1000 Random Quest Names

 In Five Parsecs From Home, along with all the Patron jobs, Rival ambushes, and the occasional cargo run to the next world over, you also some times end up with Quests. 

Quests are multiple missions loosely chained together, with a big treasure payout at the end. They're a fun concept, but they're a little underdeveloped in the rulebook. The intention is almost certainly to leave them open-ended and freeform so you can fill in your own fluff and flavor details. There is one fun little table on Page 36 that you can roll on to determine what form any Quest Rumors you gather come in, such as an intercepted transmission or an old treasure map. Beyond that, you're left to stitch-together your own narrative of what the overall Quest is, and make sense of it in your story. Which is great and all, but the rulebook gives zero examples or suggestions. It doesn't really provide you anything to kickstart your imagination (other than the table on page 36 that I mentioned), and it's particularly unclear in the early stages of your first Quest that there's not more story hidden in the rules somewhere. Like, I kept expecting the system to give me something for my Quest to be about, and it never really delivered. It was just track the number of Quest Rumors, and roll after each Battle to see if the next fight is the end of the Quest or not,  and then get extra Loot on the final fight. 

It wasn't bad nor broken, but I'm still kind of hoping some future expansion provides a little more razzle-dazzle there. I wanted something more to color my Quest, and maybe reinforce bits of the setting as well. A bit more of a framework over which to drape your narrative. I don't know if the game will ever give us that or not. So for starters, I made this:

Five Parsecs Quest Item Name Generator

It's three tables you roll on to assemble the Quest Item you are chasing after. This assumes you're after some artifact or collection of treasure, like it's an old pulp serial or Indiana Jones movie. You roll 1d10 three times below, and generate 1 of a 1,000 possible random names.

Die Roll	Column A	Column B	Column C
1	The Cerulean	Brain	-Eater
2	The Crystalline	Chariot	Entity
3	The Dark Matter	Egg	from the 5th Dimension
4	The Empathic	Firewall	from beyond the Fringe
5	The Impossible	Heart	of (insert the name of the planet you are on)
6	The Proto-	Laser	of the Engineers
7	The Non-Euclidean	Nova	of Hakshan
8	The Strange	Sabre	of the Manipulator
9	The Uplifted	Shield	of the Precursors
10	The Xanthous	Universe	of the Skulker

When you've completed the Quest and rolled up the extra Loot you get at the end, you pick the item that's the best match to the name and declare it the thing you'd been questing for. If all your Loot rolls fail to provide anything that feels like a good match, that would be a good time to spend a Story Point and pick an item from the book that is worthy of the name. (Maybe even make up your own item if you're feeling inspired and brave.) 

 

Example in Play: In my current campaign, the first quest I rolled up was for "The Strange Brain of the Skulker." I decided it may be some sort of Strange Matter matrix with computational powers but also religious significance... mostly decided because my Captain is motivated by Faith. It was also a lucky cosmic coincidence that I ended up facing Skulkers on my very first mission. If I'd gotten to the end of the Quest without Skulkers ever showing up, I may have considered spending a Story Point to force their appearance. At the end of the mission, my Loot rolls were for a Damaged Camo Cloak,  a Damaged Communicator,   a Teach-Bot,  and a Unity Battle Sight. They're all sort of "thinky" or "brain-like" items, so naming any of those as the Strange Brain would have been just fine, though perhaps it would be weird to have the Unity Battle Sight be a rare artifact since the name sounds like an off-the-shelf bit of kit routinely issued to Unity soldiers. If I'd wanted to go that route though, it'd be easy enough to say it's unique Skulker tech but has identical game effects to the Battle Sight, but achieves that effect via exotic Strange Matter. That was option. Instead, I decided the Teach-Bot was the best match for a "Brain". The single-use nature of the Teach-Bot meant that it would only benefit my Captain, which made sense that she was driven to pursue it because of Faith. So she interfaced with the Strange Brain, got a bunch of XP, and I spent it on Reactions to represent her mind quickening and broadening.

Chasing Brimstone

Over at Board Game Geek, someone was asking for ideas for Shadows of Brimstone scenarios that wouldn't just play out as the same "stumbling about in search of clue tokens" feel that is the default experience for most of the published missions.

Here's the rough idea I threw at him. I figure I might as well cross-post it here, since I haven't blogged much lately.

I propose a mission that is a chase through a tunnel, where you place ~4 tiles in a row at the start. Place the Corrupt Sheriff token (or an unused red mini) at the far end from where the Heroes start. Players are trying to catch up with him.

How far he moves each turn depends on the Hold Back The Darkness rolls / Depth Track, or a custom chart. Some rolls trigger him to jump ahead to the start of the next tile, and other rolls just send him a number of spaces forward.

You could avoid Exploration Tokens entirely, so no clues at all. Maybe the only Encounter cards drawn are ones that correspond to the "Advanced" block at the bottom of room tiles. Threats are produced by the same chart that governs the Corrupt Sheriff's movement. Instead of being Threats determined by your Posse level, it'd be only Low Threats entering via side doors, and the frequency (instead of Threat Card color) is determined by your posse level.

They want to bring the Corrupt Sheriff back to justice, which requires getting adjacent to him and making a 6+ Strength check to wrestle him down. Once he's down, no more monsters spawn, and the players win if he's down and they've killed all the monsters that had appeared during the chase.

Stopping to fight the monsters while the sheriff is still on the loose is counter-productive. There'd be a rapid pace forced on the players, with optimal play being about punching a hole through the monster formation, not fighting everything to death (which would only allow the Corrupt Sheriff more time to run away).

Catching Your Breath wouldn't be triggered by eliminating all the monsters, as there's never a moment without at least that one Enemy (the Corrupt Sheriff) in play. So instead Catching Your Breath comes from some entry on the Sheriff's movement chart, which also provides the Loot rewards, and can happen even if there are monsters still in play.

The Corrupt Sheriff is himself carrying a Lantern, so if a Hero is faster than the rest of their posse, they could risk running ahead and try to use the villain's light instead.

The idea would be to reward characters with Move bonuses, since they'd be able to catch up with him fairly quickly. In one of the posses I play with, there's a character with +3 movement, that's pretty much always wasted as she can't safely move ahead of us slow-pokes. In this scenario, she'd excel, provided she can slip around the Low Threats as they come up.

It would also make "discard and redraw the map tile" powers somewhat better than they are in most missions. You'd use them to redraw large rooms (since the Corrupt Sheriff can sometimes jump the whole length of a room in a single turn) in favor of short passages and small rooms.

Building the chart and getting the timing right on the Sheriff's movement and monster spawns would take a lot of playtesting and number-crunching, but it's a starting point.