(UPDATE: Session 2) Against the Cult of the Reptile God: Scarlet Heroes Game Journal

I've really loved reading everyone's progress updates on their games, and I've found them to be a great source of discussion for practical, at the table questions, so I'm gonna hop on that train haha---for anyone interested in running Session -1, mysteries, premade content in a proactive game, old school games, or goofy player hijinks, this might be useful. Spoilers for the module!

I've been out of the country for the last few weeks (which is why I haven't been in the lab for a bit) but right before I left, I tried out Scarlet Heroes, an OSR game intended for a single player and GM, with room for more. I've wanted to try it out for awhile, both to try a smaller game and to dip my toes a bit deeper in the OSR pool, so I gave it a shot! I might talk about the game itself more some other time---I found it interesting and kind of quirky---but that's for another time.

I grabbed two players and an old module Matt Colville talks about a lot: Against the Cult of the Reptile God (GREAT name). Scarlet Heroes is designed to be compatible with all AD&D content for first and second edition, and does some little tricks to convert them and iron out the weird wrinkles of the systems, so it was very easy to drag and drop into this game. I felt a bit iffy about the Scarlet Heroes setting, and I wanted to get more practice using our system for adapting content into a proactive game that we developed for our next book, with a few tweaks for playing with only two people, so I went with the AD&D module.

We had our Session -1 (collaborative worldbuilding), 0 (making characters and goals), and a little bit of play to start all in one session, which went FAST with such a small group. I made this sheet (which already has the edits the whole group made on it---everything on the first page is without any edits, and most stuff under the Session -1 heading was added to by all three of us): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-uUIrkFDMHABFM1Ba5dfjlY27RTt_8G9_EZzMkU6sOk/edit?usp=sharing

I spent like twenty minutes leafing quickly through the adventure and writing down important things I knew we needed for the adventure. We've gotten a lot of questions about how to run a mystery in a proactive game (especially with a Session -1), and my solution for this particular problem was to add in waayyyy more NPCs than I normally would. I did this for a specific reason: the bulk of the early stage of the adventure is all about exploring the town and figuring out who is secretly a member of an evil cult. I told the players they could do all the usual stuff during Session -1 (create interesting facts, mysteries, questions, conflicts, and more about the NPCs) but they couldn't know whether anyone was innocent or a cult member, even if they made things that implied one or the other. They were on board (which is important to check!) and we got to work. With a big list of NPCs, it was less obvious who was involved in the cult, and if I wanted, I could improvise on the fly who was a cultist and who wasn't, but I kept to the module. I was ready to let the players know if any ideas interfered with something important enough to the module I didn't think we could use it, but that didn't happen.

Speeding through the results, we ended up with these big changes to the module:

The group is on a time limit of ten days (which they imposed on themselves!) before the mayor (who they decided is a bit mad) goes on a rampage and purges everyone in town, innocent or guilty
Something powerful is being awoken by the cult (on paper this sounds like a huge change, but in practice, I think when the heroes triumph they send a huge serpent back into slumber and it's an easy change to make. Or I can add a big snake fight if I'm feeling ambitious lol)
A few other smaller but impactful changes (the church has a curse on it, the cult is super rich, the personalities or genders of a NPCs, etc)

We made characters (a very quick process in Scarlet Heroes) and they decided that they're neer-do-well thieves stuck in this backwater town as they wait for the heat of a heist to die down: they're in it for treasure and themselves, which fits Scarlet Heroes well. They developed some goals (rob the cult, keep the town intact, etc) and before next session, we'll flesh those out a bit with more specifics, since they know what's going on now.

Then we started playing! I wanted a little bit of action and not just worldbuilding, so I ran them through the start of the adventure. They chatted with some NPCs, robbed a an innkeep (who secretly serves the cult) and got in a fight with an NPC they decided is an old enemy. Nice, solid little intro to the game, and we'll get back to it before too long. I'll try to track pieces of it, whatever seems most useful to talk about.

Lengthy post haha, but hopefully useful. There was a point where we had questions about running secrets and mysteries in proactive games all the time, so that's what I think will be most useful about this---let me know if you have any questions about it!

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