How I Write an Adventure, part 1 – Introduction

I’ve had a few people ask me, over the years, how to prepare an adventure for a tabletop role-playing game.

For me, an adventure requires four main ingredients: an Objective, a Motivation, three Obstacles, and Supplementary Information.  This post will provide a quick overview of these elements; I’ll be talking about each of them in detail in subsequent blog posts.

Preparing an adventure consists of selecting these four ingredients, then writing it out in a format I can work with.  This is not the One True Way of developing adventures, but it’s the method I generally use, and it works for me.

Some General Observations

  1. A GM deals in problems, not solutions. (Well, okay, they occasionally deal in solutions, but only as a shady side-business.)  These problems can have baked-in opportunities (“That one PC has always wanted to confront her father’s killer, so I’ll have that killer show up in this adventure…”), but your planning should primarily be about what problems the PCs will deal with, not with activities that the PCs will perform.
  2. Players will always choose a path you didn’t anticipate.  If your plan depends on them doing certain things in a certain order, you’re already hampering yourself.  This is the old “no plan survives contact with the enemy” principle.  My setup is very modular, which keeps things nice and flexible.
  3. Players will be confused by things that are obvious to you, and vice versa.  They will see through your fiendish puzzles immediately, but will spend hours walking in circles around your blazingly obvious clue.  I avoid having adventures depend on fiendish puzzles, and when I want the PCs to figure something out, I keep a large supply of clues in my back pocket that I can drop on them, one by one, until they end up on the right track.
  4. If the objective is to the left, and the PCs go right, and going right turns out to be really awesome… consider quietly moving the objective to the right, in the PCs’ path.
  5. Railroading sucks.  It’s sometimes necessary, but it sucks.

Four Ingredients

The four ingredients that make up an adventure are:

  • An Objective – What exactly are the PCs trying to accomplish?
  • Motivation – Why are the PCs trying to accomplish it?
  • Obstacles – What can make the PCs’ task more difficult/interesting?
  • Supplementary Information – What else is likely to come up?

Honestly, those four bullet points are 90% of my message.  The rest is just tips on ways of selecting them such that you make your life easier down the road.

Development

There’s no set order in which to develop these elements.

If it’s an ongoing campaign with established PCs, I might already have useful constraints on the Motivation: if the PCs are heroes with a lust for adventure, I just need a tempting target, and a quiet out-of-character mention that that’s our adventure for the night; if the PCs are students at a magic school, they’re likely to have friends who might come to them for help, and they’ll certainly have assignments, some of which will be adventure-worthy.

Maybe my whole inspiration came from some bestiary entry, in which case the creature described might be one of my Obstacles.  I might start thinking about where the PCs would encounter such a thing (somewhere expected, or somewhere unexpected); in such a case, the location would become Supplementary Information, and I might start thinking about what the PCs might want to accomplish in such a place (Objective) and why (Motivation).

Maybe the players themselves have come to me with a particular goal for their characters, in which case I’ve already got the basis for my Objective and Motivation.

Tomorrow, we start with Objectives.