DramaScape has two products at 20% off in the Cthulhu Mythos Sale at DriveThruRPG, The Lighthouse and The Asylum.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/mythos.php?manufacturers_id=4491&affiliate_id=12615
Our fellow Game Publishers' Guild member Mystical Throne Entertainment also has Five Points (Dark Streets) available in the sale at 20% off.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/195092/Five-Points-Dark-Streets?affiliate_id=12615
Tower is a tarot.
UPRIGHT: Sudden change, upheaval, chaos, revelation, awakening.
REVERSED: Personal transformation, fear of change, averting disaster.
In Season 3 of Dice Funk: Ilium, the Tarot cards came into play in a big way and Tower was pulled just before an incoming disaster. I was very into Tarots as a means to guide character development back in the late Earthdawn days. I had bought a Mage: The Awakening Tarot deck and was playing around with it as a way to read the fortunes of characters to create them.
That deck is still available here:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/205864/Mage-The-Awakening-Tarot?affiliate_id=12615
Tower is a also a fortress. Perhaps the greatest dungeon I have ever made all time never saw use. I had crafted a 22 level mage tower for Dungeons and Dragons 3e. It started out with Hanz and Franz, barbarian sorcerers on the first floor who run a surplus magic item shop for the 20th level wizard on the 22nd floor of the tower. You could buy magical potions, scrolls, etc. in preparation for ascending the tower.
"I am Hanz. And I am Franz. We are here to pump...your magic up!"--Hanz and Franz in Arnold voice
Hanz and Franz were also the gatekeepers of the tower. Entering the second floor required adventurers to sign a legal waiver that put the blame for any death, injury, or maiming squarely on the adventurer, but it also said that getting to the 22nd floor with the signed waiver would earn them a prize. The waiver was also enchanted with a sort of Sanctuary spell which meant the wizard could not harm them unless they attacked the wizard, tried to steal his belongings, etc.
The magical tower itself was supposed to be a rogue-lite kind of simulation. Every 24 hours it would reconfigure every floor 2-21 with shifting walls. So you couldn't just map it, rest, and come back. Because the map would have changed. This also meant it would have a lot of undead, constructs, slimes, etc. Because otherwise all these shifting tower floors would end the guardian monsters too, so they had to be resilient or malleable in some ways to getting moved around. The store was always closed every 8 hours for 2 hours to give Hanz and Franz some rest and one of these periods was when the shift occurs.
The wizard at the top of tower was quite mad and would attack anyone without a waiver on sight. So if you thought planeshifting to the top would be cute, prepare to get time stopped and delayed blast fireballed. But if you actually succeeded in getting to the top with a waiver, the wizard would exchange a magical item for the waiver. That he would then sign, and would act as a sanctuary spell against the person who had signed the contract. The wizard remained friendly to them as long as the contract held. The wizard had been cursed by a devil of some kind that had made him delirious.
Sequels could have been the magical item they were given was cursed by the devil that cursed the wizard and would slowly drive them insane as well. Which might have ended up with them going to Hell to confront this devil perhaps freeing themselves and the wizard.
Fellow Game Publishers' Guild member Mystical Throne Entertainment has released their August Throne Report detailing updating products to SWADE and Entropic 2.0.
http://mysticalthrone-ent.com/throne-report-august-15-2020/
I really loved meeting Earthdawn and DramaScape friends, fellow gamers, and fellow publishers at Origins, GenCon, and Con on the Cob. I can't wait until I can afford to go again and we aren't in the middle of a global pandemic. I also miss meeting with my gaming group every few weeks to play.
The Meet in the game itself usually happens at a tavern in a lot of fantasy games like in DnD and Earthdawn. Shaintar saw the group meet at a Grayson's Gray Ranger military camp. Necessary Evil had them make a prison break. Saga of the Goblin Horde had them meet at the Redfang Tribe camp. 50 Fathoms sees the group shipwrecked and needing to escape Torath-Ka. In Deadlands we usually meet up on a train or a stagecoach. All of these represent a shared space which allowed for introductions to occur, especially being trapped on the same vehicle together for a time is an effective device for this. The ship or a spacedock is an effective meeting device for a sci-fi game but we haven't really played any of those yet (although Necessary Evil is a little bit of that).
"Follow me my friends. I know this tavern owner, and he keeps a cask of special brew behind the bar for me...Myrthion, my good man, five mugs of the good stuff, please. Zounds--you aren't Myrthion!"--Swordmaster Luthan discovers that one more reliable fixture in his life has changed.
The word Comfort in RPGs leads me back to the quote above from the Earthdawn Gamemaster Pack. Things were getting too comfortable and reliable, so the GM has shaken things up. Is Myrthion dead? Fired? Is the bartender an agent of one of the character's enemies sent to remove and replace Myrthion and poison the player?
You can't let the characters get comfortable. You have to change and mix it up at times to add wrinkles and curves to the story. It also makes the world feel more realistic and believable when no NPC is forever.
As for me, missing my Comfort of running and playing games lately.
What is the most Dramatic turn of events in any game as a Player or GameMaster? I think for me it was probably when Garthan Zufere turned against The Usurpers in Earthdawn Kratas Quest. The group decided to turn against Garthan's mentor and friend. Rather than go along with it, Garthan betrayed the party to save him. This was a hard choice, but it was what the character would do versus what would keep the party cohesive. I ended up playing a couple of other characters who died late in the game (one of them was a dwarven archer who only lasted one session!) before playing Garthan again in the campaign finale (an enemy of my enemy is my friend for now situation).
The Frame of your adventure is how you visually see the major points in a game session...before you add in the player characters and their actions anyway. Like frames in a movie that I am writing that the players are going to "edit" later. I usually visualize them as individual scenes when writing up an adventure myself filling in gaps in the story which I used a lot in Earthdawn and Shaintar. Usually a scene descriptor like combat, social encounter, hazards, etc., maps if needed, minis if needed, and motivation, objective, personality (aka MOP) for pertinent NPCs. Basically it is all the notes you need to run the encounter at the table.
Savage Worlds and One Sheets tends to make it even easier on GameMasters with a sequence of combat scenes, interludes, chases, mass-combat, quick encounters, social encounters, and other framing devices for each scene during an adventure. Saga of the Goblin Horde in particular has some well constructed adventure frameworks and One Sheets for game play.
