Hello everybody,
I wanna improve my Game Mastering, especially my adventure planning. As in one of my groups I do not want to run a complete pre-generated adventure path, but want to design my own world, adventures, etc. I was thinking about how to use pre-generated material for my own inspiration.
I'm about 4 years into my current campaign. The party is 6th, just about 7th, level. We've played probably 80 evenings in that period. I plan the campaign to finish around 13th level, which would be at this rate in another 3-4 years time. The format, per the questionnaire I handed out before the campaign began and it was in its planning stages, is in more of the adventure path mode, and the overall story arc and setting is my own. But as an aid to reduce the time I spend in preparation, there have been and will be a number of elements that came out of pregenerated adventures.
The initial few nights play involving the players fleeing from a tsunami, attempting to rescue survivors, and then fighting in a pitched night time battle against an army of deep ones was entirely my own. But then the next chapter involved a slight rewriting of the adventure 'Of Sound Mind', which is among the better 1st level adventures you'll find. The original adventure had a psionic theme, but my overall story arc was about necromancy. With a bit of rewriting, the necromancy theme replaced the psionic theme. I also fleshed out the dungeon to some degree, adding more rooms and encounters everywhere and a larger caverns complex. In order to integrate the story into my larger work, I had the BBEG from the adventure be mere mini-boss minions of my main BBEG. My central BBEG's were given a role in the story of having organized the original expedition as part of the attempt to acquire various artifacts they needed for the project which is central to the story and which the players have not yet fully comprehended.
After that, the next chapter was largely based off some hints at the end 'Of Sound Mind' for further adventures. I placed cultist allies in the town who had designs on melting down the magic bell that is featured in the module, because the main BBEG needed the metals for his own powerful artifact creation. This played out as something of a murder mystery leading to the PCs attempting to thwart a heist, and finally a climatic battle with another mini-boss in a foundry complex. Technically nothing here was published and I did all the work myself, but the ideas were suggested by the module and the work I'd done detailing and expanding on the NPCs in the town.
After that the PCs had a choice of which leads to follow, but decided first to head back to the Capitol to refit. In many ways, this amounted to an incidental choice. Here I brought in ideas from the Dungeon module, 'Mad God's Key'. Although I had to rewrite large sections of the module to move it from its setting to my homebrew world, change things to my taste, make it more level appropriate to my now 3rd level PC's, and integrate it into my story, the fundamental ideas behind the encounters - the boat chase, the thieves lair, the ancient tomb - could all be appropriated. Again, the story was connected to the larger story by the evil cults attempts to acquire necromantic knowledge.
After this, there followed a fairly long sequence where I was all on my own, in what was really the first mega-dungeon of the story - the lesser and greater catacombs of Amalteen - of which only a tiny portion where explored (by design, since much that was in the greater catacombs was far beyond the PC's level). There I borrowed an idea from 'Return to the Tomb of Horrors', that of the Blackfire of Moil, repurposed and reflavored again to my game world, and made the object of the bad guy's quest which the good guys would have to thwart. This led ultimately to the revealing of the next mini-boss, and a series of encounters with him (and his signature hellhounds) and the eventual destruction of the Dark Fire in the outer chambers of a Lich king before the bad guys could acquire a sample.
At that point the PC's were lagging in treasure and XP from what I needed, so I wrote up another adventure of my own design largely as a sidequest concerning a town beset by marauding Perytons and an ancient cursed treasure. The seeds of that had been set when I'd detailed the regional map and decided in a cursory way what sort of dungeons and challenges could be found on it.
After a few more encounters suggested by story events, mostly regarding the war triggered between the PC's nation and a rival by the tsunami, we moved the setting to a new larger and more perilous city. Most of what I've had to write there is original, but I borrowed a couple of rooms from Mona's excellent 'The Whispering Cairn' - including his infamous face trap - to flesh out one of the several dungeons. The full module wasn't suited to my needs as by this time the party was hot on the trail of the bad guys. But certainly many of the decorations of this other larger cairn would have been familiar to anyone familiar with Mona's, only this one was the lair of an evil cult.
From here, I'm planning after the party goes through another dungeon of my design and finally meets the real BBEG, to use 'X1: Isle of Dread' as the next stage in the parties 'anti-treasure hunt' (they are going around destroying treasures before the villains can get them). In this case, the villains will be after the famous black pearl, the last piece they need to complete their 'deadly world destroying weapon'. Again, I'll have to almost completely rewrite the original and expand on it greatly, but the central ideas give me a firm starting point.
Anyway, at some level you could say this was the following adventure path:
Of Sound Mind
Mad God's Key
The Whispering Cairn
The Isle of Dread
And at some level, it's none of those.
As I'm not the best storywriter I was thinking about if some of you out there has some concepts, ideas, methods on how to build good adventures.
Hard work. There is no other substitute. You must pour over your setting again and again working details into it with sweat the way a sculpture works details into stone. You must with sweat and blood smith words on to paper. I wish I had better news for you; but that's the size of it. For your own sanity, slow down the pace of leveling and with it the need to reinvent everything.
In general, start by writing what has happened and what the bad guys have been doing and what they want to do. This should take about a page. Be detailed like you were writing background for a PC or a write up of your own adventures. This is the master copy of the story from which future events will proceed. Notice the story is set in the past, the rest is intention but will be subject to change based on what the PC's do.
Then make a map of the region, and mark a few points of prominence and briefly note what you think might live there - were-boars, saughin, storm giants, perytons, wyvern, etc. - even if you don't think you'll use them.
Figure out from your master copy what flaws and weaknesses the bad guys have. What clues have they inevitably left. What logistics do they have that are unavoidable and might leave breadcrumbs to their door. What minions that might be unreliably are they reliant on. What plots have they attempted that might have failed. What enemies have they made - unpaid debts, betrayals, jealous rivals, family of victims. What big visible calamities might they cause just as the PCs are at the right place at the wrong time? These are your plot hooks that you'll dangle in front of your PCs until they bite one.
From their, design lairs. Keep them small. Anything over 25 rooms is too much. I've a post on dungeon design here:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...crawling/page3&p=212975&viewfull=1#post212975
Now for every bad guy briefly describe in a few sentences 1-2 NPCs that aren't part of the bad guys plot but which are the natural sort of people you'd think inhabit the region the bad guys are living in. Also design a few wandering encounter tables for your regions to make them seem more lively. Generate weather by your favorite means, and put a few events on a calendar.
If you do that, you should be good to go. Doing it right takes 1-2 hours of preparation for each hour you plan to play - more if you are sandboxing.
Periodicly write out every unanswered question in your campaign you can think of, particularly as it pertains to NPC motivations and plots. Try to answer this as best as you can. The 'DM emulator' mentioned above seems to be an attempt to formalize this process, but I note it doesn't (and can't) do any of the hard work which is coming up with the concrete details.
And one last thing: I'm quite good at improvising and using instant ideas at the table.
I always hear this and yet I've never met anyone that actually is. It's just impossible to think on the fly that quickly. What I think people mean is, "I never think very deeply about the game I'm running until I'm actually running it, and then I surprise myself by the things I come up with." I'd encourage you to not take too much pride in improvisation. All that improvising you do at the table, you can do away from it as well, and then you'll find that you have more tools and ideas for improvising with.
I will spoil the good stuff and yeah... it does not end very well...
