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What other RPGs have a heaping helping of adventure support?

The Fantasy Flight Warhammer 40k games appear to have a stack of adventure support. Only played Rogue Trader myself, but it's worlds away from D&D.

Actually, I wouldn't discount Call of Cthulhu for a kids game, if you ratchet up the pulp factor. I played through the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaign in my very early teens and had an absolute blast.
 

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Great dungeon generator, right here:

http://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/

Very flexible roleplaying rules, right here:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?349392-Modos-Rulebook-the-real-time-editing-thread

Okay, okay. That second link doesn't have combat rules posted yet. But it generally goes like this:

Initiative
When combat begins, every character rolls initiative on a d20. Use your best ability modifier to increase your result. This determines the order of turns in the combat round, starting with the highest, and going to the lowest.

Posture
There's no grid or positions, just posture. Which one you're in at the start of combat depends on how you got into combat. Offensive posture is like the front row of combat; you take full melee, missile, and magic damage from the enemies in offensive posture, half melee damage from enemies in defensive posture, and full missile and magic damage from enemies in defensive posture. In defensive posture, you take half damage from all attacks except for missile or magic damage made by offensive enemies. Flip these around to see how your attacks do damage.

Actions
The combat round proceeds by actions. The character with the highest initiative has the first turn, and he gets to use as many actions as he wants during his turn. During any action of the current player's turn, someone who's waiting for his turn can use one action. If this person's initiative is higher than the current player's, his action happens at the same time as the current player's action. If this person's initiative is lower than the current player's, his interrupting action happens immediately after the current action. After all actions are resolved in initiative order, the current player may use any other actions he has left, or he can reserve them for use during other players' turns.

Special Actions
Since having a higher initiative is beneficial in this system, characters can wait for an opening to get a better initiative. This costs one action, and the character must forfeit his turn. This action is called "delay."
To encourage players to act on their turns (instead of during everyone else's), they can combine actions. This only happens on a player's turn, and players can only combine actions made with the same skill. For each action combined, a player can make another contest roll. The player keeps the highest result and uses it for each action in the combined action. The downside to combining actions is that if circumstances change from one action to another, you can't abort your combined action.

End of Round
At the end of the round, any unused actions are discarded, and a new round begins with the highest character's initiative, and all characters get a new set of actions.
 


Ignoring ones already mentioned in this thread, I'll mention a few where I think they've got good adventure support. Pendragon, both books which are specifically adventure collections and a number of adventure hooks and/or partial adventures in every sourcebook. Dragon Warriors, for a slightly different take on class-based fantasy. Exalted has rather a lot of adventures, as do some of the WoD games. Tunnels and Trolls is famous for solo adventures, but they also published a number for group/GM play, and it's both quick and easy to play. Rolemaster/MERP had a lot of adventure material. Cubicle 7 are prolific, the quality is good and most of the books for their published RPGs have several adventures in - even Rocket Age, relatively new, has a couple.
 

Warhammer 1e and 2e had some adventure support, though not as much as D&D.

West End Games' Paranoia and Torg also saw a lot of support material, as well as their Star Wars versions.

A little less can be had for Earthdawn or Legend of the Five Rings.

ICE's MERP and Shadowworld come to my mind, too, but be prepared for a different experience reading them compared to the ususl D&D stuff.
 

Have you looked at the newest version of Gamma World? The box set comes with an adventure. Each of the 2 expansion box sets, Famine on Far-Go and Legion of Gold, has a big adventure. They are based on the old, classic modules. It would all be the basis for a good campaign. The new game is a simplified version of 4e and very fun to run (if a little shallow for players).

Otherwise, I'll agree with Savage Worlds. There are lots of 1 sheet adventures on the publisher's web site for free that could be an adventure a night. And any plot point campaign setting book you get will have a bunch of adventures in it. The game is fast, furious & fun - as billed.
 

Lots of excellent suggestions here. Many of the older games, I am familiar with, and most I have owned at some point, but there are some new games I will need to check out too.

