Posts from July 2009

Last night, I ran a new adventure for my ongoing Warhammer campaign.

About a week before a new adventure, I start e-mailing the various members of my gaming group about the upcoming game session, asking them about the things they want their characters to do. I hate railroading. Hate it. So I prefer to let the players take the lead. Once the campaign is up and running, I prefer to let them grab the story elements that they like and determine the initial course of each adventure. If they don’t want to explore a castle, but would instead prefer to investigate the sewers, that’s fine. I’ll prep an adventure that at least starts at the sewers … and then I’ll take more authority over what happens from there.

Freedom isn’t always a good thing, though.

Before the adventure began, the players had reached the consensus that it was about time to finally find out what an evil nobleman and his creepy retinue were up to. Over the course of the past few adventures, they’d gotten several clues directly and indirectly linking this nobleman to a number of weird events occurring in the city of Kislev. The plan was to do a little reconnaissance around the manor house, figure out a way to get someone invited inside the manor house for some more snooping, and then depending on what they found, break into the manor house later that evening to find evidence of the nobleman’s nefarious plans.

So that was the adventure I prepped. No problem.

Five minutes after we got started, though … they decided that the plan was (1) premature, since they still didn’t have a clear idea of what they were looking for (they wanted evidence of the nobleman’s bad deeds, but weren’t sure what that would be), and (2) asking for more trouble that it might be worth if they got caught. (And I can’t say I fault them on their logic!) So the plan was completely abandoned, and they decided to do other things instead.

And absolutely nothing I had prepped had anything to do with the new plans they wanted to try instead.

What to do?

Fortunately, I’ve gamed with these guys a long time. So I had some ideas.

Here’s a few of them, in case you ever find yourself as a game master in a similar situation:

Mapping. No, not a literal map, but something equally helpful. Whenever I’m writing an adventure idea for a campaign, I create what I call a road map – namely, the logical sequence of where certain adventures may lead. If I have the players investigating a warren of rat-men in the sewers, I know that at some point they should find clues to the wherebouts of the Gray Seer that leads the rat-men, or a bigger warren, or the giant warpfire engine being constructed beneath the city. In other words, whenever the players decide to pick up the threads of an adventure that they’ve left fallow for a while (“Hey, remember that coded map we found in the rat-men’s lair? Maybe we should find a sage who can help us decipher it!), I already know where that adventure thread might lead.

Strong supporting characters. I tend to pre-populate my campaign settings with a number of strong NPCs. For each one, I give a quick breakdown of their personality, of their goals and agendas, and most importantly, how they link to each adventure thread I’ve already put in place. (As for the NPCs I make on the fly – I’m looking at you, hundreds of barkeeps I’ve created over the years! – each one gets a similar treatment right after an adventure ends, while the details of the most recent adventure is fresh in my head.) Players will latch onto the words of the most obscure NPCs sometimes, for whatever the reason, so I like being prepared to have those NPCs steer the adventure back on course, or back towards something I at least can manage better.

Improvise. While a good campaign requires a bit of careful prep work by the game master (in my own humble opinion, anyway), sometimes it’s good to go with the flow and just let things happen. The important thing I’ve found in improvising is letting the players take the lead. Let them determine where the action is going to go. If I’m trying to make stuff up out of whole cloth on the fly, I know a lot of times what I try to do isn’t that strong, or doesn’t really fit the campaign well. On the other hand, if I’m just reacting to what the players try to do … I can adapt the pre-existing campaign ideas that I have to fit their actions. If they talk to a particular NPC, for example, and the conversation starts going a certain way I can tailor the answers to fit the direction I want the adventure to go.

As an example:

(Player: “Have you heard about the people disappearing near the docks?”)

(NPC: “Yes, strange, isn’t it? Most of them seem to have worked for the Serpent’s Breath Trading House.”)

(Player: “Really?”)

And I’ve nudged them closer to investigating the Serpent’s Breath Trading House. If I’d just dropped this information on the players out of the blue, they might follow up on it, or might not. Since they were actively seeking this information in the example above, though, they’re more invested in it, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’ll follow up on the lead. It’s a truism I’ve found throughout my years of gaming – players don’t trust clues that are simply handed to them, but they’ll implicitly follow the ones they think they’ve discovered on their own.

A caveat to improvising: when you improvise, you’re essentially committing to whatever you’re coming up with off the top of your head. It’s hard to take stuff back sometimes. I love to improvise, but a good rule of thumb I’ve found is to simply take your time. Before you decide that the kindly barkeep the player characters have befriended is really an evil cultist, and that’s the hook you’re going to use to get them headed off to fight some other cultists … just take a moment. Actually think “is this something I want to do?” before you go ahead and do it. If the players have befriended the barkeep and this seems totally out-of-character, or if you’d had other plans for how the barkeep might factor later on into the campaign, you might want to stop and think of something else. If not, go for it.

