Adventure Design Checklist

Since I write most of my own adventures, instead of running prefab material, people sometimes ask me how I go about it. Without really meaning to, over the years I've developed a pretty straightforward process where I work through a checklist of ideas; by the time I get to the end of the list, I've usually got a scenario that's fleshed out enough to run without any hassles. Below is what I do; it may work for you, it may not. That's none of my business. It does, however, work for me.

Adventure Design Checklist

This is my checklist for designing an adventure:

• What is the character’s goal in the adventure?
• Are the characters meant to kill something? 
• Stop something from happening?
• Obtain information?
• Explore a location?
• Obtain an item?
• Note: you don’t really need to figure out how the goal must be achieved–that’s on the players
• What locations are likely to be visited in the adventure?
• Make a list of places the characters are likely to go in this session
• What NPCs are likely to show up?
• Make a list of NPCs they might meet over the course of the session
• What events might happen?
• Are there any “set pieces” you want to detail in advance?
• You might been to invent a few events to push things along or put on pressure if they players spin their tires for too long
• Is there any mood or atmosphere you want to establish with an event?
• Do you want to use any events that foreshadow events to come?
• Is there any cool loot?
• What above-the-ordinary items might they uncover?

Locations

These are the things I keep in mind while designing an adventure location whether I’m thinking generally of a whole building or site and when zooming in on specific rooms or chambers

• Basic set dressing
• Purpose of room or area
• Furniture
• Decorations
• Sensory details
• Cleanliness
• Temperature
• Important and/or hidden items
• Are their people in this room?
• Any strange or noteworthy objects?
• Exits
• Where does this place lead to?
• What comes next after visiting this location?
• Hidden doors or hiding spots?

NPCs

I make notes on each important NPC in an adventure in this format:

• Basic abilities
• What can this person do?
• How good are they at fighting?
• Do they have any magical or special ability?
• What do they know?
• Depending on the system, this is the stuff you might need to stat up ahead of time
• Appearance
• Basic description of physical appearance
• Clothing
• One noteworthy physical characteristic
• Personality
• General note on their basic demeanor (secretive, jovial, angry, etc.)
• One noteworthy quirk that stands out
• Motive
• Most NPCs only really need one strong motive that they are laser-focused on
• Flaw
• Tragic flaw or exploitable weakness

Events

Things that could happen outside of the players’ control–the world moves around the characters whether they want it to or not

• NPC encounter
• Potential ally or enemy?
• Chance encounters
• Trading for information or a necessary item
• Fight
• If you know what fights are likely, you can get your stats organized ahead of time
• Also, it’s not a bad idea to have a few fights lined up to move things along if they dither 
• (Guards or other patrols are especially good for this aka “Orcs attack!”)
• Foreshadowing
• Is there anything you want to hint at that is coming later in the adventure?
• You can use fortune telling, omens, symbolism, etc. to establish future tangents
• Pressure
• Anything that makes the players feel like they need to act now or get the show on the road
• Anything that puts them in mind of a ticking clock
• Or indications that if they don’t make a move, things will get worse or harder down the road

Loot

What stuff might they pick up on the way to their goal? I think of this broadly, not just in terms of physical items

• “Magic” items
• Equipment that bolsters their abilities
• Or is at least better than their current gear
• Keep in mind what they have, what they need, and what they want
• (These are very different categories in practice)
• If you anticipate the adventure being dangerous, seeding a few one-use healing items is a great idea
• Information
• Knowledge that helps them make better decisions is a kind of loot!
• It could be where the thing they want is, an enemy’s weakness, the answer to a mystery that has been vexing them, the location of a shortcut, etc.
• Allies
• Allies are tools that can be leveraged for direct aid, information, guidance, healing, etc.
• Keep in mind what their allies will be willing to do and what they won’t
• Not every ally will stand by your side in combat
• Also, the characters will need to put in work to maintain those relationships
• Or at least be able to offer the ally something in return for their aid
• New abilities
• Occasionally, rarely I’d say, an adventure might even offer new abilities outside the scope of the usual “advancement” rules

The Cool Friend NPC

What do NPCs in an role-playing game do? To put it another way, what function do they have that justifies the time spent detailing a fictional person beyond "Uhh, yeah, the blacksmith's name is Johann and he says he'll fix your armor for 25 gold pieces"?

