Aetrimonde

Since I’m on the topic of adventures, in preparation to write Aetrimonde’s starter adventure, I think a great subject for this week’s post is adventure seeds: short, flavorful concepts that can form the basis of an adventure for a GM willing to write their own.

The advice I’ve written in the GMH on writing your own adventures uses adventure seeds as the foundation of an adventure: start from one simple concept at the core of the adventure, and build out from there. Today’s excerpt covers three common kinds of adventure seed (which are not the only ones that the book discusses) and how each one can define an adventure.

While I’ve got your attention: I have ambitions to write a starter adventure for Aetrimonde using feedback from reader polls on this blog to guide how the adventure develops. The first poll is already up, and asks which of several regions of Aetrimonde sound interesting for an adventure. Want to be involved in the development of Aetrimonde’s starter adventure? Go vote now!

One of the easiest ways to start writing an adventure is to start from an adventure seed: a concept, usually no more than a sentence or three long, of something that would be fun to play through. Adventure seeds are usually focused on one aspect of the prospective adventure, and turning one into a full-fledged adventure means fleshing out its other aspects to better serve the core concept in the seed.

Conflict

One kind of adventure seed, and the one that many first-time adventure authors might gravitate toward, focuses on an interesting conflict that can drive the adventure’s plot. Possibly the most straightforward way to base an adventure on conflict is to find a group of enemies in the Bestiary that would be interesting for players to fight, and then come up with a reason why the PCs would be fighting them. Other forms of conflict that could be turned into adventures include:

• Two or more rival factions are fighting over territory, resources, past insults, or some other provocation. The PCs have the opportunity to side with one and help them achieve victory, or possibly, if they play their cards right, find a peaceful compromise. (Example: A clan of modernist dwarves who make firearms are fierce competitors of another clan who make crossbows. The business competition is approaching the point where they are about to start turning their weapons on each other.)
• Something bad is happening, but nobody knows why and everybody is pointing fingers. The PCs need to investigate these happenings, find the actual cause, and figure out what to do about it, all while preventing the victims from turning on each other. (Example: A remote village suffers a spate of obviously supernatural thefts, kidnappings, or murders just as the PCs are passing through. As the prime suspects, they first need to clear their names, then find and deal with the culprits before the locals start burning their neighbors at the stake.)
• A town, country, or organization profits from an ongoing injustice, and the PCs undertake to put an end to it, against the interests of those in power. (Example: A wealthy trading port still practices slavery under the guise of indentured servitude. The PCs decide to put an end to it, but must rally support for their cause and undermine the merchant prince’s position before they can topple him and start an uprising.)

Antagonist

Another adventure seed may revolve around an antagonist: the villain of the adventure, who opposes the PCs and is responsible for the challenges they face. The antagonist may not actually be fought in the adventure, but for antagonists who are personally powerful, it’s common for the final scene before the epilogue to be a climactic “boss fight” against them. The important thing about an antagonist is not their appearance or their fighting style (although it helps to make those memorable), but the way that their influence is felt throughout the adventure. Examples of potentially fun antagonists include:

• A powerful monster that the PCs must track down, bring to battle, and defeat. (Examples: Dragons, demons, powerful undead.)
• \item A mastermind who commands hosts of lesser foes but doesn’t deign to face the PCs until they have fought their way into a position where they pose an actual threat to their agenda. (Examples: Warlords, powerful fey, necromancers.)
• \item A secretive manipulator, who puts sinister plots into motion but who avoids fighting and whose actual identity is only shockingly unmasked near the end of the adventure. (Examples: Master thieves, double agents, changelings.)
• \item A conspirator who is only powerful because of their position in politics, society, or an organization, and who the PCs can’t even touch until they gain an equal amount of support. (Examples: Corrupt politicians, greedy robber barons, heretical priests.)

Setting

Some adventures revolve around a setting rather than a conflict or antagonist. A setting that is the basis of an adventure might be where the entire adventure takes place, or it might be a hub that the PCs operate from during an adventure that takes them all around the region. The important thing when basing an adventure on a setting is to make the setting a kind of character” in the adventure, rather than it being a purely passive backdrop to more interesting events: the setting itself needs to interact with the PCs somehow in order to make an adventure focused on it memorable. Ways to do this include:

• Letting the PCs alter the setting in various ways over the course of the adventure. (Example: An initially dying frontier town, which the PCs can reinvigorate by driving off bandits, breaking curses, and investing the loot from their adventures.)
• Having the setting pose unusual dangers that the PCs must take special steps to stave off. (Example: A haunted manor filled with ghosts that attempt to possess the PCs if they try to rest outside of specially-warded safe rooms.)
• Tying the setting to an overarching mystery that the PCs gradually solve over the course of the adventure. (Example: A centuries-old wizard’s sanctum, filled with oddities and artifacts, but that the former owner appears to have abandoned abruptly, leaving numerous experiments unattended…)
• Giving the PCs novel powers tied to the setting, letting them do things that they wouldn’t be able to elsewhere. (Example: An abandoned city whose past is mystically overlaid onto its present, allowing the PCs to move between the two time periods to cross bridges in the past that have collapsed in the present, or walk through gaps in walls that are intact in the past.)

Up next in this column, I’ll be looking at factors involved in adventure writing like length, structure, and pacing. Stay tuned!