Anyway.

There was a lot of improvising last night, and a lot of picking up dormant adventure threads. And it all worked out pretty well in the end. The players managed to figure out a bunch of mysteries that had been perplexing them for a while, and connected two storylines in the campaign that they previously believed had been totally unrelated. In some ways, we had a lot more fun – and got a lot more accomplished – than if they’d just investigated the manor house.

But when they finally investigate that manor house, I’ll be ready.

I have a whole adventure for it prepped and ready to go.

One the adventures that influenced me the most in becoming a game writer is probably one you’ve never heard of.

It was also written by one of my favorite writers, and one of my best friends.

Both my sister Laura and I played Dungeons & Dragons as kids. Laura was the reason I began playing in the first place. Though Laura doesn’t particularly game much anymore, she’s been one of my favorite people to have at a gaming table during the many years I’ve been playing these things. Much like my late friend Doug, Laura was always well-versed in the rules, able to come up with some fiendishly clever ideas during the course of a game … but she never, ever lost sight of why we were gaming in the first place. Namely, to have fun. And Laura was – and still is – a lot of fun to have at the table.

As kids, we shared a subscription to Dragon Magazine. Sometime it would be a race to get home from school if we thought a new issue magazine would be waiting for us there – after all, the first one to grab it could take their sweet time reading it, while the other person had to wait for an eternity for the other to finish!

In those days, there was no Dungeon Magazine. Adventures popped up sporadically in the pages of Dragon, and as I recall there were a few really good ones in those early issues. Eventually, the featured adventures in Dragon proved to be a popular enough feature to spawn a sister magazine – Dungeon, of course! I remember reading the announcement of Dungeon Magazine’s impending arrival in one of the editorials of Dragon, along with the announcement that the new editors of Dungeon were looking for new writers to create adventures for the magazine.

Even then, I wanted to be a game writer. So I was tremendously excited about this news. An opportunity to write Dungeons & Dragons adventures? Awesome!!! I proceeded to spend a lot of time talking about the adventures I wanted to write, sketching out ideas for the adventures I wanted to write, and coming up with ridiculous over-the-top monsters and traps for the adventures I wanted to write.

One small problem.

I never spent any time writing any actual adventures. Oh, I could talk the talk, but walking the walk … ? Not so much. I liked the idea of being a writer, but then I wasn't putting in the time and the effort needed to become one.

Laura, on the other hand, absconded with the typewriter, and spent a few days actually pondering what the editors of Dungeon Magazine might want. She reasoned – correctly – that everyone submitting adventure ideas would probably be trying to knock themselves out writing the next high-level “Tomb of Horrors”. So she developed an idea for an entry-level AD&D adventure, designed for beginning DMs and players, and wrote a proposal for it. She mailed it off to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

About a month later, she got a letter from TSR … and a phone call from the editor, Roger Moore. Her proposal had been accepted, and they wanted to see the complete adventure.

That adventure became “Lady of the Lake”, which was published in issue #5 of Dungeon.

(For those of you freelancers out there, yes, that does mean Laura succeeded in getting an adventure accepted by a publisher – TSR, no less – on her very first try. You may commence with your gnashing of teeth and frustrated wailing now. I've been doing so for years.)

Laura’s success was vital, I think, to my becoming a publisher freelance writer much later on. Were it not for her success – and being able to see how she accomplished getting an adventure published, not to mention the writing of that very adventure – I think I might still be in that place, talking the talk but not walking the walk, so to speak. If you want to be a writer, you need to write. A lot. You need to make mistakes and learn from them. You need to learn the difference between passive voice and active voice, and why editors go crazy when you use the former instead of the latter. You need to learn about structure, and pacing, and fighting through those moments when you feel all the good words have escaped your grasp.

And that doesn’t happen unless you write.

Laura made it all look surprisingly easy.

I came across “Lady of the Lake” not too long ago. Reading through it was a wonderful trip down memory lane. It reminded me a lot of the games we used to run – much like those old games, “Lady” is more of a sandbox than a dungeon crawl. There’s much adventure to be had in the village of Gydnia, as well as in the forbidding wilderness of the Syzygy Mountains … but there’s no formal structure to the adventure. There’s a point to the adventure (surprisingly, it involves both a Lady and a Lake), but exactly what happens between the beginning and the end is very, very fluid. I found myself surprised by how well it held up, and how well it was written, considering that it was Laura’s first (and only) published adventure!

I’m going to be taking the original adventure over the next few weeks, and updating it for the Pathfinder rules system. My goal is to change as little of the adventure as possible. The words will be Laura’s; only the rules conversions and updates from AD&D to Pathfinder will be my work. This is partly as an experiment to better familiarize myself with the Pathfinder rules, partly to play around with some publishing software … but mostly, to share this adventure with some of you, and to let you all experience the work of a writer I happen to like. When I'm done with it, I'll be posting the final product on this site - free, for anyone who would like to take a look at it.

