Adventure Design 101

One of the most rewarding parts of gamemastering is seeing the ideas you had for your adventures take shape as the players play them out in game.  One of the most intimidating parts can be designing those adventures in the first place, especially when you’re new to GMing.  In this series of articles, I’m going to go step by step through the process I usually use.

Before I start that, though, it might be useful to talk a little about what you won’t need.

A World

You’ll need a setting, of course, but you won’t need a fully fleshed-out game world.  In fact, if you find the idea of designing a whole world a little daunting, you might find it easier to approach it by starting small:  you can flesh out a little at a time as part of your adventure designs, and leave the bigger picture more or less undefined until you need that detail.

Make no mistake:  you’ll need that detail sooner or later, assuming you’re running an ongoing campaign and not a one-shot or “miniseries.”  Even if you’re using a published setting, there will be blanks you’ll have to fill in.  But you don’t need to do it all at once, and you don’t even need to do most of it before starting the game.  All you really need to begin is one fleshed-out region which contains your first adventure, and some vague idea of what the larger world is like.

For your first campaign, it might be useful to begin in a fairly remote region.  There should be a small town or other settlement to serve as the party’s base and a couple of locations of potential adventuring interest.  The party doesn’t necessarily need to know anything of the world outside of this region.

Fallcrest and Nentir Vale, from the fourth-edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, is an excellent illustration of this principle:  you could easily run a game where the PCs all come from Fallcrest and the surrounding area.  There are plenty of plot hooks for the first few levels, with adventure locations like Kobold Hall, the Keep on the Shadowfell, and Thunderspire Labyrinth.  In fact, you could probably run an entire campaign there, if you were so inclined… but eventually, you’ll probably want the party to look further afield.  At that point, you can introduce them to the barony you’ve created, in which the Nentir Vale lies.  And then the kingdom the barony is a part of.  Then the continent, the world, the world that lies inside of your hollow game-world, the three moons, the great crystal sphere in which the world, the sun, and the moons are suspended… you get the idea.

It’s okay to start small and build outward, and it can make the first steps much more manageable.

An Overarching Campaign Plot

If you have an idea for a central storyline to the campaign, that’s great.  But you don’t need one.  Here’s a secret of GMing:  even if you run almost completely unrelated, episodic adventures, your players will probably tend to find connections between them.  It’s human nature.  If you have a couple of recurring NPCs, use similar monsters in two different adventures, or even drop an offhand reference to something that happened three adventures ago, the players wll start coming up with theories as to how they might be related.

Listen to these theories.  Take the ones you like best and make them so.  Add a little twist if you like.  Don’t tell the players that this is what you’re doing, and don’t adopt everything they suggest.  But don’t be afraid to run with their ideas.  They’ll feel more invested in the story if they “know” where it’s headed.  Even if they turn out to be wrong on occasion.

By the same token, if you do have an idea for an overarching storyline, but the players seem more interested in pursuing another idea — don’t be afraid to drop it and pick up what they had in mind.  Or maybe you yourself will come up with an idea you like better while designing a part of the world.  Scrap your old idea, tying off some loose ends as necessary, and go ahead with the new one.

If you get stuck or make a continuity error along the way, go back to listening to the players.  If you’re challenged on an error, smiling and saying, “Yeah, that’s pretty strange, isn’t it?” will probably net you a couple of ideas as the players discuss among themselves, trying to explain the glitch.  If the party is drifting aimlessly and you’re short on ideas, dropping the name of  a recurring NPC or an appearance by the minion of a villain the party had thought dead or defeated might be enough to get things back on track.

A Big Bad

That’s right — you don’t even need to decide on the identity of the Man (or Creature) Who’s Behind It All in order to build your adventure.  You will need a local villain, and fairly soon, and you won’t want to wait too long before working out the Big Bad’s identity and motivation.  But for those first couple of adventures, all you really need is a name, and maybe a named lackey or two who’s carrying out a minor part of the Big Bad’s plan.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to take you through what you will need, step by step.  I’m going to assume you already have the necessities:  players, a place to play, the dice and rulebooks, and all of the associated physical paraphernalia you might want to use, like a battlemat, miniatures, that sort of thing.  You have all of that worked out, now all you need is something to play.

Stay tuned for Adventure Design 101:  The Villain.

Related posts:

1. Adventure Design 101: The Setting
2. Adventure Design 101: The Villain
3. Adventure Design 101: The Plot – Story
4. Adventure Design 101: The Plot – Problems
5. Adventure Design 101: Dungeons That Live