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Call for dialogue adventurers! I'm going to try making more of these. Here's the explanation from my newsletter:
It’s a dialogue adventure. I made it for a friend who recently had a baby and won’t be able to make it to D&D for quite some time. The idea is to let him still affect the game in a lightweight but hopefully meaningful way.
The adventure consists of story beats. Each beat is consists of:
- Some text and/or pictures that explains a situation
- An opportunity for the player to to affect the situation, in the form of multiple choice or free text.
In a sense, it’s just a series of forms to fill out. But even ambitious games like King of Dragon Pass or the question rooms in Slay the Spire boil down to that.
The situations take place in the game world, and the player’s actions affect the next D&D session with the in-person players. For example, the players are currently in the Temple of Elemental Evil (minor spoilers at that link) in our D&D game. An Item Mart (TM) kiosk appeared on the ground floor of the temple the last time they played. The Item Mart corporate scouts placed and stocked the kiosk based on the player’s consulting advice from the dialogue adventure.
It’s a form of co-design with the player who can’t play. My hope is that these will also fun in and of itself, though we’re not quite there yet.
Some characters I have in mind for dialogue adventuring are:
- Jeumes, a Kuo-Toa (a kind of subterranean fish humanoid) who is not enthusiastic about the all-encompassing raiding culture of the Kuo-Toa. He was convinced to desert his post by the Worst Party (the player characters). He spent some time traveling the Worg Caverns with them, but Worst Party culture was alienating to him as well. He ghosted, then wandered off to the surface, getting entangled with other adventuring parties along the way.
- Ouistyn Cliaaagh, a dwarven cleric from a rival party of the PCs. He got sucked into hell during a climactic battle with a gigantic slime hive mind.
If I’m feeling ambitious, maybe I’ll make ones for:
- Smigal, a brigand leader who the PCs magically locked into a room to die
- A Time Squirrel, a member of a species of squirrel that can manipulate time
Email me if you want to play!