Tag Archives: adventure creation

Adventure Creation Handbook Now Available

Posted on 15 July 2011 | Leave a comment

Want to write your own adventures?

You can learn to write good adventures and The Adventure Creation Handbook will show you how. Maybe you’re searching for an original idea. Or maybe you’ve just looking for a way to take that exciting climatic battle you see in your head and put it into a form your players will enjoy. Wherever you are in the adventure creation process, this  book will guide you step-by-step through the process of creating an adventure for any genre, any game system.

Overcome creativity blocks and dry spells. The Adventure Creation Handbook describes several methods of coming up with adventure ideas your players and you will enjoy.

Customize plots for your group and your game. By using your players and their wants as a starting point, this method allows you make adventures your players will want to play.

Integrate adventures into your campaign. This method integrates the adventures into your game system and campaign world from the very beginning. No trying to shoe-horn or retrofit ideas that don’t really fit.

“GMs, if you want a recipe for creating great adventures, the Adventure Creation Handbook is for you. Cherie lays it all out for you in great detail, and leads you by the hand through all the steps needed to wow your players with awesome stories. I love this GM advice book and can’t wait for the next in the series.”
Johnn Four
http://www.roleplayingtips.com
http://www.campaignmastery.com
http://gamer-lifestyle.com

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What’s included:

  • A step-by-step method for creation adventures that covers
    • Generating the original idea
    • Translating that idea into a series of events by asking and answering questions
    • Putting the events in a meaningful order that’s flexible enough to take player whim into account
    • Developing incentives to entice your players to go on the adventure
    • Getting it all down on paper (or in the computer) so you don’t forget anything important
  • Suggestions for running your newly written adventure
  • A worksheet to help you put your ideas in order
  • A checklist so you don’t miss any steps
  • Printer-friendly black & white design. No heavily colored pages to eat toner.

“…I have to say it’s not only a gorgeous book with great use of layout and black and white images, but it’s the perfect size to get folks started creating better adventures.”
Fitz
Game Knight Reviews

In addition, when you purchase The Adventure Creation Handbook, you receive these free bonuses:

  1. Life time updates. You’ll receive a free copy of this book every time it’s updated or revised. No need to go searching for errata or buying the next version, just to have up-to-date information.
  2. An example of adventure creation using this method, illustrating each step.
  3. A booklet of GMing tips from my blog Evil Machinations.
  4. 90-day unconditional money-back guarantee.  No questions asked.

What’s it cost? $7 for the next 30 days. That’s a special launch price. After August 15, 2011, the price will go up to $10.

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Adventure Creation Handbook Ready

Posted on 26 June 2011 | 3 Comments

The adventure creation handbook is finished and just about ready. I’m looking a release date of mid-July (haven’t settled on a specific launch date–there’s still a fair amount of back-end stuff to do).

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback so far from friends and family who’ve looked it over and I’m really excited about releasing it. The main response I’ve gotten is that after reading it, people immediately go looking for pencil and paper to get started designing adventures, which is exactly the result I was hoping for. The 48 page booklet will retail for $7 as a launch special, with the price going up to $10 after 30 days.

To sweeten the deal, I’m adding in a couple of freebies when you purchase the Handbook. One is a step-by-step example of the 6 W’s method. I decided not to include it in the basic booklet because I didn’t want to lock people into my way of doing things. My intent is to provide you with a tool you can customize to fit your own style and method. The second freebie is a mini-book of GM advice articles from my blog, Evil Machinations, edited and typeset into an easy-to-use handbook you can take with you anywhere you’re preparing for games. Both will be optional downloads that come free with every purchase.

With this project now almost shipped, I’m starting to look ahead to my next project. I’ve get several ideas, but I’d like your feedback. Let me know what you’d like from me next by leaving a comment on this post. The ideas I currently have are:

  • A campaign creation handbook, a start-to-finish guide to help GMs set up and run campaigns
  • A city creation handbook designed to help GMs of any genre build believable cities for use in their own campaign setting
  • A world-building handbook, which will probably be broken into several smaller books, since the topic of worldbuilding is so large. These would include a general overview of worldbuilding to get people started, a culture creation book, a language creation book, a races creation book, worldbuilding for fantasy games, worldbuilding for SF games and anything else that people want or I think would be useful.
  • A player guidebook for GMs. This would cover what to do to help your players have more fun in your games.
  • Something else I haven’t even thought of that you’d like to see.

Right now, I’m trying to decide between the campaign creation book or the city creation book. So, please, let me know what you’d most like me to cover next.

I’ll announce the actual release date here on this blog first, so keep checking back.

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Is It the Time…or the Place?

Posted on 22 April 2011 | Leave a comment
Pocket watch, savonette-type.

