RPG a Day #18 Write

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

Do I write my own adventures? Yep. I’ve talked about this from the other side earlier this month. I like to write my own adventures and supplement them with purchased content. It works best for me. For today though, I think I’ll cover how I start writing an adventure.

My first step is almost always determine the final boss. I want to know where the story is headed and it gives me a guide for what sort of things they’ll have to deal with. Knowing what the boss is lets me know what minions to use, locations to prepare, and types of underling encounters that will help set the stage. I want everything to be a gradual rise in tension to that final encounter.

 Also, the boss may not be the villain of the story. I’ve used the boss encounter as a stepping stone to future adventures or had it under the sway of a physically weaker character. This particular dungeon may only be a stepping stone in the overall villain’s network.

I also think it’s important to point out that the boss might not be a combat encounter. Sometimes the boss is a puzzle, a diplomatic encounter, or a series of emergencies crashing into one another like giant cosmic dominoes.

 A little while ago I wrote an adventure for Star Trek Adventures. The boss set the tone for the entire mission. For this mission I had decided that the “boss” would be a massive unstable wormhole in orbit around a mining colony on an asteroid.  The rift was destabilizing the asteroid and putting the lives of everyone in danger. It was going to be up to the team to evacuate survivors, stop the field generator that was causing the rift, rescue a Klingon scientist who was pinned by rubble, and get their own ship to a safe distance.

After I knew this was the boss encounter for the mission I was able to go in and seed the different things that led up to the final encounter. They were required to host a formal diplomatic dinner for a group of Klingons and Romulans to build rapport with both groups to improve the odds that they’d try and save him. I was going to have them examining an ancient control panel in a hidden section of tunnel that would eventually break down and cause the rift they needed to repair.

The entire adventure was either setting up the end problem, laying out future possible adventures hooks, and giving the group a chance to use their skill and look good doing it. This is why when I write adventures I start with the monster at the end of the book.

I’ll see you tomorrow when I talk about theme.

Until then, stay safe and be well.