When I think back to the best times I had running adventures, I feel like they were great not because the adventure was fantastic (although in some cases, they were), but were great because of how we filled in the gaps. If you run Steading of the Hill Giant Chief as written, you’d be painting lip-gloss on a shotgun and squeezing the trigger before you got to the end of the adventure. Why? After you explore and kill all the giants in ten rooms or so, you’ve probably had enough. Do this ten more times and you have found the very definition of boring.
A surface read of the classic adventures reveals that despite the fun we had with them, as written they do little to light me on fire. Many are just page after page of room descriptions, sprinkled liberally with monsters to kill, traps to avoid, and treasure to find. If there’s a plot, it’s thin and, often, acts to the adventure’s detriment, something best ignored or adapted to suit the game master running it. The adventure is a framework and it’s up to GM and the players to bring it to life.
For me, this is why adventures like Steading and the rest of the G series were so great. Yes, you can kill room after room of giants, if you decide to approach the adventure that way. It’s far more entertaining to infiltrate the steading, to sneak, to hide, and keep the fighting to a minimum. After all, make a lot of noise and you’re going to bring the entire place down on your head. If you can get in and out with a few sacks filled with loot and without having to swing a sword, you can count the entire enterprise as a win. This sounds like so much fun, I want to run it right now!
This approach to adventure design has largely fallen out of favor. It seems far more important to ram a thick plot down the audience’s throat. Rather than getting a map, some interesting locations, and some clear goals, adventures demand you first climb the wall of text, to read and absorb 32 or more pages of background, to discover an entire cast of characters, each with their own goals and agendas, the detailed histories and layouts of countless towns and cities, with every plot presented with meticulous detail. Once you survive this gauntlet, you might get to the adventure itself.
But wait! No designer wants to create a railroad adventure. Players want choice! They want to go where they want, do what they want: They don’t want to follow the GM through to the end. And so the adventure gains pages and pages and pages of side-treks, hooks, work-arounds, helpful advice to get the PCs back on track, adding page after page after page of information, all of which obscures what is, effectively, a simple treasure-hunting, stop the bad guy, destroy the artifact expedition.
I understand why adventures often take this shape. A robust story can cover the unforeseen decisions the players might make. The development sections insulate the GM against the confusion and mishap that can occur when the players go off script. So rather than pull back on story, the solution has been, at least for most mainstream games, to go full on story, to map out a web of possibilities so no GM will be caught unprepared.
And this is why adventure design gives me an ulcer. Why should the adventure cover almost any and every eventuality? It runs counter to the user experience—designers throw their labor into the wild and the audience puts it together in whatever ways they want. A designer has no control over how the audience uses the game, so why would we bother to hand out scripts that do exactly what the game experience is not supposed to do?
Of the many games and systems out there, it’s Savage World’s take on adventure design that gets me all hot and sweaty. I’m looking at “The Dark Side of Love” in Solomon Kane and what I see is a basically a broad outline for how the action might unfold with the climactic scene at the end. The game expects the players and GM to fill in the details and let the adventure play out in as organic manner as possible. This, my friends, is the way to do adventures.
I would go a bit further, though. Here are the things I would cut from general adventure design:
- Text in the background that exceeds 100 words.
- The adventure synopsis
- NPC descriptions that go longer than a sentence or two.
- All read-aloud text.
- Location descriptions would be limited to three basic things: Broad parameters about the place, the first thing visitors notice, and something for the players to play with—a secret to find, a monster to kill, treasure to grab.
- All descriptions of things that exceed the most basic information a GM needs to know.
- All stat-blocks for creatures other than ones new to the adventure.
- Anything that is a mechanical process that the core rules already cover.
- Conclusions, aftermaths, anything that deals with what happens next.
The idea here is to empower the GM and players to frame the story in a manner that works for the group. I would take this approach for dungeon crawls, investigations, mysteries, explorations, hex crawls, everything. I know, this is aggressive, but I think it’s crucial to keeping people playing the game. How many times have you wanted to run a game but couldn’t because you had nothing prepared? How many times have you hit upon something in the adventure you’re running and accidentally forgot to reveal an important plot point? How many times have your players gone off script and left you frantically trying to adjust?
Let me give you an example before I sign off. I think it would be fun to set a story in a ghost town near some mines. So here we go:
Background: The miners delved too deep and came upon a demon imprisoned in the deep, dark depths. The miners freed it. It killed them. The demon, gore-slicked, crawled out of the mine and butchered the townsfolk. One person got away. The PCs find the survivor, who’s insane and gibbers “Everyone is dead!”
Town: The town has ten buildings. They include 6 homes, a smith, a tavern and inn, a church, and a general store. Muddy footpaths meander between them. Farms ring the town for about a mile all around, speckled with farmhouses, silos, and barns.
