than to replay one, so the mechanism to make them all easy to replay is probably wasted, especially if I stick to my promise to keep adding new ones.
So all the new Arcs became 15 brand new scenarios, and that created more involved stories, which in turn led me to think of them as “level 2” stories. Which means again that by the time I got to Guild and Squad I was ready to run with that as the concept. So that’s what I’m finishing off right now and will be publishing next week, the updates to Guild and Squad that are specifically adding follow-on arcs for your Party or Squad to keep going instead of starting fresh. In both cases I’ve ended up re-writing the tenth Arc that was already there as well as adding two more. Tomorrow I’ll tell you what these stories are.