#htwaa

@dungeons-and-danis was asking about how to plan out a campaign. I write out my advice here, but several of the steps in writing an excellent campaign revolved around putting all your DM creativity into the player’s current adventure, so I feel it’d be a disservice to not do a followup on how to write bomb-ass adventures that will captivate your players. 

Step one: inspiration

inspiration for an adventure can come from anywhere, (including my sideblog @dailyadventureprompts) and I highly advise keeping a journal to write down stray thoughts and an associated google doc where you can keep ideas in hard copy. That said, you can generally get the necessary “seed” for an adventure by finding something that excites you, whether it be a monster, a dramatic scenario, a particular character... and building out from there. The fact that it EXCITES you is important, as your enthusiasm for your own ideas is what’ll drive your creative process forward. 

Step two: brainstorming

Once you’ve got your seed, you’re going to want to give it rich soil in which to grow. Get some scrap paper or a journal ( not your campaign journal) and start asking the six basic questions ( who, what, when, where, why, how). Note that answering these are going to be a LITTLE different than normal: 

Who: Npcs are important for providing an emotional anchor to the ongoing events of your adventure. Whether it be potential allies in upcoming conflicts, antagonists to push the world towards chaos, or normal people caught in between. Work to build a cast of likeable characters your players can form bonds with, even if that bond is with a scenery chewing villain your players love to hate. 

What: Generally any adventure has two or three crowning moments of awesome. Events that the story hinges on but must build up to in order to EARN that payoff. If an adventure involves fighting a dragon in a disused mine complex, you could just point the players at the nearest tunnel entrance and let them blunder their way along, but to properly ground that setpiece you need do some groundwork to earn it. What gets the palyers into the mine? What threat does this dragon pose? what effect has this event had on the wider world? What sort of history is at play here? what’s the average person’s opinion on this, and who disagrees with them and how? 

When: To keep your players focused and interested and “on mission” I can recommend this tip: when the players neglect a section of the plot or subplot that you want them to draw their attention to, “upgrade” the threat posed by that plot element. Say you have one subplot involving bandits and another involving a haunted inn. No matter which element your players investigate, you can draw their attention back to an overlooked element by making it intrude upon the player’s lives. Maybe the bandits mount an attack while the player’s are playing ghostbusters, or maybe the spirits haunting the inn possess an ally of the party while they were out battling the brigands.  This technique can be very useful for drawing your player’s attention back to the game, but be sure to reward them with a little downtime for their efforts. 

Where: The location of an adventure isn’t just a backdrop, it provides a useful toolbox of stock characters, potential gameplay mechanics, and inbuilt player assumptions. If an adventure takes place in a port frequented by pirates, one could easily extrapolate adventures involving treasure hunts, dealing with untrustworthy sea-dogs, and dramatic sea battles. A high-fantasy trade town likely has local festivals, a wilderness full of foul beasts to track, and scheming merchants/nobles looking to turn a profit. 

Why: While writing out a full history of your world is likely a useless timesink, its important to know the causal chain of why things are happening the way they are, and what will happen after the players interact with them. Start with vaugeries, then sketch in details as needed. Have a few different endings in mind for each plot element, and maybe include some that your players are likely to fail.   

How: The bridging factor between the adventure as you’ve planned it and the players are the HOOKS. Reasons for your players to care about your adventure, things that tie them to this particular settlement/setting, and temptations to dangle before them so they’ll get embroiled in the goings on of your world. 

If a stray idea comes across in your brainstorming, WRITE IT DOWN. Nothing is off the table at this stage. Ideas are always useful, even if they’re not useful in your current adventure. 

 Step three: putting it in order

if an element isn’t working, throw it out,  try including another one. Do this till you’ve got a handful of stable setting elements, then get to work arranging them. You’ll want to focus in on the player’s experience, how you’re going to introduce them to each element without being too heavy handed, the early forshadowing or lore you NEED to get out of the way. After they know the very basics of what they need to know, let them discover the rest on their own terms, create a few low-stakes scenarios for them to get tangled up in which slowly reveal to them the forces at work in your world.

(Read all of my “ how to write an adventure” series HERE)

Last time we talked about making yourself a foundational adventure, we talked about setting up scenery that was conducive to enticing your group’s imaginations and generating the right sort of plot points. With that out of the way,  it’s time to talk about what to put in that scenery in order to get your players both active and invested in your plot.

