Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[UristMcDwarf]

In my fervent reading of the rulebooks and my attempts to commit them to memory, I never learned how to write an adventure. All my game sessions are literally just the PCs starting off in a random dungeon with no set-up whatsoever. What do I do?

[Mephansteras]

Set up the basics of a story for the PCs to get involved in.

What is the major problem they have to solve? This could be an Orc tribe gathering strength to attack the kingdom, or a faction within the kingdom plotting a revolution, or whatever.

How do the PCs get involved? The easiest way is to have them be hired by someone to perform some action that kicks off the story. Scouting out the wild lands the orcs inhabit, investigate rumors of some rebellious group, what have you.

How will the story react to what the players do? This is as much contingency planning as it is story writing, but it is important to have notes on this. What happens if the PCs report back about the orcs saying they're about to attack? What if they don't see anything and report that everything looks fairly calm? What if the players get distracted and don't report back at all?

How would the story unfold if the PCs don't get involved? I find that a great way to make the world feel alive is to have events unfolding around the players that effect them regardless of what they decide to do. They turned down that job to investigate the Orcs to explore the sewers looking for Wererats? Rumors of Orcs attacking outlying villages should start to reach them. They still ignore it? Word comes that Orcs have overrun the border posts. They still do nothing? Have an Orc army ransack the city they are in!


That's roughly how I approach adventures.

[Ozyton]

I don't play DnD myself though I've had interest in it. I suppose it all depends on what kind of cgame your players like to play, do they like a roleplaying type of game or do they like a combat type of game? I can't give you a good answer for either but knowing that should be a good start for what kind of adventure you'll want to be making.

[UristMcDwarf]

Set up the basics of a story for the PCs to get involved in.

What is the major problem they have to solve?
AAND STOP RIGHT THERE.
I don't know. I can't think of any problems.

[Aoi]

I second Ozy: Are the people you're DMing mostly RPers, dice rollers*, or puzzle solvers? Resolve that, and you've gone a long way towards a start.

*Mostly combat. Or craps players.

Alternatively: A random DF game dug too deeply and ended up opening a portal that sucked your party over. Now you have context that you're personally familiar with. (Hopefully, nobody you play with runs as an elf...)

[Elfeater]

Okay, well a good idea for plots may just be looking at history. LIke say you want a war between two noble houses, look at the war of the roses... etc.

[Mephansteras]

What level are they? Pick an appropriate level monster from the Monster Manual, and then have that be the problem. What the problem is DOING just depends on the monster.

Kobolds have overrun a mine. The players are hired to exterminate them/determine what happened to the miners/whatever

A Necromancer is building up an army of undead to take his revenge on the local Temple that tried to destroy him. The players must stop him and his army of Skeletons/Zombies/Wraiths

A foolish apprentice tried to summon a Demon and it got out of his control, killed him, and is now rampaging around the city. The players have to defeat it.

A wealthy Ranchers hires the PCs to discover what is eating his prized cows. It turns out to be a stray Displacer beast that the players then have to defeat/drive off.

[Ozyton]

Well, what kind of setting is this taking place in? Problems can range anywhere from somebody's MacGuffin has been taken, the bad doods are after somebody's MacGuffin or the somebody that is Mr. MacGuffin, or the adventurers want to kill the bad doods, or the adventurers want money food.

[Ogdibus]

This might help when you're stuck.

http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/adventure/

The edition that I have suggests a flow chart format for organizing the events within your game.  It points out that the rooms and halls of a dungeon map closely resemble a flow chart.   When unexpected things happen, you can modify the chart, but it takes quick thinking.  Trying to force a narrative onto the players doesn't work well, so try to design the adventure to be flexible, but structured enough that the players feel motivated to pursue it.  With some groups you can just ask, and they will give the answer, others might not know, and you will have to get a feel for what they like as you go.



Another thing is rhythm.  Try alternating action with searching/revelations.  Alternating in this way keeps each event fresh.  Most fights take a while, and it can be draining to do several in a row.  Too much searching for information can get tedious.

