Setting an Example: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas, pt. 3

Posted on 20 November 2010 | Leave a comment

In the last couple of posts we’ve discussed what adventure seeds are and outlined the basic steps to fleshing them out into full-fledged adventures. Today, I’m taking an adventure seed I found on a gaming forum and fleshing it out into a rough adventure.

The Seed

Your group is tasked to infiltrate a high-security national leader’s compound by traveling with some entertainers he has hired for a private performance.

This comes from the RPG Life Member Forums.

Write Down Questions

Here’s where we really get into turning this short idea into an adventure. When reading over our adventure seed, what questions come to mind?

  • Which national leader?
  • What compound?
  • What nation?
  • Where is the compound?
  • Who are the entertainers?
  • What is the performance they’re going to do?
  • Why is the leader having the performance (what’s the occasion?)
  • Who hired the PCs?
  • Why does (s)he need the PCs? Why not hire someone else?
  • What security measures are in place?
  • Why these entertainers?
  • Why does the PCs employer want them to infiltrate?
  • Do the PCs know why?
  • Why should the PCs go?
  • What happens if they succeed?
  • What happens if they fail?

Back to the 6 W’s

We can group these questions into our 6 W’s of Adventure Creation and add in some more standard questions that should be asked about every adventure:

Who

  • Who hired the PCs?
  • Who is the national leader?
  • Who are the entertainers?
  • Who wants the mission to succeed?
  • Who wants it to fail?
  • Who leads the entertainers?
  • Do the entertainers know about the PCs mission?

What

  • What are the exact goals of the mission?
  • What is the performance the entertainers are going to do?
  • What kind of entertainers are they?
  • What security measures does the location have?
  • What maps do you need to create?
  • What special items might the PCs need to succeed?
  • What does the compound look like?
  • What group or faction does the national leader belong to, if any?
  • What group or faction does the PCs employer belong to, if any?
  • What obstacles might stand in the way of the PCs succeeding?
  • What will happen if the PCs succeed?
  • What will happen if they fail?

When

  • When is this performance to take place?
  • What is the current date?
  • How much time do the PCs have to prepare?
  • How much time do the PCs have to complete the mission?
  • How long is the performance supposed to last?

Where

  • What nation is national leader a leader of?
  • Are the PCs from the same nation or a different one?
  • Is the PCs employer from the same nation or a different one?
  • If different, what nation?
  • Is it the same nation as the PCs?
  • Where is the compound located?
  • Where is the performance supposed to take place?
  • What is the adventure’s starting location?
  • What is it’s ending location?
  • What other important locations might be important?
  • What are the languages, customs, and practices of the entertainers? Are they different from the PCs?

Why

  • Why do the PCs need to be the ones to go on this mission (there should be a reason beyond ‘they’re the PCs’)?
  • Why did the national leader hire these entertainers?
  • Why is (s)he holding this performance (what’s the occasion)?
  • Why is this mission taking place? (Why does the employer want the compound infiltrated?)
  • Do the PCs know why?
  • Why should the PCs go?
  • Why are the entertainers taking this job?

How

  • How are the PCs going to fit in with the entertainers?
  • How might they prepare for this mission?
  • How might they succeed?
  • How might they fail?
  • How are the entertainers going to perform?

Most of the time, you’ll be creating an adventure for an established campaign or you’ll at least have an idea of the kind of setting you’re going to use this in. Since we’re creating an adventure from scratch, we need to decide some additional details, such as what genre we’re going to create this adventure for. The seed itself seems imply a science fiction, superhero, modern day, or cyberpunk-style setting. Since I want to show you that you can adapt adventure seeds that may not seem to be a perfect fit at first, let’s not use any of those. I’m going to set this in a “standard” high-fantasy genre.

Next time we’ll begin answering the questions.

[Photo courtesy of Horia Varlan via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0].

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Step By Step: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas, part 2

Posted on 17 November 2010 | Leave a comment

There are basic steps to creating an adventure from the adventure seed:

  • Read the seed
  • Write down questions
  • Answer your questions
  • Pull out events from the questions
  • Put the events into a possible order
  • Determine the outcome of success or failure

We’ll go over these steps in detail in the next post(s), where I’ll provide some examples to make things much clearer.

