100 Medieval Careers
Taking a brief break from adventure design, I present a related topic: 100 jobs NPCs in your game-world might have. Helps with creating those random NPCs — pick a job, then add a name, race, gender, and a quirk or two.
I’ve broken them down into some broad categories, in case you want to go old school and turn it into multiple subtables to randomly roll on. If you’re taking that approach, note that the “Working Class” and “Scoundrels and the Underclass” categories should be most common in the typical medieval-European-style game worlds, followed by Professionals, Entertainers, and Martial, with Learned and Lesser Nobility being least common.
100 jobs, after the jump.
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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.
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Adventure Design 101: The Plot – Story
My last post discussed a method of setting up a plot by creating a web of characters’ actions, motives, and goals. That design begins with simple building blocks and interconnects them to create a more complex structure. I’ve had great success with it, and I design many of my adventures in that way. It is, however, a little bit counterintuitive. If it’s not to your tastes, don’t worry — there are other methods of plotting that can serve equally well.
Instead of a character-driven method, for instance, you might try an event-driven method. When I was starting out as a gamemaster, I used what I call storyboarding, after the film organization method.
A storyboard is a static graphical and text representation of a film, first developed in its modern form by Disney for their animated features of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was widely adopted for live-action films in the 40s. It’s essentially a comic-book of the film — concept-sketch images of each scene, often several per scene, along with a brief text description. It provides a visual layout for the film to follow and allows, among other things, for scenes to be “designed” for the camera before shooting begins.
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Adventure Design 101: The Plot – Problems
Now that I’ve talked about the villain, the next step in designing your adventure is the most fundamental: the plot. As an English major, allow me to distill the plot of 99% or so of English fiction (everything aside from the avant garde stuff):
There’s a problem, and someone does something about it.
This is not as tongue-in-cheek as you might think. Starting from an oversimplified perspective like this one can be a big help. As I suggested with the setting, you’re starting out with just a little bit of information, and slowly adding more detail as you go along.
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The Making of a Villain
Since I promised to share some stories about adapting and running with players’ ideas along the way, here’s a topical one. It’s about a superhero campaign I ran almost ten years ago, and how through sheer serendipity I ended up with a villain who became a recurring antagonist through much of its run.
The Enigma was never intended to be a recurring character. He was a fairly stock character — a “superhumanly-skilled normal” motivated, originally, by fame. His modus operandi was the theft of bizarre objects; his targets included the world’s largest ball of string, a symphony orchestra, and several hundred tons of green tea. And he’d leave his calling card, reading “It’s an enigma,” in anticipation of the inevitable question: Why?
The Enigma wasn’t a very dangerous guy. He could have been; he was a technical and scientific genius, a talented athlete, a well-trained thief, and pretty handy in general. But he wasn’t interested in causing outright harm. He was certainly no murderer. He was simply an audacious headline-grabber. I imagined the characters would hunt him down, confront him, and ultimately emerge victorious. The Enigma was a gentle sort of villain-of-the-week, a four-color-style antagonist to throw into the campaign early to help establish the high-heroic flavor I was after. This was at a time when dark anti-heroes were all the rage, but none of us wanted to play that way, so the Enigma would be a bit of insurance against it.
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