Pre-written adventures

Something I realised after the Liminal game: I don't generally run pre-written adventures.

My two Scion campaigns were entirely my own material.  My first Victoriana campaign started out with the pre-written adventure The Marylebone Mummy, but quickly moved onto my own story, and the second campaign was all original.  I ran one pre-written adventure for The Dresden Files before switching to my own stories.  I wrote my own material for Don't Rest Your Head.  I tried running The Kurosawa Extraction for The Sprawl, but struggled with it and have only run my own material since then.  My Scum and Villainy games are all my own, as is the cyberpunk Christmas adventure I'm hoping to run next week.

The only game where I've used a lot of pre-written material is Pathfinder.  I know why this is.  The games I tend to run have a pretty strong focus on story over mechanics, but Pathfinder is a crunchy game with levels and hit points and stuff, and actually requires proper encounter design.  I trust myself to pull a good story together, but have less confidence in my ability to build an encounter that's the right level of challenging and interesting.

So besides Pathfinder stuff, I've only run three pre-written adventures before, and only as an initial adventure before switching to my own material.  The same goes for Liminal.  While I'm tempted to pick up the four pre-written adventures available for it, what I'm really excited about is writing my own campaign.  And the more a game emphasises building the story around the PCs, the less likely I am to run pre-written material.

Oddly enough, with Delta Green I do actually want to run the pre-written scenarios from Nights at the Opera.  Probably because it's a horror game, and while I'm quite happy doing urban fantasy and space opera, horror is a bit outside my comfort zone.  I've played several Call of Cthulhu one-shots but I've never run a horror game and I feel like I'll do a better job if I've got some great writers to help get me started.

So given how much I enjoy writing RPG adventures, my RPG goal for next year is to publish some of my own scenarios.  Even if it's only as free downloads on here, it'll be an interesting experience trying to create something someone can run without being inside my head.