AT70 Extra: Adventuring Against the ’70s (Part Two)

Nothing has been left out of Adventuring Against the ’70s.

Originally published 12/5/22 on Substack.

Hey folks! Here’s Part Two of Adventuring Against the ’70s, as promised by Part One, back in… May. (nervously tugs at collar) If you’re new here, it’s probably because you follow me on Twitter at @bestalbum95, and subscribed because, should Twitter become an ex-bird, this will likely be the home base for my Best Album bracket until a new home can be found. Welcome!¹ Please note that this newsletter is usually a review (or consideration) of a 1970s movie, followed by some Cypher System roleplaying game material based on that movie. Every so often, though, I find myself writing something else — in this case, an overview of different types of prewritten table top roleplaying game adventures. This actually does tie into my Against the ’70s project as a whole, but the full reveal of that will take few more posts to adequately convey. Anway, I hope you find this interesting, but if you’re just here in case of the Terrible Return of the Fail Whale, I’ll only disturb your inbox a few times a month. (Except this month. I have a backlog to clear.)

As last time, I’m using whatever images come up after googling “adventuring against the ’70s.” Weirdly, the results seem to change every time I do it.

Back in Part One, I did a quick overview of five different kinds of prewritten adventures for ttrpgs². As I said then, these categories were made up by me and aren’t a real thing; I created them merely as a way of talking about the concept of prewritten adventures. Prewritten adventures³ reveal a lot about the assumptions of a ttrpg and its setting. They indicate, directly or indirectly, just how that particular ttrpg is intended to be played. If I intend to create an Against the ’70s ttrpg, off the back of the Cypher System or another game, I need to know the answers to some basic questions. What is it about? What is the setting, exactly? What is the core thing that defines it and differentiates it from other ttrpgs? One way to get at those answers is a bit counter-intuitive: assume the game has already been completed, and think about what a prewritten adventure for it would look like. That way, I could quickly get to decisions about what I want and don’t want.

Choose your fighter.

Now, it’s not like I’m starting from a completely blank slate. I do know some things about my so-far imaginary Against the ’70s game. The “elevator pitch,” if you will, is that I want a game where players can pick familiar⁴ character archetypes inspired by ’70s media — characters that wouldn’t normally share the same narrative space, like a stubborn newspaper reporter, a nurse turned vigilante, and a space guy who fell from the sky⁵ — and form a group to undertake missions to defeat bad guys, usually of a SF or supernatural nature. In other words, the world is a kind of multimedia mash-up we’ve seen in books like Anno Dracula, comics like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and TV shows like Once Upon a Time⁶. That in turn is married to conventional investigative/“wo/men on a mission” model, drawing from such sources as Charlie’s Angels, The A-Team⁷, the Mission: Impossible TV show, and more recent shows like The X-Files, to name just a few.

So, starting form that premise, what kind of prewritten adventures would work for my vision of this game? And why isn’t it any of the five categories⁸ I talked about in Part One?

From D&D Player’s Handbook, Mike Mearls & Jeremy Crawford.

Let’s start with the classic D&D adventure. If you’ll recall, this kind of adventure focuses on dungeons or some other kind of self-contained site, and is usually organized around the rooms within that contain encounters. That already doesn’t sound right for my purposes, but another important element of this kind of adventure (one that is downplayed in D&D 5e, admittedly) is exploration. Exploring dungeons in D&D is a lot like spelunking in the real world. It’s slow, and you have to continually manage physical resources. What gear do you have? How many expendable items like food and torches do you have? How heavy is the equipment you’re carrying, and is it going to slow you down? Playing D&D like this can be a blast, but this is the exact opposite of the kind of experience I’m going for. You should never have to worry about encumbrance or equipment lists in Against the ’70s, and while exploration should definitely be an element of the game, it shouldn’t be this granular.

Situational adventures are also right out. This is a prewritten adventure type that really isn’t; it’s more of an overlay onto other adventure types. The point is to introduce a sense of realism and rationality to a scenario, by taking the scenario’s designated area and imagining how the individual non-player characters and creatures interact and support each other within it. For example, a bandit fort may have a number of rooms and a number of bandits; instead of essentially “gluing” the bandits to particular rooms, it’s up to the GM to determine where they are at any given moment and how they might react to adventurers invading their abode. This is a terrific advancement in ttrpgs, and the thoughts and considerations it engenders are important across all adventure types. It’s applicability here however is, I think, obviously limited.

From “Node-Based Scenario Design — Part 7: More Alternative Node Designs” by Justin Alexander, from his blog The Alexandrian. “Node-Based” is a better name and concept for what I’m calling “investigative,” and you should read Justin’s work on this. If you have any interest in ttrpgs, you should just read Justin.

