Adventures in 2320AD

[Colin]

My current thinking on adventures is to make them sourcebook/adventures, available as PDF files initially. Each book would further detail a colony system, outpost, or ship class, and have an adventure attached to it that makes use of the information. Each book would only detail a single system, outpost or ship, and in the case of a system, would focus heavily on the system's mainworld.

Does this sound like a useful format? Each book would provide roughly 16 pages of world information, including more info on climate, animals, animal encounters, people and places, and any unique vehicles/technology employed.

 

[kafka47]

Naw, it has to be deadtree all the way. Just kidding Colin. I know it will be an uphill sell for 2030 but probably everyone on this board will buy it. The secret to the PDF adventure sourcebooks will be a promise to convert them into Deadtree replished with lots of art and helpful Player/GM aids that were not in the original PDF and incorporating the criticism/playtesting notes into a final deadtree...this way nobody feels cheated.

Personally, I like deadtree over any other format. However, I am reasonable...and if you can arrange, say, through Avenger to get them out sooner than later. This would also help the sales of the main rulebook...

 

[Nearside]

As long as they are very printer friendly, I don't mind...

 

[epicenter00]

PDFs sound like an excellent idea, really. As Mr. Herron pointed out, as long as its printer friendly. With PDFs you could include all the "spam" like in the old 2300 supplements like trace elements in the atmosphere that nobody ultimately cared about without being accused of bulking up the page count (not to be harsh but did anyone really care about the "info" in the overlong listing for Gamma Serpenti's primary? Seriously.).

I know it's not very popular to admire anything about TNE, but one thing I think they did right was their "Path of Tears" supplement. If you have a copy (or know someone who does) I think that would be worth a flip through.

In short: each place in question would be detailed, like on a colony world (as you said) the mainworld would be detailed, along with the current situation and a number of adventure seeds (enough for a small campaign) could be presented to go in sequence, as well as a few unrelated seeds along with a short adventure that a harried GM could run directly.

For ships, I'd really like to see a certain amount of "leaky valve" detail - like the kinds of small quirks and things that give a ship character but don't really translate into anything special in Starship Combat (like perhaps, "Due to the way the Suffren's cooling system is arranged, with long heated pipes running along hallways there's a tendency for hallways not in the main lifesystem to be a bit humid and damp. This tends to interfere with Infra-red imaging systems as well").

Just my .02 livre

 

[Falkayn]

Printer-friendly PDFs works well for me - but printer-friendly does not mean NO images, rather no extraneous borders etc. I think they should still be chock full of equipment, people, ships, logos, maps and terrain pictures.

 

[Colin]

Since I do all the maps, stuffing that sort of thing in is no problem. I personally believe that any animal, weapon, vehicle, or piece of equipment requires it's own illustration as well. For world books, a few shots of placement scenery would likely be possible too.

As for ships, yeah, an adventure sourcebook centered around a ship would include lots of fiddly details, a 25-30mm scale deckplan, adventure seeds, and an adventure. A few interior shots might be possible, but harder to do.

PDF gives us the opportunity to work more in color, too. That would be particularly important for scenery shots.

 

[Colin]

Oh, and that's 16 pages of sourcebook material, at ~700 words per page, with another 8-16 pages of adventure.

 

[Nearside]

The color aspect is good, but I feel that it's probably very important to make the pdf's work with black and white printers, as that's how most of us are going to be getting our hard copies of them. Perhaps the last couple of pages of each pdf would have higher-quality color maps - allowing those that can print them out (or use them on screen during the game) to do so, but we can just not print those pages out.

 

[walkerhound]

sourcebook/adventures: this is a wonderful idea. the immediate usefulness of a adventure with the long term utility of a sourcebook.

now in a perfect world i would like hard copy. but in the world we have, PDF would almost certainly give us (consumers and producers) more bang for the buck. in other words the less unit's ya'll have to sell to make a profit means more chance that ya'll will keep producing supplements.

how about relishing first in PDF then once you've seen what one's sell especially good you offer them in hard copy? maybe even go the print on demand route, just to trough it out there maybe even a small discount for anybody that fist bought the PDF version?

 

[TheKiwi]

Printable PDF works just fine for me, but I have access to a tame printer (my brother).

 

[Takei]

Printer friendly pdfs work fine for me. Colour would be OK for important things like maps, but not included in the main body of the document.