The Long Journey of the Good Needle

Of all the scenarios I have written, "The Good Needle" is the one I have played most often and with the greatest number of different systems.
It startet out as a scenario idea for cubicle 7's excellent Middle-Earth rpg The One Ring. I wanted to capture the more whimsical elements of The Hobbit and especially, of Tolkien's beautiful and funny novella "Farmer Giles of Ham", and ended up with an adventure that featured man-eating fairy-tale giants, mean and surprisingly clever goblins, dead fish and a whole lot of sewing. Overall, it became a little more macabre than I had planned, but still felt like a well-behaved, kids-friendly scenario for do-gooder heroes. I went on to use it as my go-to scenario to introduce new players to The One Ring at our bookshop's open gaming nights, used it with Fate Accelerated to introduce my two nieces to rpgs and later expanded it and played it several times with Fantasy AGE. For the latter, I did a completely written and statted version (in my native German) with an eye to publication. However, for several reasons, nothing came of that.
Still, I wanted to see "The Good Needle" published. Badly. I have spent so much time with it, and it just seems to work remarkably well - GMing it, I got all kinds of things out of it, from "We'll talk our way through the whole adventure without ever baring a blade" to a fun dungeon romp (and, in one case, a would-be dungeon romp that ended with the group in goblin captivity).
Easy, most of you will say - just stat it out for some old version of D&D and put it on drivethru, at least three peoble will buy it, and you might even get a review. And that would be quite enough for me ... only, I totally don't speak D&D.



Don't get me wrong: I play and love Dungeon Crawl Classics. I adore Gavin Norman's Dolmenwood setting and am aware of the high quality of his Old School Essentials. I know and respect the importance of D&D and its earliest iterations. But I just can't wrap my head around GMing anything with saving rolls, where thieve's skills seem to come from a totally different game system and chances of 5 or 6 on d6 for arbitrary stuff like kicking in doors are hard-wired into the rules. Yeah, I know, in the end, it's all up to my rulings as a GM. But with OSR systems, I feel like someone gives me a toolbox without a hammer in it. Sure, I can use most of the tools inside that toolbox as a hammer, but still, a hammer would be more handy. And I don't really need all those other tools that I couldn't even name.

So, while I would have probably managed to stat something for OSE and put it out there, it would have felt a little disingenious. And most other systems I'm familiar and comfortable with are too restrictive in terms of license and/or are not available in German, which is another hurdle, since I'm not ready yet to do a full scenario write-down in English (working on it, though).

Finally, a solution manifested: I've been into Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer from the get-go and recently started playing in a RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha campaign, so the whole BRP family is pretty intuitive to me. Mythras, one of the more rules-heavy, but also of the best-designed BRP games out there, has a German publisher (the 100-Questen-Gesellschaft), and they recently began publishing original adventures by German authors. I had some hesitations about re-working "The Good Needle" for Mythras, because it didn't fit the ancient Greece/ancient Rome paradigm that I associate with that game. But finally, I made up my mind that Mythras is well-equipped to handle the scenario's implicit, vaguely Tolkienean low-fantasy setting. Also, I'm a fan of one of the big adage's of BRP (coined by OpenQuests Newt Newport, I think, or at least, I read it on his blog): "Monsters are people, too." This is an idea that always seems to work well with BRP systems (partly because you can never treat anything as cannon fodder, but I think it goes beyond that), and it feels very true of the role monsters play in "The Good Needle." So I just went and asked the 100-Questen-Gesellschaft whether they'd be interested to publish my scenario.

The answer was heartening, and so I spent two weeks re-statting and rewriting the scenario, expanding the elements that would work well with Mythras and paring others down.

By now, it's all handed in and I'm waiting to hear back from editing. It was an interesting experience to work with one scenario in so many different gaming systems: While I'm the first to admit that "system matters", I feel that it is still possible to adapt a scenario to very different sets of rules, as long as the scenario makes sense in itself.

So, it looks as if "The Good Needle" will finally see publication in the nearer future. And if all goes well, the German edition will be followed by an English one. I'm probably a little early with the advertising, but I couldn't just keep it in any longer. This will be my first rpg publication as an author for I don't know how long (I did a few official scenarios for the German edition of CoC about 20 years ago), and I'm strangely giddy about it.