>>5584190>do the opposite of fantasy questsYou could also take the opposite approach to this, Design By Subtraction.
Remove as many elements as possible from a fantasy story.
Instead of adding complexity with more and more elements, reduce everything to bare sparseness and minimalism.
Take something like Lord Of The Rings. Now remove all the elaborate details of war, characters, narrative, lore, places, maps, monsters orcs elves goblins dwarves, magic, history, chronology, languages, politics etc and even Names. Maybe just reduce it to a single minor yet high emotional intensity scene and see how long you can sustain the melodramatic ferocity.
A good scene I think for this one might be either that scenario in Two Towers film when the mother sends her tearful children off to Rohan hillfort as messengers that the orcs are raiding and attacking. Or maybe the Denethor Faramir Father Son scene (that requires exposition and framing context though). The entire quest is set just in the parameters of this one scene, it is the traditional unity of time place and action the Classical Aristotelian drama thing, there is no scene change or perspective shift you just follow and stay continuously in the scenario. You don't travel anywhere or even pick up any items or loot you just roleplay the deluge of passion the upswell and outpouring of feeling.
I had a few dramatic roleplay scenarios I used in the past for this (I have a variant of this adapted in one of my quests). An old roleplay one I really liked is stolen from the Bible, it is basically temptation. I call the scenario The Sword. What it basically is, you are some wanderer or traveller (again details do not matter) in some wilderness. You have this mysterious package, you are not supposed to unbundle or open and look at it, but it basically is a Sword. What then happens is of course it is a demon sword. It whispers to you constantly and wants you to draw it and feed it and caress it (in battle against flesh). It promises you Conquest and Power or even might trick you other ways (ie, confess to you it is Evil, hoping that you relinquish it to another more weak-willed individual...) So the entire scenario is just trying to resist this demon sword, this is a basic familiar fantasy narrative, but if you strip everything back this alone has very interesting roleplaying potential.
