Buy Me a CoffeeRandom Adventure Generator
| 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 chieftan. | |
| Story Hook | Mystery Woman |
| Create an NPC "mystery woman" sure to be fascinating to your hero and have her keep appearing inexplicably in his life. As he becomes interested and investigates her, he keeps stumbling across the villain's plans and becomes inextricably mired in the plot. (For female player-characters, the Mystery Man is just as useful.) | |
| Plot | Event |
| For this plot, choose some sort of event -- a tournament, a holiday, a celebration called by the king, a masked ball, or whatever -- and set the commencement of the Master Villain's plan against that backdrop. | |
| Climax | Bloody Battle |
| This is the best Climax for an adventure involving the clash of mighty armies -- or for any adventure where, toward the end, the Master Villain and a large body of minions confront the heroes and their own troops. This finale is characterized by a monstrous clash between the two forces, with the heroes chewing through the enemy ranks to get at the Master Villain and his elite guards. It's strenuous, exciting, and classically simple. | |
| General Setting | Cosmopolitan City |
| Most of the story takes place in a large, sophisticated city; center the villain's plot and activities around that city. This setting is best suited to adventures involving more people than monsters; most of your villains should be human or demi-human. | |
| Specific Setting I | Legendary Forest |
| This classic adventure site is the sometimes dark and fearsom, sometimes light and cheerful, always magical and incomprehensible forest inhabited by the oldest elven trives and most terrifying monsters. | |
| Specific Setting II | Demi-human Community |
| In wilderness areas, this will be a large community of demi-humans -- elves, dwarves, halflings, whatever -- or intelligent nonhumans such as orcs. If your action is taking place in a city, this could be a hidden community (such as a secret underground dwarf community) or a section of the city inhabited mostly by demi-humans. | |
| Master Villain | Destroyer |
| This villain is like the Corruptor, except that he likes destroying instead of corrupting. He operates like the Conqueror, moving in his armies -- often nonhuman or monstrous armies -- and destroying everything in sight. Again, the Destroyer could easily be an evil god or demon, meaning the heroes wil have to find his weakness in order to thwart his current plan. | |
| Minor Villain I | Single-Minded Soldier |
| This most trustworthy of villain minions is the experienced, competent, persistent soldier -- a field-trained officer who serves the villain with military precision. He is usually encountered in the field as leader of the villain's field operations. He is not encountered directly until the middle of or the latter part of the adventure; until then, the heroes encounter only his subordinates. | |
| Minor Villain II | Misguided Moralist |
| This fellow has been convinced that only by helping the villain achieve the Master Plan can he improve the world. He tends to be encountered all through the adventure's plot, usually escaping from the heroes and taunting them for their wrong thinking. Fortunately, he's no more effective as a villain than he is as a thinker. | |
| 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, incautions, in frequent need of rescuing, etc. | |
| Monster Encounter | Noble Beast |
| With this encounter, the heroes find that they have to capture -- but not injure -- some sort of powerful, noble beast in order to accomplish their mission. For instance, to reach a mountain-top aerie, they must capture pegasi and ride them up to their enemy. | |
| Character Encounter | Blackmailer |
| If the party is pulling a scam, this person knows it and can tell the potential victim; if they're wanted by the authorities, he's willing to alert the authorities that they're here; if they're hiding out from the Master Villain, he's going to tell said villain that they're here; he may have kidnapped one of their favorite NPCs and be holding him for ransom; and so on. | |
| Deathtrap | Animal Pit |
| This is a classic trap of the adventure genre: The heroes (perhaps just one hero) are dropped into a pit filled with dangerous animals -- snakes, lions, bears, whatever. They must either fight the beasts or delay them until they can escape -- climb back out, open a secret door, break down a wall, have a rope lowered by friends above, etc. | |
| 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 | Totem Animal |
| If a hero has an animal which is his totem, he may see the animal engaged in a fight to the death with another animal -- one which, coincidentally, is the totem of one of the villains. How his totem defeats the other -- or is defeated by it -- gives the hero some clues as how to fight his actual opponent when the time comes. | |
| Secret Weakness | Holy Symbol |
| The villain may have the traditional weakness to a specific holy symbol -- but don't choose just an ordinary one. It may be a holly symbol no longer used by the church, or may be some forgotten variation of the current symbol. (For instance, the cross may not work, but a variation -- such as the Roman cross -- might; alternatively, it might have to be a holy symbol which has undergone some unfamiliar ritual.) | |
| 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 | Saving Quandry |
| Finally, another classic quandry puts the heroes in the position of choosing between a grand opportunity to hurt the Master Villain -- or saving the lives of a number of individuals. | |
| Red Herring | Lying Rumor |
| This is the worst and most useful type of red herring -- the interesting rumor which just happens to be false. In adventures of this sort, the best Lying Rumor concerns the Master Villain; it gives the heroes some "important" information about him which later turns out to be useless. | |
| 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 very limited in the resources they can acquire. |
Based upon tables from the Dungeon Master's Design Kit by TSR, Inc.