The Railroad Beyond the Mountains of Madness

darthfozzywig · May 03, 2018, 03:32:36 PM

Yeah, the problem (if it's a problem) with Beyond the Mountains of Madness is that it's a mega-adventure/mini-campaign. Really, it's probably more my issue than my players'. Most of them will eat it up, while inside it eats me up.

Spinachcat · May 03, 2018, 03:55:32 PM

Quote from: darthfozzywig;1037337Most of them will eat it up, while inside it eats me up.

That's a recipe for disaster.

Go medieval on that campaign until it does what you want and makes you happy.

RPGPundit · May 05, 2018, 01:36:58 AM

Here's the thing: the significant majority of the most famous CoC adventures were railroads to one degree or another. It's just that they were so well designed that they still worked, usually spectacularly well.

darthfozzywig · May 06, 2018, 12:37:34 AM

Quote from: RPGPundit;1037632Here's the thing: the significant majority of the most famous CoC adventures were railroads to one degree or another. It's just that they were so well designed that they still worked, usually spectacularly well.

Agreed. And this group is good at following the railroad tracks.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1037343That's a recipe for disaster.

Go medieval on that campaign until it does what you want and makes you happy.

Also agreed. I'll probably run it largely as-written, but I'm prepared to let it all burn if they passively sit around or catastrophically screw up.

When I ran this group through the deceptively-named Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, I was more than prepared to let the world be destroyed in the event of failure, and that made it interesting.

soltakss · May 06, 2018, 07:50:09 AM

Published scenarios are usually written as railroads, to a greater or lesser extent, or are written as resources that can be used/slotted into a campaign.

If you have a set of linked scenarios in a supplement, then there is an assumption that thescenarios have probably followed a very rough path, so they can be used together. If you have an NPC in the first scenario who is also in the fourth scenario, PCs killing the NPC in the first scenario would affect the fourth scenario in actual play, so the GM should adapt the fourth scenario accordingly. Sometimes, the linked scenarios will have a box of text mentioning what would happen if the NPC has been killed, but for complex linked scenarios this would be very distracting.

RPGPundit · May 08, 2018, 02:36:53 AM

Quote from: soltakss;1037781Published scenarios are usually written as railroads, to a greater or lesser extent, or are written as resources that can be used/slotted into a campaign.

Well, yes, but that 'greater or lesser' extent is a very wide spectrum. What I mean is that old-school D&D adventures, the old TSR ones for example, rarely had more railroading than "here's the dungeon, you're going there".

The CoC adventures had a lot more than that because of the need for investigation, etc. And the amazing thing is how many of them did it very well; because almost every other RPG line that had that level of railroading produced adventures that were at best highly unmemorable.