I have some adventure ideas, but I’m unsure about how viable can they be in Torchbearer.
My main doubt is about placing dungeons in town/right outside of town. Does this break the phases cycle in the game? As far as I can see, there’s no problem since camp and town phases work differently, and being in town is meaningless without loot, but also I fear that being able to scavenge the dungeon for some treasure, emerge in town to recover from conditions and going back again can be a little bit “game-breaker”.
If there’s a dungeon with treasure near town, perhaps the inhabitants know? If so, there might be a “toll” or some sort of price for going there; maybe it’s an Ob 3 Resource check to enter (or leave, preferrably)? That could put a damper on bouncing in and out…
Yeah, the biggest concern I see is that it makes finding a “safe” place to camp pretty easy. That’s not necessarily a problem, and if it becomes one, a clever GM could always make it temporarily difficult to return to town (there’s a plague, or a tunnel collapses, etc.)
I don’t know that it’s even a problem. It’ll just be an “easier” adventure. The PCs still have to find their way back out of the dungeon, and when they get back into town, there’s still Town Events and the cost of living. Come to think of it, “near” is an abstraction anyway. The dungeon could be a couple of days away, but as long as you don’t call for a Pathfinder (or some other) test, then it might as well be right outside the gates.
In case you haven’t already seen it, there is some text on TB p. 127 (top left) that specifically addresses nearness to town for adventure design.
The basic premise is that the difficulty of an adventure is proportional to the number of tests required to return to town. I’m curious how this interacts with Cartographer skill, though.