New friends: as great as your plotlines may be, your players are unlikely to get invested in just the notion of playing the game for the heck of it. Sure, they may look back and think” that was a really neat adventure!” but that hindsight helps you little when actually launching them in to such a chain of events.  The trick in this case is to pair your plothooks with engaging NPCs, in order to couch ongoing stories in personal stakes.  If the players get a brief job helping a trader move goods to the next town, they’re going to spend time listening to her opinions on the local bandits, the corrupt duke and all those strange things that folk are saying happened in the next valley over. Random travelers who wander into town aren’t going to decide that they need to risk their lives unseating that duke on a whim… but if people they care about are being threatened, they’ll gladly pledge themselves to the cause.

Better toys: Players love getting new items, and without an opportunity for a shopping trip now and then, what’s the point of amassing gold from your adventures? THat said, there’s an art to putting items in front of your players and having them get excited about it.  Regular gear from the equipment section generally won’t be exciting enough to get your , nor should you spend effort highlighting all the ways they can get perfectly mundane items.  Instead throw a few uncommon items out in front of your starting level party in the appropriate merchant’s stalls and you can watch their eyes light up with greed and their minds start racing as they frantically look for ways to get the needed coin.

Outstanding Challenges: no one’s been able to recover the bishop’s ring from way up in the tower belfry since a magpie took it to its nest. Folk take pains to avoid the crumbling old fort, and anyone who’d spend the night there is either mad as a goat or brave as a lion. The fancy hat on that assholish duelist is just BEGGING to find a new home. When you lace these sorts of challenges into your setting you are not only daring your players to prove themselves to be a cut above the rest but also providing them the opportunity to indulge in some celebratory roleplay. These challenges can evolve into humorous misadventures, or the seeds for the PCs growing legends.

A sense of purpose:  Players are likely to feel lost when they first start out, regardless of how experienced they might be. Their characters are only half formed, and are in all likelihood pretty aimless. What better place to start than giving them the opportunity to enlist in a cause far greater than themselves?  While their stories have only just begun, your world has (at least fictionally) been existing for quite a while, and that means an abundance of causes, ongoing struggles and people of means and motive looking for aid in their endeavors.  Local militias might be looking for able hands after a roving beast injured a patrol last week, an alchemist seeks reagents and test subjects as he seeks the cure for his son’s baleful transfiguration, a bloodied courier collapses in the party’s camp one night, her mission unspoken until the party earns her trust.  

This is, in part a rejection of your usual “ questgiver” structure. Games have trained us to think of the people who give us tasks and hand out rewards as stationary and of little consequence. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and I encourage you to do everything in your power to forget the notion. By giving NPCs their own ongoing stories, ones that outstrip the reach of your heroes, you give players something to inherit once they have done the necessary growing. It provides a true sense of both legacy and progression.

Personal goals: Any time your players mention that they might want to do something (in or out of game), make a note of that. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with giving players what they want, so long as you make them work for it. Mine your players backstories for future plot threads and keep track of what you think might excite them as fodder for future adventures.

With that, I think I’ll bring this part of “How to write an adventure” to a close. It’s been a harpy and a half getting all this organized, but you should look forward to more stuff like this in the future. If you have any thoughts or results, feel free to shoot me a message or leave something in the replies. 

Until then, 

(Read all of my “ how to write an adventure” series HERE)

In our first entry into this series we talked about how to arrange your adventures into a serviceable beginning. Now we’ll talk about where exactly that adventure takes place and what you should have prepared before you set out.

Landscape to explore: Even if your campaign or adventure doesn't have a strong focus on exploration, it’s good to know what landscapes make up the breadth of your surroundings. While some DMs go all out on building elaborate continents and complete worlds, our interest in constructing a foundational adventure extends only so far as our players might travel in their first few levels.  While tales of the shining towers across the tear-green sea might distract them around a taverns hearth, you don’t need to map them out unless your party is taking a trip there next session, and you’d better be served with detailing local landmarks and their next encounter.

While having a map helps ( and there’s plenty of resources to make them online) the true charm of detailing your landscape is painting in broad strokes and letting your adventures fill in the details. Talk about the nearby haunted woods, about the hissing wastelands across the ridge or the ruby veined mountains dotted with dwarven halls. Let your players discover the roads and landmarks, the shortcuts and the monster lairs. and for the love of good writing, don’t put roadsigns towards your dungeons. It undercuts the majesty of delving dark caves or forgotten temples if they’re as well known by the townsfolk as the local makeout point.

That said, wilderness in your games should never be so simple as heading towards a known goal, describing scenery, maybe having an encounter or two. What’s the point of having wilderness if they aren't truly wild?  So if you don’t like the idea of making traversing from one major settlement to another a mini-adventure in its own right, it’s best you just skip the notion and go right to the adventures you DO want to run.

