I'm guessing FFG will come out with adventure-packs, prebuilt sories of sort.

What do you think?

Beyond the beginners set there has been no word on future supplements. While I could see the possibilty of an adventure included in a supplement, I doubt we'll see much in the way of any on their own. They are poor sellers.

FFG have put out a lot of adventures for their 40k games.

Frex, the Dark Heresy line is

I can't imagine that they wouldn't publish adventures, especially if the game is successful. As was stated above, they publish adventures for their other RPGs.

Yeah, I hope we see published adventures, too. I really hate what WotC did with… well, ALL their lines when they just published obscene amounts of stat blocks & player options, but practically no pre-built adventures. Writing the adventures is what takes the most effort for game preparation, so providing well written modules would be a major boost to the line.

-WJL

I could swear I heard someplace, likely the Order 66 podcast during one of Jay Little's guest appearances, perhaps shortly after the GenCon 2012 announcement, that FFG does intend to publish adventures. No word on how many, since that would have been several months in advance, but the intent was there.

That said, much as the fanbase might want them, pre-made adventures don't always sell that well in comparison to sourcebooks. That's the main reason that WotC didn't sell many adventures for their Star Wars RPG lines, that the profit margin after production costs and licensing fees were accounted for, was too slim for them, especially when compared to the revenues generated by a sourcebook. Now WotC has little problem publishing printed adventures for D&D, as they own that particularly property and D&D quite likely has a much larger yearly operating budget than the Star Wars lines ever did. It's the same with Paizo and Pathfinder; they own the Pathfinder IP, don't have to fret about licensing the d20 mechanics thanks to the OGL, and so their adventure paths have a decent enough return on investment to make them profitable, even if the only person generally buying those adventures are the GM.

So, the question is will Adventure Packs/Paths/Modules be profitable enough for FFG to warrant publishing them in dead-tree format? Given the "no PDFs for sale" per their current license with Lucasfilm, seeling adventures online isn't an option for FFG the way it is for other RPG publishers, and as it's naturally more expensive to have material printed and shipped to retailers than to just sell them online, that's probably going to cut into their profit margin.

I realize I may be repeating myself from other systems in other times and other places, but I still think it would be cool, and more likely to sell, if adventures weren't just sold on their own individually. Instead, including a set of relevant miniatures, complete full size maps (though EotE doesn't necessarily need them), etc. PLUS the adventure as a complete package, seems like the way to go. Sure, it would be more expensive, but I think people would go for it knowing that they would get everything they need to run the adventure in one go. Even if the miniatures were replaced with chits, you'd still have a complete product.

Also, instead of just printing an adventure with one or two new NPCs and maybe some additional rules, why not go half source book half adventure series. Not just one adventure in the back of a source book, but three or four connected adventures with a decent sized source book relevant to the adventures all together.

You may now all tell me that this has all been done already, tried and failed, or simply will not work at all.

…and… GO!

Jay alluded a few times to support material in the form of adventures to be released.

Garrett

Fiddleback said:

I can really only remember looking at my RPG books the first time someone told me adventures didn't sell, seeing that they were all core books or kewl power catalogues, and thinking yep, seems likly.

Course, I just played and very rarely GMed.

I'd kinda hope that releasing adventures acts as a loss leader, and while you may not sell many of them you, hopefuly people run them and you can then sell the players the kind of player tat I used to buy and come out ahead, but if that is in any way true I have no idea.

Fiddleback said:

So… You'd want to introduce Plot Point Campaigns… like publishers use with settings for Savage Worlds… Failures? hardly. The books are half sourcebook for the setting, half adventure seed material. Plot Point campaigns are a series of connected adventures that potentially change the setting as the players move through them along with other adventure seeds to fill out the campaign.

For example, Sundered Skies from Triple Ace Games is 10 Adventures for the Plot Point Campaign, with 20 other adventure seeds listed in the main book (plus other published adventures for the setting).

I think modules ("Adventure Packs" / published adventures / pre-generated adventures). They exist for an important purpose for any game system: act as an entry way for new gaming groups / GM's who might feel it's too daunting a task to generate an entire adventure from scratch.

I know the entire industry's different from West End Games' days, but they had about the right mix between sourcebooks, modules, and "seed campaign" books / boxes.

