Aetrimonde

Today, I’m going to talk about some of the early steps in writing an adventure: planning the scenes that will go into it and linking them together into a cohesive framework. I tend to write adventures from the top-down, starting with a few big-picture concepts and fleshing out various scenes and encounters to support those concepts; the advice in the GMH, in the best tradition of “write what you know,” follows on from that approach.

Planning Scenes

Previous chapters have discussed how to design a scene in isolation, but when writing an entire adventure there is also the issue of choosing scenes. Before putting in the work of designing each scene, it helps to consider the entire collection of scenes together: this way you can build a framework of how scenes relate to each other and how they fit into the larger scope of your adventure before fleshing each of them out. Big-picture factors to take into consideration at this step include:

• Types: An adventure intended for a general audience should have a balanced variety of scenes, including exploration, interaction, and both combat and non-combat encounters. Aetrimonde is a fairly combat-focused system: a good basic approach is to, for every 10 scenes, start with 5 combat encounters and one each of exploration, interaction, and non-combat encounters. Then, fill in the remaining two scenes as you feel fit.
• Variety: It is generally a good idea to break up scenes of the same type to provide players with a little variety. If using the basic approach above, in which half of the scenes or more will be combat encounters, that generally means interspersing other kinds of scene to break up long stretches of combat, and if you have duplicates of other scene types, do not set them one after the other.
• Significance: Not every scene has to be vital to the plot–in fact, for longer adventures, having every single scene introduce new plot twists, supporting characters, or locations can make it hard to follow. It helps to have some scenes that don’t bear significantly on the plot: these can be plot-related but not advance the plot, like a fight against an antagonist’s minions who are just standing in the PCs’ way, or they can be completely unrelated, like a game of riddles against a giant who just happened to be wandering through at the wrong time.
• Difficulty: As a rule of thumb, most scenes should be of default (i.e. moderate) difficulty. For every 10 scenes, one or perhaps two should be difficult, and an equal number should be easy. Significant scenes do not have to be difficult, although a final climactic battle against an adventure’s villain should generally be on the harder side. In fact, making significant scenes difficult can make an adventure harder to complete, by raising the risk of failure at crucial junctures.

Linking Scenes Together

Once you have a general idea of what scenes your adventure will contain, but before fleshing them out, it pays to think about how the scenes flow together and how the players may move from scene to scene. The goal of this step is to establish a structure for your adventure, defining the order that the players are expected to progress through each scene (although they may get inventive and find unanticipated ways to progress, which is where the GM has to do some quick thinking…). It’s particularly important to make sure that all of your scenes are reachable—that you haven’t done the narrative equivalent of locking the key to a door behind the door itself. Factors to consider here include:

• Geography: Where do the scenes of the adventure take place, and how can the characters physically move from scene to scene? Scenes taking place in a wide-open wilderness may allow the party to move freely from any one to any other, but scenes set in a ruin, fortress, or some rougher kinds of outdoor terrain may limit the party’s movement. It may be necessary to first defeat the guards at the gate to the fortress before attempting to rob the fortress’ vault or face the sorcerous overlord, for example.
• Ordering: Do the players need to complete one scene before attempting another? For example, do they first need to shoot down the dragon using the ballista atop the castle, before they face it on the ground? If so, they need to be able to reach the ballista on the roof before fighting the dragon—but they might be able to pass through the courtyard where that fight will take place, just with no dragon currently in it. In fact, having the players pass through locations where later scenes take place—perhaps with separate scenes occurring on each visit—is a great way to provide foreshadowing and let the players have advance knowledge of where they’ll be fighting.
• Knowledge: Are some scenes inaccessible without the players getting a clue or advice? This might be the case with scenes taking place in remote caves that aren’t on any map, or that require the players to speak a password that they have no way of knowing until they interrogate a prisoner from another scene. If so, think about which scenes would give the PCs the appropriate clues—you may want there to be several options so that the players don’t miss them. Like with ordering, scenes requiring knowledge might take place in the same location as previous scenes, with elements of the location only becoming noteworthy or understood with the benefit of further knowledge.
• Points of No Return: When the players start a scene, does it lock them out of other scenes either temporarily or permanently? This could be a matter of geography (attempting to cross a bridge causes it to collapse and forces the PCs to find a way out of the ravine before doing anything else) or it could be because plot developments in a scene make another scene moot (attacking the warlord in his throne room draws all of his guards to the battle, and so the guards formerly in the barracks aren’t there anymore).