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Mcguffins and quests
and contacts, oh my!
While most Adventurers like to think of themselves as “heroes”, being an
Adventurer is lot more like business than chivalry. Adventurers are in the
business of going on adventurers so that they can acquire heaps of gold,
dance on the bones of trolls, and generally have some legitimate excuse for
walking around town bristling with magic wands and singing swords. During
a TOWN phase, the party needs to acquire QUESTS to go on (which may
remind you of how role-playing is handled on a lot of electronic computing
machine virtual worlds, that we will not mention).
There are 2 primary ways of gaining QUESTS – finding a posted Quest, or
getting a Quest from a Contact. Posted Quests are created by the dM prior
to play and represent general work for Adventurers and their ilk. Contacts
are player-generated quests that work just like posted quests but help the
Party move their own personal story along.
An Adventurer can only ever have 1 QUEST at a time. Once they pick up a
quest (from a contact or a post) they are stuck with it, until the Party selects
their quest for an adventure.
Once the party has gathered in the bar (or tavern, or malt-shop, or wherever
it is that you gather), you all need to agree on (or more accurately, argue
about and then settle for) which QUEST you want to tackle next from your
parties available quests.
POSTED QUESTS
Adventurers can find posted Quests at THE BAR, THE GUILD, and
occasionally at a SHOP or TEMPLE. Each of these places has a Tack Board*
where people can post QUESTS that they need to have completed.
Adventurers can read the Title (all Adventures have Titles) and the brief
description of the Adventure, and see what the reward for completing that
Adventure is.
A dM needs to have a few posted Quests ready for play when the Party
starts – since you never know what they are going to select.
At this point, we need to digress and rant for a paragraph or two. As lifelong
Game Masters, if there is one truth that we have discovered is that the
best laid adventures of mice and men are always thwarted by the desires of
the party. Far too many Game Masters have poured their hearts and souls
into carefully mapping, charting, and stating impressive dungeons and
treasure rooms – only to have the party decide (usually at the last minute)
that they “really don’t feel like tracking the Ogre King back to his Lair, why
don’t we ride out to that cool sounding mountain range that the Game
Master doesn’t even have drawn on his hex map…” Way too many times,
have we seen a GM brought low by these chaotic whims and wild goose
chases. We promise that’s never going to happen to you in Warhamster.
*Not an ATTACK BOARD, which is a 5 th Level Cork Elemental bristling with
multi-colored quills and powerful dry-erase spells.
CONTACT QUESTS
When an Adventurer is in TOWN, they can spend their STORY to “find a
contact”. When they do this, they have to name the contact and select what
kind of McGuffin that contact rewards. Contact’s usually have a simple and
easy to remember name (like Barney the Bartender or Quisilnoph the
Question Maker or Firstname The Profession*). A contact can be anyone (or
sometime anything), and except for giving Quests will offer no other
assistance to the character (we did call them contacts, not buddies).
Once an Adventurer has established a Contact, they can visit that Contact
again to get additional quests. Usually, these quests will have at least a
semblance of continuity – though it isn’t required.
Quests obtained from Contacts are created by the player making the contact.
You do this, by using the Warhamster Murderous Adventure Design Library
(usually shortened to Warhamster M.A.D.LIBrary for space reasons***). As
a player, you get to answer a few short questions about the setting and
purpose of the QUEST, and then the dM gets to fill it with monsters, traps,
and you get the picture!
* Strangely to the Milnor Gnomelings of Aurora, Firstname the Profession is
the name of a legendary Gnomish warrior-chieftain who was the wielder of
the mighty Goggles of Obviousness, and the legendary Hammer of Generic
Doom**.
** Generic was the capital city of the ancient Gnomish Milor Empire.
*** And in no way infringing on the copyright or trademarks owned by the
totally awesome Penguin Group.