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How is an adventure like a cake? Both of them are delicious baked goods that I love to eat, except for the adventure. But they are alike in that they need the right ingredients to be any good. And this adventure is all about cakes, adventures, and ingredients. Except it’s not really about cakes. I wish I had some cake.
Much as I would love to sit here and describe the various elements of a homebrew adventure, you’re not ready for that crap yet. You don’t even know how to plan, I can’t tell you what to plan.
I WAS going to rant about ability scores. But I accidentally ended up giving good advice about being inflexible for the good of the game. Sorry.
What if it turned out that everything I ever taught you about action adjudication was wrong? And that there was an entirely different way of looking at actions in role-playing games? Well, don’t worry. Nothing I told you was wrong. But there is another way of looking at actions. And sometimes, everything I told you is wrong. Sometimes, you’re not resolving an action, you’re taking a gamble.
People keep asking me to revisit adventure building. And to make it clear and useful. Maybe spell out a nice, simple process. Fine. Let’s talk about building your own adventures from scratch. Again. Only better.
This isn’t for you GMs to read; it’s for you to print and hand to your players. That way, they can declare actions and play the game in a way that actually let’s you, you know, run a good game. Just let me talk to them. I’ll be nice.
There’s more to narrating combat than just flowery prose. Actually, there’s less. Combat needs less narration, more emotion, and more information.
The first thing every GM does when they decide to create their own setting is to start drawing a map. And there’s no reason for that. Except one reason. Which is why that’s the first thing I did for my Pathfinder campaign.
With a crappy, generic pitch sold to my players, it was time to let them generate their characters. The problem was, they couldn’t do it on their own and I had to be involved. Ugh.
One of my least favorite holiday traditions is the one wherein I get bombarded with requests to explain how to write a good a holiday adventure. Or at least outline one. And I can’t fight it anymore.
What do you do when you’ve got nothing? Figure out how to make nothing sound like something, send it out, and deal with the fallout later. And that’s exactly what I did when my Session Zero for my new campaign fell apart.
For the first time in three years, I – Angry – am running an actual, real-life, regular campaign. And it’ll provide a great example of how to cobble together a campaign you don’t have time to plan or run in a system you haven’t used in years. At least, my Patrons think it will.
Every settlement in an RPG has its own tone. It’s own flavor. At least, it should. If you want it to be good. But how do you convey that tone without just telling the players what it is?
It’s time to finally talk about world building and setting creation. Which means it’s time for the obligatory, overly long semantically discussion about the definition of the thing I’m talking about. Enjoy.
You asked for it. You wanted the fluffy, story bulls$&% to go along with the useful, systematic mythology-building thing I already posted. Here it is.
A well-build mythology can drive stories and create a fantastic world. Unfortunately, D&D doesn’t provide such a mythology. But you can make your own if you understand thematic conflict.
People keep asking me how to draw good maps. Well, I can’t teach you how to draw pretty maps, but I can teach you how to draw useful maps. The trick is to stop trying to draw maps and start presenting information instead.
You can get a lot of mileage out of themes. Especially when you set up some thematic conflicts. You just have to know what themes are and how to set up their conflicts. And why “good versus evil” doesn’t count as a conflict.
Having developed a nice list of story turning points in previous articles, it’s time to turn our attention to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and see what additional turning points he’s got to offer. And to see if there’s anything MORE IMPORTANT people overlook when talking about Campbell. Hint: there is.
This article EVENTUALLY builds a basic narrative structure for gamers. But first, it has to spend a time on some remedial lessons. Apparently, some things didn’t sink in the first time I discussed narrative structure.
The only thing worse than a GM with no sense of narrative structure is one who just learned some new form of narrative structure in school. This is an open letter to GMs obsessed with the three-act structure, the five-room dungeon, and Joseph Motherf$%&ing Campbell to PLEASE STOP E-MAILING ME.
Mysteries are like pancakes: solving one is satisfying, but solving a whole stack is even better. But when it comes to stacking mysteries into a delicious mystery campaign, it’s easy to f$&% it up.
There’s a difference between a puzzle and a problem. And most GMs don’t understand the difference. That’s a shame because most GMs who think they want puzzles in their game actually want problems. And problems work better.
I’m sick of dealing with questions about how to implement puzzles properly from GMs who insist that puzzles just suck. So, it’s time for me to act. By writing 5,000 words about it and then walking away.
Sometimes, you just get tired of taking notes and you just want to show up and have a fun adventure. And then another. And another. Enter: The Adventure of the Week Campaign. Which has nothing to do with meatballs. Except when it does.
No type of campaign is more iconic than the Epic Quest Campaign, especially the Save the World Campaign. Well, unless you count Dungeon Delve Campaigns. And Adventure of the Week Campaigns. But shut up. We’re talking about Epic Quest and Save the World Campaigns.
It’s time to look ahead to new beginnings. Specifically, the beginning of my new campaign. And since I went through all of the trouble of running a Session Zero and writing a Pitch, I thought I’d let you see exactly how I developed MY upcoming campaign. Merry F$%&ing Christmas or whatever.
Start as you mean to go on. It’s good advice for writers and it’s good advice for GMs. Except when it isn’t. But it is. But it might not be.
If you give a newbie a game, he’s going to want to a campaign. If you give the newbie a campaign, you’ll be stuck with a terrible player for life. Don’t make that mistake.
There are infinite ways to fill that blank piece of paper that is your campaign plan. Here’s about four of them. We’ll cover the other infinity-minus-four in future articles.