The Demon: The demon eats the people it killed. Roll a d10 when the PCs arrive to see where the demon’s eating. On a 1–6, it’s in a home; 7, the smith; 8, the tavern; 9, the church; 10, the general store. If the demon hears a loud noise, it comes out to investigate, perhaps bringing its meal along with it.
Other Threats: A pack of 1d6 + 6 wild dogs fighting over the corpses of the dead; a gang of 1d4 hungry ghouls; a survivor who’s thoroughly mad and screams if he sees anyone, which alerts the demon and draws it out.
Scenery: You can use the following to dress up the town.
- A room painted in blood with a blood-drenched doll in the middle.
- The body of a woman that looks alive from the front, but is dead and missing the back of her skull. Let’s say there are horrid teeth marks in the bloody brain matter.
- A cloud of flies, each fly bearing a human face, evacuated from the demon’s bowels and lingering in a room. Their buzzing forms the words “You will die” over and over again.
- An uncast shadow creeping across a wall.
- A hidden room that holds a victim’s treasure, say 20 + 1d20 sp and a jade idol of a fat, horned god worth 1 gp.
- A hidden room that holds the trappings of someone’s deviant and secret fetish—manacles, a leather suit, or something really gross.
And that’s it. A map could be helpful, but really isn’t needed. It’s not like their arrangement is all that important to the story. And if it’s important, the GM can just make it up. There’s enough here for a GM to get an idea about the place, ways to set the mood, monsters to fight, treasure to find, and the information creates a scenario that the GM can play through in an evening. If I wanted to expand it, I might talk about the mines. The PCs could follow the trail back to the mines, deal with some underground critters—beetles and so on—and finally come to the room where the demon was released. Perhaps the characters find a ritual scroll and can perform the ritual to bind the demon once more. Of course, the ritual’s performance would recall the demon to their presence and it’s probably not at all happy about being sealed up again. But this is an adventure and it’s enough for a group to play – have a great time, and, hopefully, remember for a long time.
Robert J. Schwalb
Robert J. Schwalb is a freelance game designer and developer with a slew of works to his name, and you can find more of his work in the next incarnation of D&D. When not making fun, Rob spends far too much time listening to music and holding up the bar at his favorite watering hole. You can follow Rob on Twitter, become his new best friend on Facebook, or check out his website.
Here is the thing. Yes, that would be great for experienced DMs. But there are a lot of DMs out there that are new or don’t have the confidence to just make up material on the fly. Most adventures are put together with these DMs in mind, as they are the broadest audience and require the most hand-holding.
Also as you pointed out, an experienced DM can cull all of that out, and make what he wants from the adventure. I’ve done this on numerous occasions myself. I’ve even spliced together various parts of different adventures to make something new. Unfortunately, it usually takes years to develop the skills and confidence to do that.
So we are stuck with 36 page adventures, with a lot of material we will likely never use.
I have no problems with instructional adventures and I think every game needs one. But after? Nope. Look at the original Isle of Dread. An Expert adventure, but one that didn’t sweat too much about how everything fit together and presented super cool adventure location to explore.
Creativity and improvisation are necessary for RPGs. Too much handholding creates an expectation that all adventures must provide the same level of content. This creates a barrier to GMs who want to design their own and creates a disincentive to new GMs to even try.
But I hear you!
I completely agree. As you pointed out… that was an “Expert” adventure. I fully realize that has more to do with the ruleset than the actual adventure, but if you were still playing from the “Basic” ruleset you wouldn’t exactly go pick up an “Expert” adventure. These days there is no indicator of the required capabilities for the DM. Add to that the fact that every adventure needs to be mass marketed, leads to the problems you describe.
Personally I think there is some middle ground. Particularly with today’s digital offerings. Why not have the adventure printed cheaper, with less material embedded, with a QR code that leads to a download for additional content if the customer wants. Possibly for a small fee to recoup the cost of generating that content. This way we can get the best of both worlds. More hand-holding for those that need it, and less set in stone for those of us that feel capable of managing it ourselves.
On the plus side having the less content would make it easier to merge into an existing campaign.
I can’t say I agree with everything, but sometimes I really feel that my games need the spontaneity you describe. I mean, one of the things I love from the old print Dungeon Magazine was the backdrop articles. Cities are rich and wonderful environments that permit players many choices and sidetracks. In that sense I think that their backdrop articles were kind of in the middle-ground between what you described as a lean and simple place rid of long texts that the DM and players can just plainly ignore, and the full size actual adventure where all of those aspects that give you ulcer lol are maximized.
The backdrop article could certainly give you a bit long descriptions of the most important figures and places in town, giving you ideas to side quests and plots. But they didn’t go beyond that, they were just ideas so that you, as a DM, could create everything else. They were tools so that you’d be able to better improvise if the players just want to explore town and wrap up themselves in side plots not related at all with the main adventure.
