Building a Better Adventure: Monte Cook Does It!

A few weeks ago, I was pointed to an adventure product coming from Monte Cook Games titled "Weird Discoveries". This is a collection of adventures for the "Numenera" game, a game that I've enjoyed playing but don't ever expect to run, so the product was of limited interest to me for itself.

However, the press release for the product mentioned a new adventure format that Monte had developed that should help the GM run the adventures with zero (or near-zero) preparation, which is obviously an interesting proposition. And so I hunted down the free preview, and took a look.

And the new format is very, very good.

It all centres around a map of the adventure location, which is presented as a double-page spread (although, tragically, the age of the tablet has just made the double-page spread obselete!). But in addition to the map, that page also pulls out all the key data points so that the GM can see these at a glance.

Where the adventure has clues (or 'keys' as he terms them), these are also marked. But, cleverly, the keys don't have fixed locations but instead have several locations where they could be found. This is an elegant way to square the circle of the "required clues" problem - the PCs might miss the clue in one location, but should probably find it in one of the three!

The map is then surrounded with a few pages of background text that can be read quickly if time permits, but which can be skipped if necessary. But the product places a lot of trust on the GM to improvise things as needed - the map gives you a couple of bullet points on an NPC and then leaves you to it. Which is good for the more experienced GM who doesn't need everything spelled out for him.

Of course, the format is helped immensely by Numenera's rules-lite nature: an entire encounter can be summarised in a sentence. However, it's not impossible to think you could do the same in D&D but break the encounter out to a separate page with the requisite information. Which, of course, starts to get reminiscent of the unlamented Delve Format, but...

At the very least, I think it's worth checking out the preview. There's definitely some ideas there worth... borrowing.