Catch the Rainbow
My first published adventure, for Free RPG Day
Today the tabletop games industry is celebrating Free RPG Day, when folks can go to their friendly local game stores and get all sorts of fun giveaways from top-tier publishers. But hey, why not ALSO get something from me, huh?
“But seriously, folks” - as I’m hitting my second year in my current job/city and finding some stability for the first time in ages (sociopolitical forces notwithstanding, though of course that’s an asterisk so large it threatens to blot out your screen), I’ve been thinking about what I really want to be doing with my time, and “writing more” is high at the top of that list. So I figured I’d set up on Substack as an outlet for some of my output, especially as it relates to narrative, games, and their intersection. I’m going to try to keep anything on here relatively polished (i.e. no early 2000s Xanga-style blogging, unless something really goes wrong), and, just being very upfront about this, I plan to have paid content sooner rather than later (though a fair amount will remain free). Basically, I’d like Substack to host some wacky, strange stuff I generate that won’t quite support its own publication.
So for this first post, coinciding with Free RPG Day, I thought it’d be fun to give away the text of the first adventure I wrote for publication, “Catch the Rainbow,” inspired by the 1975 record Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, which was printed in the first volume of my zine Rock & Roll. But the version in this newsletter has a twist!
A not insubstantial amount of the feedback I got from Rock & Roll was “why does this have to be 5e?” Which, honestly, I think some of that is just cool kids rebelling against Daddy WotC. But it’s fun to explore other gaming systems, and the one that was most recommended to me was Old-School Essentials. So for this post, I tried to translate “Catch the Rainbow” into an OSE adventure instead. It wasn’t too difficult; the biggest switch was wrapping my head around a system where characters didn’t have skills and instead rely on their players’ ingenuity. I mean, obviously design philosophies between 5e and OSE differ pretty substantially, but I think this adventure translates pretty well since I always wanted it to have an old-school feel anyway (being based on a record featuring Ronnie James Dio and all). That said, a pretty crucial aspect of its design is a hefty roleplay encounter at the top, so if your group is so old school that you don’t want to talk it out sometimes, this still may not be for you. [Also, I left 5e-specific monsters and mechanics in brackets just like this.] I also made the map look slightly better!
Hope y’all enjoy “Catch the Rainbow”; I’ve definitely got another project in the same vein cooking that you’ll see around August, coincidentally when Zine Quest launches…
