This article appeared on my website DM's Haven a couple of years back. Here's the bulk of it (sorry for the long post!)
This article is about expediting your time in adventure development. Adventure development, NOT adventure writing. I call it this because writing, I feel, carries with it a certain unnecessary weight you don’t need unless you are trying to get published. No, adventure development is simply ensuring your friends have something to occupy them the next game session you’re responsible for.
I have many people who think I must be insane to run five or six game sessions a month, at 5 hours a pop or more. I know DM’s who have a horrible time preparing for a session three times, twice or even once a month! My secret is I cheat, steal, and cut corners like a hardened criminal…all in the name of gaming fun for my friends, of course.
You live in a real world. Kids don’t always cooperate and let you sit looking through sourcebooks and draw maps. Sometimes friends and family need to see you. Sometimes you just want to read a good book, see a movie, or go dancing, and so you give yourself only a few hours a week to develop an adventure. You designate maybe 1 hour each weeknight, sometimes less, to prepping for the coming week’s session. It doesn’t add up. If you insist on writing all your adventures from scratch you are always going to be behind. But there’s a way around this too:
Start investing wisely into adventure material. I don’t mean buy every adventure that comes out; I mean invest in adventure collections, ideas and springboards. There are currently dozens and dozens of free D&D adventures from third party publisher sites, not to mention loads from the WotC web site.
Let’s say you simply don’t have time to cruise for adventures, and an occasional store purchase simply isn’t an option, for whatever reason. Perhaps you’re old school and remember when TSR would give us one adventure about every 6-8 months and in between we all wrote our own stuff. That’s cool too, you’re a classicalist. Here’s how to put one together without spending hours and hours on it:
• YOUR MAP: You need a map, both for you and the players. For you, steal one. Just steal it. For starters, go to
www.profantasy.com and get their free viewer. Then browse the hundreds of maps there…dungeons, keeps, cities, towns, ALL FREE. Or go to the WotC web site and search for “map of the week” and you’ll find dozens more. Or sit down with a piece of graph paper and draw out a dozen rooms and corridors or a forest or town. Don’t make it pretty! You’re not getting published; you just need a general layout! As long as you can read it, who cares? Even if its just room or encounter shapes connected by lines representing corridors or trails that’s fine.
THE HOOK: Just print it out and scribble, right ON it what’s in the room. Even if that means “kitchen, 3 ghouls” or “balcony, troll and 2 goblin archers” that’s all you need to know, and it doesn’t take lots of time. In fact, once you’re done, if you keep it around a dozen rooms, you don’t even need to write a key! Just put the room’s name, the monster, and where you got it (abbreviate the source name and page number).
• PLAYER’S MAP: Very rarely will you need two versions of a map, rather what this means is the all-important one-inch-square floorplan tiles for miniatures or counters so necessary for proper D&D play. Many folks like to get that Chessex Battlemat and draw on corridors. It’s a good idea, and good for outdoor encounters. It’s a snoozefest when it comes to drawing corridors and rooms. It’s a time sucker and it’s dull to sit through. You need tiles you can whip out and plop down fast. Many of them are free sample tiles. FREE. Go here:
http://www.skeletonkeygames.com/downloads.html and get all the tiles you need. Print them all off, then go back and print the ones that have corridor sections again and again. Cut off just the corridors. If you have even basic desktop publishing skills, grab some empty 10x10 sections and fill an entire page with them all connected to make an 8x11-inch room. Print off a dozen and you can cut them into small, medium and large square, circular and hexagonal rooms. This takes time, but then you never have to do it again.
THE HOOK: Don’t be a perfectionist! You won’t have in your arsenal the exact shaped room from a purchased adventure. Guess what, your players won’t care one bit. If there’s a strange corner or an oddball angle here or there, forget it! They don’t know any better and you don’t have enough time to prepare one, so live with what you got.
• MONSTERS & NPCs. It’s neat to be able to put together custom-designed villains and NPC’s. You don’t have the time, so stop doing it! Just steal them from other sources. The WotC web page,
www.greenronin.com and
www.necromancergames.com are also loaded with free monsters, NPCs and the like. Print them all off and start a collection. You need a 6th level bard? Go find one!
