The first step in developing your story is to break it down into bite-sized chunks. If you're still working at the campaign level, breaking your story into chunks will help you determine what your adventures will be about. If you're working at the adventure level, breaking your story into bite-sized chunks will give you your encounters and events that will make up the adventure parts. If you are working from campaign-level down, you're going to need to take your bite-size chunk that will be the adventure you're going to work on and break it into smaller, bitier-sized chunks.
For example, if my campaign is about choosing a new monarch for a domain, my first adventure might be to gain favor with one of the candidates for monarchy. Gaining favor is too general, but it can very easily be broken down into an adventure (or perhaps several adventures, for something this complex). All you have to do is go back to the first question: what is your story about? If the treasure for the campaign is restoring law and order to the land, then the treasure for the first adventure might be to gain a powerful ally. What obstacles would stand in the players' paths on their way to such a treasure? How can the outcome of gaining that treasure backfire on them/the antagonist(s)?
There are volumes of questions that can be asked here, but the most important one is always going to be what is your story about? Answering that question will give you focus. Everything you write afterwards will relate back to whatever the answer to that question is. If it doesn't, you don't need it.
To organize your story into more manageable segments, your adventure should be made up of a series of Acts. Acts, like those in a play, will provide all of the encounters and information related to that section of the story. These are larger than chapters, but still divide up your story for ease-of-use. There is no need to adhere to the three-act-structure here. Acts are, in this case, simply dividers.
An act might encompass a region or a period of time. Ensure the acts flow logically, with the start at the beginning and the conclusion at the end. Although your conclusion doesn't have to include the player's getting the treasure, you'll often find that your players feel more rewarded when they do get the treasure.
Just like your larger story chunks, each act should have a treasure. Again, not a literal treasure, but definitely some motivating objective that allows the players to progress through your adventure. Everything contained within your act is going to be tied to your act's treasure in some way or another, whether as an obstacle or as an aid to the players. If you're looking at something in your act and you can't answer how it is relevant to the act's treasure, it needs to go.
When you're starting out, repeat the same process of paring down your acts into little miniature stories in and of themselves. It is possible to have a one-act adventure, although it is likely to be short and less rewarding. Acts are most effectively used to transport player characters to different regions within a reasonable space. If you're employing extraplanar travel, for example, you might devote an entire act to visiting Carceri while another is devoted to the Material plane.
Scenes, or rooms, or encounters, are the subsections of acts that the players participate in. These will be gone over in more detail later.
For example, if my campaign is about choosing a new monarch for a domain, my first adventure might be to gain favor with one of the candidates for monarchy. Gaining favor is too general, but it can very easily be broken down into an adventure (or perhaps several adventures, for something this complex). All you have to do is go back to the first question: what is your story about? If the treasure for the campaign is restoring law and order to the land, then the treasure for the first adventure might be to gain a powerful ally. What obstacles would stand in the players' paths on their way to such a treasure? How can the outcome of gaining that treasure backfire on them/the antagonist(s)?
There are volumes of questions that can be asked here, but the most important one is always going to be what is your story about? Answering that question will give you focus. Everything you write afterwards will relate back to whatever the answer to that question is. If it doesn't, you don't need it.
To organize your story into more manageable segments, your adventure should be made up of a series of Acts. Acts, like those in a play, will provide all of the encounters and information related to that section of the story. These are larger than chapters, but still divide up your story for ease-of-use. There is no need to adhere to the three-act-structure here. Acts are, in this case, simply dividers.
An act might encompass a region or a period of time. Ensure the acts flow logically, with the start at the beginning and the conclusion at the end. Although your conclusion doesn't have to include the player's getting the treasure, you'll often find that your players feel more rewarded when they do get the treasure.
Just like your larger story chunks, each act should have a treasure. Again, not a literal treasure, but definitely some motivating objective that allows the players to progress through your adventure. Everything contained within your act is going to be tied to your act's treasure in some way or another, whether as an obstacle or as an aid to the players. If you're looking at something in your act and you can't answer how it is relevant to the act's treasure, it needs to go.
When you're starting out, repeat the same process of paring down your acts into little miniature stories in and of themselves. It is possible to have a one-act adventure, although it is likely to be short and less rewarding. Acts are most effectively used to transport player characters to different regions within a reasonable space. If you're employing extraplanar travel, for example, you might devote an entire act to visiting Carceri while another is devoted to the Material plane.
Scenes, or rooms, or encounters, are the subsections of acts that the players participate in. These will be gone over in more detail later.