Much of the success I've had as a freelance writer is due to this adventure ... and to its wonderful writer. So thank you, Laura. Thank you very, very much.

Here’s to a noble Lady indeed.

Last "Lost City"-themed post for awhile, I promise.

There's other good things to discuss soon.

But in the meantime ...

One of the more interesting aspects of Moldvay adventures like “The Lost City” and “Castle Amber” is that they’re dynamic dungeons. By this, I mean the denizens of those dungeons are actively doing stuff, and trying to advance their own purposes and goals before the player characters ever show up.

When the player characters show up in these adventures, they’re partly there to Kill/Loot/Repeat. However, there’s also active, ongoing storylines already happening in the adventures that the players can choose to join, or modify, or ignore. And when they do so, the actions of these very same dungeon denizens also change. Granted, those actions may become the actions found in pretty much every dungeon ever written (“Intruders! Kill them!”), but they also may be more nuanced than that (“Hey, those guys have the Crown of the Ancients! Maybe they’ll trade it for this map to a dragon’s lair …) Having a dynamic dungeon gives the players more options, which is something I always consider to be the mark of a good adventure.

“Castle Amber” opens with one of the strangest examples of a dynamic dungeon, and it’s also one of my favorite openings for an adventure. The player characters enter the castle, ready for a fight … and almost immediately stumble across a boxing match, one being watched by a bunch of drunken nobles (who, incidentally, are also pretty powerful adversaries in a fight!). They invite the player characters to sit down and watch the fight, to bet on it, and even to participate in it (which means some hapless player gets stuck fighting a nasty monster called a demos magen in a bareknuckle brawl). It’s an opening that invites a lot of roleplaying opportunities, and allows the players to potentially learn about other areas of the dungeon, or even to forge some alliances with the strange residents of the castle.

And if they choose instead to treat the room like a standard dungeon crawl and attack everything in it, that works.

And if they are simply bemused by the situation and choose to move further into the castle, ignoring the boxing match completely, that works as well.

The opposite of a dynamic dungeon, of course, is a static one, when monsters simply hang around and wait for years in a single room, fervently hoping that someday a party of adventuring heroes will stumble into their lair so that they can fight them. The most notable offender of this is “Keep on the Borderlands”, although I kind of give that one a pass because it’s meant (I think) to be more of a “Danger Room” for newbie players. That’s where someone new and unfamiliar to the game can take his freshly-rolled magic-user to the nearby kobold lairs, learn some basic tactics (never stand near the front lines, find a good hiding spot when your magic missiles are used up) and head back to the Keep to heal up later.

But in terms of dynamics … c’mon, just look at the Caves of Chaos featured in “Borderlands”. It's awful.

Apparently, there’s a lair of kobolds just a few dozen yards away from the lair of goblins, which is just a few dozen yards away from the lair of orcs, which is just a few dozen yards away from the lair of gnolls, which is just a few dozen yards away from the lair of bugbears … and they all manage to co-exist in some sort of socialist nirvana without trying to kill each other. These various tribes also don’t seem terribly concerned that a bunch of so-called “heroes” from a certain nearby Keep continually slaughter their neighbors, and sit around their own cave lairs waiting to be murdered.

In a dynamic version of “Keep on the Borderlands”, the adventure would probably work like this instead:

• First Encounter: Player characters raid the kobold lairs in the Caves of Chaos.
• Second Encounter: A goblin/hobgoblin/bugbear alliance, alarmed by the genocide of their kobold neighbors, try laying siege to the Keep and the player characters inside it.
• Third Encounter: A gnoll shaman, sensing the opportunity to eliminate the aforementioned goblin/hobgoblin/bugbear alliance, tries to parley with the player characters, offering to help the heroes attack the lairs.

… you get the idea.

The only danger with a dynamic dungeon is that sometimes you can start including too many options, and wind up juggling too many things at the same time. Most dungeons have an overall goal for the player characters to reach – slay the dragon, find the sword, save the princess, and the like. If there’s too many things going on in the dungeon, they become distractions from this main goal, and the adventure loses focus. A good dynamic dungeon may have things going on that do not directly relate to the main goal of the adventure, but in some way, they should tie back there eventually. In “The Lost City”, for example, the player characters may encounter a lot of various factions, and may interact with those factions in a variety of ways … but at the end of the day, the factions all either fear the great Zargon, or want to see Zargon destroyed. Any interaction the player characters have with any of the factions slowly but inevitably point towards the same goal – Zargon is the Big Bad Guy at the bottom of the ziggurat, and he needs to be destroyed.

Just something to keep in mind when writing your next adventure. A little dynamics goes a long way.

I’ll try to keep it in mind as well.