Chatty’s Mailbox: Writing an Adventure

As some of you may know, I just finished writing a draft for a D&D 4e adventure to be possibly published by Goodman Games (if the editor likes it).  I’ve been posting vague updates on Twitter and Facebook  and such for the last few weeks and some have been following it, being very supportive.

So with adventure writing on my mind, I recently got a letter from another blogger asking precisely about that.

I’m wondering how to go about writing an adventure. I’ve generally been terrible at it but I’ve been wanting to improve.

My thing is that I’m a big improv nut when I DM. I don’t trust what I wrote down to work, so I often end up changing things on the fly. Same with monsters.

So I think a good exercise for me would be writing down something and leaving it written. Then come things like layout, additional information, and so on. Anything you can share from your own experiences?

It so happens that I have always been a very scripted DM when it comes to the home adventures I wrote for my pals.  While I have used published adventures most of the time, once in a while I inject my own one/two session adventures to shake things up.  Since I’m very scripted, those adventures end up feeling like published ones.

So here’s how I go at it.

The Pitch

I start with an elevator pitch for the adventure.

For example, for my Kobold Love project:

“A bunch of Kobold “ugly ducklings” go forth on a Quest to seek out the Tavern-in-the City. They are to kill the mysterious stranger that sits in the corner, giving out adventure hooks that always end up destroying their dungeon home. It’s going to be a 5 scene, semi-linear event-based adventure, filled with carefully chosen Fantasy RPG tropes. Playing time 4 hours..”

As another example:

“A cross between Retro-Stupid gaming and a reality show, the PCs are tricked and sent to the Plane of Games to participate in the “The Crawl™”. Complete with shady producers, product placement and instant stardom!”

Once I have this, I mull over it for a few days, building possible scenes in my mind.  Once ideas start forming, I put down key scenes/encounters.

I then build a short adventure (a 5 rooms dungeon or a 5-6 scene adventure if it’s event based) and put my encounters in.

I usually have the following components:

Intro

This is the classic pathway of telling Players what they must do and what they gain from doing it.  If I feel like doing it differently, I usually go for an ‘In Media Res‘ start where PCs are thrown into action before they can understand what’s happening to them.

The “Orc Ninjas attack you while you were in your tavern room”‘ is the kind of thing I’m talking about

The Guardian

Something or someone is trying to prevent the PCs from achieving their quest.  In a dungeon setting, its the entrance encounter.  In an event based scenario, its the first wave of opposition that the party finds in its path.

The Cool contraption/Playground

I usually try to make scenes that have multiple elements in them.  In 4e, I especially like to mix combat and non-combat elements in the same encounters.  For example, I’ll create a combat scene with and Embedded Skill challenges, or some traps, or a few pieces of interactive terrain elements like collapsible walls, fire pits and exploding braziers.

The Boss

I’m a conservative at heart when it comes to adventures, and I almost always end them with a Boss.  Some sort of Elite/Solo monster with a few minions/guardians, ready to have an ultimate showdown.

Once again, I try to make the final environment as dynamic as possible.  If I bump the boss to quite a few levels above the PCs, I make sure that there are elements in the room that PCs can use (and abuse) against the ennemy. If I feel like an evil DM, I’ll do the opposite and put traps and PC-hostile elements in the room, all controlled by the Boss (that I take down a few notches to compensate.

At the gaming table

When I write an adventure for my bi-weekly group, I often don’t have time to polish it up, so most of how it goes  remains unwritten and in my head.  A purely roleplaying scene is often not spelled out much apart from ‘NPC goals’.  However, I usually have all the creature stats, treasure and battlemap setup written down.

During the game, I usually stick pretty closely to my script.  I will speed up combat when it becomes tedious and will try to accommodate players who inclined to explore outside the boundaries I wrote about (although I sometime steer the straggler back before he finds out there’s just big white space behind that secret door I forgot to remove.

For a published adventure

I did pretty much the same thing for a published adventure.  Except this time, I needed to write all of the little tidbits that I usually keep in my mind when I stop prepping.

Since I had a clear word count, I made a written plan:

• Adventure Intro
• Adventure Summary
• Adventure Background
• Hooks
• Scene 1
• Scene 2
• Scene 3
• …
• Finale
• Concluding the adventure

I gave myself an estimated  word count for each section and I made sure that I stuck to it.

I wrote it, over a few weeks. Then I had the adventure read by someone I trusted and got challeneged. I rewrote the adventure based on the feedback I got and sent it back.  Technically I would playtest it, but in my particular case, this will occur after I hand in the draft.

So that’s about how I go at it for both!

What about you?  Share your adventure creating strategies!