One can't entirely the gobs and gobs of freeventures that WotC released in the form of pdf online supplements. These were most certainly "loss leaders," but well worth it, IMO.

FFG has had a great beginning. Release the beginner game that's not too daunting for everyone. Supplement this with the release of some red meat freebie pdf's online. Now, they really need to follow up with a couple of EotE "Adventure Pack" books. I think a really good mix might be a standard module. And then a different "seed campaign" book that could have a few key locations, a few key rogue's and their gallery, with the bulk being adventure hooks and some instruction how they could be strung together to form a multi-part campaign.

Then we get the next core book, follow the same formula.

They can keep interest and momentum high for the next five years or so and through the next two core books.

Fiddleback said:

That was kinda how WotC managed to get some adventures, even if they were just seeds for adventures with an accompanying encounter, published for Saga Edition, by including them in what sourcebooks they could.

Of course, that brought with it the issue of having to make room for those adventures and adventure seeds, something that really only could be done with the non-setting supplements such as Galaxy at War, Scum & Villainy, Galaxy of Intrigue, and Unknown Regions.

What you suggest, half sourcebook (crunch usable for players) and half adventure is probably the best way for FFG to have published adventures on the shelves. Perhaps even taking a page out of WEG's playbook and have the sourcebook portion deal with a particular region of space, and then an adventure or two that deals with that particular region, perhaps even including some of the notable NPCs that were introduced in the sourcebook portion. It'd also give FFG a chance to revisit some old fan-favorites from days long past, such as the Minos Cluster (GG6: Tramp Freighters).

All I know is I'd pay for an collection of adventures, connected or not, if it came with some added content like ships and the like. I thought it was very nice of FFG to finish the story that started with Escape from Mos Shuuta with The Long Arm of the Hutt. Hopefully there will be more of that in our future?

I think products that are just adventures can be profitable. There are plenty of examples on this thread alone of companies that have published plenty of adventures.

It's true adventure modules don't sell as well as rule supplements, but they can still be profitable. Seeing what's been produced (especially by WotC), I think a nasty cycle has developed: The publishers don't think adventure modules will sell well despite demand, so they give them crap for development budgets. Without a decent budget, the adventures that get published are crap, and don't sell well. The publishers' opinion that adventure modules don't sell well are reinforced and don't want to spend money on producing more adventure modules, while the players and GMs still don't have the adventure modules they want to play.

I don't think WotC/Hasbro had any problem with this situation, since their [unsustainable] RPG business model seemed to concentrate on easily producible schlock material. The adventure modules are just harder to produce than splat books full of player options and mechanics, and they didn't think it was worth the effort. Even when they did have a great adventure module, like Red Hand of Doom, I don't think they really capitalized on it (RHoD had a $25 MSRP, but was easily worth twice that because of teh milage a group would get out of it.)

The point: If FFG can actually put some production value into Star Wars adventure modules and produce just a few big modules/small campaigns like RHoD for EotE, and charge for them appropriately (ca. $40), I think they could make a load of money and have happy players.

-WJL

One of the things FFG has done very well in the Warhammer Fantasy and 40k franchises is that they provide a bit of linkage between some of their standalone adventures (much like we see with Long Arm of the Hutt and Escape from Mos Shuuta).

With Warhammer Fantasy they included an adventure in every one of their official supplements, and they produced two full self contained adventure arcs and two standalone adventures (apologies if there were more that I forgot). AND this is in one of their redheaded stepchild RPGs. Each of the 40k rpgs has a number of adventures in each of the GM focused books, and they all have at least one three part sweeping campaign arc (Dark Heresy has two now if I'm not too far out of date). Bottom line, I'm sure we'll see plenty of adventure content for Edge of the Empire.

One thing I'm looking forward to with adventures that will be produced in this edition (versus any of the d20 offerings), is that I'll have a much easier time mixing up the order of scenarios and coming up with my own linkages therein. I won't have to worry about whether or not an adventure is too high or too low level, and spend a weekend pumping it up or pairing it down. We can just get right to running adventure A and then B and then C. Or, we can do B and then A and the C….etc.

In the words of Bizzaro, me am stoked.