[Turhan's Bey Company]

I promised something DN-like back when GDFA1:MOTFD was being written, so here are some thoughts on it which may be of some use to people who are interested in it or in working with the adventure outline themselves.

A primary design goal here was ease of use, which raises the question of what the adventure is supposed to be used for. It seems to me that adventures, in the context of GURPS products, imply a plot, or at least a specific objective. It's not just "here's an interesting situation"; it's also "here's what you want to do about it." For sandbox games, you want Locations or Hot Spots, not Adventures. To that end, the content is deliberately about pursuing the objective: how to get PCs involved, and how to keep them involved. This is, as some have observed, good for novice GMs, who need some hand-holding, but it's also good for more experienced GMs who might not be strong at keeping players on task or, having downloaded the adventure only a few hours previously and given it a single read-through, would benefit from having that sort of thing explicitly pointed out. Some GMs won't need that kind of advice at all, but I wouldn't expect them to be buying adventures (as opposed to Locations) in the first place.

(The secondary design goal is, of course, reusability. That was pretty easy to achieve, actually. DFM1 wasn't out until MOTFD was well along, so I more or less had to come up with a mini-monster manual, and reusable tactical maps are pretty easy.)

The structure of the outline was awkward to work with initially and it took some time to work out what it all meant and why it was arranged that way. The three major components (once you're past the first chapter laying out general concerns) are:

1. Places where things happen.

2. Things that (are likely to) happen.

3. People things happen with.

As laid out in the outline template, this makes a bit more sense for adventures which aren't so much like MOTFD. For example, a modern detective story will have locations (scene of the crime, police station, morgue/crime lab, homes or places of business of persons of interest, coffee shop, courtroom, etc.), things that happen (revelation of various bits of evidence, argument between persons of interest, "bong bong" sound when significant things happen), and people they happen to (heartless executive/ex-spouse/etc. who is the obvious prime suspect, sweet and lovely relative/current spouse who could not possibly have done it, interfering DA, quippy lead detective, butler, police informer, hooker with a heart of gold). In such an adventure, there's not a strong link between the three high-level categories. A confrontation between the investigators and the DA might happen at the police station or the courtroom. An interview with the hooker with the heart of gold might happen in the police station or the cold, windy streetcorner. Any number of fights between people of interest (one of them accusing another of the crime) could happen just about anywhere and involve any combination of said people. The three-part structure allows the author to set all those out separately in a mix-and-match fashion.

The problem with that structure and MOTFD is that it's not appropriate to the adventure, because MOTFD does have strong associations between places and events. Adventurers won't run into wandering monsters in town or ask questions of the oracle when they're in the final dungeon. Indeed, as one of the playtesters pointed out, it's was a pain to shuffle back and forth between the "places" and "events" chapters, so for this adventure, the events were subsumed under the places where they happened.