Adventure Recipes

These procedures help you build an adventure skeleton or outline. You'll then go through and flesh out the details of the adventure, including adversaries and locations. As you play, you'll keep adjusting to fit the events of the game. Anything you haven't already introduced can be changed as needed. Just like with any recipe, you're meant to adjust the details to fit your group's preferences. You might stray far from your starting point, and that's OK! These recipes use eight steps. You might want to look ahead to your future steps and make choices out of order based on what's most important for you to convey. The catch-all term “opposition” refers to the various adversaries and obstacles the PCs will face. The opposition should be thematically consistent but not necessarily monolithic. It might contain multiple individuals or groups who might not get along with one another. Styles: The overall vibe of your game, such as exploration, dystopian adventure, horror, infiltration, intrigue, military adventure, mystery, planar adventure, romantic adventure, or space opera. These frameworks offer guidelines for the number of sessions and types of encounters that work best. Threats: Thematic dangers to incorporate into your game, and ways to evoke them as you play. The style and threat are the core parts of your recipe. Motivations: Determine more specifically what the opposition's goals and motivations are. Story Arcs: This section gives you guidance on how to construct story arcs that will play out over your adventure and maybe beyond. NPCs and Organizations: The characters and factions you include should fit the theme. Locations: The adventuring sites and settlements featured in your adventure. Encounters: The individual rooms and locales within your adventuring sites, including the creatures and hazards found at these places. Treasure: The rewards you give out to characters after dealing with encounters. Adventure Research In addition to the advice and adventure recipes detailed here, reading other adventures is a great way to get ideas, whether they're published adventures or ones your friends have written. You can borrow ideas and structures if they work for your game and tweak as needed. You don't need to go into the same level of detail you'd see in a published adventure. You might be able to get by with just an outline, some bullet points for each NPC, a breakdown of encounters, and a few rough maps. Or maybe for your style of running games, you prefer to have some text written about each scene, or even particular lines of dialogue. If you're creating your first adventure, it can be good to write out a little more than you need. Just keep in mind that things might change in play. If you prepared more than you actually used, that's normal! Detailing NPCs or locations in particular can be useful, especially if they're going to appear again. But in many of these cases, you'll add details at the table and can jot down those notes for later. Building a Sandbox In a “sandbox” game, you give the players a sizable location to explore and let them decide how to go about it. A sandbox doesn't have as many time-sensitive events as a directed adventure, and the flow of the game is driven more by the players than by the opposition. You can put self-contained dungeons or other locations within the sandbox, but it's up to the players when and how to visit them or deal with them. To make a sandbox, create about triple the number of encounters and spread them out among multiple locations or factions. You can expect the PCs won't deal with all of them. In most cases, you'll want to determine where the PCs are headed next before the end of a session so you can prepare for the next session. Depending on the size and complexity of the location, the number of encounters might be much higher. Treat each sub-area as a kind of mini-adventure and only loosely sketch it until you know what the PCs' plans are. Running Your Own Adventure It's often easier to run an adventure you made yourself, but that's not true for everybody. If you notice as you run your adventure that your notes don't have enough for you to go on, you can be more thorough next time. And if something ended up inconsistent, there's nothing wrong with telling your players you want to revise something you previously said. Because this is your own creation, it's closer to your heart. If the adventure doesn't go well, it can sting. Sometimes this is because of random chance, sometimes due to unforeseen decisions, and occasionally because you made a mistake. Those are all normal parts of the game! One of the things you'll internalize the more you run games is that you are a part of the creative process and don't need to be perfect.