I remember DMing Greg A. Vaughan’s Touch of the Abyss and coming across my favourite backdrop article: Istivin, City of Shadows. With the help of those ideas I was able to frame my own Istivin and the begining of a great adventure (that sadly didn’t endure due to external agents from our own real world) where the players did what they wanted to and didn’t get nowhere near to the main plot. Instead they followed a side plot I created with the help of the backdrop article, thinking that that was the actual course the adventure took.
I didn’t really need the heavy labor a game designer usually takes writing an adventure (though I like to read it and use it as I will), but what I appreciated the most was their ideas.
I’m somewhat divided between your approach and, let’s say, the “traditional” as written one. And in a sense that’s one of the reasons I prefer Greyhawk to Forgotten Realms, the former gives you the main idea and some hooks to do with them as you like, the former is overdeveloped and full of things that I’ll never use or play it as written.
Interesting article! I agree with pretty much everything Rob, except cutting read-aloud text. I love read-alouds
I’m not sure I understand why the presence of the extra information makes an experienced GM – or even an inexperienced one – feel constrained to use it.
Use what you like; scrap the rest. Everything is optional, because it is your game. Don’t fuss because the designers decided to offer you some options… If you think of better ones, use ’em!
It’s not that GMs are “constrained” by the extra information. It makes the product a lot harder to use. If the adventure assumes the GM is going to memorize all the information before running it, it won’t be written in a way that makes it easy to run on the fly.
One particularly annoying tendency is to describe the room in lengthy read-aloud text (and ONLY in read-aloud text), so the GM has to read it, understand it, then summarize it for the players. That bullshit needs to stop.
Thank you for this article. I pretty much agree with all your arguments. Your article is perfectly summing up my discontent with pre-written adventures. Reading them eats away a massive amount of time. It’s impossible to remember all of the (often elegantly) scripted parts and at the table I often found myself flipping through the pages trying to find the oh so relevant parts. And it the end, most of the setups you have read through either do not pay-off or are simply forgotten. However, I do think maps, interesting pictures of sights or items or 1dX suggested complications could be to the benefit of this approach to adventure design.
I think ASH LAW is doing a great job with his OP-adventures for 13th Age leaving a lot of space for the GM. However, I really enjoy the clear structure of your example and the down to the point wording of the sentences. That’s something I am going to steal. The adventure and the structure. One will make my next game better, the other definitely the ones that will follow.
Thanks!
As always, Rob, you are spot on!
As a very lousy DM (no matter how much reading preparation I do beforehand, I always forget 90% of the storyline, hooks, names of the NPCs and their role in the story) I always end up improvising (it’s more like trying not to drown) and trying to keep my players entertained.
My group will try to “break” the story anyways and do their best to not follow the railroad . So I really try to use common sense when a situation arises, act quickly and make up sh*t as I go. It’s good for improv skills, and hopefully we all have a good time.
I must say D&D 4th ed dungeon modules had encounters perfectly laid out for the DM on 2 pages, but still for me and my 2 braincells, I just can’t process all that data, use it and play fast.
So I end up skipping huge parts of text (the players won’t know – and don’t care – anyway).
My DM style is like you said: “frantically trying to adjust” sweaty, seat of the pants style from start to finish , all-the time!
RPGs are just a social get together, an excuse to have your PC say and do stupid stuff and for all to have a good time. (with maybe, maybe a background storyline…that will most surely will get forgotten real quick).
I agree with everything being said,but the one thing that should not be cut from any adventure is the monster stat blocks for the entire adventure.Having the entire stat blocks for all encounters will help new DM’s and speed things up for experienced DM’s. Beyond this,everything seems fine. I write my own material anyways,but even i add all the monster stat blocks so no referencing is needed and play goes smoothly.
Have you played Lady Blackbird? It is the epitome of open-ended, fill-in-the-blanks scenario design, leaning heavily on the group’s shared knowledge of steampunk and adventure-fiction tropes.
You pretty much just described Dungeon World and what Sage Latora and Adam Kobel were going for and pretty much accomplished.
Also awesome article. I’m glad more people are starting to think this way, especially people who’ve worked on some of the more influential RPGs out there.
I really like this approach for more experienced GMs. I have personally run only a couple published adventures, and much prefer to create my own. With an approach like this, I am much more likely to pick one up and run it with my players.
I would add one caveat to this, and that is there must be some content detailing any monsters, items, and NPC statistics that aren’t word-for-word in a core rulebook. The only real benefit for me to actually pay for an adventure someone else wrote is to not have to do the legwork myself. I can do the creative part without much trouble; it’s the details that slow me down. Obviously this is just one GM’s preference, for whatever that’s worth.
This is exactly why I don’t use published material save for monsters stats, maps, loot, and inspirational pictures/NPCs/threats. I’m already doing the heavy narrative lifting at the table with my friends, since it’s all our shared story. I don’t need homework, I need short cuts and inspiration!
Great stuff. Followed for more.
I’m happy to see that I am not alone in liking the minimalist approach to adventure design. Does anyone remember the old Judges Guild supplements? I like those. 🙂