A game’s intro adventure helps communicate what adventures are generally supposed to look like, or at least what PCs’ lives may be like at the start of a campaign. That can be a whole lot of weight to carry. Academia Arcana’s starting adventure is Night of the Were-Wizard. This adventure had an odd origin sometime in 2020. It both changed a lot, but a fair amount stayed the same too. Let’s go through the story of this adventure. Spoilers ahead!
I think I was relistening to some old Nightvale episodes and wrote something down about wolves stealing books. My notes were something aking to “A wizard has been robbed. Wolves stole his books. One of the wolves has a big Mojo Jojo brain.” That probably set in a google doc for a while until I unexpectedly needed it one night. I was scheduled to play in an online game but the GM didn’t show up. After about 15 minutes of waiting with the other players, I offer to run. And I started improving off those 3 sentences.
A wizard asked the PCs to go get the books back. The PCs followed a pack of wolf tracks and the occasional missing page into the woods. They soon found a cave and a magic barrier. The barrier could be easily passed through by an furry animal, but less furry creatures had some difficulty. The next room has 1 huge wolf (with a Mojo Jojo brain threatening to burst its own skull) that was fitfully sleeping near a pool of glowing-green water. There’s some stairs leading up to where a bunch of wolf-men are doing a ritual with the stolen books. That was enough for a night’s adventure!
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Most of that really remained the same, just a bit polished. When creating Academia Arcana several years later, this seemed like a short adventure that could be tied to a mystery. I mean, why are wolves stealing magic tomes? Well, one of these wolves was bitten by a wizard and is now a were-wizard: becoming a very intelligent wolf-man during the full moon. But also cursed by the existential terror with the knowledge that they will return to a dumb beast. So they want a way to permanently become were-wizards and not loose that intellect.
But we need an intro change for Academia Arcana and to attach this to a mystery instead of a simple “there’s obvious tracks leading to adventure”. So we have a victim of literature theft become a teacher at the Eternal Academy. The teacher just wants their books back and offers a reward. A different teacher surreptitiously offers a different reward to the PCs, as they want to recover the books and make the first teacher look bad. So we create a 1d10 table of clues that can be found around and a few likely locations that the PCs will investigate. The judge can improvise the rest, but a combination of locations, malleable clues, and a few NPCs creates a fun playground to explore. And after exploring and investigating the PCs are pointed are pointed towards the wolves. By adding some backstory, the PCs also start asking whether or not this should be a violent confrontation. Sometimes it is, and sometimes there is absolutely zero combat when I run this adventure.
This is the form that the adventure stayed in for a long time, but eventually I realized this is an adventure that this is good for student PCs that are already in school, but not ones who are just beginning their first year at wizard school. I had a fun little “welcome to school mixer” written into another adventure, which essentially got ported into this adventure. The other adventure was a little more dangerous so it wasn’t as good an intro adventure anyway.
So now Academia Arcana’s intro adventure introduces at least 2 NPC students, 2 NPC teachers, several locations, and a faction (the were-wizards) who are not even members of the school but still live in the same demi-plane. It has investigation, danger, and a finale that offers combat but does not require it. You can solve problems by taking part in magical rituals, just as you can solve it with violence. That sounds like the kind of adventure that I endeavor to create for Academia Arcana.
What are your favorite “intro adventures” for another setting or system?
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