The players can do something like get ambushed while minding their own business, and then when it's over, they can find clues about who did it and why.  This works very well if having an enemy is part of a player's background.  They will likely want to confront or evade the person that is responsible.  This can lead to a chase, a social challenge, or a dangerous showdown.  Any of these could be followed by a further revelation or a resolution. 

[Neonivek]

Truthfully the first thing you should do is find out what "You" want to run.

If you are happy with dungeon romps then plan dungeon romps.

[Sensei]

I just start with a simple basic plot and throw obstacles or interesting people to interact with on the fly. Give them excessive information about things that aren't important now and then, they'll start brainstorming about the shopkeeper's dark secret when you tell them he has a scar over his eye or something- and just steal their ideas.

[Sonlirain]

Umm i remember one template from a polish RPG periodical... only barely so you'd have to build upon it i guess.
I'm not sure it was made for D&D but i guess you could make it work.

So basically it goes like this...

The heroes arrive at a village/small town that is mostly deserted with a skeleton crew of townfolk remaining.
The problem?
Someone keeps sending packages to everyone with some random unsuspicious things in them.
HOWEVER.
The person recieving the package dies in 3 days.
So after several causalties people stopped accepting the packages and left them all at the sheriffs office.
The person who kept sending the packages is revealed to have been dead for at least 3 years now.
Days go by  and more and more packages from beyond the grave keep comming and the heroes must determine whare all those packages are comming from.

The solution:
The town was built on top of a particularly pure vein of "insert valuable mineral here".
The person who prepared the poisoned packages knew about the vein and wanted to aquire the land.
He planned to scare off most of the population (and possible buyers) and buy it for cheap HOWEVER he also unknowingly poisoned himself (and died) before sending the packages.
The person who inherited his wealth (distant family from far away that had no knowledge about him or his plans) decided to send the (already prepared) packages explaining how the packages got sent by a dead guy.

The vein:
After solving the mystery the players might decide to do something about the vein which may spark another quest.

[Neyvn]

One thing that I have been meaning to get started with my group is make Setting/Theme and even Story completely up to them. Naturally I have some small walls set up to funnel them into a certain style but what I mean to say by letting everything go up to them is that they get to build the world as we play it. It sort of worked in our VERY FIRST game but I quickly realized that we were never really ready for that so we went back to Modules until we got our heads around the rules better...


By Theme/Setting I am talking about what kind of world the game is set in. Naturally things can be normal Medieval Fantasy that most games are but if you have the other books such as Advanced Combat, you find classes such as Gunslinger, Samurai and Ninja...
This opens up a Wild West setting where you have Gunslinger as a Baseclass then mush together the other core classes with it or just give those coreclasses Amateur Gunslinger at creation, Now you have Cowboys and Fantasy mushed together...
It also brings forth a nice Japanese World, Have them battle in the Sengoku Jidai period, with Fantasy added for bonus for some interesting things. Heck Pokemon did it why can't DnD... Actually..... I WANT TO DO THAT!!!

[Girlinhat]

For making a campaign, you generally want one thing: Someone has to want something.  The lich could want the throne, the archwizard could want research material from the astral plane, the PCs could want immortality...

What I'd suggest, make a world first.  Some nations, cities, even just some basic ideas on what's in what area of the world.  Paint some terrain in broad strokes, and put some sort of people in every region.  Then put in something or someone that's upsetting the setting, like a lich who's marching out of the swamps and into the kingdom.  Now the party has to defeat the lich, so now you need to decide where the Phylactery is, what legendary sword will cut off his head, what secret mountain cult is hiding the blade...

One of the more solid ideas, I think, is to make a fairly simple goal - The dragon may only be slain if his heart is stabbed by the sacred blade.  Then put the goal behind a small number of quest chains, and put all those behind random interference.  Like, to get the sacred blade you have to prove to the monks you're ready, and they want you to fetch an amulet.  The amulet is on the other side of a goblin village - the goblins aren't worried about the quest at all, they're just goblins doing goblin things.  Similarly, the swamp they live in isn't a quest item, it's just a swamp doing swamp things.  And the wyverns...  Just sprinkle the area in unrelated but similar-CR problems.

[Cthulhu]

Snip

And I would've had it too, if it weren't for those meddling adventurers and their stupid displacer beast!