Writing Your Own Adventures

Sooner or later, every GM wants to write his own adventures – or at least modify store-bought ones to fit his own group. More power to you! Homegrown adventures can range from simple "dungeons" to entire worlds, intricately worked out over a period of years.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

You can get ideas from novels, movies, comics, RPG supplements, other GMs, and of course the players themselves. Whatever your source, you'll want to come up with enough new twists to keep your players (and yourself) interested.

Some GMs give their players a lot of voice in the type of adventures they will have. If the players want to hunt for treasure, the GM comes up with a treasure-hunting scenario. Other GMs see themselves as Blind Fate, and the players never know what will happen next. It's all a matter of taste.

Adventure Design

When you design an adventure, you are writing the outline for a story. The full story will begin when the PCs appear on the scene. To set the stage, you must prepare the plot, maps, character descriptions, etc. and a number of "encounters" involving these things.

Level of Difficulty

The first thing to decide is simply how "hard" your adventure is going to be. Are you planning an adventure for four beginning-level characters – or for a half-dozen experienced adventurers?

The rewards should be commensurate with the risks. In a fantasy campaign, don't let the PCs butcher two halflings and a senile goblin, and then rush back to town with a chest full of gold! (Or, if you do, have the king's taxman there to welcome them!) The real rewards in this game come in the form of bonus character points. These result from good roleplaying, and have nothing to do with the amount of wealth you drag home.

Still, material things have their uses. Ask any fighter who can't afford to buy armor! Don’t make wealth (or power, or fame) too easy to come by, or you will unbalance your campaign.

Continuity

You should also decide whether the adventure needs to fit into (or kick off) a campaign, or if it is just a "one-shot."

In a campaign, each adventure has to follow naturally from the last one, and leave room for future adventures. It also has to take the PCs into account. If they are famous – or notorious – certain NPCs should recognize them. The adventurers should recognize some of the NPCs, too, and possibly some of the locations in the adventure. Most importantly, the adventure should not render the PCs unplayable no matter what the players do...because the whole point of a campaign is to keep playing the same characters!

In a one-shot adventure, however, you have no continuity to worry about. Future play balance is not an issue, and neither is character survival. You can experiment with certain death, transcendence to godhood, and other extreme outcomes without the risk of destroying a campaign.

Background

This is the setting of your story. In what game world does it take place? When and where? What are the events leading up to your tale? Who are the important NPCs, and what are their motives? In short, what is happening behind the scenes, and what is the "big picture?" If this adventure is part of a campaign, a lot of the background is set. If it is a "one-shot," the background can be sketchy. But if you're starting a campaign, give the background a lot of thought.

Plot

The "plot" is your plan for the things that are supposed to happen during the adventure. In a simple adventure, the GM guides the PCs from one "encounter," or scene, to the next. Each encounter starts when the heroes arrive; then it is played out, and the next one can begin.

In a more sophisticated adventure, certain things happen at certain times, regardless of the PCs' actions. If the heroes must solve a murder, for instance, some clues might vanish if they are not found in time – and others might not exist yet if the investigators come on the scene "too soon." The murders might even continue as the players investigate (that's one sure way to eliminate a suspect). Likewise, important NPCs may come and go, with little regard for the adventurers' wishes. And there is no limit to what can happen "offstage." Elections, wars, and alien invasions...many events can present new challenges.

This sort of plot is harder to write, and demands more from the GM during play. But it gives the players a sense of urgency that is missing in a plain, linear adventure.

Introduction

The purpose of the introduction is to get the players' characters into your plot so that the game can begin. If the players are not familiar with your game world, you should tell them a little bit about it. If they know the game world (or are part of a continuing campaign), you can just set the scene with a few words and start the action. You should not give them the whole background. In a well-designed adventure, one of the players' objectives is to find out what's really going on. Don't give away all your secrets right at the beginning!

The most hackneyed introduction of all (but still one of the best) is the Old Man in the Tavern: "You are all strangers in town, looking for adventure. You are sitting in the local tavern when an old man comes up to you..." The old man can ask for help, order the PCs out of town, sell them a map, offer to guide them to fame and fortune...it doesn't matter. Whatever he does, he is a mouthpiece through which the GM can give the players a little background and start them off in the right direction.

Some other good “mouthpiece” characters for an introductory encounter:

• An officer briefing a group of soldiers, spies, supers, etc. to perform a mission.
• An injured stranger who staggers up and gasps a few cryptic last words.
• A strange story in the news (the "mouthpiece" in this case is the person the PCs contact to ask about it – a reporter, a scientist, etc.). The GM might instead let the party witness the mysterious event.
• A storyteller, herald, or town drunk, passing on an interesting rumor.
• A wealthy person who offers to hire the party for a dangerous mission.
• A retired adventurer telling about the treasure he couldn't quite get.
• A spirit or deity visiting the faithful (or fairly faithful) with commands – perhaps in a dream.
• A villain's henchman, delivering a threat, ransom demand, or boast.
• A friend of one of the characters – or, for that matter, a total stranger rescued from immediate danger – who needs help.
• A lawyer reading a will, which sends the party on a quest for an inheritance.