Some types of NPCs are fairly self-explanatory, like the "Quest Giver" or the "Nemesis." Those are useful, but I want to write a little bit about a type I haven't seen people talk about much that I really like putting into my campaigns: the "Cool Friend."

The function of the Cool Friend NPC is to make the players feel like their characters are Cool just by knowing the Cool Friend. 

A Cool Friend NPC doesn't have to be powerful to be Cool. Nightsong, the black metal bard from my current Krevborna campaign, is Cool because she's famous, people recognize her, and being pals with her nets the PCs respect; when people realize that the characters are friends with Nightsong, it changes how those people treat them, which in turn makes them feel Cool. They're in, they know somebody important, and a little of that swagger rubs off on them.

You can also use a Cool Friend NPC to shore up a deficiency that the party has, at least in the short term. In the previous campaign, the Widow (a sentient automaton NPC) stuck around because the party lacked any physically strong characters until more players joined the campaign. In the same campaign, Serafina (a grave robber) was a Cool Friend NPC who excelled at stealth, a skill nobody had overly invested in. Viktoria Frankenstein, from the same campaign, was a Cool Friend that the rest of the world feared and could provide medical aid unavailable elsewhere--as well as the use of her chateau as a base of operations.

If your players are smart (and why would you play with dummies?) they will realize that the Coolness of their Cool Friend can be used as a tool to get shit done. Coolness can obviously be leveraged in social situations; using their Cool Friend might open doors to them that would otherwise remain closed. As an example, in my current campaign the players used Nightsong's blasphemous, rage-filled musical performance to start a riot in a prison, and in the ensuing chaos they were able to bust an imprisoned witch out of jail. In this example, Nightsong's Coolness was something that enabled their Coolness--nobody in the setting had ever successfully staged a jailbreak from that prison, but now that group of characters has. 

Of course, acquiring a Cool Friend shouldn't come too easily. A Cool Friend NPC is a bit like a good piece of loot, in that sense. You gotta put in the time to earn that shit.

Just remember that a Cool Friend is there to add to the player characters' Coolness rather than upstaging them. Being the Cool Friend doesn't mean they're a protagonist.

Besides basking in the Coolness imparted by a Cool Friend, here's the other trick: if the players think their NPC buddy is Cool, it will light one fuck of a fire under them when their friend is endangered. You will never see your players so motivated; they will move heaven and earth to save their Cool Friend from peril. Trust me on that.

Making a Powder Keg, the Dune Way

Want to make a setting that is a powder keg of competing interests, intrigues, and goals? A potential conflagration into which to thrust your player's characters?

The set-up of Frank Herbert's Dune is what you should be stealing from. Although it's got a ton of worldbuilding and detail, the basic set-up of Dune is pretty simple and easy to reskin to suit just about any campaign setting. The conflict in Dune revolves around six competing factions, each of which is easy to scrub of specificity and refashion. 

Here's what Dune has and here's where you get to play with the ideas therein:

Dune Has...

• House Atreides & House Harkonnen
• The Bene Gesserit
• The Fremen
• The Padishah Emperor
• The Spacing Guild

So You Need...

• Two noble houses with a long-standing hatred of each other that will inevitably erupt into violence
• A religion that masks its political power in the guise of spiritual guidance
• The unaligned tribal military force that exists outside the structure that defines the place of the other factions
• A powerful military force that defends traditional power structures and the interests of a distant ruler
• A mercantile force that masks its political power in the guise of pure economics

Notice that each of these groupings represents an approach to political power: the power of aristocratic title, the power of religion, the power of the nomad, military power, and economic power. Create factions that represent these groupings of political power, make them compete for a limited resource, and let the sparks fly. Now you've got a powder keg. Hand your players the match and see what happens.

We Should Throw Out All the Dungeon Master's Guides

We should throw out all the Dungeon Master's Guides...and replace them with the collected works of William S. Burroughs.

Need a baroque-weird, quasi-religious punishment for your fantasy setting? Ol' Bill has you covered with this gem from Wild Boys:

Criminals and captives sentenced to death in centipede are tattooed with those pictures on every inch on their bodies. They are left for three days to fester. Then they are brought out given a powerful aphrodisiac, skinned alive in orgasm and strapped into a segmented copper centipede. The centipede is placed with obscene endearments in a bed of white-hot coals. The priests gather in crab suits and eat the meat out of the shell with gold claws.