If your campaign arc is focusing on exploration having multiple environments also allows you to plug multiple wilderness adventures into the same arc, while at the same time varying the environments, associated creatures and challenges.

I find some of my best results comes from finding three or so evocative landscape illustrations or photos of the same general theme and trying to bend them together into one cohesive whole. If this technique works for you, make an image folder or pinterest board for each subregion and refer back to it when writing your descriptions.

An awesome Town: I wrote about tricks in making excellent hub towns here,  so I’ll be brief on this section.  Ensure that your foundational adventure has a good town to rest up in. somewhere to sink all your plot hooks and act as the neutral space between big adventures. Detailing other settlements in the region is fine, but it’s important to note that this is THE town for your adventure… and it deserves the proper attention.

A central tension for your setting.  Matt Coville has a great couple of videos about the central tension here and here.  suffice to say, it’s a dramatic conceit that everyone the party meets is going to have an opinion on. It’s something that motivates many characters and sparks side adventures. It also does the gruntwork of illustrating your story’s theme. Variations on these events and themes can be used to generate nearly infinite material for your game, so I highly encourage you to throw this in.  I also encourage you to NOT make your central tension anything that could be resolved by your foundational adventure. That’s for grand adventures down the line, once you have your party on the hook.

That’s it for designing the backdrop for your foundational adventure, in the final bit of this series we’ll talk about what you need to put in your world to grab your player’s attention in ways they won’t even notice. 

Until then,

(Read all of my “ how to write an adventure” series HERE)

Intro and adventure drivers.

While we all want to have adventures consisting of epic encounters with stakes we truly care about, it’s a hard truth that we can’t conjure these types of experiences out of whole cloth.

Instead, today I’m going to tell you how to build what I call a Foundational adventure. The sort of thing which will help you to build the dramatic framework necessary to get your players invested up till the end of your dramatic finale.  

The first step in my experience is determining whether your story is Dm driven or player driven. A DM driven story is likely a mostly linear affair interested in telling a specific series of events, probably in sequential arcs. A player driven story will be more open ended, allowing the folks around the table to pick and choose where they want to get involved, chasing multiple plot threads at their leisure.

It’s also important to talk to your players about whether you’re running a player or DM driven adventure, as that ensure you’re all on the same page when it comes to taking action within a campaign. A Dm who mistakenly expects a player driven game can be idle as they wait for their players to act out and start investigating the corners of their world, whereas the opposite situation will have the players feeling their choices constrained by an otherwise energetic DM.

If I’m creating a player driven game, I generally like to plan three or so coinciding narratives, each mostly independent of the others. I start the campaign in a way that allows me to highlight multiple areas of interest, and then set the players lose with a bevy of minor, optional sidequests that could draw them in any number of directions.  Failing that, I pepper in hints and rumors, bounties, and other chances at glory that’ll lead the players where I need them to go. The trick with player driven foundational adventures is to subtly shape all the potential distractions into adventure hooks without your players even realizing it. It takes a bit of finessing, but with multiple narratives to explore, you’ll have plenty of options at hand, even if you need to improvise.  

Dm driven adventures are much simpler. Give your players a mission, set them loose, resolve the tension, then give them a bit of down time before you throw the next big hurdle at them.

Regardless of which style of adventure you’re after, I would advise that the first steps of your quest are A) non-violent B) used to sow the seeds of later adventures/ introduce important characters for adventures later on.  This not only does a lot of your work for you as a DM: starting your players out with an emotional investment in upcoming narratives, but also spares otherwise early level characters from the meatgrinder of combat until they have some survivability and options.  This bloodless approach is not always the case, as new players in starter or sample adventures should be given a taste of combat early to see if that aspect of the game suits them. Veterans however know how to wait for a good thing, giving you plenty of room to build up the dramatic weight.

Foundational, Minor, and Grand adventures.

If our foundational adventure is going to work, we’re going to need to figure out what parts of our story to include in it, and how best to convey them to our audience.

Enter the notion of Minor and Grand adventures.

In this context, a foundational adventure is a bit like a cornerstone. It’s the first one laid that helps support all the others later on in the process of building. Minor adventures are the building blocks, making up the bulk of your narrative and giving it character. They’re a great place to explore different things about your setting and get to see your characters in a new light.Grand adventures are your flourishes, your keystones. They’re what gives your campaign it’s true emotional weight and what you’re building towards, even if you have to finagle the other bits to get there.  The building metaphor isn’t an accident, as these different types of adventures are stacked a little bit like a pyramid, with grand adventures resting on and requiring the support of multiple minor adventures in order to have the proper setup and dramatic/emotional stakes. You can’t just jump into a grand adventure without preamble, and while a campaign can support multiple grand adventures, it takes more work to get there.