The "mouthpiece" NPC can end the introductory encounter by providing the maps, passwords, or whatever else the party needs to start the adventure.

Dungeons

The term "dungeon" refers to a simple fantasy adventure. Typically, the PCs wander from room to room, killing monsters and grabbing treasure. There is often no rhyme or reason to the contents of the rooms – in children's fantasy games, every encounter may be rolled randomly! However, a dungeon setting is good for a beginning adventure; it teaches basic game mechanics quickly. And an underground labyrinth does not have to be "kid stuff" – it can be part of a very realistic background.

A "dungeon" can also be a building, battleship, space station, etc. If the adventurers are dropped into a limited area, with little or no goal except to grab what they can and get out alive, it's a "dungeon." A dungeon is easy to map, since its area is limited. When treasure-hunters go too far, they just run into a blank wall and have to turn around. The typical dungeon is a collection of rooms, connected by corridors, shafts, or tunnels.

Dungeon Inhabitants and Plot

The GM should populate his dungeon (or building, or whatever) with appropriate men, beasts, and monsters. If you are just creating a "hack-and-slash" dungeon, you don’t need to worry about what they are doing there, what they eat, why they attack the party, or anything else – just stock the rooms and go.

Likewise, the "plot" for a hack-and-slash adventure will be very simple. "Joe the Barbarian, with his friends Ed the Barbarian and Marge the Barbarian, went down into a cave. They saw lots of monsters and killed them and took their treasure. A dragon ate Ed. Joe and Marge ran away. The End."

If you want to create a situation that actually makes sense, you have advanced to the level of adventure design. Congratulations. Read on...

Maps

As described under Maps, you will need a number of maps – one per area you consider "important" to the adventure. Prepare combat maps in advance for any location where a fight is likely.

The experienced GM can save a lot of time by "recycling" maps. One house is a lot like another. One tavern is a lot like another. And so on. Of course, if you always use the same one, your players will kid you about it ..."Aha, here we are, back in the Generic Tavern!"

Commercially produced combat maps (from SJ Games, or any number of other companies) can also save time. Often an interesting map suggests an appropriate encounter, helping you to design your adventure!

NPCs

Nonplayer characters – whether played by the GM or the Adversary – are vital to an adventure. The GM can even plan an entire adventure around a few interesting NPCs and what happens when the PCs become involved with them!

Design the most important NPCs before you work out the encounters and other details of the adventure. Their abilities, personalities, motivations, and backgrounds set the tone for the whole adventure, and give you ideas for encounters and lesser NPCs. Build important NPCs just like PCs, complete with full-scale character sheets and brief character stories, so you can roleplay them well.

Create less-important NPCs – spear-carriers, cannon fodder, shopkeepers, and the like – after you plan the first encounters. You do not need complete character sheets for these characters; all you need are notes on their important statistics. Some trivial characters require no planning at all! If you suddenly need to know (for instance) a skill for one of them, just roll 3d and use the result.

Finally, work out a few "generic" NPCs to use, as needed, in improvised or random encounters. For instance, in an adventure set in a fantasy city, you could prepare a few city guards, a couple of storekeepers, a couple of thieves, and maybe a strolling minstrel or wandering drunk. If you need them, you have them...and if you don't need them now, you'll have them for next time. Guards, like taverns, can be recycled over and over again!

Encounters

An "encounter" is a meeting with NPCs, animals, a trap, or anything else the GM wishes. There are three kinds of encounters: planned, improvised, and random. Ideally, as you run the game, your players should never know which kind is which!

Planned Encounters

The GM works these out in advance: when the adventurers come to this place, they meet these people (or animals, or whatever). All the important encounters in your adventure should be planned.

Be aware that few encounters go exactly as planned! You should always be ready to adapt to the characters' actions. Suppose a planned encounter involves the bouncer at the "Blue Boar" – but the PCs don't go near there. You can drop a hint to send them there, of course...but it might be easier to change your plans and let the innkeeper at their rooming house serve the same purpose. The more flexible you are, the more you can avoid the appearance of manipulating the players. And appearance is more important than reality!

Improvised Encounters

The GM makes these up in order to keep the adventure moving along planned lines. The simplest "improvised encounter" is the little old man (looking a lot like the one you met at the tavern) who appears in your path and says, "Turn around! You're going the wrong way!" Such encounters can provide extra clues, hints toward the "right path," etc.

