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.
[This template will be included in Universal Exploits, an upcoming supplement for Alpha Blue. Kickstarter happening now]
