ADVENTURE CALENDAR

WHAT IS THIS?

Adventure Calendar is a setting and campaign that I’m telling through the medium of random tables – 25 of them, one released each day of December, up until Christmas Day itself. All of them will be available for free as individual articles, and at the end of the month, I’m going to bundle them all up into a pay-what-you-want PDF. It’s an experiment in worldbuilding, and I really hope it goes well.

UPDATE: If you’d like to get the whole Adventure Calendar compilation as a PWYW PDF or a fancy designed and illustrated booklet, it’s now available here!

Each of the pieces is illustrated by an artist who isn’t me. I’m paying for this through my Patreon – instead of a one-page game this month, we’re doing this. My takings from the Patreon will be split six ways between me and the artists. Everyone who backs the Patreon at a physical reward level will get a little zine with all of the tables in it when I do mailouts, and we’ll make the zine available for sale at cons and the like (once cons are a thing again). I’ll credit each artist individually when I post their work – please give them a follow, and maybe even commission them for some illustrations. 

The artists are:

Rollin Kunz
Kanesha Bryant
Rowan MacColl
Beck Michalak
Annabelle Lee

One of the best things about random tables is the unsteady relationship they have with canonicity, so to that end – everything that you read in a table is potentially true if you want it to be but not necessarily true if it would make for a worse story. Don’t go sifting for the One True Plotline, because I haven’t written one.

You’ll be able to use the random tables right away, and as more and more of them are released, the situation in the setting will advance and evolve into something different. You don’t have to use all of the tables, obviously. Just use the ones you want. Hell, don’t even roll dice – just pick the entries you like. I’m not your dad. I’m not going to tell you what to do.

MECHANICS AND THAT

I’ve done my best to write the mechanical parts of these tables with an eye to making them easy to adapt into your home game by working in generic terms. Primarily, rules are [bracketed away in square brackets like this,] although I’m sure I’ve missed them out a few times and just put them in the main text. Here are some examples of what I’m doing:

• I reference “Easy, Average and Hard” saves or skill checks, which you can adapt to your rules system and player character power level. In D&D terms, these equate to DCs of 10, 15 and 20. (I think?)
• I use a mixture of invented and pre-existing terms for stats, but hopefully it’ll be easy enough to figure it out.
• Some effects have Dx damage or Dx healing. These assume a low-level D&D campaign or your favourite OSR alternative (I recommend Electric Bastionland). You’ll in fact note throughout that this is basically written for D&D but so loosely that I don’t have to determine firm data for things like spell DCs and GP costs; this is because I am motivated enough to write 25 different random tables but lazy enough to not do it properly.
• Occasionally I’ll reference “[stats as X]” – please use the appropriate creature’s stats, or something that’s vaguely close to it.
• When I say “roll with Advantage,” it means roll twice to check and pick higher. When I say “roll with Disadvantage,” it means roll twice to check and pick lower. 

I’m going to update this post with each table as it goes live, so if you want to keep up to date, you can check back here. Or you can follow the #AdventureCalendar hastag on Twitter.

DAY ONE – D10 Festive Spells
DAY TWO – D10 Things To Eat And Drink At The Winter Festival
DAY THREE – D6 Places To Go, People To See
DAY FOUR – D10 Magical Gewgaws from Professor Flouro Wizbiz
DAY FIVE – D6 Party Concepts
DAY SIX – D6 New Arrivals from the Far North
DAY SEVEN – D12 Fantasy Yule Lads
DAY EIGHT – D8 Winter Festival Visitors
DAY NINE – D8 Winter Festival Games
DAY TEN – D8 Rumours from Afar
DAY ELEVEN – D8 Slumbering Creatures That Have Awoken With The Coming Of This Dreadful Winter
DAY TWELVE – D12 Things the Doomsayers are Yelling in the Town Square
DAY THIRTEEN – D6 Travellers from Abroad Who Probably Want to Hire You, An Adventurer
DAY FOURTEEN – D6 Things You See On The Outskirts Of The Village
DAY FIFTEEN – D8 Concerned Villagers
DAY SIXTEEN – D8 Colours of Northern Lights that Spark Madness
DAY SEVENTEEN – D8 Ancient Magic Items, Sensing Chaos and Unrest, That Rise to Prominence
DAY EIGHTEEN – D6 Cults Who are Attempting to Curry Favour with the First and Final God
DAY NINETEEN – D6 Heroes who are Probably Not Going to Avert the Apocalypse but Might be Useful Distractions
DAY TWENTY – D20 Signs of the Apocalypse
DAY TWENTY-ONE – D6 Horrible Ways To Die
DAY TWENTY-TWO – D12 Awful Yule Lads Who are Here Now
DAY TWENTY-THREE – D6 Nightmare Florae And Faunae Of The Apocalypse
DAY TWENTY-FOUR – D6 Blessings from New and Terrified Gods
DAY TWENTY-FIVE – D6 Items That Could, Theoretically, Avert The End Of The World