Instant Encounters 5E RPG – coming soon!

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Today we’d like to tell you the story of our new upcoming (Kickstarter launch on 5th August) project – Everyday Adventure: Instant Encounters. And it is longer than you might imagine! As a company, we mainly operate within the board game industry, but at hearts, all members of our team love different kinds of nerdy and geeky things – literature, films, comic books, video games, wargames, what not. And yes, we all love tabletop RPGs, too! We’ve always wanted to release something dedicated for RPG players, but the ideas about what it should be were very different inside the team. The first incarnation of Instant Encounters was born in the early summer of 2018, during a brainstorm we had at an airport, waiting for a connecting flight on the way back home from UK Games Expo in Birmingham. We thought it would be cool to have a random generator of in-game elements, like locations, items and NPCs, in the form of a deck of nicely illustrated cards. No story hooks or minis were planned at that time, it was just cards with cool artwork, but the seed had been planted and it had finally evolved into what we are proud to present you now!

Among many RPG systems we play or played, the legendary D&D has a special place in most of our teammates’ hearts. As the Open Game License allows fans to publicly release their own work for the latest, 5th Edition, the RPG market is currently witnessing a surge of available content, mostly new settings, campaigns and individual scenarios. But what we feel is not represented enough among these publications, is aids and tools for Dungeon Masters. And here’s where Instant Encounters takes the stage.

Combat is an important element in most game sessions, and designing your own encounters is both challenging and fun. We feel every DM should prepare interesting conflicts and extraordinary enemies for their players, but why not use some help from time to time? As much as epic fights often make the most memorable moments of your campaigns, designing them might be painful and challenging for a number of reasons. Sometimes you just don’t have enough time before the meeting, sometimes you get into a rut – choosing a cool monster from the manual is an easy way to go, but not the most creative thing in the world. And RPGs are much about creativity, right? Also, for higher level Player Characters, you need more stuff to put into an encounter to make it challenging enough for the PCs, and a fight becomes a mini-adventure inside an adventure, while you still have to come up with everything that leads to it – the plot, NPCs, etc. Rewarding for sure, but heavily time-consuming.

Dungeon Masters ourselves, we have experienced such problems not once or twice throughout the years of DMing. In the early days, we were often in doubt if a carefully designed encounter was scaled well to fit our parties – demanding enough not to feel too easy for the players, but also not to prove unbeatable. As grown ups, we have much less time for prep before a session, so accessibility and versality of ready-made encounters have become key factors. Our Instant Encounters content focuses exactly on these aspects. It provides encounters that are not generic, but are universal enough both to incorporate in your homebrew campaigns and to build whole scenarios around them completely from scratch. Every module comes with a number of ideas how to introduce it to the session, and features full stats cards, printable maps, pawns and monster miniatures for owners of 3D printers. All in a digital form so that you don’t have to buy a physical product, but have access to it whenever you want, and print out as many copies as you currently need!

These are the main premises of the whole project, but what does Instant Encounters offer?

  • Dynamic environment, limited time and plot twists to make the clash fresh and exciting and to keep your players on the their toes till the very end.
  • Concise form, everything you need to read before the session is written in a 2-3 pages long PDF.
  • Scalable encounters, different for low-, medium- and high-level parties.
  • Both classic 5E monsters and completely new ones.
  • All physical components you need to play, like pawns or maps with grids – beautifully illustrated, colorful, appealing and immersive, ready to print at your convenience.

 

You might know part of our company’s professional activity is 3D design. We make miniatures both for our own games and on commission for other publishers, and we of course made models for Instant Encounters too. If you have access to a 3D printer, you can replace paper pawns with awesome, detailed minis, scultped by the best 3D artists out there, available as pre-supported STL files. In fact, some of these miniatures were designed long before we decided to publish Instant Encounters, but we were totally sure they’re too great not to be used someday… So here they come now!

Instant Encounters is coming soon to Kickstarter. To get a free demo, stay updated with the progress of the project and get notified on the launch day, visit its website and subscribe to the newsletter. Feel invited to follow us on KS directly too, and spread the word about the upcoming campaign!