To add some meat to this post, check out a few scenario ideas  I pitched to Margret Weis Productions – one for Serenity, BSG and Supernatural. I wrote these back in late 2007 and never heard back from them. Enjoy!

Serenity

Working Title: Glory, Glory.

Concept Length: 8 pages

Nutshell: Jacob, a singer of unparalleled talent reawakens old hatreds in the remote colony of Lonesome Pines.   By singing old Independent Faction songs from the Unification War, he has inadvertently stirred up the seeds of a rebellion. Rabble rousers want to turn him into a propaganda machine, the Alliance wants to kill him and only the player characters can help him.

Quick backstory: Jacob is a naïve teenager who simply has incredible singing potential. His mother only taught him Browncoat ditties and upon her death, Jacob left the farm to find work. Once he reached the town of Lonesome Pines, he became an instant sensation. Many of the settlers there are veterans of the Unification War and fell for his beautiful renditions of their favorite songs. A dissident named Marley saw how emotional the veterans became when Jacob sang and seized it as an opportunity. He organized a movement to kick the Alliance off the planet forever. With Jacob’s voice as a draw, the resistance became popular. The few Alliance officials on the planet saw trouble brewing and began to crack down on the resistance. The entire colony is in turmoil when the player characters arrive.

Act One: Jacob meets the player characters as they near Lonesome Pines. He attempts to flee town when an Alliance officer spots him and attempts to arrest him. A mob forms, trapping the party, and demands Jacob’s release. Jacob sings to calm the crowd down, but someone shoots the officer. A riot breaks out.

Act Two: The Alliance locks the colony down. Unfortunately for them, they currently lack the manpower to restore order. Cries of ‘Remember Serenity Valley’ ring through the air. Marley sets up a militia and prepares for a fight. The player characters realize that the Alliance will eventually send in enough soldiers to crush the resistance and probably burn Lonesome Pines to the ground. Jacob attempts to stop the resistance but Marley captures him to shut him up.

Act Three: The player characters have to defuse the situation or get out alive. If they can teach Jacob a new song and get him to sing it to pacify the situation or convince Marley that everyone will die in vain, they can peacefully stop the resistance. Otherwise, they will have to dodge Alliance soldiers and angry Browncoats to escape. The Alliance will shoot or arrest anyone they catch in Lonesome Pines.

Battlestar Galactica

Working Title: Stray Dog

Concept length: 16 pages

Nutshell: the captain of a civilian ship hoards resources and deals with the black market. His latest deal has gone south and needs the player characters to go to the heart of the black market, the ship Prometheus to make things right.

Quick backstory: Captain Blackwelder distrusts Fleet Command and hoards whatever resources he can to benefit his ship or to trade to the black market. However, Blackwelder’s last shipment was intercepted by the government. Someone snitched. Blackwelder needs to know who. The party is given the job because Blackwelder doesn’t trust his crew and outside troubleshooters are disposable. .

Act One: Blackwelder meets with the party and offers them the job. Once accepted, the party will be transferred to his ship as new crewmembers. The party can explore the ship and pick up clues to the identity of the snitch. Meanwhile a mysterious figure tries to assassinate the players one by one.

Act Two: The party realizes that the gangsters are setting up Blackwelder for a fall so they can take over his ship. The snitch has planted evidence of murder on the ship that will put Blackwelder for life. The military arrests him. The party tracks the snitch to the Prometheus and learns of several ways to get on board.

Act Three: Once onboard the Prometheus, the players must find the snitch and either capture him or find evidence of his crimes. Players may shoot their way out, negotiate with the criminals or trick them. The gangsters are ruthless but not suicidal.

Supernatural

working title: American Saga

Concept Length: 32 pages

Nutshell: Hundreds of years ago, the Vikings journeyed deep into the wilds of the New World to bury Skard, the most corrupt warrior ever known among the Nordic. Twenty years ago, Skard awoke in his tomb. Yesterday, he declared war on humanity.

Quick backstory: Skard made a bargain with a nameless demon: the souls of his entire clan in exchange for immortality. After slaughtering his family and friends, Skard became a draugr, an undead being of immense power. He raised an army and committed countless atrocities for years. Eventually, he was caught by relatives of his victims. They could not kill him, so they took him to the New World to get rid of him. Skard remained buried until an amateur treasure hunter found his tomb twenty years ago. Once Skard learned of how the world had changed, he decided to bring about a new Dark Age. He would raise an army to destroy civilization.

