Oct 22, 2019 by [ "James R. Miller"
]
Categories:
rpgs
Tags:
5e
dnd
homebrew
lets-write-a_module
This blog post will look at distilling our adventure brainstorming down to a single sentence.
This is often the hardest part for me; getting a single sentence that covers the entire adventure is difficult.
Because of this difficulty, I often find it useful to find some inspiration from other adventures, namely the back covers of published products.
Tomb of Annihilation’s back exterior cover has a great example:
A death curse has befallen everyone who’s been raised from the dead. Its victims are rotting away, and all efforts to reverse the decay have failed.
Yes, that’s technically two sentences, but that’s close to what we’re looking for.
Another example, from the back exterior cover of Out of the Abyss:
…the dark elf Gromph Baenre, Archmage of Menzoberranzan, casts a foul spell meant to ignite a magical energy that suffuses the Underdark, and he tears open portals to the demonic Abyss in the process.
Note, I’m intentionally cherry picking parts of the back-cover descriptions that have nothing to do with the players at all. I’m picking examples of what the villains have done or are trying to do. This goes back to our earlier post that said we do not want to prep plots; we want to prep situations.
The point I’m trying to make is this: make your single sentence paint the major “situation” involving your villain.
Here’s a bad example that’s player driven:
The players hunt for a vampire, find him, and kill him.
Instead, try this:
A vampire is feasting on a local village to drown his sorrows regarding his lost love.
While not the most pithy example, note that the second version is villain driven, as opposed to player driven. It’s a given that the players will get involved somehow so we don’t even need to worry about that at this stage yet. But the very specifics of how they get involved will come out at the table, not in your preparation. In later blog posts, we’ll slowly refine the major situation to smaller situations, turn those situations into what you think of as your traditional RPG encounter, and find ways to link them all together.
I turned to my trusty Dungeon Master’s Guide (“DMG”) to roll some dice on the tables to see what kind of villain and therefore major situation we’ll be using. I turned to page 94 of the DMG and rolled a 7 on the Villain’s Scheme table, which is “Revenge” and then I rolled a 1 which is “Avenge a past humiliation or insult”. I then rolled a 20 on the Villain’s Methods table on DMG page 95, which gives us “Warfare” and I rolled a 1 to get “Ambush”.
So, I have a humiliated villain seeking revenge using ambush tactics. I am setting this primarily in a small town, so the humiliating event should likely arise from there, and since the villain is using warfare tactics, he needs some sort of training pre- or post-humiliation.
Here’s a first crack at my single sentence:
A soldier makes a deal with a devil to get revenge after he returns from a long campaign to find his fiancee married to the town’s mayor.
I’m thinking in the back of my mind at this point that the soldier was an experienced soldier with expertise in guerilla warfare, and that the only thing that kept him going through his grueling campaign was the thought of coming home to his sweetheart. But I’m not writing that down now. That’s a later step. At this point, I don’t know if the fiancee thought he was dead or not before moving on. I don’t know yet what the deal with the devil was. I don’t know the scope of the revenge, whether it’s against an entire town, the mayor, or others, and I don’t care at this point.
What we do care about at this point is whether that sentence makes sense. Can we build a series of situations and encounters around it that will let our players have an adventure and some fun?
Next time, we’ll move forward in the snowflake method to expanding that sentence to a summary paragraph.