Need some decadent and deranged NPCs for your urban campaign? Interzone is chock full of people like these:

Hans sat several tables away. He was a German who procured boys for English and American visitors. He had a house in the native quarters--bed and boy, two dollars per night. But most of his clients went in for "quickies." Hans had typical Nordic features, with heavy bone structure. There was something skull-like about his face.

Morton Christie was sitting with Hans. Morton was a pathetic name-dropper and table-hopper. Hans was the only one in Tangier who could stand his silly chatter, his interminable dull lies about wealth and social prominence. One story involved two aunts, living in a house together, who hadn't spoken to each other in twenty years.

Need an adventure seed? Flip to any random page in Naked Lunch and you'll get something like this:

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

or this:

Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance as a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: "I don't give them time to die", he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. "Fucking undisciplined cells!" he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.

or maybe even this:

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One

Interludes for 5e Dungeons and Dragons

Art by Max Gibson

Interludes

It isn’t unusual for the characters in heroic fiction to engage in dialog or acts of storytelling that reveals something important about their pasts or gives the reader further access to their personalities. The system below gives a mechanical incentive for scenes of revelatory characterization:

• During a period of natural downtime, a player may nominate themselves to roleplay an interlude scene.
• That player must draw a single card from a standard deck. The value and suit of the card drawn determines the essential content of the interlude, as per the Interlude Table.
• The player will then tell a story based on that theme in the voice of their character. The story should reveal something about the character’s backstory or give the other players a greater sense of who that character is, their motivations, their hopes and fears, etc.
• After a player completes an interlude scene, their character immediately gains inspiration.
• The next time an interlude scene is invoked, a different player must nominate themselves.

Interlude Table

	Clubs	Diamonds	Hearts	Spades
Ace	Realization	First day on the job	Blossoming romance	New insight
Two	Cunning plan	Patience rewarded	Dangerous attraction	False impression
Three	Skilled leadership	Teamwork leading to success	Celebration	Failure to express an idea
Four	Goal achieved	Victim of greed	Solitude	Recovery from injury
Five	Competition	Victim of theft	Tragic loss	Hollow victory
Six	Glorious victory	Spending a vast sum	Childhood nostalgia	Long journey
Seven	Last-ditch defense	Changing your path	Treasured daydream	Practiced deceit
Eight	Short journey	The devil in the details	Leaving someone behind	Feeling trapped
Nine	Prolonged battle	Self-reliance	Sexual satisfaction	Guilty nightmare
Ten	Burden of duty	Inheritance	Familial happiness	Martyrdom
Jack	Quick temper	Hard work	Falling in love	Fiery rebellion
Queen	Utter chaos	Maternal instinct	Emotional dependence	Sharp intellect
King	Artistry	Rags to riches	Wise diplomacy	Self-reflection

***

NOTE: This system is an adaptation of the interludes from Savage Worlds Deluxe, but I have significantly expanded the table found in those rules.

Vintage Christmas Cards as Adventure Ideas

VINTAGE CHRISTMAS CARDS AS ADVENTURE IDEAS
ROLL d20 FOR HOLIDAY CHEER + FEAR
(roll and put the ideas the image gives you in the comment section)

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Some of the Hardest People to Run Games For

Can you imagine trying to run a game for this prick?

In my experience, other DMs can be some of the hardest players to run games for. 

This isn't aimed at anyone in particular; most DMs keep their shit together when they're playing a character in someone else's game. If anything, it's a reminder to myself for when I play in someone else's games.

It makes sense: people who run their own games tend to be heavily invested in roleplaying games as a hobby, they're often the people who like building their own worlds and settings, and they tend to have strong feelings about how game systems and mechanisms should work.

The thing is: I'm not sure you should do anything differently when you have a fellow DM playing a character at your table. The way you run your game is a series of choices you should make about the kind of game you want to have; people will either like it and keep playing in your game, or they'll hit the bricks and find a game more to their tastes.

The things is, part 2: If you are a DM who is playing a character in a game that someone else is running, I think it's a fine idea to let go of your preconceived notions and go with the flow of the game as it is being presented to you. There should be onus is on players-who-are-also-DMs to not to be difficult at the table--because, frankly, you should know better.