One note here: The adventure seed is just a tool to jump start your creativity. If, in the course of developing your adventure, you find that your plot bears no resemblance whatsoever to the seed you started with, that’s okay. As long as you’re happy with what you’ve created and you think your players will be too, go with what you’ve written. There are no adventure police to keep you on the straight and narrow. (At least when you’re running for your own group, this is true. Published adventures can be another story).

[Photo courtesy of pj_vanf via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0]

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And *Then* What Happened?: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas

Posted on 11 November 2010 | 1 comment

Okay, now what? Has this happened to you: you’ve seen something that looks intriguing in a list of adventure ideas (often called “adventure seeds”), you’d love to use in your game, but you have no idea how to actually build an adventure from it? If so, you’re not alone.

The biggest trouble many GMs have is “What comes next?” Okay, you’ve got the start of an adventure, but what happens from there? How much information do you need to create before you present your idea to your players? That depends on your players.

You could take the seed and present it to your group as is. If you’ve got a really imaginative group, they’ll take it from there, coming up with a plot that you could never have thought of in your wildest dreams and having the time of their lives doing it. I’ve been lucky enough two have had not one, but two groups that were like this. All I had to do was drop an idea and they’d pick it up and run with it.

The upside of doing this is that you don’t have to do a lot of preparation and the players will take care of the “what comes next” problem all by themselves. The big down side is that you have to think fast on your feet, because you’re going to have make up NPCs, locations, and rewards (just to name a few things) on the spot. And you have to keep track of what you’ve told your PCs so the adventure stays internally consistent(Though I must admit, my groups know I run by the “seat of my pants” a lot of times and are willing to forgive my inconsistencies. If you have a group like this, treasure them, for they’re golden.)

So what do you do if you’re not the kind of GM who can create an eight-hour adventure out of (metaphorically speaking) chewing gum, a pocketknife, and a few leftover pizza crusts? There’s actually a process you can use to create an adventure from the simplest idea. Over the next several posts, I’ll detail each step along the way and illustrate it with several examples.

[Photo courtesy of Selma90 via Flikr Creative Commons 2.0 license]

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Barren Air: Preparing for Creative Downtimes

Posted on 4 November 2010 | 2 comments
Sample catalog card in the card catalog for Ra...
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One of the main questions I (and just about every other writer/artist/creative type) has been asked is “Where do you get your ideas?” I’ve always liked the answer given by Wendy and Richard Pini of Elfquest fame–that they had a six-pack delivered to their doorstep every morning from Ploughkeepsie.

Most of the advice you’ll hear tends to be along the lines of “Ideas are all around you; just keep your eyes open.” While this is true, it’s about as helpful as the advice that to be a success you need to “get more creative.” Get more creative. Great! Why didn’t I think of that?

If you’re like me, your creativity comes in waves. Some days, idea after idea just seems to tumble into my brain, so fast that I can barely keep up with the pace. Other times, I sit down to write or even plan my next game session and … pft. Nothing. Dry as a bone. At those times, I turn to a tool I’ve been using for almost 20 years now … my idea file.

For me, the idea file is an index card box with one idea per card. When an idea hits me, especially if I can’t act on it right now, I write it down on a card and stick it in the box. I usually carry a few cards with me to catch ideas when I’m away from my desk. At the very least, I keep small notebooks and a few pens with me (one set in my purse, one in my game bag–which also subs as a portable office–one in my car) so I can capture an idea before I lose it. Then, when I get home, I transfer those ideas to cards (one idea per card) and stick them in my box.

My box has no order. I’ll often label the idea card with a loose category, such as “adventure idea”, “magazine article”, “blog post”. Not too specific, since that can kill creativity, but enough so that when I look back on it later, can job my memory as what I thinking. I’ve also found it helpful to write a sentence or two about the idea, if that comes to me. The exact nature of the file really doesn’t matter. As long as it works for you and you can find your ideas, it could be anything from a notebook to a computer file. I use index cards because I’m a very tactile person and I like having something I can physically handle.

Then, when the inevitable creative dry spell comes, I can pull an idea out of the box. I like my box because I can pull an idea out at random, or I can look through the cards and find something that inspires me.

