Amazing Adventures is a multi-genre RPG by Troll Lord Games that builds on the rules from Castles & Crusades.
Amazing Adventures’ author, Jason Vey, was kind enough to talk to me about the newest version of his RPG and his future plans. Please note that in the third printing references are made to the adventure Heart of Yhtill being in the core rules (it no longer is) and to the adventure Day of the Worm. Both adventures are found in the excellent book of adventures Shadows of the Red God along with a final third adventure that the book is named after.
Charles Dunwoody (CD): Thanks for talking with EN World and me, Jason. Amazing Adventures was described as pulp but is now expressly described as multi-genre. What was your intention on how Amazing Adventures would be used by GMs and players in this third printing and what style of games were you envisioning?
Jason Vey (JV): First, thanks for the interview! The multi-genre “rebrand” is something we’ve had a lot of questions about. Multi-genre was really always my intent for AA. If you look in the prior printings, in the introduction I talk about how pulp is really just all the genres we love, from swords and sorcery to sci-fi, horror and beyond. What we at TLG failed to consider is “common usage,” that the term “pulp” has in the popular consciousness taken on a very specific “two fisted action” connotation. In the end, nothing really has changed about the game, except we’re making it a bit more explicit that this is the game you can use to play any type of campaign you want, from swashbuckling adventures in the 16th century to two-fisted adventure in the 30s to modern urban fantasy, to far-flung space opera and beyond! In some ways that 1930s era will likely remain a sort of “default” because in my heart of hearts I love that era and that style of game. But it’s all out there for the taking.
CD: For a GM wanting to run Amazing Adventures for the first time where should they start and what advice would you give them?
JV: If you know Castles & Crusades, you’ll be up and running with AA in ten seconds flat. We consider C&C and AA to be two parts of one giant game. AA uses the same SIEGE Engine mechanics you know and love but lets you approach whatever kind of game you like. Our “Red God Trilogy” – Shadows of the Red God, Rise of the Red God, and Rings of the Red God – gives you a nine-part campaign that runs the gamut from Indiana-Jones-style high adventure to horror to planetary romance, dimension hopping, and beyond, so you can get a taste of where the game can go. But the advice I give to every new GM is don’t sweat the details too much. Read the books, get a good, solid feel for the system, and run with it. If you forget a rule, fake it: the players likely won’t notice or won’t care, and you can always look it up and correct later. In the end, you have one job, and that’s to make sure everyone (including you, and that’s important) has a good time at the table. If you can, track down the original first edition AD&D DMG and look at Gary Gygax’s Afterword on Page 230. It’s some of the best GM advice ever given.
CD: Is Codex Monstorum being crowdsourced soon? Anything you can share from the book?
JV: Codex Monstorum is down the road a ways, simply because TLG has so much on our plates right now between the Barsoom license, the return of Castle Zagyg to our company, and others. We have made the old Manual of Monsters available as a free PDF in the meantime, and are pointing people towards the C&C Monsters & Treasure book. That said, Monstorum is going to be loaded with things like classic horror movie monsters, prehistoric megafauna, and TONS of cryptozoological creatures – I have acquired several books on Cryptids of North America and all over the world, and I’m planning to stat as many of them out as possible. As much as I dislike statting up monsters (see below, hahahaha) I’m pretty jazzed to dig into it.
CD: Will The Brotherhood of William St. John, Rings of the Red God, and Ruins of Ends Meet be available to purchase as PDFs and if yes any idea when?
JV: Yes, they all will. Rings and Ends Meet are done and in editing, art, and layout so they should be available in print and PDF very soon. Brotherhood I’m putting the finishing touches on so that’ll be a few months, yet, but it is coming, as is Legacy of William St. John (the fiction collection that goes hand in hand with Brotherhood).
CD: Anything truly challenging and/or exciting about the design process for Amazing Adventures that you can share with us?
JV: For challenging, that’d actually be the forthcoming monster book, and even parts of Brotherhood. I abhor statting up NPCs and monsters (though as I said above I really am looking forward to the Codex Monstorum). It’s my least favorite part of game design. I find it dull, and doing the math to calculate XP gives me a headache. But truth be told, I’ve been living with Amazing Adventures, now, since about 2008, so the design process for that game is something I can do in my sleep. What’s fun about it is always hearing the ideas and suggestions the fans have, and we’ve had some down-and-dirty debates about some of it in the Discord channel…but in the end it always ends up making the game better because I take the feedback, run it through my brain filters, and add the best of it to the new supplements and new printings.
CD: What prompted you to write Amazing Adventures in the first place and continue to support it through three printings and a 5E converted version?
JV: When I came to TLG, I was freelancing for Eden Studios, writing genre books for All Flesh Must be Eaten and working on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game as well as a few others for them. AFMBE’s genre books were always a huge selling point for me, and I also was a big fan of C&C. From the day C&C came out in 04, I was rabid for it. I had a fan website for the game, and I started to play around with modern rules for it. I also had become good friends with TLG’s IT guy at the time, and he got Steve and I sitting down at the table together to talk. We found out we were on the same page on a lot of things both game design and personally, and just really hit it off. The original StarSIEGE showed that there was a market to explore the SIEGE Engine in other genres, so I pitched Steve the idea of a multi-genre rules set for it, 100% compatible with C&C (which StarSIEGE at the time wasn’t) and thought that we could use the Pulp concept to capture people’s attention. He agreed, and TLG became the first company to give me a core rulebook. So AA has been my baby from day one, and it always will be.
CD: I have to ask, any chance of sea travel and sea combat being added to the game? Pirate is one of the classes. Do you have a set of rules from another RPG you use for sailing rules that you might recommend?
JV: Yes! But I can’t say when. We do indeed, however, have a concept and some notes down for a high age of piracy sourcebook that will be shared between C&C and AA. For now, if you can track down my C&C The Hallowed Oracle sourcebook, I have a scenario in there involving cinematic naval combat which can be easily adapted to just about any game. I’ve been playing around with naval combat rules that involve the elements of the ship (masts, sails, hull, navigation, oars, decks, cargo, weapons, construction, etc.) wherein as you take damage, so do your ship’s “systems,” for lack of a better word, and when systems hit 0, bad things start to happen. It’s similar to the Starship combat I wrote for my own Thirteen Parsecs RPG for Elf Lair Games, and will likely also find its way into the new StarSIEGE when we get around to that one. I know it works for sci-fi, but to translate it to naval combat it’s going to need some major shakedown but our in-house playtesters are chomping at the bit to give it a go. Again, though, that one is down the line a bit as we work on the Zagyg, Barsoom, and a few other works (my manuscript for the Codex Exaltum, which deals with Celestials in C&C, is way overdue).
CD: Thank you so much for sharing your experience and thoughts with us. Any final thoughts you’d like to share with the readers of EN World?
JV: Just thanks for the support and keep your eyes open because we have lots of great stuff planned for AA. I don’t want to stop here – I have ideas for genre books that will take the “multi” in multi-genre just about everywhere you can think of and beyond! A lot of folks ask us about StarSIEGE. Yes, it is coming back and better than ever (we’re just not sure WHEN, exactly). Same with the Book of Powers, which I want to rename and expand to a full Supers tome. We have discussed (nothing in active development, yet, so don’t call us out on it!) post-apocalypse, zombies, cosmic horror (Cthulhu), Gothic horror, wild/weird west, war tales, and tons of others. I’m excited for the future of the game, and my schedule is about to open up as I wrap up some of my Elf Lair Games crowdfunding projects, to really tear into some more AA stuff. Thanks again for the interview!
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