The Imaginary Consultation

You may remember my rant about the difficulties I faced trying to get players interested in my recent RPG obsession, the 2011 version of the British classic Advanced Fighting Fantasy, a lovely Old School game with two unique qualities* that I’m certain any serious gamer would really enjoy.

Unfortunately, most serious gamers just can’t get past the name. The title “Advanced Fighting Fantasy” has a slightly juvenile ring to it and, when I mention it, yields a stink-face reaction no different from the reaction I would get if I told them the game was called “Rainbow Baby Unicorn Fun Party.”

Currently, I remain group-less and surrounded by a fanatical army of D&D 3.5/Pathfinder zealots in ALL of my social circles. Hope points and laughs at me.

Nevertheless, I'd like to “run” some solo AFF sessions that will yield immediately usable adventuring material for my someday-group play - scenarios, locales, villains, maps, etc. Having learned from my experiment with the Donald Featherstone-inspired Press Gang Questionnaire, I'd like to once again play the role of solo GM (no real players), but with extra "twists" thrown in that expand the Press Gang concept.

This includes pressing all of YOU into service! Welcome to Press Gang Project #1!

Here is your first assignment:

A considerate GM always consults first with his or her players before creating the broad strokes of a campaign so that players' desires can be incorporated into the adventures. Sometimes, this is easily accomplished; at other times, requests like Conan-meets-Ravenloft just don’t make any sense, but a responsible GM does his or her best anyway.

To simulate consulting with my imaginary players, I've written a secret paragraph-long adventure set-up, but, in the Mad-Libs style, I've left six key elements blank.

YOUR JOB: Fill in those blanks for me by writing six responses (as per the directives below) in a comment to this post before December 5, 2011. I'll roll whatever dice are appropriate to randomly choose from all of your responses and plug them into the set-up. As GM, I will have to turn the set-up into a full-fledged adventure.

KEY ELEMENTS

1. an exotic medieval fantasy edifice

2. an adjective of three or more syllables

3. a type of terrain

4. a past tense verb

5. a broad type of RPG conflict or challenge

6. an original name for a very evil person/thing

That's it for now!

Keep it (reasonably) clean, folks! Thanks!





*I’ll describe those two qualities in another post.