Investigative adventures, where the player characters are charged with solving some kind of mystery, offer a lot to draw from. These adventures usually require player characters to go places, ask people questions, and generally snoop around. This also describes nearly every procedural TV show ever. What’s more, characters in these kinds of adventures can usually appear in whatever location necessary in order to search for the next clue; travel is rarely difficult. (Again, every procedural TV show ever.) That said, I’m resistant to this one, for one particular reason: AT70s adventures should be missions, not mysteries. Maybe this is my lack of experience talking, but mysteries in an ttrpg context seem to be like a maze made of boxes and lines. The characters move around from box to box, collecting clues and making choices as to which box to go to next, but the boxes seem to define the adventure in a rigorous way that gives me pause. A mission, on the other hand is (or at least, should) be open to a variety of strategies and approaches from the players, and these may not have a “box.” Mystery is important — there should be some mystery to a mission — but it’s only a spice, not the main course.

Deliverance could probably have been a scene-by-scene adventure. The characters are going to go downstream, whatever happens.

Scene-by-scene adventures have some appealing virtues as well. They allow the GM a great deal of control over how the “story” of the session progresses. They also allow a GM to enforce the setting in a more direct way: the players have less of a choice of where to go and who to see, allowing the GM to parade elements of the setting in front of them. As a bonus, scene-by-scene adventures tend to run speedily, usually around 2-4 hours of playtime, and that’s a goal I’ll be aiming for in AT70s. Lastly, what are movie and TV shows but a series of scenes? However, the virtues here are just the flip-side of the vices. I’m a pretty firm believer in the freedom ttrpgs allow players — their characters should be able to attempt anything that makes sense (and occasionally, things that don’t). This format strips too much of that from them. As I said with mysteries above, I think it’s critical that the players be allowed to approach the mission from whatever angle they choose; this kind of adventure eliminates that.

This is what comes up when I do Google image search for “FATE rpg 1970s.” This is a sourcebook for playing 1970s-style cartoon characters who go on mysteries, and probably have a talking animal mascot. I have misgivings about the concept of sourcebooks/adventures for FATE, but nevertheless this looks fun as hell to me.

Finally, let’s talk about FATE-style adventures. FATE-style adventures⁹ are technically not prewritten, but can have prewritten material. The idea here is to be able to create an adventure at the table, with little to no prep, using tools provided by the system to improvise encounters, enemies, locations, etc. In these, the major prewritten material are the player character sheets — these systems generate adventures mostly through the personalities, goals, backstories, and other things directly related to the player characters. This usually guarantees that any adventure will be strongly tied to the characters¹⁰, which is rarely certain in the other four kinds. This isn’t to say the GM doesn’t bring anything to the table; whatever the setting the players and GM created, there is usually a list of antagonists, places, and conflicts that can be dropped into the game as needed. In the previous four types of adventures, it is as if everything outside the characters exists in and of itself, because it has been prewritten. There are two doors in this room, one leads to the princess, one to the dragon, the GM knows which is which but the players won’t until they open one. This isn’t necessarily true in a FATE-style game. In a FATE-style game, everything is fuzzy, and nothing really exists until it appears in the game session. (This is why these kinds of game systems often have rules for flashbacks; they’re easier to integrate when only the things that have happened at the table are “solid.”)

Of the five adventure types I’ve presented here, this is by far my favorite. I like the idea of providing tools, rather than answers. I have ideas for very specific AT70s adventures¹¹, but I don’t know how deep that well is. I don’t want to an AT70s game to live and die by how imaginative I can be, especially when that imagination is drawing from material I don’t legally own. Furthermore, the only ttrpg games that matter are the ones that happen at the table, not stuff written in a book or on a website or whatever. I want to provide the canvas, and let the GM and the players fill it in with their imagination.

Over the hills and far away.

However, there are a few issues here. One, because of the ad hoc, loosey-gooseyness of how adventures are created, adventures tend to take on a sine wave structure, periods of tension and release, that maybe build to a climax… but maybe don’t. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of structure; in fact, the Cypher System rulebook suggests that this is how a campaign should feel in that game. But, for reasons I’ll get into next time, this feels all wrong for AT70s.

Second, I’m realizing that part of my struggle to define what an AT70s adventure is like is due to a conflict between freedom and constraints. I want to give the players the freedom they are due, but not so much that they can ignore what makes AT70s what it is. It’s also made me realize that setting is the first big constraint on a ttrpg — you probably won’t be playing a Man in Black in a suit and sunglasses in a D&D game, and you probably won’t be playing a halfling with a magic ring in a modern day horror game. (I mean, of course you can, but that’s stretching the setting quite a bit.) But AT70s, as a setting, is currently ill-defined.

I started this by asking: what is the setting for AT70s? What is at its core? I feel like I’ve found the contours of the answer. But that’s going to require one more post. Look for Part Three very soon.