Act One: Skard kills a violent biker gang in the county jail and raises them as undead raiders.  While the mundane authorities quell suspicions about the bloodbath, the biker gang menaces the countryside. The player characters stops one of the bikers and discovers Nordic runes carved on his body. Researching the runes uncovers some of Skard’s past. With this information, the players can piece together some of Skard’s actions for the last twenty years, as his M.O. never changes. A family was killed in rural Minnesota twenty years ago and had Nordic runes carved on their bodies.

Act Two: The players investigate the dead family and finds clues leading to Skard’s tomb. There, they encounter more of Skard’s forces, undead hunters and survivalists. After defeating them, they learn that Skard needs innocent souls to transform a violent human into an undead slave. This takes them into a massive cavern that Skard dug out. The Viking has kidnapped dozens of children and either sacrificed them to make undead warriors or brainwashed them into serving him.

Act Three: In order to kick start the Dark Ages, Skard needs many innocent souls and violent humans in order to create a proper horde. He plans to hijack five school buses and drive them to a nearby supermax prison. Once there, he will begin a ritual to create an army of the undead. The party gets wind of the plan from a child rescued from Skard’s Tomb, named Nathan. With his help, the players have a chance to permanently destroy Skard.

On May 22

Other tabletop game designers have used the model to finance their work, but they were typically well known in the community and the products they put out through a ransom had a good reputation. For example, Dennis Detwiller co-created Delta Green, an award winning Call of Cthulhu campaign setting. So when he set up ransoms to pay for several Delta Green scenarios, fans had a good idea of what they would get. However, the New World has no publication history. It only began as an informal set of notes for my weekly D&D game. The only reason anyone was willing to pay into the New World ransom or even knew about the campaign was through my podcast.

I am the co-host of Role Playing Public Radio, a tabletop RPG podcast. Aside from a biweekly talk show discussing these games in general, we also record actual play episodes. The actual play shows are normal tabletop RPG games recorded with a digital audio recorder. I use a Zoom H2 recorder, which can record 360 degrees, catching everyone’s voice at the table equally, more or less. These games run from 2 to 5 hours on average. I do not edit them for content, only for quality before I encode them to MP3 and post them on the podcast. They have proven to be popular and I make it a point to record every game I play or run in.

The idea for the New World came to me when I saw a documentary about Columbus’ later voyages and governorship. The 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons came out last year and several listeners had asked me to record a 4E game as an actual play. A D&D game based on the challenges presented with colonization and exploration seemed much more interesting than the average ‘save the world from evil’ narrative. Moral dilemmas over limited resources and the exploitation of the natives also had its own appeal. I wanted the players to initiate the action instead of passively waiting for a NPC to hand out quests to them. So I wrote some notes down and began the campaign.

When I posted the first game, it was a hit, judging from the reactions of the listeners. I continued to run the game and develop the setting. By the seventh game, I had decided to write up the campaign and use the ransom model as a way to pay for RPPR’s hosting fees and some recording gear. I wrote an outline of the New World Primer and set up a ransom on fundable.com. In order to promote the ransom, I reached out to the network of RPPR fans.

RPPR has a presence on several social networks, primarily Facebook and Myspace. Fundable limits all donation drives to 26 days, so I sent out reminders about the ransom several times so that fans wouldn’t forget about it. Every episode released during the ransom drive also had a promo about the ransom. Fortunately, the fans responded and the ransom was met so I began work on it.

A great deal of the work was already done, as I had written quite a bit for the campaign. To flesh it out better, I asked several of my friends who I knew were talented writers if they wanted to contribute any writing to it. While I was prepared to write the entire primer myself, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have even more content. The RPPR co-host, Tom Church wrote adventure hooks to give GMs running the game ideas for their own campaigns.  Cody Walker, one of the players in the game, contributed background material while Patrick Seth Williams, a friend of mine from grad school wrote a great essay about historical colonial law. With this in mind, I also sent out a request for art on the main RPPR site and received free work from four talented artists.

Once I released the primer, I created a static page to showcase the art and make the primer more visible on the main site. Since I plan to create more material for the New World in the future, I’ll update the page with any future PDFs.

Given the amount of time spent creating and laying the primer out, I probably could have made more working for someone else as a freelancer. The added value from this project comes from the fact that I retain control over the New World setting. Usually in the tabletop RPG industry, writers sign over copyright and/or control of their work to the publisher. Every contributor to the primer kept copyright on their art or text. But since I wrote the main text, I can develop the setting in the future in any number of ways.

A growing number of artists are earning good revenue through the Internet but many critics point out that most of them had a reputation before they began to earn any money over the web. Through this project, I’ve learned it’s possible to develop a marketable brand solely on the Internet, even in a niche industry like tabletop RPGs.