Adventure Design

If you're no RPGer, this article's not for you... since I'm going to detail how I go about creating an adventure. You can come back next week, I'll rant about the elections or zombie-rights or something.

Ok, now that my parents have stopped reading the article...

The first, most important thing for any adventure is the hook. Now this isn't the hook to get the players interested, this is the hook to get you the GM interested. You want to find something that you can throw at the players that will just make your day. It can be anything; the look on their faces when you unveil something they never thought of before (or didn't want to think of), a particularly tricky puzzle that you're proud you put together, or a quirky NPC that makes you happy when you acting him out.

If you've got that one thing that'll bring you into the adventure, then the rest of the planning will have something satisfying to attach itself to. As a result, your players will get as engrossed as you are (that being the beauty of attention, it's attention grabbing). This is one of the reasons I rarely play pre-made adventures. Sure I'll pick one up from time to time if there's something in it that grabs my eye and I know I can build off of it... but nothing beats the personal touch.

You just can't beat knowing your own players. For me one of the greatest joys of GMing is introducing the players to a particular scene or concept in the middle of an adventure that I know is going to catch one or all of them by surprise. This scene is often the first thing I'll think of, and then I'll build up the before and after portions of the adventure around it to first draw the players into that fateful scene, and then let them claw their way out of it.

Another good GM hook is the overall story in your world. Have something going on in your world that you're interested in finding how it turns out. Set up some political intrigue on some really grand scale that you find interesting, and then let it shape your campaign for a while. It doesn't have to be something that will directly effect the players, but something that might have some effect on you, and what you're going to be bringing to the table for the next several gaming sessions.

Now that you've gotten the GM's hook, you'll want to throw in several player hooks. With luck you'll develop some that play off of whatever hook you've crafted that makes you want to run the adventure. If not, a general rule of thumb is think of each of the players in the group and put one thing in the night's adventure for them to do.

Sometimes this is really simple... you just pick a monster each player can have fun beating on (heck, sometimes you just need one monster that you know they all can have fun at). Some hack-and-slash games consist entirely of the monsters the players would face... nothing wrong in that, but your skills as a GM will need to fall much more to the art of play-balance in these cases. You'll need to know exactly how tough to make the beasties so that each player will be challenged, never overrun and never under-worked.

Other games, which are less monster centric (or when you want to spice up the hack and slash sessions), you'll want to pick a skill from each player and cobble some chain of events or plot points around each chosen skill. You've got a cat-person skilled at climbing and acrobatics? Have a chase scene that occurs over some rooftops. Got an alchemist? Throw in a corpse killed by some exotic poison. Now it's just as likely as not, players being as they are, that they come about confronting your game at ninety degree angles from what you thought they were... no worries. There's always enough going on in any particular game that players find stuff to do, but by making sure that when you designed the adventure there was something for everyone, you're certain to have given them a handful of exciting events to face over the course of the night.

The hight of adventure crafting is when you add a dash of something to the adventure for each person's personality. Just as when you're adding monsters for hack-and-slash adventures, or situations for skill adventures, you'll craft something that will act as a perfect foil for some personality trait of each of your players. Often times this is a bit of a task, so I'll sometimes tone it down to just one player per adventure and tie it into the plot somehow (and if I think of something on the fly for the others while running, all the better).

Occasionally I'll be running a game and I won't even know the players before hand (I help out my friends at the Slugathon gaming convention usually by running a Paranoia game or two). The same rules apply, you just need to imagine the players up ahead of time. You don't need to get them correct, you just need some templates of players to act as molds to shape your own constructions.

There's a bunch of other stuff I do while actually running an adventure, but this is what I do to get one whipped into shape an hour or so before the gaming starts for the evening.

i,jasona