THE HOOK: Use them again and again. Change their name, swap out a weapon or two occasionally and alter the coins in their belt pouch and throw them at your players over and over in various forms if you have to. Case in point: WotC’s Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is a virtual DM’s grab-bag of monsters and NPC’s of nearly every sort imaginable. I’ve never run the adventure, but my players have run into practically all 80 or so creatures and NPCs in the back, sometimes more then once over the last year alone. How many different types of a 4th level ogre barbarian do you need?
• YOUR MEMORY. I know, it’s not what it used to be. That’s cool. You remember those times when you’re telling a friend about a great TV show or movie you watched, or a great book you read, or a funny coworker you know? Keep these people, places, scenes and moods in your head ready to pull them out when needed. I mean, change the names to protect the innocent, but my players have had the pleasure of running into Al Pacino, my Uncle Phil, and the Bouldershoulder Brothers as NPCs. I’ve stolen visual scenes from Hercules and Xena and images from the cross-country drive to GenCon among others.
THE HOOK: You already have these things. Just whip ‘em out, best of all it’ll still be original if you make them your own.
Avoid the 3 biggest time-wasters.
1) Concentrating on useless details that won’t make a hell of a difference during the session (like a room out of shape or an NPC’s Diplomacy score 1 number off).
2) Writing out NPC dialog. Give the NPC a motivation, voice or personality hook, and jot down what he knows or believes and then improv as that character when the PCs ask him or her questions.
3) Writing out lengthy room descriptions or plot contingencies. All a room needs is a few lines to jog your memory, nothing more. Plot contingencies? You can write out 340 of them and the players will choose #341. It can’t be done.
Putting it all together.
You are about to return to your childhood and play with blocks. You are going to create a story and then take your collection of game elements above, and fit them together. Sit down with your map of the dungeon, wilderness location or town of this week’s adventure. Write on the map itself, using code if you have to, to show you what is where.
Example: Cursed Swan lake.
3 dire slugs (Blasphemy Press PDF, page 21)
Treasure: Crown of Acarra (AEG’s Mercenaries page 203)
You’re done with that section...DONE. What else more do you need? If you can’t just conjure up an original image in your head, jot down a note or two:
Example: Claw-like tree hangings
Darkly sky
Lack of natural noises
And there you have something to jog your memory. The rest you just make up as you go along. I know some aren’t too keen on improvisation, but a DM’s key skill IS improvisation so you better practice your skills at this!
Example: Bun-Bun’s Tavern
Owner: Dara the White (commoner, Suppertime module page 18)
Treasure: Sells rare herbs (Bastion Press Alchemy & Herbalists PFD add-on)
2-stories, vaulted ceiling, iron jack-o-lanterns, smells of jasmine
You don’t need a paragraph or two of description; you just need basic notes during play. I’m telling you if you’re used to long-winded descriptions and notes try using the shorthand “memory-jogging” style once and you’ll see how easy and creatively rewarding it is. Keep the books you reference handy at your side, don’t worry about transcribing the stats or anything, just use ‘em straight out of the book. If you need to, get some of those little yellow stickees to mark pages. As the players show up in each location plop down some tiles. Keep a box of other tile props near your DM station in case they’re not indoors. Keep brown, blue, gray and green construction paper with you at all games. You’re in the wilderness? Keep your Battlemat out, rip some circular green parts (trees) an odd blue piece (a lake) and some small brown or gray pieces (logs or rocks) and toss them out and you’re all done!
You want to know how I created an entire night’s adventure in under an hour? I laid out the tiles first. I took a picture of the table with my digital camera. I enlarged the photo and printed it. I wrote the types of room notes as described above while keeping four or five sourcebooks out to fill up the rooms. I custom-designed a single creature with a template as the big bad guy. I stole trap stat blocks and changed a thing here or there. It took me about 40 minutes. And the adventure spanned an entire five hours of play and the crew swore it was a published adventure.
Good Luck!
-DM Jeff
