Blog 00?: The Gentleman Caller!
The wait is finally over! Just in time for Halloween, we present the first Clockworks adventure: the Gentleman Caller.
Clockworks Presents: The Gentleman Caller
The Gentleman Caller is a steampunk mystery/horror story, set in Clorencia City. It’s a free adventure for Savage Worlds, and can play out over one to two nights of gaming. It includes 5 pregen PCs, a complete adventure, and what is hopefully a very nasty encounter at the end.
This is version 0.75. I’m going to add some artwork and fancier formatting, probably edit a few things and expand a few sections based on player feedback, then re-release it as version 1.0. When? I’m not sure, a few weeks, a month or so maybe.
EDIT: Updated the links to the version 1.0, for anyone who comes across this older blog post. The above links are to the latest version of the adventure, complete with cool pictures. Enjoy.
Some thoughts:
Man, that took much longer than I thought!
My hat is off to all of you who write RPG adventures/books professionally. It is much, much more work than just running a game. (When I ran the first playtest of the Gentleman Caller, I literally had about 10 lines of notes for the entire adventure. The full module is 13 pages, not counting the pregen characters.)
If you guys have any questions about the city or the characters that you need answered to run the adventure, don’t hesitate to ask. If you find any errors, feel free to point them out to me.
After you’ve played The Gentleman Caller, I absolutely encourage you to post on the comments here to let us know how the game went, what you tweaked, if the characters survived, etc etc.
I think for the next adventure, I’m going to do something much, much shorter. I’m thinking a One Sheet style adventure. Perhaps a follow up to this one starring the same characters out in the wilderness somewhere attempting to bring back some strange beast. Any requests for parts of the world you’d like to see?
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I will probably start a livestream later this morning to do comic #40. I think reading the Gentleman, you’ll see why I didn’t have time to finish writing/editing this adventure AND get the comic done on Thursday. (Not to mention dealing with my car window.)
Later guys, see you later today for the comic!
Fan-damn-tabulous! Thank you for giving me a reason to get into the SW system. What form of the rules would you recommend for me if I wanted to run this adventure?
>WBM
The Explorer’s Edition is the latest version of the game, and is a complete rulebook for only $10. The Test Drive is a free download that’s should be complete enough for you to run this adventure.
http://peginc.com/Downloads/SWEX/TD06.pdf
Cool! After the first Deadlands I lost track of this game system, but I hear good things about it. I was/am a massive HoE fan. Again, thanks for the free adventure! Do they keep any SW compendiums out there anywhere that have like bigger lists of cross-genre options?
Oh, and I saw the propaganda posters: Christmas. Presents.
>WBM
I’ll be broadcasting making the next comic for the next few hours.
http://www.livestream.com/clockworks
This looks absolutely fantastic. I do have one small request. Any chance of a version laid out to print 1up rather than the current 2up? It would just make it a little easier to read and handle. It would also display better on any ereader, which with more and more rpg products coming as pdfs, starts to look like every GMs friend,
I intend to give it a thorough reading over the weekend and than round up some players to run through it.
Thanks for putting in all the hard work and letting us have at it.
- Neil.
I’ll consider it. I’m a huge fan of PDF adventures that are published in landscape format. White Wolf’s SAS adventures were the first time I saw it. It’s just to me infinitely easier to read on the screen. I’m worried that a landscape format with only one column would be way too wide for the eye to follow. I’ll play with it though, see how it works.
Maybe when I release version 1.0 with the art and tweaks and whatnot I will also put out a version with no formatting, for ebooks and the like.
Thanks for the adventure.
Landscape format. EWW! My printer had a nervous breakdown and I had to reboot my computer.
I’m not kidding. I had to get into the printer menu and convince it to print your PDF. It did not like it and made funny grinding noises during printing. It also took its sweet time in printing your PDF – very slow.
Also; Landscape format looks odd and is hard to read. It pulls the eyes all over the page. I like the portrait format much better. Much easier to read.
