Adventure Design 101: The Setting

With a plot and a villain in mind, it’s time to consider the other elements that make the adventure.  Setting can be a vital element, yet in my experience it’s often given short shrift — and not just by novice gamemasters.  I used to fall into the same trap.  I would spend a great deal of my preparation time working out the plot, detailing the villain, NPCs, even minor encounters — but I wouldn’t pay much mind to the setting.  My adventures would occur in a cave, or an abandoned mine, or a lost city, or the palace, or the ancient wizard’s dungeon.  Appropriate locations, but generic.

If your plot and characters are good, you can run a memorable game this way nevertheless.  My players certainly seemed to have fun, on the whole, and so did I.  But once I started putting my settings to work for me, my group and I saw a difference.  So will you.

Now I make it a point to build at least one memorable location into every adventure.  I prefer to have at least one every session, although I’ll admit there are still times when that doesn’t happen, for one reason or another.

So, what makes a setting memorable, and why does it have such impact?

To answer the second question first:  It gives the fantasy world a greater presence in the characters’ minds.  Instead of walking around a cave, they’re in a cavern filled with crystals that scintillate in the light of their torches.  Instead of riding toward a castle, they’re riding toward Tar Nashim, the Black Gates, forged of iron alloyed with a strange metal smelted from a fallen star.  A strong visual or sensory effect makes the location resonate more clearly in the players’ memories.

This leads us back to the first question.  Think of the location as an NPC:  a strong, identifiable trait or two goes a long way toward making it feel unique and interesting.  That, in turn, makes it more likely that the PCs will want to interact with it again in the future, and that the players will recall it with fondness.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of making a setting memorable.  The first is to assign some interesting game mechanic to it — cool things to play with.  The second is to assign some interesting description or other roleplaying flavor to it — cool things to see.  If the setting in question is to be a combat location, you’ll ideally want to do both.

So, how do you do that?

Start by thinking about the places the party is likely to visit during the adventure.  First, pick out the locations the party is almost certain to visit.  Using our previous dragon-kidnaps-the-princess example again, we have three such locations:  the palace, the dragon’s lair, and the road between the two.

Next, figure out what each of those locations will be used for, and how much work you’ll need to do to flesh them out.  The palace is a roleplaying location; we’ll want to have a general idea of its layout, but we don’t expect to need combat maps or anything of the sort.  The dragon’s lair is a location the party will explore and probably fight in (although roleplaying is a possible solution, too), so we should have a fairly detailed map of the area, including a more precise tactical map of the area in which we expect the PCs might fight the dragon.  The road is mostly of use as a way of getting between the two; it might be a location in which a skill challenge is run, or a little roleplaying, or maybe some combat, but probably not much exploring.  We’ll want to have a general idea about the environs, and maybe a more detailed combat map or two we can use for encounters along the way.

Now ask yourself which locations you want to spotlight most.  Of the three we’re considering, the road is probably the least important.  We’d still want some interesting terrain on a combat map, because a plain, open area is pretty boring, but unless this particular road is of great importance in the campaign, we don’t need to make it especially memorable.  We could certainly add an interesting location off the road to explore — but if we do, we should consider that it might distract the PCs from the adventure at hand.  If you’re running a “sandbox” campaign, where the party goes where they want and picks up on the plot threads that interest them, then this isn’t a problem.  If you really want the PCs to play through your dragon scenario, though, then you might want to minimize such distractions.  Instead, focus your efforts on the locations that are more intrinsically important to your plot.

The palace is a roleplaying encounter area.  That means that we’ll want to focus on descriptive qualities to make it stand out, rather than game-mechanical ones.  Ask yourself what’s different about this castle that makes it stand out from all of the other castles in the game-world.  Is it built in the shape of a hexagon?  Of ominous black basalt?  Do the watch-fires on its towers glow with ever-burning green mageflame?  Are its plate-glass windows an artistic wonder of the world?  Was it the seat of a great king?  Are the stones of its keep carved from the bones of an elder god?  Consider giving it a name.

The dragon’s lair is an area for exploration, combat, and potential roleplaying.  Descriptive qualities are still an option here, but since it might host a combat, we can also add game-mechanic effects.  Imagine the lair is a cave — our job is to make it not just a cave.  Maybe it’s an active volcano, with steam vents and pools of magma.  Maybe it’s a glacial rift, with icy floors and mirror-like walls.  Maybe the dragon’s lair is filled with crystal-studded columns that act as cover and, in the presence of bright light, make an “attack” against everyone who can see them, with a hit blinding the target for a turn.  Maybe it’s carved from a floating chunk of rock, and seems otherwise normal, until the party finds that the dragon’s favored tactic is to try to shove them back outside, over the edge.  Maybe it’s not actually a cave at all, but the hollowed-out petrified corpse of a primordial slain in the creation wars millennia ago.

Make your important settings grand, glorious, fantastic.  You’re playing a game of fantasy (or science-fiction, or superheroics, or what have you).  Don’t be afraid to show it!  The world should be filled with strange, wonderful, inexplicable, and downright terrifying things — so add them to your adventure settings.

Related posts:

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