Past Adventures produces settings for tabletop roleplaying games focused on historical fiction adventure stories. Each setting is defined by a single year and place (or places), detailing specific scenarios of dramatic adventure in the backdrop of pivotal changes in world events. As such, Past Adventures brings the tradition of fantasy roleplaying to a historically-anchored setting—a fictional universe that amounts to a revisionist historical sandbox for developing adventure narratives that reflect the real world as it was.
Clans & Cave Lions
Clans & Cave Lions is a Pleistocene adventure setting featuring humongous mammoths, robust Neanderthals, wily Cro-Magnons, and totemic magic. Set in Europe in the icy world of 40,000 years ago, it’s a gritty setting of competition and survival. This will be the first Past Adventures project written for use with the 5e SRD, although any roleplaying system can be employed. Planned for early 2025.
Port Royal: A Solo Pirate Story Generator
Following up on the success of Rock Band, this new solo RPG “zine” takes you into the world of 17th-century privateers and pirates. It’s some part historical exploration and adventure, with a sprinkling of Pirates of the Caribbean fantasy. Releasing in early August 2024.
1976: Bigfoot
It’s the summer of 1976! Gerald Ford is running for re-election, desperately fending off a hard-right challenge from a former actor and California governor, and a relatively unknown peanut farmer from Georgia is surging to victory in the Democratic primary. America is celebrating it’s bicentennial, but somehow it seems bittersweet, what with surging gas prices, inflation, and horrible unemployment. Meanwhile, at a recreational lake in the southern Cascades, there have been occasional sightings of the mythic Sasquatch in the dark forests. And young people have gone missing. Are these strange creatures a threat, or are the darkest events in the area the doing of the world’s most dangerous animal? Put on your platform shoes, get ready to boogie, or light up a joint! Journey back to adventure in the year 1976. Now available as a pdf or softcover.
Weather Manager
The brownie escapes with the heroes’ pendant across the frozen river. The heroes stop, gazing at the thin ice, wondering if it is safe to pursue.
Weather is an important element in roleplaying games. It can serve as “atmosphere,” providing the sensory experience of delicate snowfall or the bombastic background of a thunderstorm. But it can also be an important plot element—as it was for Bilbo and the dwarves outside Goblintown or for the Fellowship on Caradhras. And don’t forget that Spanish armada!
Weather Manager provides a system and tables for generating earth-like weather for a fantasy or science fiction world. There are 30 pages of background on weather systems and climate, written with world-builders and game referees in mind. The remainder is dozens of tables for generating day-to-day weather in any earthlike climate zone. Weather events are resolved with a limited number of die-rolls and are systematically connected to previous and following weather events, creating somewhat more realistic periods of stability followed by sudden change.
Now Available on DriveThruRPG
MCCLXV: Evesham
Where do your loyalties lie? To the king, despite his shortcomings, or to the radical nobles seeking to overthrow the crown? MCCLXV: Evesham is a detailed setting for historically-based role-playing in 13th-century England during the Second Barons’ War. The resource includes the mechanics for building and running a medieval manor, introduced in Medieval Manager, but features an expansive background on medieval England, including the key historical figures of the time, such as Henry III, Eleanor of Provence, Edward Longshanks, and Simon de Montfort. It includes dozens of tables for facilitating play, character descriptions, plotlines and hooks, as well as diagrams for castles, manors, churches, and the decisive 1265 Battle of Evesham itself.
Download a sample:
Medieval Manager
Ah, the thrill of medieval bookkeeping! The spine-tingling tension of mediating the petty squabbles of the peasantry! The pulse-quickening challenge of solving field irrigation problems! Doesn’t everyone enjoy role-playing games for the fantasy of managing your own estate? And yet, players DO find themselves in charge of their very own fiefdoms sometimes.
Medieval Manager provides an “any game system” background on managing a small medieval fief. It includes a simple system for handling basic politics and economics, as well as monthly events that can serve as seeds for traditional fantasy or medieval adventures. It’s based on late 13th to early 14th century England, but is compatible with any medieval historical or fantasy game including, of course, that most popular one!
This book is to be published in early June 2022.
Rock Band: A Solo RPG Story Generator
Bring a garage band to international fame, but beware of competing egos, drugs, and tangled romances. Rock Band is a 64-page self-contained roleplaying solo experience that creates a story of a rock band using only two six-sided dice. The game recalls the mythic glory days of the rise and fall of rock bands, roughly between 1975 and 1990.
Here is a sample chapter on Creating a Band.
1937: The Abyssinia Affair
An Ohio professor suddenly goes missing, abducted from his own home by gun-toting thugs. His two children head for Europe in search of him, constantly pursued by shadowy gangsters. Days later a precious ancient religious artifact, The Black Shield of Abyssinia, is stolen from the British Museum in a daring overnight heist. Solving the mystery and recovering the missing artifact and the professor brings the adventurers on an international pursuit as the storm clouds of world war gather over Europe and Africa.
1937: The Abyssinia Affair is an “any system” roleplaying game setting that provides 159 pages of detailed historical context, adventure seeds, encounter tables, and a three-continent default adventure arc.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/19614/Past-Adventures
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