I for one like the landscape style of print.
Looking over it my immediate thought was “there is no art? And this is a webcomic too I would expect at least some art.” Then I saw your comment that it would be included in version 1.0.
Silly me for not reading the entire post.
Reading over the adventure it looks interesting and something I’d be willing to run when I have some free time in my schedule. I’ll definitely print this one out and put it into the slate of adventures to run. Thanks!
…not to dissent, but I like landscape. In my own games, any notes I type, or stats I block out are printed that way…to stave trees and stuff, as well as um…yeah that’s all I got. Thanks again for the adventure!
>WBM
I have read The Gentleman Caller. It is much darker than the Webcomic. IMHO it would take very experienced or very lucky players to defeat the villain using the Sample Characters.
This Adventure certainly brought out “the horror”. I feel much more comfortable reading the Webcomic. I just know that the main characters in the comic can handle whatever happens. In the Adventure I felt that the PCs were overmatched and would be very lucky to suceed and escape with their lives.
If you do add artwork, I hope you’ll add a map or two. My players love to ask for maps, and having any applicable to the encounter areas would be awesome.
Also, I have to agree with pineappleleader, the pregens look a bit on the weakside. Also, regarding the pregens, can you stat out the equipment, or provide a table with the equipment in it just for completeness? I imagine the stats are in the wiki, but it would be nice to have everything in the adventure.
The pregens are actually a bit tougher than your normal starting Novice PCs. It’s just that the Gentleman is really nasty. I’ll add a sidebar explaining that it’s a horror story, and the ending might not go well.
When I ran it, the PCs defeated him with no casualties. We had 3 veteran players and 2 brand new ones.
I thought all of the PCs gear had stats, I’ll make sure on version 1.0.
It occurs to me that while I’ve always known the setting has some horror elements to it, as have my players, that all of you guys really haven’t seen that part of the setting yet, and won’t for quite some time really. (Well, the CENSORED were pretty creepy, but things won’t get really nasty until the CENSORED in like 3 years.)
In the first session of Ruins, the first campaign in the Clockworks world, the first thing we encountered on our way out in to the open world was the corpse of a giant monster and a bunch of zombies.
In New Dawn, the first major encounter was with an undead fire mage with a burning head and a number of spine covered worg like beasts.
Due to the fact we’re in the civilized world, Clockworks starts off with much less in the way of terrors and monstrosities. (Although as the adventure shows, they’ve snuck in a bit there as well.)
I do appreciate the feedback though. I think for the second adventure I’ll make sure to do something a bit closer in tone to the comic so far.
One final tip for the final battle: don’t under estimate the fact that most of the PCs can put out a LOT of damage. They can’t take much abuse, but thanks to the weird science devices they can put out a lot.
Yes the Sample Characters can do respectable damage, but are likely to be fighting in a cramped low light area. This will mean a minus to the chance for an attack to hit.
Undead call be very hard to damage at all and have a plus to recover from being Shaken.
The female character’s defense against The Gentleman’s magic is Average at best.
With one exception the sample character’s Toughness is Average or Below Average.
They are just one wound away from not being able to hit The Gentleman at all.
The Sample Characters can take him down with luck and cooperation. It is still my opinion that brand new players would have a very hard time.
I look forward to reading more of the Webcomic and your next Adventure.
[...] Clockworks [...]
Were the weird science devices possessed by the pregen characters built using house rules? I can’t seem to figure out which Powers were used to make them.
They were indeed.
I would love to see those rules, but I’m guessing they’ll be included in the Clockworks setting book. Are you almost finished that yet? ;P
Man, the past two weeks have been insane. The Clockworks Test Drive and GMs Test Drive will be done soonish. Next week is also fairly insane, so probably not until the 25th or so.
Thanks for the adventure! I look forward to your combined effort though the wiki is nice to have too. I will have to look closer at the main villain at the end however my experience with SW characters is they are much tougher than they look and since they outnumber the enemy at the end they should be able to gang up too.