This is the first of what will be the “Outline” series of posts.  I’ll typically do one of these for the start of each project and possibly smaller ones for major sub-projects pieces.  We’ll have to see how it goes.  In these posts my plan is to lay out the basic structure of the project, identifying what will be included, what needs to be created and so forth.  I’ll tag each of these outlines, along with the post related to that project with a tag to make them easily identifiable.  For this particular project, the tag is “Rosegard” as is called out below.

The first three outlines, for my initial projects, will probably be a bit more fleshed out than later ones since I’ve been thinking about them a bit, or in the case of this one, already mostly finished it.  Or it may be that things go on, these will get more detailed as I’ll be better about thinking of things in advance.  We’ll have to see.  Also, these first ones won’t be open to much debate as they are projects that are fairly well along.  For future projects however, I will be taking input and idea from commenters and Patreon supporters to provide direction on what is created.

This particular project, Death at Rosegard, is an adventure I ran for my on-line Star Frontiers game and I have all the major pieces in some form, I just need to clean them up and present them.  So hopefully it will go pretty quickly.  That’s not true of the other initial projects and any future projects I create.

Let’s get started.

Death at Rosegard

Project tag: Rosegard

Level

An adventure for 4-6 beginning characters.  This was literally written for a group of 6 brand new characters as their first adventure.

Premise

The PCs work for a mega-corp (Streel in this case) which has an arrangement with the small village of Rosegard to operate a mine near the town.  One of the mining staff has been murdered and the PCs are sent to investigate.

Spoiler Sidebar

These outline posts are going to be, by definition, spoilery.  It can’t be helped.  But then again, I think the main audience for this material is going to be game masters more than players.  However, if you want to be a player in these adventures and have your GM run them, I’ll try to flag out things to skip so you don’t ruin the surprise.  To do so I’ll flag spoilery sections with this blue and gold warning mark:

If it appears near a heading, skip to the next section.  If it appears next to a paragraph or bullet item, you only have to skip that small bit.  Finally, when I do a post about one of these spoiler topics, I’ll put the warning icon right at the top and that means you may want to skip the entire article.  I may not always be successful in tagging everything but I’ll try.  You’ve been warned.

In this particular article, I think the only thing you need to skip is the Basic Story section coming up and a couple of bullet items in the “materials needed” section.

Basic Story

One of the mine staff is a sleeper agent for the sathar and has been recently activated.  He has been slowly over the past several months been “liberating” supplies from the mining facility and providing them to his sathar handler.  He has been aided recently by someone from the town providing supplies as well.  His actions were discovered and caught off guard, he killed the discoverer.  He then disposed of the body in a way to attempt to make it look like it was done by the native fauna but that failed.

The PC’s are sent to attempt to find the murder and in the process should uncover the sathar connection, discover another sathar agent unconnected to the town, and a small sathar base in the mountains.  In addition, they will get to interact with the village, meet the inhabitants and possibly form some connections to the village.  There is also the person in the village that is aiding the sathar agent at the mine to discover

Materials Needed for the Adventure

• World map showing the location of Rosegard in relation to other points of interest
• Area map of the countryside around the village and the mine
• Village map (rough draft appears above)
• Mining compound map
• Stats and bios of the mining staff
• Stats and bios of the villagers
•  Map and bio for location with the external agent and how he’s connected to the story
•  Map and stats for the sathar base
• Various bits of background and history for the planet and area
• A “Where to go from here” section with further story ideas

Last Words

And there we go, a basic outline for the adventure and a list of what is needed.  Normally that “materials needed” section would be the final bit of the outline but seeing as this is the first one, I thought I’d talk about it and how it will be used.  At a most basic level, that list is the roadmap for upcoming blog posts.  Those are the bits and pieces I’ll need to develop (and share) as I build the adventure.

The list will probably be incomplete and often a bit vague in the beginning as I’ll think of other things that need to be added along the way.  It’s not my intention to come back and edit it as we go but I might do a post at the end to compare what was made to what I originally envisioned, in part to just see how it fell out and partially as a learning tool for myself to get better at planning and estimating what is involved.

In this particular case, most of what is on that list already exists, either as notes, sketches, rough drafts as I have already run the adventure.  We’ll be working on turning those notes and drafts into final forms over the coming weeks.

What do you think about the outline format?  Are there things you’d like to see included?  Things that need more detail?  Should I not worry about the spoiler alerts?  Let me know in the comments below.