| Theme | Comedy |
| This adventure is fun for fun's sake. Its basic purpose is to
provide humorous entertainment with a minimum of actual danger or
tragedy. |
| Goal | Encounter Old Villain |
| If your campaign has a villain who shows up again and again to
bedevil the heroes, then this is an episode featuring that
villain. You might wish to roll once again on this section to see
what the villain's goal is. |
| Story Hook | Pressing Buttons |
| As a general story-hook approach, think about the
player-character -- his personal goals and his personal dislikes.
If the hero is pursuing a specific goal, you have one of the
minor villains, as a side-effect of the villain's master plan,
thwart the hero's latest step towards that goal. Alternatively,
if there's something the hero truly hates to see, have it happen
-- and have the villains be responsible. |
| 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 | 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 | 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. |
| Specific Setting II | Shacktown of the Oppressed |
| Part of the action centers around the tenements or shacks of the
worst part of town; perhaps an allied NPC lives here or the
characters are fugitives hiding out in the nasty part of town. |
| Master Villain | Organizer |
| This Master Villain is the head of the local criminal syndicate
-- the Thieve's Guild or slaver ring, for instance. He's
cold-hearted and unsympathetic, and human life means nothing to
him. He employs assassins and musclemen against the heroes, and
can only be reasoned with when it's going to profit him more to
cooperate with the heroes than kill them. |
| Minor Villain I | 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. |
| Minor Villain II | Snivelling Vizier |
| The Vizier is a throne-room villain. Functionally, he's rather
like the Hard-Eyed Advisor, offering tactics and advice to his
master; but he's an ooily, sleazy, cowardly sycophant. He's
usually brilliant in his field of advice but has no combat
abilities. |
| Ally/Neutral | Inquisitive Chronicler |
| This character is a historian who wishes to accompany the heroes
to record their exploits. He constantly pries into the heroes'
backgrounds, asking questions that are none of his business, as
the adventure continues. |
| 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 | Thief |
| At some point in their adventure, the heroes have a run-in with
thieves. |
| Deathtrap | Avalanche |
| This is an outdoors trap. Some time when the heroes are in a
narrow canyon or gorge, or are on a snow-covered mountain, their
enemies can arrange to dump an avalanche upon them (rocks and
boulders in the first instance, snow in the second). |
| Chase | Endurance |
| The Endurance Chase is not some sort of climactic chase -- it's a
rugged, tiring, persistent pursuit that tests the characters to
their limits. In this chase, the heroes and villains are pursuing
one another across a lot of territory and they're not catching up
with one another very fast. This may be a horseback pursuit
across a hundred miles of savannah, a camel chase across several
days' worth of desert, or a chase across arctic tundra. |
| Omen/Prophesy | Comet's Progress |
| Events during the adventure may be enlivened by a large and
menacing comet which appears in the night sky for several days
during the scenario; the locals take it for an omen of doom. The
comet may be the result of magic being used by the Master
Villain, or the comet's appearance can pertain to an old legend
involving the Master Villain. |
| 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 | Coping with a Curse |
| The curse might be making the hero progressively uglier, might be
draining out his life-force (he's losing experience which will be
retruned if he succeeds), or might be making him progressively
insane. Each day, as he sees his reflection in a mirror or pond
or fountain, he'll know himself to be less than he used to be. |
| Moral Quandry | Friend Quandry |
| At a critical point in the story, one of the campaign's NPCs
makes an impossible demand of one of the heroes. |
| 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 | 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.