Adventure Cookbook: An Adventure Outline for ANY Fantasy RPG
A new short series for easy campaign creation.
Creating an entire, well-designed, and well-thought-out adventure for your favorite Roleplaying game is a lot of fun. With that fun, comes hours of dedicated writing, cramped hands, and blank stares at the paper or screen. Well, with this powerful outline, an “Adventure Cookbook” will give you all the ingredients of a unique adventure or campaign. All you have to do is fill it in with NPC and location names of your unique world. Then top it off with a few monsters and you’re ready to roll. If you enjoy this outline, you check out the tables this outline is based on in the Dungeon Master's Design Kit by TSR, Inc., and create your own inspiring outlines.
Theme: Action/Adventure
This is the most common and straightforward sort of adventure there is. In the Action/Adventure scenario, you present your characters with a task and then confront them with obstacles to overcome in order to accomplish the task successfully.
Goal: Protect Endangered NPC(s)
One or more NPCs are in danger, and the characters must protect them. They might be doing this for a reward, or because one or more of the NPCs is a friend or relative of the character. You need to decide what the characters are protecting the NPCs from. The NPC might be a wealthy or powerful person being sought by assassins or kidnappers. The NPC might be a whole village of peasants who are being terrorized by a bandit chieftain.
Story Hook: Hero Offended
Someone greatly offends the hero, so much so that they'll pursue their offender right into the adventure. (Note that this usually means that the offender is a minion of the Master Villain. You'll have to decide whether the minion offended the hero precisely to bring him into the adventure or just as a side-effect of their ordinary villain activities.)
Plot: Series of Villains
This is a very dramatic plot, and very well-suited to fantasy campaigns. In it, the heroes have undertaken a quest, usually the finding and defeat of the Master Villain. They may have to travel to his citadel or head off in another direction to find some artifact capable of defeating him, or run away from pursuing villains until they can figure out what's going on. All along their route, they are set upon by villains -- each villain has a name and distinct personality, and each encounter is life-or-death for the heroes and villains; the villain never escapes to safety if the tide turns against him, he fights unto death.
Climax: Prevented Deed
Here, the heroes have been defeated -- captured by the Master Villain, or so thoroughly cut up by his minions that all believe them to be dead. And the heroes have learned, from the bragging of the villain, loose talk of his minions, or examination of clues, what is the crucial event of his master plan. In any case, the battered and bruised heroes must race to this site and have their final confrontation with the villain, bursting in on him and his minions just as the knife or final word or key are poised, and prevent the awful deed from taking place -- and, incidentally, defeat the master villain and minions who beat them previously.
General Setting: Torturous Terrain
The adventure takes place in some sort of unsettled, uncivilized, dangerous terrain; in action stories, the desert and jungle work best; choose one of those two or decide on a setting that is similarly dangerous and exotic.
Specific Setting I: Legendary Forest
This classic adventure site is the sometimes dark and fearsome, sometimes light and cheerful, always magical and incomprehensible forest inhabited by the oldest elven tribes and most terrifying monsters.
Master Villain: God of Chance
Here you have two options. This Master Villain could be a real entity -- an actual god of mischief or silliness, who has intruded into the heroes' lives to cause chaos and have fun. Alternatively, this "villain" could actually be pure chance: The heroes are having a series of unrelated, accidental encounters which cause them fits. No real single villain is involved, although initially, it looks as though there is.
Minor Villain I: Childhood Friend with a Dark Secret
This Minor Villain is like the character of the same name from the Allies and Neutrals section. However, the heroes find out early on that he's really working for the Master Villain. He may not wish to be helping the villains; his family may be held hostage, or he may just be too frightened of the villain or otherwise weak-willed to refuse. Alternatively, he could actually be evil now.
Minor Villain II: Lovable Rogue
This character is like the Master Villain of the same name, except that he has no minions of his own and serves at someone else's bidding. However, he's very independent, not always working in his employer's best interests; he often makes fun of the Master Villain's pretensions and may suffer that villain's retaliation because of it.
