Adventure Style

How the World Feels

The adventure style determines the overall feel of the game, its heroes and villains and how the world and rules react to them. Generally, all rules and mechanics will apply according to the overall Style but the DM may decide, for instance, that a particularly dangerous villain or a god might take the form of an Epic Adventure character in an otherwise Traditional Adventure.

Traditional Adventures

These tend towards being a little grungier; the characters are fragile, the world is often unfair, the dungeons are often packed with brutal monsters and traps that can often kill without a chance to save oneself. The defence against a dragon's breath is not to anger a dragon - damage is inbound and the best you can do is reduce it.

The ambition of Traditional Adventures is to hew close to the early pen and paper game and to capture as much of that old school feel as can be claimed.

Changes that are intended for these games are listed as Traditional Adventures.

Heroic Adventures

These games tend towards striking a balance - heroes that can be struck down by their opponents but, if they can snatch a little breathing room, escape to fight another day. Characters are still breakable but can survive against the odds with a little luck and pluck.

The ambition of Heroic Adventures is to provide characters who are able to embrace traditional style games without the threat of rocks falling and killing the party without so much as a saving throw, creating a happy medium between Traditional and Epic.

Changes that are intended for these games are listed as Heroic Adventures. Typically, however, the baseline given is for Heroic Adventures and it will often read "no change".

Epic Adventures

These games tend towards the powerful - the heroes involved are larger than life and whilst it will take a lot to keep them down, they are up against monsters as big and bombastic as they tend to be. As legends are formed, characters are less likely to be struck down by an errant arrow and have a chance to lick their wounds and recover before returning to the fray and may frequently cheat death - but only if they are still careful.

The ambition of Epic Adventures is to create heroes who are strong enough out of the gate to tackle at least a little trouble and, whilst they still experience a lot of threat, the threat is less often of death than of debilitation. This is intended to capture the feel of more modern games, replacing death and the expense of preserving a character through spells with a system where they can be removed from combat if they push things too hard but not removed from the story by bad luck, allowing a consistent arc to develop.

Changes that are intended for these games are listed as Epic Adventures.

Standard Formatting

Traditional Adventures - x

Heroic Adventures - x

Epic Adventures - x