My Advice for Players-Who-Are-Also-DMs

• If you are a DM, you likely have some strong opinions about what game systems or even editions are best, what kind of mechanisms are most productive for a certain style of play, or how play in general should proceed. That's fine, but when you're a player do not interject your disappointment that the game you're playing doesn't work the way it would if you were the one running it. You aren't running the game this time; it's not your purview to make that call as a player.
• You can, of course, ask for rules clarifications and try to meet the DM halfway, just as any player at the table can. But if you approach it as an exercise in "Well, that's not how I do it..." you're likely making the game less fun for everyone at the table. You may truly believe in your heart of hearts that games should have a wound system, extensive critical hit charts, damage-reducing armor, and rules for infection--but if the DM is just using plain old abstract hit points in their game, those feelings are best kept to yourself.
• Also keep in mind that the world you're playing in is not your own, and it might be overreaching to assert authorship over it without checking in to see if that's cool. Many DMs love to homebrew their own bespoke settings, which is a great, hallowed pastime. What isn't great, however, is when a player-who-is-also-a-DM tries to take over someone else's setting by asserting background details, making up content unasked for, and generally trying to steer the setting from the backseat. 
• As a player, you already have an important piece of world-building to attend to: your character. The world around your character is essentially the DM's character. You wouldn't want anyone else making up the details about your character, right? Extend the same courtesy to the DM's world. 
• Some DMs like for players to "co-author" the setting with them to varying extents. The best policy is to ask how much input and what kind of input the DM might want from you. If the answer is "none," accept that! It's far better to ask if a contribution you want to make fits the DM's setting, the adventure they've devised, or the tone of the game they're running for you than to simply tell them that this new thing they hadn't accounted for exists. 
• You know how you like your players to be excited about the game? Be that player when you play in a fellow DM's game! Don't take it over or commandeer the game, just be a player who wants to work with everyone else at the table to have a good time.
• When you're taking the role of a player in someone else's game, the passion you have for RPGs is best spent in being the exemplary player. Be the player who shows up on time, the player who plays to the hilt, the player who passes the spotlight graciously, the player you'd love to have at your own table.

Advice for New DMs

I was wondering why my blog was getting so many hits from Youtube recently; it turns out that Web DM linked to my post "World Building: When is Enough Too Much?" in the notes to their video--which is much appreciated! Check it out, they've got a lot of great advice for new DMs:

Sloppy XP Equals Sloppy Design

I have a pet peeve when it comes to rpg design: I really don't like it when designers leave the XP or advancement system undercooked. If the rules for advancement or leveling up don't feel finished and if they don't offer incentives for the players to engage with what the game is about, I think you didn't finish the job of making a game.

Examples

Stars Without Number
According to the Stars Without Number core rules, the game has a particular focus: "In Stars Without Number you play the role of an interstellar adventurer. Whether a grizzled astrotech, lostworlder warrior, or gifted psychic, you dare the currents of space for the sake of riches and glory" (5). Under that given premise, the game claims to reward things like seeking riches and glory: "Characters are awarded experience points by the GM upon accomplishing certain goals, defeating meaningful enemies, or plundering insufficiently guarded wealth" (64). 

But here's where it all falls apart: 
1) Getting XP for "certain goals" is already vague, but what a proper goal looks like and how much XP it should be worth is never spelled out, as far as I can tell. 

2) None of the "meaningful enemies" in the book's Xenobestiary have an XP value for defeating them. I can't find any guidelines for giving XP for defeating enemies in the book at all. 

3) Making off with "insufficiently guarded wealth" is intended to be the old-school D&D method of 1 GP = 1 XP since Stars Without Numbers is basically D&D-in-Space, but that's tucked away in a place that's not very intuitive--about seventy pages after the XP rules are given (131). 

It's also really clunky in its implementation; characters shouldn't get XP for a big-ticket item like a space ships, and you should increase the amount of money they're getting per adventure because space ships are money pits, but that extra money you have to throw at them now shouldn't give XP because there wasn't much effort put into the mechanics of this idea: "You should not be reluctant to increase adventure rewards or offer more remunerative opportunities to players with a starship to feed, though this should not increase the XP gained" (131). 

It's worth noting that if more defined rules are buried somewhere in the book, the index will not help you find them; "Level," "XP," "Experience Points," "Advancement," etc. do not have entries in the index.

