Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Today's Deal of the Day at DriveThruRPG is Infinium Game Studios' system-agnostic supplement FlexTale Adventure Generator: Dungeons, which is 70% off for the next twenty-four hours! Grab it before the price goes back up!
Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.
Summary
This book aims to be the most complete, most comprehensive, most innovative authority on designing, creating, and running Dungeon-based adventures ever produced.
Simply put: If you are playing, or plan to play, any sort of fantasy tabletop roleplaying game, this book will help you.
Bringing together 35 years of gaming, both old-school through to today's most popular systems, the FlexTale Adventure Generator (FTAG) culminates a lifetime's passion for the hobby into a massively useful volume that can be instantly invaluable to any gaming group, in any context, using any rules system.
Whether you enjoy complex design and superbly intricate options, or if you prefer the calm simplicity of a straightforward six-sided die roll, the FTAG has been designed with you, and the time you have available, in mind.
All FlexTale books are designed with the many demands upon the G/DM in mind--they can be used immediately, with zero preparation, with any TTRPG rules system, in any campaign setting, at any gaming table. This book was created to be supremely useful to inspire grognards who have been gaming since the hobby's inception, yet accessible enough for complete novice and first-time G/DMs to find immediate excitement.
Free Sample
It's six years old, but you're welcome to grab the FREE sample of the original FlexTale book that sparked all of this: the FlexTale Encounter Generator. Grab the free version here.
What you see in that free sample is about three orders of magnitude less useful, monumental, and awesome than this full FlexTale Adventure Generator, but as a free starting point, it's a decent enough preview.
You can also grab the FlexAI Guidebook Free Sample here. Using FlexAI is entirely optional as part of running the Encounters defined in this book, but this, too, is a decent preview of the sort of perspective, design, and approach that is being taken here.
Who is This For?
If you're any of the following and you're reading this, then I'd recommend you click on the preview to get a sense of what's involved here.
- A time-pressed G/DM, who doesn't have time to prepare for tonight's session but still wants to present a ton of exciting options for the PCs.
- Planners, who want to devote a great deal of time, care, and attention to each and every aspect of their dungeon adventures, and who want to make sure that they have provided against every possible contingency that their players might pursue.
- A G/DM who is planning an adventure with intention, but wants creative inspiration and to be prompted with ideas, starting points, and to provide structure to their own notions.
- Writers who are authoring their own adventures, either to accelerate the process or to aid with areas in which they welcome assistance.
- World-builders who hope to drive the generation of their world in adaptation to the discoveries of the PCs at the more personal level, evolving the nature of their campaign world and its contents in a way that echoes the players' experience.
- G/DMs who want to run a one-shot adventure designed on the fly dynamically, with the option to turn it into an arbitarily-longer campaign.
- Anyone with plenty of great ideas and creativity, who is looking for structure and a way to organize all of their inspiration into something that can be put in front of players.
- A solo adventurer, who is looking for a system that generates entire, endless, interesting, unpredictable, and engaging campaigns.
Designed with Solo in Mind
The FlexTale Adventure Generator has been designed at every level to fuel exciting, engaging, and surprising solo adventuring. Arguably the biggest challenge for any solo player is how to maintain the element of surprise--how can you be shocked, inspired, or excited about twists and turns that you yourself created?
Every single concept and tool in this book was designed with easy-to-use randomization, and explicit descriptions of how and when to keep revelations about the adventure's design a secret, or undetermined, until it's necessary.
What is This Thing?
The FlexTale Adventure Generator (FTAG) is over 400 pages, and contains over 380 tables, dozens of optional rules, tons of tools and templates and other powerful resources that can be used immediately, by any D/GM, in any gaming context.
Whether you're playing a published adventure, creating your own, or want to generate an entirely dynamic adventure on the fly during a game session with no prep beforehand, this book provides simple instructions, easy-to-use tables, and straightforward dice rolls to spawn a truly infinite variety of engaging, interesting adventure content, no matter what your experience level.
How Do I Use This?
There are two types of things you can do with this book.
1: Make dungeon maps.
2: Create dungeon adventure content.