When the ideas just don’t come, it’s important to remember that creative dry spells are a part of the natural process. Just because you don’t have any ideas today, doesn’t mean you won’t tomorrow. But when deadlines are coming (whether that’s a article deadline or your next game session) and ideas aren’t, it helps to have something you can pull out of the box to get you along.

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Real Lives: PCs Have Them Too

Posted on 16 October 2010 | 2 comments

It’s absolutely amazing how much time Real Life™ takes up. Between loosing my grandfather, getting married, moving house, and getting kiddo to and from school everyday on a now (thankfully temporary) 40 minute each way commute, life as pretty much eaten up my time for the last couple of months.

Which got me thinking: our PCs have lives, too. I’m sure I’m not the only GM who’s had PCs fall in love and get married. While no characters in any of my games have given birth, I’m sure I’ll run across that before my gaming career is over, too. And death, both PC and NPC is an ever-present risk.

But how often do players (through their characters) take time to mark these events? Every society in the world has special rituals and events to honor these major life changes. Yet in our games, they often get glossed over as “down time” and largely ignored. This is passing up a great roleplaying opportunity.

Wouldn’t it be a great change of pace from a regular game session to actually roleplay through a wedding (particularly if two of the PCs are getting married), a funeral or wake, the birth of a child? It would take some extra preparation on the part of the GM–designing the ritual for example. But you could find descriptions of the particular ceremony in question on line and use that, changing it as needed to fit your game. You’d want to make sure every PC had a part in the ceremony, true.

There are a couple of ways you could approach this, as well. First off, if the ceremony is taking place in the PC’s own culture, you could pass out information the characters would know about the ceremony a week or two ahead of time. Or you could arrange it so the PCs end up having the ceremony in an unknown culture and leave the PCs to bumble along as best they can on their own. Along those lines, a PC could even find themselves married without their knowing it (remember Daniel in the Stargate movie?).  Sure, it’s cliche, but if it’s something that happens once every couple of campaigns or so, it never really looses it’s punch. It’s definitely something that should be an extremely rare event, or your players will get really jaded, really fast. (“I’m married again? What’s she look like this time?”).

You could even make it a really special session by making the ceremony a live-action event, even if your group doesn’t normally do live-action. You could have everyone dress the part of their characters and have an in-character party. Depending on your game’s setting and your players’ ambitions, you could even serve food that your characters would have eaten in the game world (or as close to it as possible). You can find all kinds of interesting food by searching on-line for various ethnic recipes and there are a number of sites on-line with medieval and Renaissance European recipes.

Have any of you ever roleplayed a life-changing event in your PCs lives? How did it go and what did you do? Do tell!.

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August Blog Carnival Wrap-Up

Posted on 8 September 2010 | 2 comments

First off, thanks to everyone who contributed to August’s Blog Carnival Teaching the Game. This is my first time hosting the carnival; thanks for making it a success. This post is a little late, but I just got married last week and am only now getting the chance to get back to a regular schedule. We had some great posts this month:

Again, thanks to everyone who participated. I’ll be hosting the January 2011 blog carnival on Worldbuilding, so mark your calendars 😉 .

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Color My World: Painting Miniatures

Posted on 20 August 2010 | 1 comment

Just recently I’ve rediscovered the art of painting miniatures. I’d dabbled with it in high school and again in college, but I was never really happy with my results. At that time, before the Internet, it was difficult to find information on how to paint minis and I was reduced to trial and error, since no one else I knew did it.

Not so anymore. With the Internet, there’s a wealth of mini painting resources available. Here’s some the ones I really like:

