Everyone of us has written an adventure. Unfortunately most are not beware of that and the reason for this cannot be found in alcoholic beverages. Most GMs have spend much of their spare in the creation of an adventure, carefully creating scene after scene, balancing the whole plot, inventing new creatures, places and spells. Others prefer to buy ready made adventure, where almost every aspect is covered and dealt with. Another way is to use small adventure hooks or scenarios that are filled with life. All of them have something in common: They are not perfect! No matter how much time you spend on an adventure, how much money you invested in a supplement or how good you know your players, there are situations where you have to come up with your own ideas, you have to improvise. Your players are human beings and their actions can hardly be predicted (otherwise everyone would make a
million on the stock exchange). This improvisation is the first step to create an adventure, although only small parts of an adventure are improvised, a huge world of new adventures are behind the veil and all that is necessary is to lift it.

Even players create adventures. Roleplaying is not a one-way-street. Instead players manipulate the world they play in - sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally. I remember an adventure where my PC - unintentionally - killed the princes he wanted to rescue; just image all the possible adventures afterwards. These are also the first steps to create new adventures.

There are hundreds of good adventures on the market - and probably thousands of bad ones. This article is meant to show you some of the possible ways to create good adventures. It does not guarantee a good adventure and the one’s that are made need constant modification during game-play. Even if you fail spectacularly, you should not hesitate to try again.

To create an adventure all you need is a pen and a pencil. A rulebook may be nice, but it is not necessary. The rest is your imagination.

More to follow…

This article was written by Leif U. Schrader and originaly published by Strike to Stun in 2001

Tags: Writing Adventures

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 2:03 am by Server Goddess and is filed under GM-Aids, WFRP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.