An Adventure Path like a Dungeon

B1-9 flowchart

Recently I was reading the rpg Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo (1977). The usual take on this game is that it is less an rpg and more a boardgame. That's likely the way it will strike most people on first blush, but I think Christian Lindke makes a reasonable case that it is a roleplaying game of its era (and underwritten even for that) with a definite campaign path, almost like some story games of today.

I don't see any reason why a game couldn't have a definite campaign arc. I think that would work with a lot of licensed properties, and I think the "adventure path" style of modern published adventures is a way to do just that. Unfortunately, these sorts of adventures suffer conceptually, I think, from a couple of flaws. One is the desire to have the campaign arc come as a surprise to players or at least to appear to arise naturalistically from the earlier campaign events. This requires the GM to be deceptive. Two, if the players weren't getting railroaded to get them into the adventure, they certainly are once it starts because the path through the adventure tends to be fairly linear.

I think it can be done better. This is an idea akin to my previous one about running an adventure point-crawl--in fact, it's really just a slightly different approach to the same basic idea. 

Both involve a goal to achieve, a geography to cover in doing so, and certain events or scenes that might occur. These locations and their events/scenes form the "rooms" in a conceptual "dungeon," or more accurately the points in a conceptual pointcrawl. An adventure of this sort would have a conceptual/narrative map and a physical geography map, not unlike the actual Mongo mmap compared to the "Schematic Map" of Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo:

How would this differ from a standard, old adventure path? Well, in at least a couple of ways. As much is possible, nothing is supposed to happen. Certain events would make completing the task of the campaign easier, but only rarely would there be no other way to get it done.

Like in a pointcrawl, players are permit to just follow the physical geography. Nothing forces them to stay on the path, but the locations on the path have special features analogous to (or perhaps literally, sometimes) secret doors, teleportation disks or what have you that allow quicker, easier travel between "points." "Solving" a "point" might unlock other advantages like allies or items that make completing the goal of the campaign easier. Just like finding certain items or meeting certain NPCs in a dungeon.

This break from linearity would mean the points would have to have less of a causal relationship than the events of adventure paths typically do. It would work best, I think, for certain sorts of campaign arcs. A rebellion (like Star Wars or Flash Gordon) would be one, but something like Pirates of Dark Water with episodic exploration in search of plot coupons would work well, too. Anything more like a broadcast era episodic TV series with a throughline and less like a feature film.