  • Brushthralls.com. This is a blog devoted to miniature painting. While it hasn’t been updated since 2009, it’s still has a lot of great articles available.
  • Cool Mini or Not. This is a forum for miniature painters. They have a slew of articles on just about every aspect of painting you can think of.
  • Dr. Faust’s Painting Clinic. Offers a whole slew of painting tutorials from highlights and shading to creating believable flesh tones to basic sculpting.
  • How to Paint Miniatures.com. Just as the name says, this site will take you step-by-step through painting miniatures. Offers both beginning and advanced tutorials.
  • Jenova Project: Tips and Tutorials. Has a variety of painting tutorials, including recipes for creating various skintones.
  • Miniature Mentor. If you like video tutorials, this might be the site for you. They offer both beginning and advanced to tutorials for download and some on DVD for an extra charge. I haven’t tried any of them yet, so I can’t vouch for how good they are.
  • Necromancer Tales Miniatures: Tutorials, How-To, and Tips. Has a variety of tutorials, including several on building great bases for your minis to stand on.
  • Painting Miniatures Figures Made Quick and Easy. While aimed at the miniature wargamer, who wants to turn out whole regiments as quickly as possible, this site is still a great tutorial for the basics, even if your minis are one at a time labors of love.
  • Reaper Miniatures: The Craft. The granddaddy of miniature makers has a whole host of articles on their site. One of my favorites is on how to replace those gigantic swords.
  • The Ultimate Miniature Painting Guide. Offered by Cool Mini or Not, this is a PDF book of 400+ pages. While it could’ve desperately used some good copy editing (there are places I’ve had to guess the author’s meaning), it’s chock full of great mini painting advice, covering everything from preparing your miniature to painting to making bases to photographing your minis. At $10, it’s a book that’d be a steal at twice the price.

[Photo courtesy of dalangalma at Flikr Creative Commons]

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Beyond ‘Fred’: Ancient Egyptian Names

Posted on 13 August 2010 | 1 comment

Sometimes the hardest part of building a character is  coming up with a good name. You can always take a name from Tolkien or other fantasy novels, but you’ve seen those names over and over and you want something a little different, but not way out there. How about an historical name? Or one from a different culture? So far in this series, we’ve covered Roman, Russian, Italian, and Anglo-Saxon names. If none of these suit you, how about an Ancient Egyptian one?

Ancient Egyptian Name Structure

Names in ancient Egypt seen to have been chosen with great care for their meaning. Many contained the name of a god, as well as common words or phrases and could be used by either men or women. In some cases, as needed for identification, a person might be known by two names: one as their formal name and another, which was what they were called most of the time.

As with all posts in this series, the list here isn’t intended to be historically accurate. It’s merely providing suggestions for use with role-playing games. If historical accuracy is important, you’ll want to check your name against reliable historical records.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr, ©isawnyu 2010)

Male Names

  • Abi
  • Ahmose
  • Amenemhet
  • Ahmose
  • Bes
  • Den
  • Djet
  • Hekanakht
  • Heru
  • Horemheb
  • Kamose
  • Menes
  • Metesouphis
  • Nebnefer
  • Neferirkare
  • Padiu
  • Pakamen
  • Pakapu
  • Panhsj
  • Seti
  • Siptah
  • Ti

Female Names

  • Achotep
  • Ahori
  • Amenirdis
  • Beset
  • Cena
  • Henut
  • Hetepet
  • Iutenheb
  • Khentkaus
  • Meritnit
  • Mutemwia
  • Mutnodjmet
  • Naunakht
  • Nefertari
  • Nitocris
  • Nithotep
  • Peseshet
  • Rennefer
  • Sacmis
  • Sekhet
  • Senen
  • Sobkneferu
  • Taiemniut
  • Tawaret

Sources

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Class Is in Session: Running a Convention Teaching Game

Posted on 6 August 2010 | 2 comments

Game conventions are a great place to introduce new players to your favorite system. But running a game designed to teach a new system is a bit differently than running a game for experienced players. For one thing, you can’t assume that the new player knows anything about the system you’re running–even what type of die to use, if any. Also, you’ve somehow got to do a quick over-view of the rules without boring your players to tears and yet also manage to complete your scheduled adventure.

It’s a lot to juggle. Below are some steps to help you successfully pull off a teaching game. These steps don’t have to be limited to convention games; they’re also useful if you’re running a demo at a game shop or even trying to convince your regular group to try that new game you bought and are dying to run.

