Adventure genres

Drintera is an entire world, with enough variety to help the game master create a variety of adventures. Generally, each location, such as a city or a dungeon, is designed for one or two genres of adventure. One city might be good for mystery stories where the player characters try to solve crimes; another might be designed for intrigue stories, where the player characters perform missions to support or oppose political or criminal factions.
Here is a list of the genres and their distinguishing features:

• Action adventures are fast-paced and are dominated by some combination of chases, combat, and problem-solving under time pressure.
• Heist adventures center on retrieving some important and well-protected item from an adversary. The emphasis is on cleverly avoiding or bypassing guards and protections. The heist genre includes, more broadly, sabotage and jailbreak/hostage rescue scenarios.
• Hex crawl adventures emphasize exploration. Player characters navigate an outdoor map divided into hexes that are usually miles across. Each hex has a chance for random encounters or some planned point of interest for the characters to discover.
• Intrigue adventures entail supporting or opposing the agenda of a non-player character or faction through some combination of investigation and covert missions. The emphasis is on secrecy and on outwitting the opposing faction.
• Dungeon Crawl adventures are a mix of exploration, survival, and combat where the adventurers move from room to room, encountering monsters, traps, and puzzles. A dungeon crawl doesn't have to be literally underground: a particularly dangerous enchanted forest might provide a dungeon crawl experience.
• Horror adventures are characterized by a mood of mounting dread. The adventurers are meant to feel vulnerable and to gradually uncover some terrible truth.
• Mystery adventures are centered on investigation--uncovering some truth. Robin Laws, creator of the GUMSHOE RPG system, asserts that a mystery in a role-playing game should not be about finding clues; it should be about the players interpreting the clues to make sense of them. We advise against requiring dice rolls to discover clues, because a missed clue can slow or derail the plot. Instead, let the player characters find clues automatically if they search the right locations or question the right witnesses.