Missions are hard to write. Most of the ones I’ve looked at (for D&D, old school D&D, and Cyberpunk RED) have been weak. I find the best missions are remixes of official modules written by GMs who have run them.
Yeah, in the end you’ll always end up doing an inspiration rather than running it directly. But among pre-prepared missions there are those that are flexible and those that rely on assumptions. I was hoping that maybe someone had looked at this book and has an opinion which category these fall in
Waterdeep: Dragonheist was pretty rough. There isn’t a lot of player choice, and there’s a ten scene railroad where the macguffin is yoinked away from the players at the end of each scene.
War of the Burning Sky was similarly linear.
So far I like some of missions in Tales of Night City.
The Cyberpunk mission format encourages authors to make less linear scenarios. It reminds the author that multiple paths are to be expected.
Having said that, I have a hard time with Kibble Flavoured Popcorn and Drummer and the Whale from Tales of the Red because scenes aren’t tied together well, or some scenes don’t require the players to do anything.
This is where the remixes come in. Seasoned GMs can easily improve individual scenes while keeping the shape of the adventure.
Missions are hard to write. Most of the ones I’ve looked at (for D&D, old school D&D, and Cyberpunk RED) have been weak. I find the best missions are remixes of official modules written by GMs who have run them.
Yeah, in the end you’ll always end up doing an inspiration rather than running it directly. But among pre-prepared missions there are those that are flexible and those that rely on assumptions. I was hoping that maybe someone had looked at this book and has an opinion which category these fall in
Can you give any examples, either good or bad?
Waterdeep: Dragonheist was pretty rough. There isn’t a lot of player choice, and there’s a ten scene railroad where the macguffin is yoinked away from the players at the end of each scene.
War of the Burning Sky was similarly linear.
So far I like some of missions in Tales of Night City.
You mean this?
Yeah! That’s the one. The Cyberpunk RED subreddit has some good remixes of the missions.
In general the impression I have from reading various sources is that Cyberpunk missions are good sources
The Cyberpunk mission format encourages authors to make less linear scenarios. It reminds the author that multiple paths are to be expected.
Having said that, I have a hard time with Kibble Flavoured Popcorn and Drummer and the Whale from Tales of the Red because scenes aren’t tied together well, or some scenes don’t require the players to do anything.
This is where the remixes come in. Seasoned GMs can easily improve individual scenes while keeping the shape of the adventure.