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5 Adventure Creation & Management

QuickStart
Once you’ve made your character, here is the fastest way to get into the game!
Part of generating a character may have been the creation of a setting and/or starting
scene, but if not, generate those things by asking yourself: Where am I? What is going on right
now? If nothing occurs to you, I suggest drawing a Location from the GMA deck, and then
drawing either a Catalyst or a Random Event!
Either way, once you have the location and any starting event, then just have your
character react and use the engine to determine how it goes.
Whenever you run out of ideas, ask the deck what happens next: draw a Random
Event, a new Catalyst, a set of Tag Symbols, or anything else to inspire you!

Slightly Slower Start

While I do enjoy just diving into a game and seeing where it takes me, below you’ll find
advice on running campaigns in ALONe with a little more structure.
First is a section on using tables and charts to keep track of your game in a (hopefully)
efficient and useful way, making it easier to stay consistent with your setting and
NPCs—without letting the tables slow you down too much.
Next, I include a section on how to make what I call a Framework, which lets you
prepare for a whole campaign with very little work, if you want some semblance of a living
world with bits and pieces that move and change, whether your characters get involved or not.
The examples there are mostly for fantasy games, but the Frameworks are also described (in
various genre-specific ways) in the Adventure Guides included with the GMA decks, if you
want to see some tailored suggestions for each of those genres!
And then this chapter wraps up with a section on using a pre-written adventure to
provide the majority of your content, letting you use ALONe to make it more dynamic and
flexible than it would be on its own. While this is most likely to be of interest to players using
another RPG along with ALONe, I also suggest that you could go ahead and use a published
adventure module from any system when you are playing ALONe narratively—just ignore the
rules and stat blocks, and mine the adventure for plot!

Managing the Story and Setting with Tables

While one of the best reasons to use the GMA and ALONe is to avoid the need to
reference tables and shuffle through books, which can drastically slow play down, it’s still
possible to get a lot of use out of a few well-tailored charts.