That's some great advice
Neanderthal . How long have you been GMing?
As for the monster CR I just reskin enemy npcs as something else of comparable power. If I cant find stats for Orc Warrior Level 4 I just look for any humanoid warrior level 4, maybe increase his strength and con a little, give him some "orc" traits/feats and voila, you get a guy on the fly in 10 seconds.
Good idea. Thanks.
Tome of Adventure Design by Matt Finch - you can use it as an idea generator for nearly everything.
System-wise I think both AD&D and 5E are good choices. They are relatively easy to get a handle on and quick to prep for. AD&D (my personal choice) is a bit more brutal and deadly. Depends on what you and your players enjoy. Some might not want their 2 HP 1st-level magic-user to die instantly from a rat bite. If they play AD&D they have to be open to the fact that their special snowflake character might not survive very long.
By the way, if you're going to learn 1st edition AD&D - read through the
OSRIC retro-clone (it's free). It's much better organized than the actual 1E books. I love them to death, but coherent book organization was not Gary Gygax's strongpoint. After you learn the system with OSRIC, read Gygax's 1E DMG for all the amazing advice and ideas within. It applies no matter what edition you use.
Exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for. Thanks.
Key advice: expect the players to do things you never expected. So be open to the fact they might not take certain plot hooks, and do something completely random. Have some backup stuff prepared you could throw in "on the fly". Some stock locations, dungeons, merchants, town NPCs, interesting situations, etc.
This is pretty much what I'm going for. Just throw enough adventure seeds in there that something is bound to stick. I think having some end-the-world 'main quest' ALMOST invariably becomes very, very, cheesy, so I'm trying to think up some long-term, mid-term, and short-term event chains that will advance and develop somewhat on their own without player involvement + some more context-agnostic events I can throw in pretty much anywhere, e.g. an encounter for one person that can be slotted into a camp watch situation or the party being split. Experience from the player side tells me that the real fun often happens off the rails anyhow. I WANT them to just stumble into interesting stuff to do, and experience the world change around them depending on their action or inaction.
What sort of general plot do you think you might want to have? Are your players more interested in the combat aspect or the roleplaying?
Probably a little of both, with emphasis on the roleplaying. Currently I've just got some ideas bouncing around in my skull. Some examples:
- An innkeeper hires the party to 'take care of' a guy that's threatening to kill him. Tells a story about this guy going around asking for protection money or whatever. Innkeeper is bluffing. He's borrowed a lot of money and sees a way out of paying. Guy is a half-ogre, working as muscle for local crime boss (half ogre's are fucking rare, for obvious reasons, so there's a backstory). Is also his ward. In fact, crime boss is in no way exceptional and carved out his hegemony on the basis of having the biggest muscle around. So if party kills him, they've suddenly got the whole (very local) criminal underworld after them. However, they've upset the balane of power, yadda yadda, factions and shit - innkeeper uses some of his money to purchase protection from upstart gang at a lower price - there's a lot of ways it can go. Basically a whole can of worms from a job gone wrong. Then again, maybe party resolves the situation a different way. They figure out innkeeper is lying, offer to purchase the debt from crime boss - sky's the limit.
- Party comes across down-on-his-luck merchant. Last caravan was attacked by bandits, lost everything. Now he's gone into debt to fund his next venture - this one has to go well or he's in trouble. He can't afford to hire enough guards to protect against banditry - who can? But what the merchants tend to do anyway is join forces and combine into one big caravan. To join the caravan you have to bring four guards to the table. Now, being in a bit of a tight spot financially, down-on-his-luck can't afford to hire professional guards, but he offers to hire you scrubs (the party) for half price. Adventure ensues. Can potentially lead to a fun circle-the-wagons camp defense. Or something else.
- Mysterious murders will be heard about from time to time. Unattended (there'll be a lot of other leads to chase down, after all) this will snowball into a bunch of wererats moving into the sewers, more and more hobos will start appearing as they are pushed out by the rats.
- Party meets a man on the street that tells them about some dangerous necromancer in a tower, or how the mayor is a vampire or something. If other people are questioned about this, they'll just say the man is crazy, don't listen to him. The twist: He actually is. Maybe they end up doing a home invasion on a wizard who is only defending himself, or they end up in trouble with the authorities for going after the mayor. If they fall for it.
- Party goes shopping. Across the street of the shop selling healing potions, a man is offering to sell the same at 2/3 the price. It's a scam. Potions don't work. Party can get the chance to get revenge by getting hired by some merchant's guild or thieves' guild to bring this man to public or private justice, depending on the employer.
This is all still very rough draft type of stuff, and I'm working on a bunch of others, too, but this is the sort of stuff I'm doing right now. Low-key stuff that can still blow up spectacularly. No epic quests to thwart the evil wizard king threatening all of existence with his relic macguffin.
I want to throw in a Smaug-type dragon as a bit of a higher-level thing later on, foreshadowing it with rising food prices and building a bunch of fluff around the whole situation, though. Gotta love the classics.
Edit: Obviously not everything should be a trick or conspiracy. But if it is the case often enough, I imagine it will keep players on their toes and make the world seem more alive. I want to reward them to. Maybe they get offered a sponsorship deal with an armourer (reduced price on armour but it's engraved with ads to do your armour shopping at this dude's smithy). It would be fun to have a player sign a contract to actively advertise to NPCs, but I don't see what reason the armourer would have for trusting the players to honour their end of the bargain. Maybe only offer the sponsorship to clerics and paladins of certain standing or of certain gods?