Introduction

Have you ever wanted to slay a red dragon? How about sail a sea of stars? Perhaps you've had a great story idea or game concept you've been thinking about for a while. Now, you can turn your adventurous fantasies into a playable game in no time at all. Open Adventure allows you to quickly use a simple, yet incredibly deep framework to tell an interactive story with your friends and family. OA is both extensible and modular; meaning it's incredibly easy to add, change or take away individual aspects of the Open Adventure game system.

Special Message from the Author

When I was a child, I always gravitated towards the fantastic & imaginative. I relished in the stories of middle earth, and the space opera of Star Wars™. Growing up, I wanted to explore those worlds in more detail. When I had learned about Dungeons & Dragons™ and other role-playing games (RPGs), I was excited to finally have an outlet for my creative interests.

There was one problem though. As a kid, I found RPG rulebooks far too complex to understand. Filled with hundreds of pages of technical rules, strange prose and dozens of tabular data for reference, my hopes of exploring these worlds of wonder slowly faded.

As time passed, I began to give up hope of ever understanding the seemingly cryptic ways of D&D and other adventure games. It seemed the only way to become a player and "join the club" was to know someone who already understood the complex rules.

One day I decided it was time to learn how to play—no matter what. I was fortunate enough to have hidden away amongst my other books an old copy of the "Basic Dungeons & Dragons" starter rulebook written in the 1980's. The booklet was written in a simple easy-to-understand format because it was aimed for absolute beginners such as myself. As I read through the pages suddenly everything began to make sense. I was excited to finally begin playing and make up for lost time. I gathered together some friends, taught them the simple rules, and we began to play.

Over time, however, the rules began to show their age. The simplicity of the rule system became a limiting factor in what could be explored in the game. Many of the mechanics either didn't make sense or had since been improved upon in modern RPGs. But present-day RPGs didn't seem like a viable refuge either—some adventure games had over 500 pages of rules! Could there be a middle ground? A simple game with logical rules that doesn't suffer from it's own gargantuan size?

That's when Open Adventure was born. Conceived from the idea of maintaining the spirit of the old-school adventure games, but re-worked to fit with the advances of modern gaming. Open Adventure is all about easy-to-learn fun for the whole family, ideal for absolute beginners. Now anyone can take their first step into the limitless world of their own imaginations!

Getting Started

Open Adventure is an adventure game that employs puzzles, story-driven exploration and action-packed quests all in one interactive game. To start playing Open Adventure, download the free Basic Rulebook. When you click on the link, click on the 'raw' button in the upper left corner of the document. This will prompt for you to download a PDF version of the rulebook.

Because OA is open source, you are free to print this book for your own personal enjoyment! If you'd like to purchase a professional-made hardcopy of the Basic Rulebook, check out our Lulu print page.

Development & Contributions

See the full game development page for a detailed how-to get involved with the OA project.