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When it comes to creating and organizing the events (or “encounters”) for the adventure you’re writing, there are a couple of basic approaches you can take.

  1. Organize by sequence of events (the time-line approach)
  2. Organize by where the events will happen (the location approach)

It’s a Matter of Time

In this case, each event triggers the next; the events happen in a specific sequence. Event B must come after event A and before event C. This type of adventure has it’s merits and drawbacks. On the plus side, it’s easy to keep the PCs moving through the adventure, since each event will tell the players what to do next.

On the downside, players often have their own ideas of where their characters are going to go and what they’re going to do next. You’ll need to build some flexibility into your timeline, or you’ll find yourself railroading your players. No one likes being told what their character has to do during a game. With practice, you’ll be able to create time-line based adventures that subtly guide the PCs through your planned sequence of events, but still feel like they’re the ones making the decision on what to do when.

It’s a Matter of Place

Sometimes your list of events don’t seem to need a specific order. In this case, it may be more useful to group your events by location. With this second approach, one event doesn’t necessarily trigger another. Instead, the events trigger when the PCs arrive at a particular location. If they don’t go to that location, those particular events don’t happen. The classic dungeon crawl is an example of a location-based adventure: events and encounters happen when the PCs find them. If they skip an entire section of rooms, they also skip the events that would happen in those rooms.

The advantages of this method are that players usually feel they have more freedom in location-based adventures. They can explore things in any order they choose and if the party splits up and goes to different locations, each group of PCs will encounter whatever events are set to take place in their particular area.

The downside to this approach is if the PCs skip a location, they may miss crucial clues, making it much harder for them to complete the adventure’s goal. You can overcome this by listing two (or even three) possible locations for an event to take place at, depending on where the PCs actually go during the game. Often, you’ll find yourself using a combination of location- and timing-based events.

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Product Update

I’m back at work on the final rewrite of the Adventure Creation Handbook, which I hope to finish this weekend. No guarantees, though. I’m in North Carolina, so in addition to dealing with fallout from last weekends tornadoes, our appliances have been giving out one-by-one. Add to that a new part-time job…well, my writing time’s been a little difficult to carve out recently. Things are looking much better ahead, though.

Once this rewrite is done, I’ll be starting the actual book layout. I’ll keep everyone posted on my progress here.

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Give Your Adventure a Goal

Posted on 8 February 2011 | Leave a comment

Each adventure should have one and only one main goal. This goal should be the reason for the adventure and should be concrete and tangible—something the players will know if they’ve succeeded or failed. Good examples of goals are: recover a stolen item or rescue the crown prince and bring him back safely.

Write down the goal you want the PCs to achieve and make sure that the players understand it. This may seem obvious, but writing the goal down can help you focus your adventure. Too many GMs give the PCs goals along the lines of “Chicago. Go. Fix it.” This is extremely frustrating for your players. Without a clear goal in mind, your players are likely to flounder, uncertain what to do or what they are supposed to accomplish.

You can have more than one goal, as long as they are of minor importance. The success or failure of the adventure shouldn’t rest on the outcome of these secondary goals. You can use them to lead into other adventures or to provide “extra credit”, so to speak.

[Photo Courtesy of urban_data via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0]

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Mine Your Players for Ideas

Posted on 24 January 2011 | Leave a comment

While there are many ways to come up with the idea for an adventure, some of your best inspiration can come from your players. Players often have a wealth of ideas. The trick is, how do you get them to share those ideas? If you use PC backgrounds or character questionnaires, begin your idea search here. Go through your PCs backgrounds one by one and note important events in each of the PC’s lives.

A good character background will have lots of hooks you can can use as springboards to develop adventures from. parking reserved for players signWhat matters have the characters left unresolved? Did one of them flee an unwanted marriage? What might a jilted suitor do to save face and/or find his “lost love”? Did another escape the law? How might the law pursue her? Does a PC have relatives back home? What might happen to them with the character gone?

Basing an adventure on a PC’s backstory usually brings with it a problem: how do you hook the other PCs into story? This doesn’t have to be an insurmountable obstacle. With a little thought (and possibly the use of a mind map), you can usually find a way to get the rest of a party invested in the background of the “featured character”. Sometimes, with a few tweaks here and there, you can combine two or more PC backgrounds together, giving those characters a common cause. Other times, you can create an in-game incentive for the other PCs to aid the PC in focus. If you focus on each PC evenly, perhaps taking an idea from each of their character backgrounds in turn, the others will be more willing to help, know that their turn in the spotlight will be coming.

