Something I've wanted to create for a long time is a fairly traditional fantasy scenario with adventurers roaming the land, taking on various jobs. Of course, there are already several fantasy one-pagers for Tricube Tales, but their settings are all rather quirky, and I'd like something more vanilla.
Having recently been playing a lot of The Witcher 3, I've got a good feel for the sort of jobs the heroes might take on (and honestly, it's not that different from various novels I've read or TV shows I've watched, where people post jobs on notice boards and members of the "adventurers guild" complete them for rewards).
However, I really want this to be an expanded product, with three Six-Scene Scenarios (one set in a town, one in the wilderness, and one in a dungeon).
I had originally planned to split it into a trilogy of three separate one-page RPGs, one for urban adventures, one for wilderness, and one for dungeons, meaning each would come with its own Six-Scene Scenario. They could even be combined into a single product (like I did for Champions of Fenrir and Champions of Osiris), or released as separate products in the same series (like I did for Eldritch Detectives, Eldritch Apocalypse, and Eldritch Cultists -- or Twisted Wishes, Sundered Chains, and Wicked Dreams). But unlike those other settings, these fantasy adventures all follow the same characters in the same time and place, so I worry that it would feel very repetitive to offer them as three one-pagers.
The second option would be to adjust the layout and add another adventure generator table on the right-hand side, like this:
The problem is there's not enough space for three tables, so I'd need to combine the wilderness and dungeon adventures, which isn't really ideal when they have separate Six-Scene Scenarios. It also means there would be two pages of adventure examples, so I'd be left with a blank page I'd have to use for something else.
The third option would be to have a standard adventure generator for urban adventures, then offer two alternative location tables for dungeon and wilderness adventures, like this:
The GM would then roll 3d6 for the adventure as normal, but they could pick one of the three location tables depending on where they want the adventure to take place. There would then be three pages of example adventures, meaning the one-page RPG and its adventure examples would fit onto two double-sided sheets of paper.
Of course, each page would share the same objective and complication tables, and although I could offer different examples for each, the table entries would still need to be phrased fairly generically in order to fit all three location types. Making them too generic risks stripping the table of flavor.
But the more I think about it, the less comfortable I am with the idea of having an entire double-sided sheet of paper with just adventure examples on both sides. I like having the entire game and all the adventure examples on a single sheet of paper; it keeps the product concise, and if you're running a one-shot, you don't really need too many examples anyway. Even if you want to run more adventures, the examples are supposed to be for inspiration; they're not intended to cover every possible situation.
That brings me on to the fourth option, which is to design a simple one-page RPG in the same style as all the others, with a regular adventure generator that includes a mixture of urban, wilderness, and dungeon locations. There would still be three Six-Scene Scenarios covering urban, wilderness, and dungeon adventures, and I could also offer another sheet with an example town (much like I did for Sharp Knives & Dark Streets), which would include a map and expanded locations in and around the town.
After all this, I think I'm favoring the fourth option. As much as I'd like to expand the one-pager format and experiment with different setups, I still want the core product to fit onto a single sheet of paper (otherwise I'd be better off turning it into a book). The first page is really the "one-page RPG", as it contains everything needed to play, and the second page (i.e., the back of the sheet) includes examples for each entry in the adventure generator table.
