GM Excuses, Part 2
Last time on GM Excuses, we followed along with the master class in writing being offered by the awesome podcast Writing Excuses. And we transmogrified the slant to be about writing roleplaying adventures. Take a look at what we came up with.
Well, the writing class has moved on, and so should our GM class. Take a listen. Our homework this week: Writing Prompt: Using last week's five story adventure ideas (or five new ones): 1: Take two of them and combine them into one story adventure. 2: Take one and change the genre underneath it. 3: Take one and change the ages and genders of everybody you had in mind for it 4: Take the last one and have a character make the opposite choice. 
1. Combining Drood and World Without Tears: The players are Victorian occult investigators, and they get put on the case by a friend of Charles Dickens. Dickens is on a speaking tour, and terrible things are happening to the audiences. They arrive in good health, but leave covered in bruises and scars. It seems every reading is interrupted by a madman with a gun. And the always charismatic Dickens is spellbinding when he speaks, almost magical. When the PCs tail Dickens, they find him sleepwalking at night. Visiting graveyards and vanishing into crypts. Following, they find a passageway down from the crypt to an underground maze where shadowy figures lead Dickens on, always just out of reach of the investigators. Hidden in the maze is a strange temple with Egyptian style markings, and it is there the Demon of Misery holds court. Can the investigators defeat the demon while rescuing the greatest writer of their time? 
2. Move the Invisible Protagonist story from Urban Fantasy/Horror to Space Opera Science Fiction: While exploring the new planet Hykloksia, the xeno-archeologist player characters find a dormant power source still powering *something.* Their instruments start to fail, which triggers an automatic teleport back to the ship. Except now, nobody can see them. They search the ship in vain for a way back into the real world, then realize they are not alone. Alien forms slither away every time they comes upon them. The aliens seem to be making changes to the ship's warp drive. When they enter the drive chamber, the aliens become hostile. The creatures are trying to create a warp gate *inside* the character's ship. Not a good idea. Can they save the ship and find a way back to the real world? 
3. Change the ages and genders of everyone in my frp group goes to oz adventure. I had already changed the good/evil axis last time. So why not change the rest? In fact, we can change it up so much that the players might never guess I started with Oz at all. Which is great, I get a great world to riff from, but they think it's all my brilliant imagination. So The Great and Powerful Oz becomes the Dread Sorcerer Tally. She's only six years old, but she was born with such power she wiped out her home village while being born. She's been a terrible force ever since. A road made of violet mounds of flesh leads to the Towers of Tally, a city populated by her minions. Glindor, a handsome and powerful old witch, finds the characters soon after they reach this world. He professes to want to help them, and says that the way home can be found at the Towers of Tally, where the benevolent Empress Tally is sure to help them. He vanishes before the characters can question him further. Mombik, a six year old green (goblin?) boy also born with similar powers to Tally reaches out to the characters, and warns them against Tally and her forces. Mombik has a small force of flying lizard men that protect his castle from Tally. 
4. Take the Great Filter adventure idea and have someone make an opposite choice: What if humanity made a different choice about replicator nano-bots? We decided to keep them off of earth, in case anything bad might happen. But it's fine to bring them to someone else's world. They can help with terraforming. After some fixed number of generations, they stop making copies of themselves, and start making things more Earth like. But this planet has seen replicator swarms in it's past, and has defenses. First it takes out the player's starship, but they make it to the surface in a shuttle. Then the planet starts constructing a weapon to deal with the source of the replicator bots. Can the characters stop the weapon from attacking Earth? Can they reason with an intelligence that sees them as an invading species? And with good reason? Try this with your own ideas. Come up with anything fun and exciting?