  1. Always use pre-generated characters. I’ve yet to see a successful teaching game which started with the players creating their characters. I’m sure someone’s done it, but it does make teaching the game much, much harder. With pre-gen characters, not only do you save valuable play time, but you can also plan your adventure around those specific characters.
  2. Create “iconic” characters. Teaching games aren’t the place for off-beat or unusual character ideas. If you use archetypal  (or even cliché) characters, players can spend less time figuring out their motives and more time learning the game itself.
  3. Don’t make your players add. The other good thing about using pre-generated characters is that you can do as much of  the math ahead of time as possible. You want to be able to tell a player to “roll a d20, then add your BAB [marked in large numbers on the character sheet] to it.” As much as possible, try to keep your players from having to add more than two or three numbers together at a time.
  4. Prepare “cheat sheets” or “quickstart” versions of the rules, if the game company doesn’t provide them. I always make a one to two page summary of a game’s basic rules so the players have something they can refer to while playing.
  5. Consider creating character packets. I create an information packet for each character that contains the character sheet, any relevant character background, written descriptions of the character’s powers, and a brief summary of the game’s setting and background. It seems like a lot, but if you limit the background information to its most crucial elements, your players will thank you for putting what they need to know right at their fingertips.
  6. Simplify the mechanics. Strip away anything not absolutely critical. You want new players to get a feel for the system, not bog them down with modifiers and exceptional cases.
  7. Plan to spend the first quarter of the session explaining the game and its basic concepts. Here you want to focus on the essence of the game, not the mechanics. Sure, do a real-quick mechanics run-down (I usually go through the cheat-sheet), but spend most of this time going over the character sheet and game background and answering player questions.
  8. Tell players to hold their questions until after your explanation. If you’ve done a good game introduction, you may find you’ve already answered the players’ questions. This also helps prevent you from getting bogged down in player questions and having time to finish your introduction.
  9. Begin with a bang. Start your adventure with the PCs in the middle of something: they’re in the car on the way to the haunted house; they’re trapped in a burning building; they’ve just been locked in a room with a group of people, one of whom is murderer. Unless you’re running Tales from the Floating Vagabond, try to avoid the “You’re sitting in a bar…” opening.
  10. Do the  math for them. Try to handle as much of the mechanics yourself as possible. You want to give players a feel for the game, not bog them down with situational modifiers. Let the players roll dice, but add the modifiers yourself and describe the results to the player in words, not numbers. Sometimes you need to give the player numbers, but try to serve them with some descriptions as well: “You’re knocked back against the wall as your opponent’s blade rips through your shirt, drawing blood and pinning your sleeve to the wall. Take 8 points of damage.”
  11. Be flexible. Keep an eye on the clock. If your game is running over time, try to bring it to a conclusion, even if it’s not the one you’d originally planned. You may need to improvise scenes or cut some out. Allow the players to ask questions about the game, but try to keep them focused to the adventure at hand.
  12. Get feedback. If you’ve got time after you finish the adventure, ask for player feedback. What did they need the most help with? What game concepts need to be made clearer? Is there anything that should’ve been covered in the introduction that wasn’t. That type of thing. Really listen to what the players say and, if need be, modify your introduction and information packets accordingly.

This steps should help you teach new game systems to players successfully, particularly when you have a short amount of time to do it in, such as at a game convention. Please feel free to leave comments letting me know if I’ve left anything out or need to improve something.

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The Collected Beg, Borrow & Steal Now Available

Posted on 4 August 2010 | Leave a comment

The Collected Beg, Borrow & Steal is a PDF eBook containing the first ten issues of the Beg, Borrow & Steal newsletter. More than just a reprint of the newsletters under one cover, the information in this book has been edited and reformatted to make it easier to read and use. Also included is a new list: “20 Magical Curios” that is unavailable anywhere else. This book contains

  • Campaign Control Journal
  • 14 Last-Minute Tips to Customize a Published Adventure.
  • 20 Magical Curios for Fantasy Games
  • On-line GMing Resources
  • How to Age Paper
  • Game Money
  • 9 Ways to Use PC Dreams
  • Unstick the Stumped with Bibliomancy
  • Tips for Creating Memorable NPCs on the Fly
  • 20 Unusual City Encounters
  • 20 Unusual Wilderness Encounters

For an example, check out the 20 Unusual City Encounters post.  The cost for the eBook is only $7 (US dollars)

You can purchase it by clicking the button below:

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