Also, listen to your players as they talk about the game. What intrigues them? What ideas do they have about what’s going on? It’s very likely, they’ll come up with things you’d never have thought of. If one of your PCs suggests something that contradicts what you have planned, consider using their suggestion instead, unless it’s going to ruin something later down the road. It will make your PCs feel smart for having guessed what you were up to.

Along similar lines, you don’t need to have every detail of your adventure nailed down in advance. Let your PCs fill in some of the details. Listen as they brainstorm and speculate. Frequently, they’ll find connections you never even saw. Never be afraid to steal a player’s idea and run with it. If you find yourself stuck without a solution, present the problem to your players, in game. Then choose the solution you like the best and run with that.

[Image courtesy of Ms. Phoenix via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0]

[This is an excerpt from The Adventure Creation Handbook, due to be released at the end of February]

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Writing the Adventure: Building to a Climax

Posted on 9 January 2011 | Leave a comment

Stage fightThis is the culmination of the entire adventure, that huge battle you’ve been planning for weeks, that confrontation with the villain who has his thumb on the trigger of the thermonuclear warhead button, the last chance for the PCs to set things right.

Everything else in your adventure should lead the PCs to this moment. You want your middle to build to a fever pitch, so that your players are ready and eager to get to this moment. You know you’ve done your job correctly if, at this point, your players want to defeat the bad guy as much (or even more) than their characters do. They need to care about the outcome of this final showdown. Do everything you can to set the mood for the moment. Props, candles, music can all work to bring your players even deeper into the game, to help them feel like they’re actually there, actually immersed in the action, not just narrating it.

The outcome of this encounter needs to be in doubt. Players should feel like they have a real chance of failing and that that failure would have dire consequences for the game world. Likewise, if they succeed, they should also make an impact on the game world. Let their actions make a difference, let the PCs make history. If everything resets at the end of the adventure, players will have a feeling of “Why bother? Nothing we do makes any difference anyway.” But if you allow your players to be co-creators of the game world, they will become much more engaged and will eagerly await further adventures in your world.

This is an excerpt from The Adventure Creation Handbook, due to be released at the end of February 2011.

[Photo courtesy of Rex Roof via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0]

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Writing the Adventure: Begin at the Beginning

Posted on 27 December 2010 | Leave a comment

Humble BeginningThe purpose of the beginning of an adventure is to draw the players into the story. You want them to develop and emotional stake in the game. The more emotionally invested a player is in a game, the more motivated he’ll be to play it out to the end. But how do you get your players emotionally invested? This is where you need to know your players: what make them game? Why do they come back session after session? Is it the excitement of combat or the chance to pretend to be someone else for a while?

If you’ve been gaming with a group for a while, you usually have a good idea of your players and what they most enjoy about gaming. If not, ask them, then make sure you include that in your beginning. The worst thing that can happen to a GM is to present the adventure to your players and have them either totally ignore it, or completely reject it. If you read much about GMing at all, you’ll hear about player “hooks”. Hooks are things that motivate a PC, that grab the player’s interest and pull them into the game.

The best hooks come from a PC’s background. This is where writing your own adventurers becomes truly useful, because you can write hooks for each character into the plot of the game itself. If a published adventure, you can be stuck trying to invent convoluted reasons for your PCs to take on the adventure at hand. An example: one of group’s PCs is a fighter who discovers that she and her party are taking shelter with the widow of an old army buddy of hers and that this friend’s widow is in distress and needs help.

There’s no limit to the types of hooks you can create. You can also create hooks that refer back to unfinished business earlier in the campaign. Say that your party encountered a priest early in your campaign; later they get word that this priest has started delving into forbidden lore. The now PCs have a connection to what’s happening with that priest. And if they had confronted the priest about other less-than-holy behavior, but let the priest go during that earlier encounter–or the priest escaped their custody–the PCs are likely to feel a responsibility to set things right. Nothing keeps a player more invested in a game than a responsibility he assumes voluntarily.

You want to keep your beginning short. Try to open with an exciting scene that draws players immediately into the story. You want your beginning to communicate to your players that things are not as they should be and that the players have the possibility of putting things right. Your opening encounter should immediately convey what’s wrong and give a hint that it could be fixed by the PCs. Without that hint, you run the danger of your players feeling that the problem is too big for them to tackle themselves. So your opening encounter should be challenging, but the PCs should be able to overcome it without too much difficulty. Remember that this is the warm-up for the entire adventure.

In many ways, the beginning can be the most important part of your adventure. You need to establish from the start that things aren’t as they should be, while drawing the PCs (and the players) into the adventure by tying the action into their background–whether that’s their own character background or something that happened to the party during an earlier part of the campaign. If you can get the players to care about what’s happening in the beginning of an adventure, they’re more likely to see it through to the end.

