How do you design your adventures?

[Crazy Jerome]

My methods can be all over the place, and a lot of this happens at the campaign level instead of the adventure level, but usually it is some variation of:

1. Write a loose plot and makes notes about appropriate themes to hit.

2. Select appropriate NPCs or foes or neutrals to interact with.

3. Set up some locations and treasures.

4. Based on the combination of the above, determine goals and means for the creatures.

5. Check to make sure that every important creature, location and treasure have at least one "secret"--and some of the not so important ones, too. If they don't add some. If I've got a good "unattached" secret, attach it, or come up with a person, place, or thing for it to be attached to.

6. Complicate the heck out of all of it, and have that rachet into the goals and means. Probably adds allied creatures, affected neutrals, and some foes as well.

7. Throw the plot and theme away, utterly, and run as almost a pure sandbox. (If the players are really tired or get bogged down, I can dredge up enough of it for ad hoc hooks.)

Adventure design for me is a means more of "discovery" than writing. Not exactly brainstorming, which is not my favorite method of discovery, but something closer to Aristotles' "topics" method. The important thing with "discovery" is not to get to wedded to anything in particular that emerges.

As you might expect, my notes are rather ecletic, and almost totally unintelligble to anyone else. I'll have extensive notes on things that mean nothing outside that context, and whole cities may get a few lines of memory jogging words.

Naturally, I don't always go though all seven steps, at least not consciously. Sometimes I just know that I want a waterfall location, have it visualized, and that's good enough to go straight to it. Same way with items and monsters.

 

[Lanefan]

You guys are all way more complicated about it than I am.

Usually, most adventures I dream up come from something I either imagine or dream - often just a single scene e.g. of a Frost Giant in a chamber made of ice. From there I whip up a module map, maybe an outdoor map, a Frost Giant, a bunch of buddies for the Frost Giant, and *bang!* I have an adventure. At some later point I'll come up with a way to run it. If it becomes relevant after that I'll come up with expansions e.g. who the Frost Giant does business with and where are they now?

At the campaign level I'll storyboard out some rough adventure arcs or ideas, then either find pre-existing adventures to fit 'em or dream up some new ones. Again, at some later point I'll find a way to run 'em; but in this case knowing full well that the storyboard can be (and sometimes is) completely overturned far more easily than a single adventure. I've been running my current campaign for just over 3 years; I'm already on version 5 of the main storyboard and it sure don't look much like version 1!

Lanefan

 

[ExploderWizard]

What adventures!?

I write encounters and events and create networks of npcs. Whatever happens in the game arises from the adventurers interacting with those.

I do things in a similar fashion. The exception being the very beginning of a campaign. I generally will have a campaign starter adventure with a strong hook more fully developed. After the initial scenario is resolved the PCs will have been introduced to enough areas of interest to choose a direction and forge ahead.