Crafting Your Adventure

How about that for a title? It’s pretty audacious, acting like I’m about to deliver some sort of authoritative how-to guide. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that a better title would be, “Crafting MY Adventure,” and still better, “Crafting This One Adventure Once.”

You see, my purpose here isn’t so much to lay out a set of universal, never-fail steps for adventure generation but rather to explore the creative process that I went through to create one of my own. This will be extremely subjective, wholly personal, and possibly inaccessible to everyone who’s not me.

So why write it? Setting aside the undeniable fact that I’m wonderful and fascinating, I want to initiate a discussion on the process, starting with how I approach it. I want to lay my cards on the table, I want to crack open my head and pour out the juicy goodness, and then invite you to do the same. (We should probably lay down a tarp first.) And for those of you cynics out there who cynically observe that this is a cynical attempt to drive up my comment count, I have one thing to say: quiet, you.

DEFINITIONS

Before I get into all the nitty and the gritty, let me clarify a couple terms:

Adventure: A multi-session, multi-encounter game featuring one DM and the same players (more of less) running the same characters (more of less). It follows a primary story arc with a beginning, middle, and end, and concludes with a big, splashy, gory, messy battle. With lots of explosions. Get Michael Bay on the phone.

Campaign: A multi-session, multi-encounter game that I would never run because it involves world-building and setting creation and way more functioning brain cells than I possess. Campaigns are rooted in verisimilitude, and for that to work, you need a cast of characters, a clash of cultures, a load of languages, and a lot of laws. That seems like way too much work.

BACKGROUND

Let me establish the setting that led me to create my adventure. I grew up on the blue book, AD&D, and 2nd Edition, and then dropped out for personal and professional reasons (growing family, shrinking jobs), missing the 3s almost entirely, excepting two sit-downs and Atari’s Temple of Elemental Evil. A little over a year ago, I stumbled-staggered-fell into 4E, mostly because of various podcasts and blogs yammering on about it and a desperate need to do something with all the creativity clogging my brain.

I found a local group, immediately fell in love with the system–the drama, the pacing, the characters, the whole grindy, scribbly, conditiony thing–and realized this was something I’d have to DM. I contacted the best player I could think of, my closest friend from a hundred years back in high school, the one I’d run through Keep on the Borderlands and Village of Hommlet. I thought he could recreate his old thief and I’d run a solo adventure, infiltrating some fortress or other. He agreed. We were on for the summer.

EVOLUTION

So that’s what I had: a sneak-and-hide caper. I started wondering how I could run a solo game that wouldn’t end in tragedy. After all, the game is built for parties, not singles. How would I–wait! An ally! Yeah, that’s it: a taciturn NPC who could soak up some damage. And what about this? The growly ally has a wide betrayer streak running down his back. He will turn on my friend once they get into the fortress, knock him out and leave him for the guards as Clinty McEastwood skedaddled with the treasure. Perfect!

Wait, my friend’s son wants to play. Can he join in on the game? Hmmm. I guess I can still work the infiltration and betrayal angle with two– hold on! My friend’s daughter wants to play too. What!? Three characters? That– add in the son’s friend too. Suddenly, I have a whole party when I was planning for a solo.

My friend has never played 4th edition. His kids and the friend have never played RPGs at all. And I’ve never even run this edition. My infiltration idea was starting to seem less and less likely, or at the very least, less and less fun. The first game was coming on fast, and I still didn’t really have an adventure. I seriously considered calling the whole thing off.

EPIPHANY #1

I took a piece of paper and sketched a large, L-shaped building, drew in some rooms, then starting marking off doors and windows. I still had no idea what I was doing, but at least I was doing something. I sketched in buildings around my central building, different shapes and sizes, which resulted in narrow avenues and little courtyards. “This is the goal, the fortress,” I told nobody in particular, pointing at the central building. “But not like a castle. A tenement. Like one of those reinforced drug-dealer houses. Bars on the windows, heavy doors, guards…”

Pow!

That was it. All at once, it came into focus. This wasn’t just some “sneaking in, stealing gold, getting out” thing. This was a crack house, and… and the characters had to shut it down. Why? I didn’t know. Why wouldn’t the city guard just shut it down? I didn’t know. Where did the dealers come from? I didn’t know. But once I struck on the point of the game, these answers started to fall out of the sky in a chaotic flurry.

Somebody was hiring the party to shut down the dealers, but not out of nobility. No, it was because the dealers were cutting into the action of the patron. The patron works for some really bad people, and… wait, the patron is that taciturn ally! Mr. Clinty McEastwood himself! He works for some sort of organized syndicate, and this new drug, something instantly addictive and progressively deadly, is killing off the clientele.

Pow! Pow!

And the city guard aren’t in the picture because… because there isn’t one. No guard at all. No government. No infrastructure. My setting is a lawless shantytown, shacks and hovels and tin huts and crumble-down buildings, a kill-or-be-killed type place. This is where the party grew up. This is how you can have factions competing for power.

EPIPHANY #2

So where did the dealers come from? They would have to be well-organized and well-financed to build their “fortress,” so how’d they manage it? How did they materialize out of nowhere? One day, they didn’t exist, and the next day, they are cranking out vast quantities of a virulent, wildfire drug. And the biggest question of all, how do I keep all this interesting to a group so new to Dungeons & Dragons?

Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons. And. Dragons.

Pow! Pow! Pow!

As I remember it, the final pieces dropped into place all at once, though of course, it couldn’t have happened that way. I knew I wanted a dungeon, since they are so central to the entire game. And well, if I’m going to have a dungeon, I can’t really skimp on the dragon, can I? Underneath the house, there’s a maze of caverns, winding their way a massive chamber that once contained a dragon. Hundreds of years ago, maybe thousands, this dragon terrorized the sprawling city above, a metropolis, rich and successful. At some point, adventures geared up and marched down and destroyed the dragon.

But they left something behind, echoes of the evil monstrosity, psychic tatters. And this ghost had spent all this time slowly reincorporating itself, reaching out with its will, dominating beings who would work a dark ritual to enchant a new kind of drug with tiny bits of their victims’ souls. Most of that soul energy would be consumed by the dragon. By the psychic dragon.

Purple dragons are psychic.

Pow.

The rest was all legwork, drafting the maps and writing up the rooms, selling the adventure as a snatch-and-grab caper when it was actually a grand battle against the worst kind of evil. All it needed was a name, which came to me with the same sudden flash as the whole adventure did: The Big Job.

As it happened, I ran this game for my friend, his kids, and their friend, and it went well enough to hook the lot of them on D&D. They play together on a regular basis now. I recycled the adventure for a brand new group, truly amazing players that I found through Meetup.com, and we’ve been playing it for a few weeks now. So far, it’s been going very well, better than I could have ever imagined. We’ll probably wrap it up in the next few weeks, and then it may fall to me to start the whole process over again.

I just hope my players don’t read this blog before we finish.