[This is an excerpt from the upcoming Adventure Creation Handbook].

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Before You Write: What Do Your Players and PCs Want?

Posted on 20 December 2010 | Leave a comment

Motivation quoteAs you’re preparing to write your adventure, think about your players. You want to try and put something in your adventure for each of your players. Try to find something, no matter how small, that you can connect back to you each of the PCs. Perhaps you can use an NPC from a character’s background or can place an item another PCs been wanting as the MacGuffin for the adventure.

As you write, also think of your players. A number of books and blogs have talked about the various player types, so I won’t go into it here. But take a moment to think of each of your players. What do they enjoy most about roleplaying? One player may love digging around in political intrigue, while another won’t be happy unless there’s a rollicking fight. Jot down one thing for each player. You’ll refer back to this list later as you write to make sure you’ve incorporated these items into your adventure. If possible, try and tie that piece of action for the player into their character.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to brainstorm adventure ideas. You can also pull ideas from your PC’s character backgrounds or something that happens during another adventure. If you have a method that already works for you, by all means use that. The important thing is to come up with an idea that excites you. If you don’t find the idea exciting, if you’re disinterested, unhappy, or bored with an idea, you’ll communicate that to your players, whether you intend to or not. If you’re not excited about an idea, your players won’t be either. Remember, you’re part of this game, too and if you’re not having fun, no one else will, either.

[This is an excerpt from The Adventure Creation Handbook, currently being written].

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Why Create Custom Adventures?

Posted on 18 December 2010 | Leave a comment
Medieval illustration of a Christian scribe wr...
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There are tons of published adventures out there, so why go to the trouble of creating one from scratch? Very often, published adventures don’t fit your game world or your gaming group. Perhaps the adventure relies on monsters or treasure that you’ve decided don’t exist in your world. Or maybe you have a difficult time getting your PCs motivated to go on published adventures. Oftentimes, published adventures can require so much reworking to fit into your game that it takes almost as much, perhaps more effort to adapt them than to write something from scratch.

By writing your own adventures, you can customize them to your group. You can give rewards that your PCs will find motivating and meaningful and you can write in incentives that will have the PCs raring to go, even before the adventure actually starts. You can include the details of your game world within the structure of the adventure, thereby avoiding extensive reworking of published works that would require as much effort as writing an adventure from scratch in the first place.

The biggest obstacle most GMs seem to have to writing their own adventures it coming up with ideas. One way to develop ideas is to use a mind map. Other ways involve listening to your players and asking them what they would like to do in the campaign, or using adventure seeds or ideas, many of which can be found on-line. Evil Machinations is currently running a series of posts detailing how to take an adventure seed and flesh it into a full adventure. The Adventure Creation Handbook, currently being written, will cover several ways of  finding inspiration, as well as outlining a step-by-step method (from inspiration to game session), showing how to create your own, original adventure.

You don’t have to limit yourself to published adventures. There’s satisfaction in creating adventures specifically tailored to your campaign, setting, and PCs.

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Find Inspiration–The Mind Map, pt. 3

Posted on 8 December 2010 | Leave a comment

Struma River in WinterLast time, we fleshed out our mind map some more. As I was originally doing the mind map,  an adventure idea came me:

A small town is haunted by a ghost of a rogue who, while fleeing justice, fled out of town into the worst winter blizzard the town had ever seen. Without shelter, he quickly froze to death, but his spirit remained behind, haunting the town and its residents. They know it’s the ghost of the old thief because on deep winter nights, they can hear ghostly strains of a tune he used to whistle constantly. During the haunting, small items disappear out of the villagers’ pockets unless a small item of value is placed outside the door of each house. The items always disappear by the time the winter storm abates.

But recently, the pickpocket ghost seems to be taking more than small items. Pets have started disappearing and during the last storm, a young boy who’d been tucked warm in his bed was found frozen to death on the same spot where the thief’s body was found. The village priest has tried to exorcise the spirit many, many times to no avail, so the villagers have now turned to the PCs for help. They want the PCs to get rid of the pickpocket ghost for good.

(This adventure start will be fleshed out into a full adventure in the upcoming The Adventure Creation Handbook)

This is a simple mind map. You can find whole books and websites dedicated to mind mapping and it can get pretty complex, using different colors and symbols to relate items to one another. I’ve found I don’t need all of that; circles and lines by themselves are enough for me. If another way works better for you, then use that.

Now, I happened to work all of the ideas on the mind map into my adventure start, but you don’t have to. It’s perfectly okay to use just a few ideas or even none. The point of a mind-map is to get your ideas flowing and jump-start your creativity. This is your tool: use it however it works best for you.

[Photo courtesy of Klearchos Kapoutsis via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0]

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