Right now the Kids (14yos) are leaning towards Post Apocalypse or 20s/30s Serial Pulp. . I would definitely run CoC more like "Indiana Jones at The Mountain of Madness", vs. the really intense Lovecraft faithful style.

They really warmed up to the idea of Gamma World, however they were pretty adamant on wanting to play Pure Strain Humans. I am a fan of a less Gonzo Gamma World ala 1E, and I get the feeling the Kids would prefer that as well...a bit more gritty like Aftermath or The Morrow Project (which I possibly will steal, idea wise from, and transfer to another rules system). It is my understanding that the new 4E inspired Gamma World PCs all have mutations, is that correct?

They have also expressed *some* interest in Runequest/Glorantha, and if I was going to do fantasy, that is what I would do (likely OpenQuest), but I think they are feeling the itch to kill things with Guns ;) (at my son's age, I had already written up-or rather typed up on a Vic20 and later a C64, my own very detailed modern combat RPG, of a couple hundred pages, and 2 of my other gaming friends had also done the same, lol)

Savage Worlds...I know it gets MUCH love, but I bought the original hardcover 10 years ago or whenever it was released, ran a few oneshots and it really did not click for me. Maybe it will for them...and rulebooks are certainly cheap.

At any rate, looks like I will have to do more adventure work than I would prefer, regardless of system. Either to create from whole cloth, or make existing stuff "kid friendly".

We are not going to be getting together again until after the New Year, so I have a little time to narrow things down.
 
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It is my understanding that the new 4E inspired Gamma World PCs all have mutations, is that correct?

The newest Gamma World (GW) is all mutants on the random character generation tables except for the engineered human result if you roll the same base origin result twice. You could let everyone choose to play engineered humans, but there would be little difference in all the player characters except for random skills. It would take a few tweaks to retcon it to an all human game, but it could be done. I think it is a fine game and would work well for your application; although it would be a bit light on mechanical character development, and your players would have to be OK with that.

I think a better candidate is the brilliant Omega World (OW) d20 mini-game. It is a concise adaption of Gamma World to the d20 D&D game engine. It does the pure strain human (PSH) idea very well, especially if you house rule that high tech is usable by PSH only - as it was in older editions of GW. I had a lot of fun with that game and would run it again in a minute. In fact, I would run the remaining new Gamma World adventures that we didn't finish using OW; but that is really because my players want a crunchier level of developing their PCs' abilities, skills & feats. You easily can run a published d20 adventure as an OW adventure, and there a guidelines for doing so in the OW game. It's a steal for less than $5 pdf: http://paizo.com/products/btpy7zeq

Savage Worlds...looks like I will have to do more adventure work than I would prefer, regardless of system. Either to create from whole cloth, or make existing stuff "kid friendly".

As noted above, I think you can run GW or OW without creating adventures from whole cloth or rewriting them to be kid friendly.

As for Savage Worlds (SW), I find my prep time to run SW is about 90% less than d20 games, so it really almost runs itself once you choose a plot point or other set of published adventures. The mechanics are set up so more easily that I am able to focus more on story development. I can prep SW in an hour or less for a night of gaming as opposed to almost 1:1 prep time for other games.
 

(snip) Savage Worlds...I know it gets MUCH love, but I bought the original hardcover 10 years ago or whenever it was released, ran a few oneshots and it really did not click for me. Maybe it will for them...and rulebooks are certainly cheap. (snip)

Maybe take another look at Test Drive 6 and see what you think?

There are a couple of good Gamma World conversions for SW floating around as well. PSHs would work just fine under SW. This page has a generic apocalypse toolkit plus a GW conversion. It also has a Star Frontiers conversion if you want to take advantage of the other suggestion up-thread. ;)
 

UPDATE

I took a looksee at several systems and decided to go BRP for ease of play for the kids, and my own familiarity since 1980 or so.

I am running a pulp with some cthulhu game, starting off with the 7e quickstart, and adding in some variants from the BRP corebook to make the PCs less fragile. Just like when I got the CoC boxed set in 1983, we have started with The Haunting. Tons o fun, and the players are scared out of their wits along with the characters :D
 

Into the Woods

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