Monday 24 July 2017

Best Cold Open?

What adventures have the best Cold opens or in medias res openings in which the PC's are already engaged in something active, or something complex and interesting is happening around them or to them and they need to make decisions NOW?

TSR's 'Eye of the Serpent' had this;

This isn't exactly what I'm talking about as the PC's have no
choice as to whether they end up in the birds talons.
But I fucking love re-blogging this picture.
And its pretty ballsy anyway.

What other adventures had active or interesting openings?

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4 comments:

  1. one of the later slave lords ones has you start off killed from previous module

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. Pagan Publishing's "In Medias Res" CoC scenario (from The Unspeakable Oath #10, Fall 1993) begins with the PCs as four escaped prisoners/mental hospital inmates who just completed a ritual using a dead guard, lying on the dining room table of a house, but something goes wrong during the ritual and "none of the group knows who they are or what they are doing here or just what the hell is going on. At this point the scenario begins."

    WRT the Slave Lords: A4 (the final adventure in the series) begins with the PCs as naked prisoners (no equipment, only a couple of memorized spells) after they were captured at the conclusion to A3.

    Allan.

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  4. That's quite a difficult question to answer.

    'Wrath of the Immortals', imo one of the greatest adventures ever printed, begins *kind of* media res, in that it has a huge back story of warring immortals that the PCs never really find out about.

    'Creature of Havoc', the old Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, begins strait in the action, and its only later in the book you discover the who and why of what you are, and the back story that put you there.

    Personally I was always a fan of 'Begin at the end of another story', as in the Film Gladiator where they start at the end of the Germania campaign, or even Harry Potter where we start at the end of the 1st War.

    Please write a novel False Machine! I know its hard but I want to read some of your ideas in a novel form! Maybe a weird murder mystry...opens with the death of a Goblin in the city of Oma-Rey, and our Hero has to solve the murder...

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