If you want an example of what this process looks like, look no further than the original starwars trilogy, a great resource considering it was made to feel like the old pulp serials that D&D was inspired by.

In the first movie: Luke’s call to action, leaving tattooine, rescuing princess leia is ( despite all it’s political framing,) a Foundational adventure. Its primary purpose is to introduce our world, endear us to our characters and make us care about the adventures of a Smuggler, a rebel princess and a farmboy who wants to be a spacewizard. Though dramatic and exciting I would say the destruction of the deathstar is a Minor adventure, as the the deathstar doesn't mean anything to any of our characters besides the fact that it’s a scary space gun.

As Episode 5 starts, the escape from the empire and the chase that occurs afterwords is a Minor adventure, it sets up character stakes and it’s fun, but nothing rides on it besides the survival of our heroes. It’s only in the diverting plot where Luke goes to train with Yoda do we see our first hint of the Grand adventure, the themes of light and dark, the notion of legacy. We care about Luke, we know he’s going to struggle with this and in the end he ends up making an important character choice which ends up launching the grand adventure.

Finally, we have the rescue of Han and the destruction of the second death star. Again, both Minor adventures. They’re fun, but the dramatic stakes don’t cause any significant character changes in our heroes. As for the rest of the film: Luke doesn't go with Vader because he plans to kill the emperor, he goes because he believes his father can be redeemed, a decision rooted purely in the dramatics of his character. This is the Grand adventure that has been woven through two of these three films. It hinges entirely upon our investment in these characters and has significant things to say about the audience. Luke isn’t mr.action hero, the trilogy isn’t resolved by an act of strength, but by an act of emotion. Luke’s power then is an emotional one, a power we’ve given him by becoming invested in him over the course of these three movies and these different adventures.

Now that we’ve identified the scope of what we’re building, we can move on to actually building it.  Next time I’ll show you what you what parts of your setting you’ll need to construct to best get your story started.

Until then,

(Read all of my “ how to write an adventure” series HERE)

I can say with some certainty that the cornerstone of any good adventure setting is a good town to get to know and explore in your downtime, just like you explore the wilderness in your “UP” time. You have to do MORE than the classic trinity of Tavern/forge/item shop, your players are going to be living in this place for ages, and overall it’ll have more impact on them than the main villain of your story.

A town provides a location for your characters to be actual CHARACTERS, rather than a set of features attached to a sword or spellbook,  It’s going to be the neutral point they return to between each sub adventure.. It’s what you’re going to put into jeopardy once the big arc finally closes out , so you’d best spend some time fleshing it out or else all of those dramatic notes are going to fall flat.

Describe your town like you’d describe a key dungeon set piece. What’s the vibe? What do the characters smell and hear? How does it change from hour to hour, season to season? What’s the colour palate? Are there recurring motifs? How do people here participate in their culture beyond simply being citizens? If there are different districts or key sections to your town, describe those and the shift that occurs as a bit of narration every time your players move between them.

Towns are also a great place to install adventure hooks. It’s likely that there are secondary and tertiary effects related to your adventure, and as such there’ll be a host of NPCs ready to talk about how their lives have recently been disrupted by this or that , allowing your players to piece together what’s really going on in the world at large.

Who do your players know in town? Friends, family members, colleges? There’s a good chunk of backgrounds that give you the special power to “know” people in town, who are those people, how do they relate to your adventure hooks? Sure, wandering into a new town and checking out the tavern is a classic way to start a new adventure, but your players have likely done it before. Why not have them stay with the warlock’s eccentric aunt? Or have them bunk down with the fighter’s old garrison in the watchtower on the city limits? Giving your players these sorts of ins allows them to get a leg up on getting invested in your setting and your adventure, as opposed to having it all develop from scratch.  

The best towns are fusions of different elements. Different strata of social class, different industries, conflicting aspects of history. No settlement simply started as a town, it starts as a borderland fortress, or a landowner’s villa, a sheltered trading post, a mining colony. As history progresses the settlement changes, drawing new sorts of people and building it’s own personal culture.

An easy way to build up a town’s story is to ask five simple questions of yourself:

What founded the town? what’s happened in the town? what made the town what it is today? what is the town becoming? What are you planning to DO to the town in the course of your adventures?