User blog:Dragokar62/Adventure Design

Adventure Design

When it comes to adventure design, there are no hard and fast rules to follow. In fact, all you really need is a good plot and you can run with that. Some of the more interesting campaigns I’ve played in were just pieced together plots. But not all of those were fun. I have to admit, I’ve run with little more than a vague idea for my campaigns before, but they lacked the punch that a well thought out campaign could give. But where to come up with a good campaign idea? This is what I hope to help with in this article.

I’m going to assume you have a game world chosen to play in. If you don’t have a game world to play in, but you’re working on building one, I can help with that, too, but first, I’ll go with you having one. There are multiple options for building a campaign in your world and we’ll start with some of the easier ones.

Ultimate Evil. This is where an evil person or entity has risen from the ashes and is now causing major chaos in your game world. It could be a powerful lich. It could be a demon lord. It could be an ancient evil dragon. Or, it could be an evil cult that is threatening to overrun the realms. Either way, this is your Big Bad Evil Guy (or gal, not being sexist here) and this is what you’ll center your campaign around. What you have your players doing up to the end fight is really up to you, but make sure they know, at the end of this, is a huge boss fight for them to participate in.

'''Rival Factions. '''This is more of a political intrigue situation, where there is a rival faction out to upset the balance of the land and it’s up to the party to stop them. It might be a greedy noble wanting to usurp the king or queen or it could be an outsider wanting to invade the land you’re on. Or it could be that the current monarch is a tyrant and a good leader wants the party’s help in placing them on the throne to lead. But it should be up to the party to support whomever they choose, and for that faction to give them missions to help push the issue down the road to the finale.

'''Natural Disaster Avoidance. '''Sometimes, weather happens. Sometimes, it could be an earthquake, or a flood, or a volcano eruption, but nature has a way of creating a crisis of epic proportions. Maybe the party needs to help the survivors escape the devastation zone. Or perhaps there is a bad guy exploiting those who are in need of rescue. But the one way to turn a natural disaster into a campaign is to know it’s coming and to know it can be avoided. The volcano in the mountain range is suddenly active. The king or queen feels that it’s not a natural situation. They feel that someone is doing something to cause the volcano to become active again. Perhaps a cult, or even a monster, but this situation requires heroes to find out what’s going on and deal with it.

'''A Coming War. '''This is one of those scenarios where you need to be prepared. Playing out a war is a daunting task for any Dungeon Master, but these types of plot hooks give you a huge playing field for the players to run around on. They could act as spy masters to whichever faction they feel is their choice to win. They could be a strike force out to harass the enemy by stealing or destroying supplies or forts. The possibilities are practically endless. The thing that makes them difficult is the chance for large scale combat. Leading a company of men against another company of the enemy requires planning and good execution. You can’t just play out each hit and miss or the game bogs to nothing quickly, so you need to plan for how this combat will take place, or you don’t use this type of situation. I tend to avoid throwing the party into mass combat situations, preferring to allow them the behind the scenes game play, which is more to their strengths.

'''New Area Discovery. '''If you’ve been running your game world for awhile and you feel that things are getting a little stale, you might open a new territory in your land, be it an island off the coast that has just been discovered or a small section of a forest or mountains that holds something the players have yet to explore. It could even be on a different plane of existence. The players like discovering new things and you can build a campaign around this for the most part, but you might need to incorporate one of the above ideas to make this new area in danger. Just going there isn’t all that interesting, unless you throw a lot of new things that your players haven’t seen (like a new race or new magic), but otherwise, you need a reason for them to be there and be helpful.

Building your own game world can be fun and frustrating, all at the same time. Creating a land mass on which to hold your sessions is the easy part these days. Log into the Internet and create a cool map that you can print out, and you are now a Dungeon Master. It’s those little details that will cause you some heartburn. Names of terrain features like mountains, rivers and forests. Names of major cities the players will venture into. NPCs for them to interact with. What kind of economy does the land have? What trade do they prefer? What currency do they use? What political structure does it have? And those are just a few of the many questions you’ll need to have an answer to. But there is a way to create this land mass and still be able to play in it much sooner than you might think.

Rather than create all of the details of this massive world, choose a small portion of it and focus on that. Perhaps you choose the capital city and that is where your players will start. That is where you should focus your efforts, on that city. Or maybe you want them to start in one of the forests. Then flesh out that area only and focus there. You don’t have to have the entire land mass detailed to be able to play, you just need to have where the players are going to play for awhile taken care of. But be prepared, because players are noted for doing the unexpected and they might venture beyond where you have fleshed out. If so, have some handy information available to you, like village names, NPC names and some ideas on what they might find beyond. Or, you can just drag them right back to the area you have ready for them with a handy-dandy plot hook they can’t resist.

The other thing I’d like to mention here is about full campaigns. This does have something to do with adventure design, because there are many adventures in a campaign. There are several ways to create adventures that will go into a long running campaign and that’s the area I’d like to talk about. There are three types of campaign paths that I’m aware of (there are probably more, but these are the three I’ve used and know the most about).

The Long Journey. This is much like the Lord of the Rings quest line. You have this thing you need to do way over there, so you and your stalwart band of heroes take up your backpacks and trudge endless across miles of dangerous terrain to deal with some big, bad evil. Yes, these can be fun campaigns, even though it doesn’t sound like it. Imagine having to travel thousands of miles, but seemingly, with every step, you find a new obstacle. Villages to rescue, tyrants to depose and damsels to save, it’s the ultimate heroes quest.

The Over-Arc. This is the type of campaign where you have an end goal laid out for you from the very beginning. Some big, bad evil dude is doing what he does best and it’s your job to stop him. But you’re just a 1st level noob and need to build up to that final confrontation where you become the hero. These are the most popular campaigns that I know of. Along the way, you put mini-bosses and stumbling blocks in front of the players, so that they feel they’re growing into their role, and to make them angry at the big boss. It’s like the video game method of campaigning. You have to gain levels, get better gear so you fight tougher monster, so you can gain levels, get better gear so you can finally confront the bad guy. Sad, but true. But, it is a very effective way to create a campaign, minus the video game reference.

'''Episodic Adventure Design. '''This one is rarely used because it requires the DM to put the campaign together like a puzzle and they tend to like the epic sagas better. This is more of a challenge to the DM than it is to the player, because the player just reacts to the DM’s narrative, while the DM has to piece together multiple scenarios for the players to handle, all while moving the story toward the end game. Each “episode” is completely different than the others, but in each one, there is a small clue that will lead the players to the big, bad guy in the end. Sometimes, the clue makes absolutely no sense to them at the time, but later, if they’re paying attention, that clue will suddenly become a big beacon of light, leading them right to the evil guy. This is storytelling at its finest, but it does require more preparation by the DM than any of the other campaign methods.

Well, those are my ideas for creating adventures and campaigns. These are the ones I’ve used for my entire time of Dungeon Mastering and I feel they’ve worked pretty well. I hope this helps some of you.