| 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 | Hero Offended |
| Someone greatly offends the hero, so much so that he'll pursue
his 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 his
ordinary villain activities.) |
| 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 | Divine Retribution |
| Here, the heroes' goal has been to alert the gods that the Master
Villain threatens them or their plans; in the last scenes of the
adventure, as our heroes face an overwhelming enemy force, the
gods bring down their divine retribution on the villain, causing
a massive earthquake, tidal wave, lightning storm, or flood of
monsters. This is all well and good, but the heroes are too close
and must escape the fringe effects of this awesome disaster. A
variant on this is the Natural Disaster. No gods are actually
involved, but the Master Villain has been tampering with the
delicate forces of nature. He may, for instance, have been
powering his master spell with the energies of a volcano. When
the heroes attack the scene of his spellcasting, the spell goes
out of control and so does the volcano. The villain is consumed
in the eruption and the heroes must escape or be consumed
themselves. |
| 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 | Tavern/Inn |
| This is a classic fantasy setting, the residence of travelling
heroes and the home of the tavern brawl. |
| Specific Setting II | Catacombs |
| These can be catacombs beneath a living city or a ruined one;
they can be long-forgotten or still in use. |
| Master Villain | Advance Agent |
| This villain is the vanguard of some sort of invastion; often, he
is trying to open up a portal to a dimension full of trapped
demons and evil gods. |
| Minor Villain I | Moronic Muscleman |
| This fellow is a huge, powerful monster of a fighter. His job is
to smash anything the villain tells him to smash. He does that
very well, but don't ask him to do any thinking; he has no time
for such brainy stuff. |
| 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 | Government Observer |
| For some reason, the heroes' ruler wants one of his own people
accompanying them. Whatever the reason, the heroes are now stuck
with a haughty, self-important royal observer, an expert in
(probably) military tactics or espionage. He continually offers
unwanted advice and tends to get the heroes into trouble by
pulling rank whenever he's not satisfied. |
| Monster Encounter | Nocturnal Predator |
| This is a classic monster encounter; the arrival of a hungry
carnivore in the middle of the night. Usually, this attack
happens to heroes camping between villages or out in the deep
wilderness; a wild animal, attracted by food odors (from the
heroes' campfire or from the heroes themselves) sneaks in for a
bite. |
| Character Encounter | Old Friend at the Wrong Time |
| When the heroes are trying to sneak through a guardpost, citadel,
or city where they can't afford to be recognized, one of the
characters' old friends recognizes him and loudly renews their
acquaintance in full view of the guards looking for the
characters. This usually leads to an exciting chase as the heroes
must escape. |
| Deathtrap | Pit and the Pendulum |
| Actually, we're applying this term to any of many time-delay
deathtraps. In this sort of trap, the villains capture the heroes
and place them in a trap which will soon kill them -- it operates
on a delay, often based on a timing device or a burning fuse. |
| 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, labrynthine, treacherous catacombs. |
| Omen/Prophesy | Birthmark |
| One of the heroes has a birthmark that pertains to the adventure
in some way. He may have a birthmark identical to some NPC -- for
instance, some person endangered by the Master Villain. This
mystery can give the hero his reason to become involved.
Alternatively, his birthmark may mark him as a hero fulfilling
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 | 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 Quandry | Honor Quandry |
| 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 | 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 | Mission is a Ruse |
| In the course of their adventuring, the heroes discover they have
been tricked into performing a mission which helps the Master
Villain. |
Based on tables from the
Dungeon Master's Design Kit by TSR, Inc.