Dark Heresy 2nd Edition

Dark Heresy has not one, but two systems for awarding XP. The first is to award a set amount of XP per session: "Under the abstract method, experience points are awarded for time spent gaming, ensuring a steady and even progression for all characters. For each game session composed of multiple encounters, every PC should receive 400 xp. This would allow them to purchase a minor increase in their capabilities approximately every session, or a more significant one every few sessions. This method assumes a game session lasts approximately four hours of active play time. For longer or shorter sessions, the GM can adjust the rewards accordingly" (371). What this system doesn't do is offer an incentive for doing anything during play, and only really rewards showing up to the game. As a system, it's easy and doesn't require much book-keeping, but it also strikes me as lazily designed because it doesn't connect to the premise of what the game is about.

Surely the more detailed system picks up the slack, right? Well, no, "It is also possible to award xp in a more detailed manner, in which every reward is tied to a specific difficulty or challenge. This allows the GM to match the PCs’ progression to the progression of events more closely, or to increase the players’ sense of accomplishment. However, it requires that the GM be able to evaluate each encounter and challenge and assign an appropriate amount of xp" (371). 

This sounds like a system that was fully thought out, and there is even a chart showing you how much XP to award per character based on seven categories of encounter difficulty. Unfortunately, however, although this system does create an incentive ("win" encounters), it is ultimately incomplete because the rules offer no guidance as to what constitutes as "easy" encounter or a "very hard" encounter. The designer has absolved themselves from providing what seems like a fairly crucial part of how XP will be awarded. 

DIY RIFTS

Making your own Rifts-inspired setting seems pretty easy once you understand the underlying premise and approach the project as a two-step process: 


1) Take the elements you like from various 80s action figure lines, movies, cartoons, and comics and combine them without any regard for realism or subtlety. 

If the colors are garish and candy-like, you're probably on the right track. If you feel a visceral "that's so cooooool" pull to a character, vehicle, or location, it belongs. If the thing you're considering adding to the setting would have been an awesome present to unwrap on Christmas, it needs to be in the mix.

Rifts didn't invent the remix, but it embraced the mash-up before it went viral.

Let the images below be your starting point:

You could also throw in any ideas from the sword & sorcery novels you'd always find on the wire racks of off-brand pharmacies when you were young, as well as anything you remember from the hella-weird music videos of the early MTV era. Hell, I'm not the boss of you, add what you want and need to the pile.

2) Now that you have the raw material and points of inspiration in place, you need to make them into a sensibility. My advice: approach the material on its own level, with a sense of genuine joy at working with the ideas, imagery, and aesthetics they're bringing to the table. 

It would be easy to write something Rifts-esque that veers into satire, parody, and (worst of all) irony. But "Hah, look at how silly all these things were back in the 80s," is a bad sensibility; it implies detachment, and a top-down view that only comes with the assumption of superiority to the material. At best, you're gleefully slumming. At worst, you're signalling that this is all a guilty pleasure that no one should take seriously.

Instead, immerse yourself in that level of excitement you remember from childhood--it wasn't an immature impulse, it was a sensibility that emerged from real engagement and art-for-fun's-sake.

Gather your toys and run to the playground.

A Hack for Adding a 1st Level Character to an Experienced Party

This is a thing that happens: you've been playing D&D for a while with some cool folks. Their characters are climbing the ladder of levels, gaining hit points and cool abilities and all that stuff that signals accomplishment in D&D.

And then, hearing what a good time this game is, a friend asks if they can play too. They've never played D&D before--hey, maybe they will have so much fun you'll make a convert of them! 

But...it might be pretty overwhelming to have them make (or worse yet, just hand them) an experienced character that fits the party's level. All those numbers and abilities that feel like accomplishment for the regular players in your game might feel confusing and hard to remember for a person new to the game. Hell, just the stuff a 1st level character gets can be a little daunting.

A solution that I have not yet stress-tested: help them make a 1st level character, but give that character the hit points and proficiency bonus equal to where the rest of the party is at level-wise. If the rest of the group is playing 5th level characters, help them make a 1st level character who has the hit points and proficiency bonus of a 5th level character. This way, they'll only have to grapple with the abilities and options of a first level character, but have some of the survivability and competence of a higher-level character. As they level up, they won't get more hit points or a higher proficiency bonus until they level past where the group was when they joined the game, but they can gain new abilities as they level up--hopefully slow enough that it won't feel like an avalanche of new stuff to keep track of. 

