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How long should an adventure be?   Bilbo once asked, “Don’t adventures ever have an end?” This was likely his unfortunate response to playing the original Dungeons and Dragons game module, Temple of Elemental Evil (First Edition, AD&D, TSR Inc, 1985). Nothing against that grand and well-read and never-finished adventure, other than it is long…really long; totally devoid of much variation other than the a-z roster of things you will kill and rob. This is a classic example of what we now call “grinding” games. Grinding, or the act of playing to get stronger so that someday the game can be enjoyed, is usually a video game issue. In this case, it is so that you don’t have to enter another room with an illogical set of adversaries, who are totally unaware that you slaughtered their buddies in the last room.   So then, is it really about length, or is it about continuity of content and variation of encounters that determines what a good adventure looks like? I would opine that an adventure can be one page and still be too long, or one thousand and still not belong enough. Think about the one-page example, can’t be that bad,

Scripted vs Procedurally Generated Adventures   Ahhhh, the age-old debate.. a scripted but decision-limited adventure or a procedurally generated, fully sandbox but sometimes senseless adventure? Those purists from back in the day might harken back to the murder hobo days of their youth. Where it did not matter that the monsters in the next room made no sense (shark in a dungeon) and tended to ignore the death cries of the ones you murdered in this room. The days of wandering monster tables that made things feel more like playing the first Diablo or Doom, rather than the story of a character’s life.   This is offset by a view that everything should mean something, and the goal is to get to the end of the adventure and achieve something meaningful. A process where the party strives to make “the right choices” and where murderhobo-ing is both discouraged and counterproductive. A process where merely choosing whether to walk down a hallway might actually be out of your hands, and where you are along for the ride rather than driving the bus.   Which is better? Honestly, neither, and both.   That is to say that both have their place in

  Why Every Hero Must Die…or…Why Never Buying Underwear is a Good Thing.   In a world of healing surges, resurrections, spare bodies, and immortals, death for a Player Character is a pretty rare event. Things were not always this way. When I started playing, we tended to run several characters, as some would end up getting eaten, killed, or (in some systems) institutionalized. In fact, a decade before I found my first boxed set of limitless fantasy, players would attend competitions with dozens of character sheets and even more hirelings to go into meat grinder dungeons where no one would come out, but those who died last got the prize. Make no mistake, this was a shit way to game, but you have to start somewhere. These were the early days, and role-playing was just beginning to be about stories and less about wargaming. It was the days of Chainmail and the White Box sets that you needed someone to teach you how to use, rather than learn from the material itself. These were days when you did not really invest in your character, as they were not going to be around long anyway.   Fast-forward to the 1990s,

Research and Adventure Writing   I have been writing and running adventures in various forms and systems since 1983. Admittedly, my initial adventures at the age of 7 or so were severely lacking in plot, background, originality, depth, and ink in many cases; what are you going to do? As we all do, I went through various phases of development until, in my late 30s, I found myself spending 4-10 hours prepping for a game session that would, for all intents and purposes, last for 2-3 hours with 1-1.5 hours actual game time. This is about average, and is not out of the ordinary for a Game Master who wants the story to flow properly and to ensure that the suspended reality that is role playing is not interrupted by someone asking the name of an insignificant non-player character (filler) and me stuttering and making shit up; proving that they can now ignore the poor fellow as he is insignificant.   Now that I write these professionally for others, the need to cut down their prep time means a lot of studying for me. In most cases, fantasy or horror games pull from the collected zeitgeist that is mythology (real

Adventure Flow Mapping, or “Avoiding Supernatural Railroading”   Today, the initial draft of the Adventure Flow Map of the upcoming adventure, Tears in the Snow, was reviewed. Like most adventures written as a story, it looked like a long hallway with a lot of arches and two doors. The choices appeared to be whether to start the adventure or not, and whether or not to die. This is completely normal, and after about eight grueling hours of what-iffing and why-notting, an appropriately convoluted chain of events that allowed for free will grew.   If this had not been done, the party involved would have been subject to what is known as “supernatural railroading,” or forcing the party down a path with little in the way of free will. In a few cases, I use this “railroading” as a game mechanism (Old Man of the Woods being the greatest act of railroading I have ever committed to paper), as it also feels like they are prisoners to the events, but it is a very rich dessert that must be eaten sparingly, or the players will be sick of it.   Adventure flow mapping turns linear stories into more of a sandbox

High and Low: The Magic Problem.   Magic is a huge problem in fantasy horror writing and adventures. It’s as much of a problem as the “murder hobo” lifestyle that the RPG industry has had since its early conception, i.e. “why are we doing this if we are the good guys?” J.R.R Tolkien, for all of his use of wizards and elves, used it sparingly, and I would opine that this added to his world in its absence. If his characters could have just “magicked” their way out of things, then his stories would not have been stories at all.   This goes double for any world where you want horror to be a factor. In a world where raising your long-deceased butler from the dead to get your housework done is a thing, the dead are no longer out of the ordinary, and magic is mundane. In an adventure where the party discusses the difference between the various types of monsters and what magical gewgaws and spells are needed to overcome them, like a mechanic discussing the finer points of the socket wrench, detracts from the “unknown” that must be present for horror to work. In essence, if everything

Crafting Doom – Making Normal Horrible A big part of horror adventure writing is designing a doom that is both horrific and sourced from the mundane. A cuckoo clock that Grandma used to wind, but the clock stopped when she died; so the victim winds it to find that they must do so forever, or some unfathomable doom comes for them. Sometimes the clock brings Grandma back, and the family is held hostage by the creature masquerading as Grandma. These are good examples, but they miss the mark. No, the clock must actively work against your trying to wind it by disappearing or by forcing you into semi-realities based upon moving iconography, then kill you if you don’t wind it. Or…Grandma does not just come back as a rotting aberration, but she treats your 40-year-old self and a small child, and the real monster begins to show when you don’t play along. These are closer, but again don’t convey true horror to the player. Better the clock saps your capabilities based upon the time of day or night when it begins to slow, so that failures in tests begin to accrue, or your character’s ability to sing along with grandma’s

System Neutral? By Kirk Kahoe   Many will ask “why?” Why suffer in this way and condemn yourself to the never-ending hell of confusion and statistical non-conformity? The answer is, I like a lot of game systems and prefer to be able to add my adventures to any system campaign that I happen to be running in whatever system they are running in. I have done this for over 30 years, with several groups running the same adventure in different systems and with similar statistical outcomes.   The trick to this lies in having an accurate system-to-system conversion process and aiming for the specific target audience’s success percentage. In the former case, this became terribly easy when Excel became easy to use, and for the latter, it is totally based on the type of campaign played. For high fantasy with godlike intervention and more wizards on the corner than coffee houses in an artists’ district, the target is usually 65%. For grim and dark fantasy with realistic outcomes, 50% is a good starting target. For horror, things take a turn for the worse, and I tend to aim for 45% at the beginning and then 35% toward the end to