Adventure Cookbook 2: An Adventure Outline for Any Fantasy RPG
Part two in our Adventure Cookbook Series! If you missed part one, check it out here!
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.
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: Escape
Early in the adventure, the heroes are captured. The remainder of the adventure consists of them learning enough so that they can escape. They have to get to know their fellow prisoners, learn the prison's routine, inventory their possessions, acquire other possessions they need, plan an escape, and execute it.
Story Hook: Mistaken Identity
The hero could be mistaken by one villain for another villain involved in the master plot. This has good comic potential if the hero and missing villain are in fact so similar that no one can tell them apart. (This is even more fun if they turn out to be long-lost twins.)
Plot: Accumulation of Elements
In this sort of plot, the heroes have to go from place to place -- perhaps covering very little area like a city, perhaps roaming the known world -- and accumulate elements to be used against the Master Villain. These elements may be clues, pieces of an artifact, evidence, or allies.
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 is poised, and prevent the awful deed from taking place -- and, incidentally, defeat the master villain and minions who beat them previously.
General Setting: Exotic Distant Land
The adventure will take the heroes to some fascinating and exotic distant country, where they'll have to cope with new customs, monsters unfamiliar to them, and very colorful NPC encounters; choose one of the more fascinating foreign lands from your campaign world.
Specific Setting I: Ruins
These can be the ruins of some ancient civilization, an abandoned temple or castle, incomprehensible blocks of stone arranged by ancient gods, etc. They can be magical or normal, inhabited by normal animals or by monsters, centers of magic or just tumbled-down buildings.
Specific Setting II: 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: Lovable Rogue
This Master Villain isn't really evil -- he's just chaotic and fun. Cheerful bandits in the forest who rob from the rich and give to the poor, singing and rope-swinging pirate kings, and romantic, sophisticated duellists all belong to the category of the Lovable Rogue. Often, the Rogue will not be behind the nastiness the heroes are encountering; he may be in competition with them for the prize they're seeking. Often the heroes and the Rogue (and his minions) will have to team up to succeed at their task. Just as often, the Rogue will try to get away with the whole treasure.
Minor Villain I: Avenger
This character is much like the Master Villain of the same name, but he's not in charge of all this villainy, and he's definitely an enemy of one of the player-characters. You'll have to decide who he is and why he hates one of the heroes; he could be anything from a recurring villain to someone who simply lost a fight to the hero once.
Minor Villain II: Mistress with a Heart of Gold
This character is much like the "Lover or Daughter of Villain" type of Mystery Woman from the Story Hooks section. In this case, she usually accompanies the Master Villain, but sometimes goes on missions of her own, where she runs into and develops affection for one of the player-characters.
Ally/Neutral: Gibbering Madman
Some poor wretch blundered into part of the master villain's plan and saw too much. What he saw drove him crazy. He gibbers and jabbers, occasionally uttering clues about what he's seen, but just isn't coherent. He knows enough that the heroes will need to take him along to comment on what they're encountering, though, so he can't just be met and forgotten.
Monster Encounter: Foreshadowing Monster
With this monster encounter, combat may not be necessary. This monster encounter exists to alert the characters to the fact that something unusual is going on, a foreshadowing of their upcoming conflicts with the Master Villain.
Character Encounter: Mean Drunk
The Mean Drunk works much like the Belligerent Soldier except that he's not as tough, is of course drunk, and is usually accompanied by other Mean Drunks.
Deathtrap: Demolition Zone
In this classic deathtrap, the heroes are placed (usually bound and weaponless) in some building or area just as it's due to be destroyed.
Chase: Horseback
This is a relatively short chase -- it only needs to go on for a mile or so before even the best horses are winded. If it goes on longer than that, the horses may collapse and perhaps die.
Omen/Prophesy: 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 fulfills some ancient prophecy.
Secret Weakness: Secret Embarrassment
Finally, the villain may have some aberration or secret shame that will force him to flee when he is confronted with it. It could be something as simple as the fact that his nose is too big, or that he is a small and nebbishly wizard pretending to be some vast, powerful demonic power. When his shame is revealed, he is too humiliated to continue; this is a good option for comedy adventures.
Special Condition Omnipresent Observer
If a wizard, demigod or god has forced the heroes to undertake this quest, he may be with them continually -- in spirit. He can't help them, but does magically watch everything they do. And when they do something he doesn't like, he tells them about it -- loudly and nastily. (This is distressing when they're trying to break into a fortress or sneak through enemy lines.)
Moral Quandry: Ally Quandry
You set up the situation so that the heroes have a good chance at defeating the Master Villain if they get the aid of two specific individuals, probably experts in fields relating to the villains' activities. But the two experts hate one another and refuse to work together, even if it costs them their world.
Red Herring: False Path to the Artifact
Once again, if the heroes have had too easy a time finding the artifact capable of destroying the villain, give them trouble this way: When they get to the place where the artifact is supposed to be contained, they find the coffer or chamber or whatever empty, obviously looted by robbers, who have scrawled such remarks as "Kelrog was here!" upon the walls.
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.
Based upon tables from the Dungeon Master's Design Kit by TSR, Inc.
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