Updates/Changes

Over on my public facing social media I have been talking about some changes/revisions that I want to make to Adventures in the Unknown before I prepare it for print. There are two things that I'm working on changing/adding to the game.

The first is that I'm going to change up the approach the game has to "powers." Adventures in the Unknown was never meant to be a game about super-heroes, or super-powered beings. because I've already written one of those (that is an affiliate link btw) and it handles that stuff very well. But I think there needs to be space for some sort of handling of psychic abilities, magic and general weird abilities. I have not finalized my ideas, so it could be that this section isn't dramatically overhauled. Basically I want to simplify and make it so that the rules better fit with my next change.

I want to make the game more "fiction first." This might not mean a lot to you, and that's okay. It's honestly not as scary of a concept as it might sound. Fiction First role-playing is basically two things: 

• The group working together to create the overall story of the game. This means everyone in the group from the GM to the Players. Some of this is started in the part of the game about Session Zero, so it isn't completely coming out of nowhere. Basically, rather than the approach of having the GM come up with everything in a game's setting and story, players also contribute to things. By making everyone responsible for the story it makes everyone in the group more invested and helps to promote long term play.
• This one is a bit more esoteric, but you think about the mechanics of the game in terms of how they impact the story. Okay, maybe it isn't that esoteric. Typically this means framing game play in a different way than you might be used to doing. First you think about what effect that you want your character to have within the fiction of the game, and this can be as simple as "my character punches the neo-Nazi" to "I want them to parkour up the side of the building and catch up to the fleeing criminal." Once you have figured out want you want to do, then you figure out the best way to get that to work mechanically.  This can be as simple as a Brawl roll, or perhaps a couple of Jump rolls and a Quickness roll?

If you've already read the game you'll notice that I have already picked at the edges of these concepts in the existing text. I just want to make this approach more explicit, and give some better guidance on it.

I don't really have a time table for this, but I will send out an update when I've uploaded the next version of the document.