Improvised encounters are often necessary when the players do something really unusual. For example, suppose you have the PCs encounter a traveling duke who is beset by bandits. The heroes drive off the bandits and save the duke, who offers to pay them generously to track down a family treasure. The players accept, but conclude that the bandits were after the treasure, too, and decide to hunt them down to find out what they know.

Since you only intended the bandits as a means to introduce the duke, you could say, "You can't find the bandits. You must have scared them off." Or you could let the party find the bandits and defeat them in a meaningless battle. But it would be more fun to improvise an interesting encounter. If the heroes skillfully track, overwhelm, and interrogate the bandits, you could reward them with a clue. Perhaps one of the bandits snatched the duke's heirloom cloak clasp, which broke open when he tried to pry the jewel from it – revealing a fragment of an old map!

Random Encounters

The GM might wish to generate some encounters at random. One technique is to use a "random encounter table": a list of encounters keyed to a roll of the dice. See Sample Encounter Table for a simple example. Some "adventures" consist mainly of such tables, allowing play to proceed for hours with no planning at all! This is great for a quick game, but not in the same league with a "real" adventure.

Another method is to invent a character on the spot, rolling dice for any important statistics.

If you don't let random encounters become a crutch, they can provide variety and free you from planning every single encounter. Don't let the players know that you are rolling a totally random encounter, however. If they realize an encounter is not "part of the plot," they will act differently.

Finale

This is the climax of the adventure. Most adventures have only one finale (unless the party gets killed along the way). As the GM, you should guide the party, as subtly as you can, toward the "big ending" and resolution of the adventure.

The players' earlier actions affect the details of the finale, but its basic nature remains the same. If the players make "wrong" decisions along the way, it takes them longer to finish, and they should have a harder time dealing with the situation – but they should make it to the finale eventually. The exception might be a case where they have blundered so badly that the finale would certainly kill them all, in which case the merciful GM will drop a hint that they are in over their heads, and let them give up and run for home.

A more sophisticated adventure could have several possible finales, depending on decisions made by the players during the adventure. This sort of "branching-path" adventure is harder to design, but sometimes easier for the GM to run, as it calls for less improvisation.

Features of a Good Adventure

A good adventure (by the standards we use for our own publications) includes:

• Many opportunities for the PCs to use noncombat skills – including some difficult rolls, and some involving unusual skills (forcing the PCs to roll against defaults).
• Contests between PCs and NPCs – and possibly between PCs as well.
• Situations where the players have to think about the right thing to do...puzzles, moral choices, or both.
• Situations where proper use of social skills, like Fast-Talk or Diplomacy, will avoid combat.
• Situations where no possible use of social skills will avoid combat!
• Interesting descriptions of people, places, and things, to give the players the feeling that they are really there with their characters.
• A clear introduction, a plotline that builds tension or mystery, and a clear conclusion.
• Opportunity for roleplaying and character development. This should be present in even the most lighthearted hack-and-slash adventure! Fighters are interesting people, too – at least, they should be.
• A reward for characters who complete the adventure successfully, and a consequence for characters who fail!

Organizing a Continuing Campaign

Even more complex (and more interesting) than a full-scale adventure is a series of adventures involving the same characters. This is called a campaign. If a single adventure is the equivalent of a novel, a campaign is an epic trilogy – the kind that is still going after seven books!

A campaign consists of one adventure after another – or possibly several overlapping adventures at once. Each adventure may take many sessions to resolve. The GM decides what goes on in the game world in between game sessions – and especially between adventures. Important NPCs go about their own affairs. Wars, weather, politics, and trade can go on in the "background" of the campaign, giving rise to new adventures. Your players can be a good source of suggestions...and they will be tremendously pleased if their adventures affect the "whole world" in some way, whether they turn aside a catastrophic war or simply find a cure for the Queen's wart.

A large campaign can have dozens of players (not all playing at once!), several cooperating GMs, planets worth of mapped territory, and hundreds of significant NPCs, from kings and popes down to thieves and beggars.

DON’T PANIC. You don’t have to do all this at once. Most campaigns just "grow," a bit at a time. One adventure leads to the next, and before you know it, you've been playing for a year and you've got a campaign going. Much of the flavor of a good campaign comes from the players themselves. The PCs' Dependents, Allies, Patrons, and Enemies become continuing NPCs...old foes reappear when they are least wanted...maps become more detailed each time you play. Players come and go, but the campaign goes on. And nobody learns to run a campaign by reading the rulebook. Experience is the best teacher.

To help, we've included a Campaign Planning Form. Filling this out will put you well on your way to adventure!