Timed Adventures
If you find yourself repeatedly going over a predesignated time limit for your game nights, or you run adventures for local game stores, clubs, or school groups, you may want to try running timed adventures.
I first saw this idea in Sly Flourish's hero tier reward, Crypts of Karigulon, a ShadowDark adventure designed for tight adventures run during gaming conventions. The adventure is a classic dungeon crawl through an ancient crypt, however you have a real-life timer for when the crypts collapse in-game. This distinction is useful because it gives the players at your table a concrete idea of time ticking away with each of their actions, while also ensuring that you don't run an overly long adventure.
Quest for the Vorpal Sword is another example of a timed adventure. You can check it out for free on my itch page!
Setting Up a Timed Adventure
If you want to try this strategy, you need three things:
- An adventure with a time-sensitive goal, and
- A specific time limit.
- A FINAL SCENE.
Time-Sensitive Goals
The first of these can be tricky to decide at first, but once you come up with a couple ideas they start to flow a lot quicker and easier. Your time-sensitive goal is ideally something that players can progress over time without needing to do every little thing in order to succeed.
For example, in Crypts of Karigulon, the PCs goal is to collect as many magical relics as possible (total of 6) in their time limit before the crypts collapse and swallow everyone and everything still inside.
Ideally, each percentage point that players progress the goal is also a percentage point of success chance in the FINAL SCENE. As in, each magical relic gives you a useful spell in fighting the werewolves awakened by the collapsing crypts.
Some examples of good time-sensitive goals are:
- Recover the lost memory shards of Xaldynios Ossndar and his mining company before the Glass Caverns are swallowed by a rampaging purple worm.
- Find all the inscribed rods of the wrecked merchant caravan before their true owners come searching.
- Harvest the Purple Crystals growing beneath the Axe Lord's Barrow to make medicine for a vile plague.
- Translate the occult sigils littered around the Pale Moon Ruins before the convergence of the Demon Legions.
- Assassinate the corrupt nobles staying at the Camp of Nine Houses before the next Emperor is chosen.
- Find and explore the hidden groves in the Iraian jungle before an ancient enemy detects your presence.
- Find and save each member of a mercenary group from the terrors of the Quartzine Rift before it loses stability.
- Locate the fragments of navigation software from a derelict ship before scouts of the Red Empress come to scan the debris.
- Infiltrate Overseer Quani's space station and secure necessary assets from his office to get passage into the adjacent star system. Additionally, you have the optional goals of rescuing captive refugees, hiring a star-dragon mercenary, and replacing Quani with a sleeper agent.
When you prepare these types of adventures, think less about "scenes" you want to have happen and more about what "situations" are going on in the general area. Things like what places are guarded, what secrets are kept here, who would try to stop the players, and what interesting NPCs are around are very, very useful.
Time Limits
The specific time limit is the easiest to figure out; you just decide how long you want the adventure to take. For single-session adventures I usually prefer 3 hours for my time limit; for my campaigns I prefer 4 hours so that people have more time to talk to each other.
The Final Scene
With your time limit decided, subtract 45 minutes from the total. This is when you bring out the FINAL SCENE. Your final scene can be anything, really, but in a lot of roleplaying games it works well as a cool boss fight of some kind. It could also be a chase scene, a tricky puzzle, a tense negotiation, or a skill challenge.
When you run your adventure, tell your players the absolute time limit, i.e. 3 hours, that they have to accomplish their time-sensitive goal. Then set a timer out that they can all see, so that they can watch the seconds tick away. On your own, either set a second timer or watch the first one carefully for when there is 45 minutes left. That's when you interrupt everything else going on and introduce the FINAL SCENE.
During the FINAL SCENE the players are either trying to A) escape a bad situation or B) finish what they came here to do. I generally prefer option A) because it is usually easier to accomplish. Sometimes though, your time-sensitive goal encourages players to stick around and see things through.
If players were sent into an area to recover as many items as possible, they are probably going to be doing option A) in the FINAL SCENE as you introduce a big threat to their plans. Something like a swarm of locusts that chase them around a abandoned mansion does the trick quite nicely.
If players were sent on a mission where the quantity of things they do increases their chance of victory for their goal, like each corrupt noble assassinated increases the chance of the correct Emperor being chosen, then the FINAL SCENE might involve the players watching the Emperor be named with any remaining nobles stepping forward to intervene, giving the players a chance to save the Emperor one last time.
No matter what you do, I find that the more over the top and crazy the FINAL SCENE is, the better these adventures work. By beginning with a concrete task with measurable progression and timing, then ending with a strong threat to their goals, you end up developing an incredibly memorable adventure for your friends.
Final Thoughts
We talked about writing timed adventures to create compact and memorable scenarios for your friends. Remember, with these adventures you should be developing a "situation" rather than a linear path. Grab a map, scribble some collectibles on it, and give the players a reason to find those collectibles before the Tarrasque finds them.
Hope you enjoyed this post, see you next week!
Things on my radar:
- I'm making my way through the Discworld audiobooks and they continue to amaze. Equal Rights is fantastic!
- I'm thinking about the different strategies we GMs can use to run games for different age groups than we are used to.
- Beau Rancort has an entertaining post about the Arden Vul megadungeon, saying their campaign could not sustain the vast quantities of treasure available on level 4. What I learned from the post is that you need to take some time to consider how much XP you make available in your modules.