Basic Fantasy RPG Forums

Since our campaign is just beginning, I'm looking forward towards what is available for the players after the area around Morgansfort is fully explored. So, I'm working on a spreadsheet list of all the published adventures (69 so far, including AA3) showing me what is available as well as where the character level gaps are that would need to be filled in, possibly with my own creations.

The list currently has these fields/columns:

Book: The name of the published work
Adventure: The name of the adventure within the work
# Players: If given
Character Levels: 1, 1-3, 6, 7-9, etc...
Brief Summary: Meaningful, one sentence summary (Blurb). Some of these are more difficult than most. Trying NOT to include any "GM only" info.

Once I have the "Brief Summary" for all of them, I MAY add other fields/columns for things like "# of Levels", "Primary Terrain", "Settlement Size", "# Sessions" or NOT.

Is anyone else interested in this information in this format?

Funny enough, while putting AA3 together I thought about making something like this, similar to the monster index I made. If you already have (or are planning to make) this in spreadsheet format that'd be great! Would be curious what info everyone would want to have for each adventure/entry...

Here is my work in progress. More than half of the adventures are missing the Brief Summary, but everything else is there.

This was exported from Google to .ods format.

EDIT: Some of the "Brief Summary" content is mere commentary on my impression without an actual description. These entries usually start with "Hmmmm".

EDIT: More entries now have a "Brief Summary". Added revision number to file name as "-rx" where "x" is the current revision number.

r4 - only 15 brief summaries left

3rd post file attachment updated

Nemolomen, good work, I like what you have done.

I already had a spreadsheet that I was using for my personal use. Since it is intended for me, I didn't include a description "blurb". There are three sheets, the first is each book, including the JN1-3 books with each element broke out. The second sheet is the list of Basic Fantasy Books and the abbreviations I used for the spreadsheets. The third sheet is a copy of the first but sorted by the low level column then secondarily sorted by the high level column.

On the first page you may notice the encounters for JN1 are grouped by a given location with specific caverns. Personally when I use this book I break up the caverns to be within ten hexes of the given locations. Personally, I think having the large number of caverns in one location would make the ground above unstable and have a potential of collapsing. Breaking each set of caves off also gives the party more incentive to explore the full map instead of just going back to one location for all the caves. I made my choices based on the monsters in the named location, i.e. The Ruined Castle location has Orcs, one on of these Orcs has a crude map to a lair; Cave A or Cave B, that is nearby. I then say that these were a party of Orcs sent to bolster the Orcs in the cave the map goes to.

I'm currently working on doing the same to the list of adventures in JN2. Each group is listed roughly from South to North, I was going to combine them so that numbered, ocean, ruins and villages are mixed but based on going from South to North on the islands.

My personal copy also includes modules from other games that I have and convert to Basic Fantasy usage, since they are licensed for their individual games I have removed them from this list and have only included Basic Fantasy material. Note that the information for AA3 and CS2 are in red since they do not have a print release, yet.

I've attached a copy of my spreadsheet for you to look at too.

Thanks AlMan, this is great!

Likes:

• Abbreviations: Leaves room for more columns
• Breakout of the JN# books: I was wondering how I could accomplish that
• Min and Max Level Columns: I was thinking about doing it that way, but didn't have the horizontal real estate

Dislikes:

• Using word "Module(s)" vs "Adventure(s)": Certainly the books BF1, JN#, DC1, etc... would be considered "Modules" where there are a group of (inter)related plots, locations and "Adventures", while books like AA# & CS# contain groups of unrelated adventures, but this is really a semantic issue and not a problem, per se

Another column that I've been thinking about adding is some way to "grade" the content of each adventure for "length of play", or some such, since some of the adventures are rather long and have multiple levels and multiple sites (like town, dungeon, temple, fort, buildings, etc...) and others are a single level with only a couple of rooms, which is more like a side quest found while traveling in the wilderness.

One of my purposes for the list is to have a "handy" reference for when the party does the unexpected or expresses interest in a particular type of scenario and I need to come up with something quickly. I can take a quick look at the list for an appropriate "set of encounters" (IE: adventure) and if nothing appropriate presents itself, THEN I can use my imagination and/or break out the rules or one of the Field Guides to get an idea of something to present.

This is where the grading scheme would come into play. Lets say that the grading scheme looks like this:

Value of each Encounter (Monster(s), Trap, puzzle(s), etc...) = 1
Value of each Dungeon Level (at, above or below ground level) = 2
Value of each Site (town, farm, temple, castle, ruins, tower, etc...) = 3

So, count up the number of each type of item and multiply by the value for that item and add the products for each group of items to get a total value of the adventure.

For example, an adventure with:

2 sites ( a town and a ruined castle), 3 levels at or above ground, 3 levels below ground and 25 encounters:

• 1 encounter in town with the survivor of the attack/experience at the castle
• 3 encounters on each level at or above ground
• 5 encounters on each level below ground

So the "Adventure Value" would be:
(2 sites * 3) + (6 levels at, above or below ground * 2) + (25 encounters * 1) = 6 + 12 + 25 = 43

Which give me some idea of how much relative time this adventure could take compared to other adventures. Lower numbers would be less time and higher numbers would be more time.

Yeah, I know, I think way too much and over complicate things.