Best case scenario: they level up more rapidly due to facing challenges appropriate for higher level characters, they still have fun because the higher hit points mean they don't die in one hit and the higher proficiency bonus means they still get to meaningfully contribute to the group's endeavors, and they have such a good time that they begin to enjoy their character and want to keep playing.

Does Your Dungeon Pass the Whiteboard Test?

Most folks seem to "need a lot more practice." 

I know, I know, I can already hear the grognards grumbling that "D&D isn't like a video game!" But if I'm honest I have to admit that I find dungeons that look like the one in the intermediate example to be dull to run and a chore to explore as a player.

Either way, I think this is worth thinking about.

The Two Things I Want Cover Art to Do

Should the covers of RPG core books be designed to serve a purpose? As a thought experiment, I propose that core book cover art should be designed to answer two questions: who are the characters and what do they do?

(I also want the art to be good, but that goes without saying.)

Let's see how a bunch of RPG covers stack up according to my rubric:

Moldvay Basic D&D 
The gold standard of D&D covers. The game is called Dungeons & Dragons, the art shows that the player characters are fantasy adventurers who go into dungeons and encounter monsters--like dragons, for instance. Easy win.

3.5 Dungeons & Dragons 
Absolute failure. What is this game about? Also: ugly and so very brown. If anything, the only vibe it gives off is about what the player, not the character, will have to do in this game: it might be a warning saying "This is a textbook, get ready to study."

Pathfinder
Cover art is a place where Pathfinder smokes 3.5 D&D. Borrowing a page from Moldvay, we get fantasy adventurers versus fantasy beasts in fantasy dungeons. It does what it says on the tin.

4e Dungeons & Dragons
We get a sense of who the player characters are on this cover, but not of what they do. You could argue that it looks like they're exploring subterranean depths, but it looks way too cautious for the big set-piece battle style that 4e supports.

5e Dungeons & Dragons
A return to form for D&D cover art: adventurers fighting monsters in fantasy locales. The slightly over-the-top heroics of the cover compared to Moldvay Basic give a fairly good indication that D&D isn't a necessarily a meat grinder anymore.

1e Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
The characters depicted on the cover look like they were rolled off of random tables, stuck together in a party, and are now facing a tough battle that will leave some of them dead and others hideously wounded. I'd say that's a good encapsulation of the WRFP experience, actually.

7e Call of Cthulhu
It is usually the case that earlier editions of Call of Cthulhu have moody, evocative covers that show Cthulhu being generally menacing and whatnot, which really doesn't give an indication of what the game is about. The newest edition does a better job of this by splitting the game into two books, and thus has two covers. The cover of player's guide shows investigators getting way over their heads by discovering a cult idol--a pretty good indication of how the game is likely to play out.

Deadlands
I love the Brom painting on the cover of this book, but...you're probably not going to get to play a harrowed gunslinger so it feels a bit like false advertising. 

1e Shadowrun
The cover reads as "fantasy Flock of Seagulls steal data and do violent stuff in a cyberpunk dystopia," so it nails the premise fairly well. It may also hint at the idea of the party's hacker going on their own Matrix adventure while everybody else does other stuff.

RIFTS
So, we play the alien-chicks version of Charlie's Angels trapped in that one Rick Springfield video? No? Oh...in that case, this cover doesn't work for me; it really doesn't tell me anything about the player characters or what they get up to. Also, I know this is a beloved piece of RPG art, but I've always found it really static and a bit ugly.

Savage Worlds RIFTS
Okay, the amount of trade dress on the cover is excessive, but this gives me the impression of playing a post-apocalyptic punk with crazy weapons who fights robot Nazis, which is actually much closer in spirit to what RIFTS is about than the original cover.

Burning Wheel
Yeah, I would have no idea what this is about if I saw it on a shelf. Ridiculously uninformative. The cover is actually really attractive, especially when you see it in person, but it doesn't get me excited about the premise of the game itself.

Swords & Wizardry Complete
I'm not going to go to hard on this one since it's already been a lightning rod for grognard ire, but it suffers from the same problems as the Burning Wheel cover above. While I really like the image, it doesn't really indicate that the game is an OD&D clone.

Traveller
Seriously, go fuck yourself.