I’m working on a sample adventure for Expedition soon that will hopefully give you something to start with on creating your own adventures with the system. If you’re already familiar with fantasy games of any stripe, you can use adventures from other systems, and things you’ve learned from building adventures for other systems, in Expedition. I intended Expedition to be a game where these kinds of narratives can be ported over without great shock. Things like Skill Challenges from D&D 4e, or the merciless dungeon crawls of AD&D, or even some of the gimmicks from newer Pathfinder Adventure Paths, can be interpreted as Expedition adventures with some time spent converting the monsters, and a little imagination for porting the challenges.
You don’t have things like definitive spells, so if a module requires a spell to be cast for something then that might seem like trouble brewing, but you can turn those into Favors or just have players engage in Events using their Potentials to solve those problems. I think you’ll find the game can be very flexible about these things.
Expedition’s been downloaded 167 times now. A friend of mine is planning a campaign for his players, and Shaun Welch has created a character on his Gnoll’s Den blog. I’m pretty excited about it all! My time for running my own games is limited so right now I’m just planning to play with some friends, but hopefully I can inspire you to try out the game in your own way.
Now for that bonus bit.
Expedition RPG has two types of damage: actual damage that accumulates toward your incapacitation or death, and Stress that accumulates toward penalties and ultimately incapacitation at 100 (an unusual but possible circumstance). In the beta document, there were some things that were cut out in order to simplify this mechanism as much as possible. I found it better to create a simple and clean baseline, which could be modified from there. You’ll notice that monsters don’t actually behave the same way with Stress as players do. Many monsters have lower health than the players, so they don’t have thresholds. Thresholds would also give the GM a lot to keep track of for each monster in the middle of a fight, and for not much of a gain – monsters don’t have the persistence that players and player-like NPCs do within the narrative of the game, so tracking their wounds after each battle is a bit of an unnecessary pain. Instead the game presents the mechanism whereby PCs decide the fate of monsters when they win battles, up to and including death regardless of the wounds incurred in the battle.
However, if you want to have have Stress dealt to tough monsters factor in a little more, you can use the rule for Stagger. It’s a pretty simple rule. Keeping track of the Stress a monster takes, if you deal half of its Endurance to it as Stress, it becomes Vulnerable for 1 round, and cannot be Rallied out of this condition. If the creature was already vulnerable, extend the vulnerability by 1d5 rounds. So by glancing it a bunch of times you can get a free Vulnerability, and coordinating all of these moves can score you significant tactical advantage without spending AP. This gives Stress dealt by the PCs a bit more punch than it would normally have, and it does add another little thing to keep track of in battle, but it’s not as nuanced as the Stress thresholds of the PCs. You may even allow non-Saboteur PCs to deal Stress (instead of Damage) with all of their normal attacks as a choice, rather than just dealing Stress as part the Glance mechanism. You could also use it to simulate knock-outs outside of battle, like if a PC sneaks up on an NPC and chokes him or her out, you can have the PC roll an attack and if it causes Stagger then it succeeds in knocking the NPC out.
As usual, Leader monsters cannot be incapacitated this way, nor do the conditions last as long for them.
Consider it, tinker with it and enjoy the game.