You can use this book for one or the other of these. If you do both of them together, you're literally generating an entire adventure, from start to finish--or, more likely, not to a finish, so much as to an infinitely-unfolding narrative and exploraton of an entire gaming world. All with some simple dice rolls!
Each topic has a HUGE assortment of tools and rules and description, and you're free to mix and match your use of everything in whatever combination feels best for your needs and preferences.
1: Make Endless Dungeon Maps
Dynamically generate a dungeon map using simple tables and visuals of dice rolls. You can use six-sided dice or d20s as you prefer.
You can harness the awesome power of FlexCrawl map Tiles, over 200 geomorphic map segments that fit together as seamlessly as possible in infinite combinations. Or, you can design your own dungeon maps using the structures and guidance and tools provided.
2: Create Infinite Adventure Content
"Adventure content" is a term that includes all of the interesting things that the PCs see, fight, and interact with in their journies. You can use this book to quickly pick from a wealth of over 250 pieces of pre-defined and immediately-ready-to-use content. Or, you can use the tools in this book to generate your own, unique, brand-new adventure content, using a few dice rolls and some tables to create an infinite variety of engaging stuff for your PCs to do.
The FlexTale Adventure Generator defines seven categories of adventure content, as follows:
For each type of adventure content, you get ALL of the following:
- Secrets: Hidden passages and chambers.
- Obstacles: Doors, boulders, rivers, and more.
- Traps: From a spring-loaded needle on a pirate's chest to a minor cave-in that threatens to squish the entire party.
- Encounters: Combat encounters, ambushes, lairs, traveling caravans, and much more.
- Rewards: Not just piles of gold and swords, but maps, relationships, revelations, answers, information, blackmail, and much more!
- Quests: The pulsing, innovative heart of the Adventure Generator. Over a hundred pages of easy-to-use, comprehensive structure for creating dynamic and engaging quests, narratives, and entire storylines with zero preparation and just a few dice rolls.
- Exits: Not so much true escapes from the Dungeon itself, but rather trapdoors, chambers, caches, tombs, crypts, hideouts, and more temporary in-and-out diversions, basements, and side-quests that might be lurking beneath any dungeon floor.
- Overview: Optional rules, general tools, and considerations for how to run the content.
- Canned Adventure Content: A simple 36-result table you can roll on to get an interesting and meaningful piece of that content immediately.
- Create Your Own Adventure Content: A section on how to generate new, creative, dynamic adventure content: a few more dice rolls lets you create an infinite variety of unique, interesting new pieces of content! A true boon with unprecedented power for the time-pressed or creatively-exhausted G/DM, and especially for the solo adventurer!
The FlexTale Adventuring Difference
FlexTale is an approach to roleplaying game design and session-running that operates on a simple thought: If you can create one thing that's cool, and you can identify the things about it that make it cool, and permute each of those things in different ways, then you have the building blocks to make an infinite varietey of cool things.
Identifying the how and why of what makes some aspect of a roleplaying game fun and exciting, and figuring out how to make that excitement flexible and endlessly diverse, is at the very core of what FlexTale attempts to make not only possible... but easy.
As with all other things FlexTale, everything in this book has been designed to be used with ANY set of PCs of ANY level, and scales accordingly. No two adventures or quests are the same.
The majority of the book is system-agnostic, and can be used easily with any TTRPG system. Some specific tools and elements contain rules language tailored to 5E, Pathfinder, Pathfinder Second Edition (P2E), OSR, and Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC).
What's Included
Inside the FlexTale Adventure Generator: Dungeons, you'll find:
- Over 350 tables, most of which have been thoughtfully designed to be rolled with either a single six-sided die for straightforward and rapid results, or a d20 for more complicated results.
- Over 50 FlexTables, each one four tables in one, with different results coding and probabilities based on the circumstances.
- The most thorough, complete, versatile, and easy-to-use dynamic Quests system ever published.
- Dozens of Utility Tables aimed at making it quick and easy to instantly generate dynamic adventure content.
- Simplified FlexAI rules to drive dynamic and interesting creature behavior in combat and in social interactions.
- And much, much more!
Content Previews
Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.
