|
|
| [General] | [History] | [Why not free?] |
The WFRP Adventure Collection is exactly what its title implies. It is a collection
of scenarii, adventures and campaigns written for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
I am pleased to say that it is probably the largest collection of adventure texts written
for a single role-playing game.
Its continuous growth is achieved by its increasing numbers of supporters. From all over
the globe, WFRP gamers write down their own adventures or translate that of others
to gain access to the WFRP Adventure Collection.
The basic idea behind this project is the following:
The WFRP Adventure Collection offers all its adventure texts (plus any that will
be added in the future) to anybody who contributes at least one adventure by himself.
Therefore, access to the collection is restricted. You need a password to get all the
honey.
There are a few criteria for contributing adventures to the WFRP Adventure Collection.
Please read the section How To Get Access for more
information.
By now, you can find 188 adventures in it.
How it all began
Several years ago, when the WFRP net community was smaller, in the
beginning 90s, after Games Workshop dropped their support for WFRP,
after Flame died and long before Hogshead Publishing relaunched this
great game, complete adventures were something very sparse.
There were lots of WFRP gamers out there, and most of them were quite capable to write decent adventures - since they had to improvise most of their WFRP gaming session due to the lack of support for their game, but almost nobody found the energy and motivation to write complete adventures for the public.
During the years on the net several authors worked out adventures or
scenarii for WFRP, translated adventures previously published in
magazines or fanzines like Casus Belli, Le Grimoire or others, or
simply put them on the net to make them usable by others. The idea
sprang up in someones mind, that it would be nice to collect all of
these and bring them together into on document to make sure that
noone should ever need to start a net expedition to find some still
unseen WFRP adventure. So this person (Oliver Rosenkranz)
edited all WFRP adventures he had collected from various sources
to fit into this Adventure Collection. 'Historical' reasons were
responsible for this document becoming a LaTeX document (since
Oliver had already created other WFRP documents with LaTeX)
together with the need of including pictures, maps, page numbers
and so on...
As LaTeX is not too wide-spread on popular computers like PC
and Mac, the final format of this document is PostScript.
While the actual documents contain 188 WFRP adventures,
the first document contained only five. To enlive this project
the editor was in need of new adventures. Personal experiences made
him sure that only few people would send him new stuff if they did
not get something in return. As money was no choice and adventures
are only for use for GMs (who are capable of creating adventures),
the editor designed a certain access policy for this document (see
below).
Some supporters were found and the WFRP Adventure Collection grew during the next years. When a certain size was reached, more and more people were willing to contribute to it as they finally had motivation to write down their own material - even if not all of them were talented writers from the start.
"Share-holder Value": The contributors to this project sent their
submissions not only to get the actual material, but also the material that
gets contributed in the future. By changing the distribution policy, potentially
less new contributions will arrive, which will possibly annoy contributors.
Motivation: The WFRP Adventure Collection reached a size where lots of
gamers become interested in contributing - whether they actually like the idea
of restricted access or not. Throwing the distribution policy over-board would
rob the project lots of material in the future.
Dislike: Personally, I dislike the attitude of people who just want to
leech and never give something in return. A hell lots of work has gone into this
project by both me and all the contributors. I cannot speak for others, but I want
something in return for this work. I have heard people complaining that they don't
have time writing a single adventure, but who seem to have enough time to read and
play almost two-hundreds of them. I have heard people telling me that they are not
talented enough to write something. Believe me, everybody who has been a games-master
for some time is talented enough to write something that is accepted as valid
contribution to the WFRP Adventure Collection.It is just a matter of being willing...
No lack of material: There are people who tell me that the restricted distribution
of the WFRP Adventure Collection will prevent people from playing WFRP or from finding
material on the net. I cannot believe this. There are tons of material freely available
on the web - more than you will ever be able to play with your group. So, this argument
is little more than nonsense.
Free Samples: Some people accepted my challenge to write adventures for the
WFRP Adventure Collection. These adventures (and even some others) will be made
publicly available as publicly available samples as soon as they have been contributed
and accepted.
Why don't you make it publicly available?
Copyright: Every single text was sent to me under the condition that
I add it to the WFRP Adventure Collection which is/was only accessible by
having access data - which means that it is not publicly available.
Allowing public access would mean, that I would need explicit allowance of
each and every author and translator for this. The work of those that I cannot reach
anymore or of those who do not agree to this would have to be removed from the
collection.
I have heard people who complain that they don't have any ideas for contributions.
I say, get in contact with me and if you are really willig to contribute, I will
provide a couple of ideas to get you started.