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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Adventure Design 101: The Villain

The villain is possibly the most important aspect of adventure design.  There’s a school of thought that says that a strong villain is what makes a piece of fiction most memorable.  I’m not sure I’d go that far, but there’s no question in my mind that a strong villain goes a good way toward that.  A memorable bad guy can cover for a weak plot or setting and enhance a good one.

A villain can be a lot of things.  The fictional version of Cardinal Richelieu, of The Three Musketeers, and Darth Vader, of Star Wars, are both strong villains, but their personalities, motivations, and approaches are very different in nature… and neither of them is much like Batman’s antagonist, the Joker.  So it can be a little hard to pin down what makes a good villain.

But there are a few questions you can keep in mind to help you design one.

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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.

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Myth Direction: the Faerie Courts

A quick thought experiment, today.  The Manual of the Planes contains some information about the Faerie Courts, the Seelie and the Unseelie, in its Feywild section.  I don’t plan to use that particular take on it in my game, since I have something else worked out.  But it did inspire some ideas about a third way.

This probably owes something to The Dresden Files, too, since I’ve been rereading that recently.  I highly recommend the series if you have any interest in urban fantasy, the “magic in the modern world” sub-genre.  Some of the books are better than others, but even the worst of them is very entertaining.

One of the more obvious bits of the construction was a simple emphasis on the duality:  the Seelie Court, the Court of Summer, is right at home in the Feywild, with its preternatural wilderness.  So where else should the Unseelie Court, the Court of Winter, be, than the Shadowfell?  In fact, I picture the Feywild as an eternal summer, warm and vibrant.  The Shadowfell isn’t entirely locked in winter — but certainly parts of it are, as I picture it, a frozen waste of eternal cold.

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