Ally/Neutral: Absent-Minded Expert
The characters find they need an expert in some fields -- pottery, alchemy, whatever -- but all they can find is a somewhat daffy and absent-minded master of that subject. He's useful when around his subject matter, but otherwise absent-minded, incautious, in frequent need of rescuing, etc.
Monster Encounter: Beast Amok
Sometimes when the heroes are in a village or city, an animal, probably an otherwise tame or captured beast, is set loose by the villain's minions or driven mad by the Master Villain. The beast goes berserk in the crowds; if the heroes aren't inclined to capture or kill it, it goes after them.
Character Encounter: Inquisitive Official
Some local authority has noticed the characters' presence and it makes her curious. She snoops around asking questions all the time. She may be a city guardsman or special agent of the ruler, but (functionally) she's a police lieutenant, asking the wrong questions at the wrong time; the heroes have to work around her, sneaking where normally they'd be able to work in the open.
Greetings and well-met adventurer! Are you prepared to embark on a fantastic journey to lands unknown?Role-playing games are designed to transport us to a world of fantasy and adventure. Through shared storytelling and world-building, players and their characters set out to explore exotic locations, fascinating people, and solve complex puzzles.
Deathtrap: Mutually Assured Destruction
In this very nasty deathtrap, the heroes are bound up in such a manner that any one of them may get free of his bonds -- but when he does, all his friends perish. Obviously, the heroes' task is to find some way for everyone to get out alive. Perhaps an intricate series of cooperative rope-cutting will defuse the trap; perhaps a coordinated maneuver will get everyone free as the trap is being sprung.
Chase: Special Terrain
You can make any chase more memorable by having it take place in a setting to which it is utterly unsuited. For instance, horse chases are fine and dramatic when they take place through the forest, out in the open plains, or along a road -- but they become diabolical when they take place inside the Royal Palace or in dangerous, labyrinthine, treacherous catacombs.
Omen/Prophecy: Hero Fulfills Prophecy
This is the most useful sort of prophecy. In the early part of the adventure, one of the heroes discovers that he fulfilled some ancient prophecy.
Secret Weakness: Element
The Master Villain can be banished, dispelled, killed, or otherwise defeated by some element or item. The Master Villain tries to get rid of all the examples of this element in his vicinity; he doesn't let his minions carry it or bring it into his presence. But he's not stupid; he doesn't announce to the world what his weakness is. He tries to hide his concern within another command. If he's allergic to red roses, for instance, he orders all "things of beauty" destroyed within miles of his abode.
Special Condition: Time Limit
Finally, the most obvious condition to place on an adventure is to give it a time limit. If the Master Villain is going to conclude his evil spell in only three days, and his citadel is three hard days' riding away, then the heroes are going to be on the go all throughout the adventure -- with little time to rest, plan, gather allies, or anything except get to where they're going.
Moral Quandary: Honor
You want to use this on the character with the most strongly developed sense of personal honor -- someone who has lived all his life by a strict code. Toward the end of the adventure, this character realizes that the best way to defeat the Master Villain is a violation of that code. For instance, the character might be a paladin, who discovers that the only possible way for the heroes to defeat the Master Villain is to sneak up on him and stab him in the back.
Red Herring: Extraneous Details
When giving the heroes details on their enemy -- for instance, details they are learning from investigations and readings -- you can give them just a few details too many. This may prompt the heroes to investigate the "extra" (i.e., irrelevant) details in addition to the relevant ones, thus losing them valuable time and resources.
Cruel Trick: Wanted by the Law
One final complication, one which occurs pretty frequently, is when the heroes are wanted by the law. When they're wanted by the law, they have to travel in secret and are very limited in the resources they can acquire.
If you enjoyed this outline, you can pick up the entire book, the Dungeon Master's Design Kit by TSR, Inc., and create your own inspiring outlines.
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