Efficient Adventure Design - Getting Started

What You'll Need

• Pencils
• Paper
• Competent word processor / publishing application
• RPG Source books (Player's Handbooks, Monster Manuals, Dungeon Master's Guides, etc.)

Typically you'll start with pencil and paper (or pen if you're brave!) to get your initial ideas down on paper.  Some folks like to use their computer for everything, and if that's your style then more power to you.  If you do use your computer, I recommend that you do not delete anything you write!  And I cannot stress that enough.  Even if you've decided not to use an idea, highlight it in black or strike it through or something.  Whatever you delete is gone forever.  Never trust memory!

Campaign Worlds

Dungeon Master's Guides or other Game Master reference materials can provide tons of useful information and inspiration for creating a campaign world.  What is most important for you to get down on paper first, if you want to build an adventure that is part of a campaign, is what your overarching story is.  Your adventures need to all add up into one greater story, like the collection of Harry Potter novels or the Song of Ice and Fire novels.  This can help you figure out where your adventure fits into the greater narrative.

If you're not using a larger campaign, then don't concern yourself too much with this step.  Either way, at this stage you want your campaign story idea to be vague.  It will include some elements that are key to all stories that will make them adventures.

(Note that this advice is largely pointed at role-playing games in which there are adventures, and is not aimed at role-playing games that are meant to be played differently.)

Story Elements

There are a handful of recurring story elements that you will likely see referred to repeatedly throughout this blog.  These are listed here along with short descriptions.  Your stories should contain some logical combination of these elements, if not all of them.

• Treasure - This is often, although it doesn't have to be, actual treasure.  Magical items, money, land holdings, power, glory... your story needs to drive towards some ultimate reward.  Smaller treasures can be found along the way, but it is the big treasure that gets the adventurers out on the open road.  Don't focus too much on the literal term, though: sometimes the ultimate treasure of your story might be restoring peace to a domain.  Know your players, and devise a treasure that will motivate them.

Treasure doesn't have to be real treasure, but it often is.

• Antagonist - There needs to be at least one - but generally there are lots of these.  From mooks to big bosses, there need to be characterized obstacles in between your players and their treasure.  An antagonist can be nature, or sometimes paranoia.  This is going to be based largely on the obstacles you want to place in front of your characters.  These can be the same as traps, but they are notably different from puzzles.

There's nothing quite like having a good villain.

• Supporting NPC's - These are hard to find, but always appreciated when they are genuinely helpful.  These characters fall entirely under the dominion of the GM, and they should be used only when they are relevant to the story.  Although it's great to have a backstory for every merchant in your settlement, your players may never even meet those NPC's or take the time to ask them about their wife and children.  Remember the goal is to keep your work efficient.  They can also be optional if you play hack-'n'-slash.

Make sure your NPC's are actually useful.

•  Puzzles - Puzzles are like supporting NPC's.  Good puzzles should challenge the characters, but not necessarily the players.  Puzzles must also be connected to the world they exist in.  Puzzles can be used as obstacles to treasure, but they also make excellent expository moments for hidden truths.  Puzzles of this kind are not typically locked doors to be picked or special artifacts, but rather tricky situations for your players.  These puzzles will enhance your game's storytelling, and give your players a chance to value their characters' abilities.  These are optional if you play hack-'n'-slash.

Puzzles should be targeted at the characters and not the players.

• Irony - This is the hardest concept to work into your story, but it is important.  You should set up situations where your players can figure out what's going on without explicitly telling them.  Despite its connotations, irony does not always have to be funny.  Sometimes irony can be tragic.  What is important is the reversal of intention that the players can catch and feel clever about.  Sometimes this might seem campy, but when it works well it will really ring true with your story.

Irony can apply to antagonists or player characters.

Don't feel discouraged while looking at the list above.  Writing stories is a skill, and one that has been discussed at great length.  Try to work in whatever of these elements make sense to your story, starting with the treasure, the antagonist, and the irony.  The irony might come later, but writing your adventure is a process so don't sweat it if you don't get everything on the page right away.

At this early stage, it is okay to put too much into your story idea.  Get something on the page, and then ask yourself what the core of it is.  Be difficult and honest with yourself.  Do not worry about originality.  If your story is about a group of friends that need to throw some jewelry into a volcano then focus on that story.

Once you've got a story idea, you're ready to start developing it.

Efficient Adventure Design - Introduction

Back in 2014, I began writing a blog for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition dungeon masters focusing on how to write adventures efficiently.  Or rather, I created a style guide which was intended to make writing adventures more efficient.  This was an age before the Dungeon Master's Guide had been released, and, although it was aimed at 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, could absolutely apply to most any RPG without a defined style guide for adventure writing.

In the interest of expanding Efficient Adventure Design, streamlining it and making it more helpful to Game Masters everywhere, I am moving the blog to this page and revisiting much of what I wrote in 2014 on the subject of Efficient Adventure Design.  I will expand on writing styles and techniques as well as further explore the style guide posted on the old website.

I developed the concept for Efficient Adventure Design when I encountered a reoccurring problem that I had when writing games for my players: often I would develop quite a bit of material that just wouldn't get used.  So often this material was left by the wayside, despite its presence to flesh out the details of my world.  Well, that's a big problem if time is something that you don't have much of, which many working adults don't.  Efficient Adventure Design is intended to be a process that helps you focus your work on the key elements of telling your story and writing it down so that you aren't wasting time writing about things that won't get used.

This style guide is a set of guidelines and not a set of rules.  There are two important things to remember when you're a GM for any game: Know your players, know your story.  If you know these things, then the specifics of what's written on your page can fall by the wayside and a fun time can still be had by all.  Group storytelling is not an exact science, and you shouldn't expect it to be.  Spontaneity is part of its charm.

Efficient Adventure Design is adventure-based instead of campaign based.  This will be covered in more detail later, but in general this is because while your campaign's story is important, it is made up of the smaller journeys contained within your adventure modules.  Well-written adventure modules interconnect to create fun campaigns.

Substance is part of your adventure design, but it is specific to you as a Game Master.  I will talk about writing strategies for developing and keeping track of your stories, but I will also talk about what you should include in your daily adventure writing routine.  It is too easy to get sidetracked on the history of a magical sword that gets picked up by your fighter and then sold because its bonus just isn't as good as one he can make himself.

I will talk about formatting your work in such a way that you can reference it more easily in the future.  This will build on choosing what to include in your adventure, and will develop into discussing the individual parts of the adventure.  I will discuss strategies for coming up with the different parts of your adventure and how to handle traps, puzzles, and encounters in a way that gives you plenty of information to work with but open-ended solutions that let the players feed you the answers.

It is my hope that, using this style, GMs will create games that they can share with each other freely.  Having a writing style will help make adventures easier to read, and train us to focus our stories on the most cinematic, relevant parts of our stories.  Efficient Adventure Design will, I hope, help us write better adventures.