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 | Missing Memories |
| One or more of the PCs wakes up with no memory of the recent past, and now they find themselves in some kind of trouble they don't understand. The PCs must find the reason for the memory lapse, and solve any problems they uncover in the meantime. | |
| 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 | Chase to Ground |
| First, you have the Heroes Chasing the Villain. The villain, after a series of encounters with the heroes, is running to safety, to some place where he can acquire more power, or to somehwere he can accomplish some dread purpose such as assassination or mass murder. The heroes chase him, have to deal with the obstacles he leaves behind, and finally catch up to him before or just as he reaches his goal. Here, we have the final duel between the villains forces and the heroes. Second, you have the Villain Chasing the Heroes. Often, in a story like this, the heroes have found out how to defeat the villain -- such as getting to a particular temple and conducting a particular ritual. The villain chases them all through their quest, catching up to them just as they're commenciing their ritual; they must, with heroic effort, conclude the ritual while suffering his attacks. Third, you have the Master Villain's Sudden Escape Attempt. This takes place in adventures where the Master Villain's identity is unknown until the end. His identity is revealed and he makes a sudden bolt for freedom; the heroes give chase. This usually results in a dangerous foot-chase through nasty terrain -- such as across rooftops, through the dungeons, or across an active battlefield. | |
| General Setting | Hero's Home Town |
| The action takes the heroes back to the home territory of one of them. Note that this usually means that this hero's family or old friends are deeply involved in the adventure. | |
| Specific Setting I | Lost City |
| This is the remnant of some lost civilization or expedition, still thriving in some forgotten corner of the world. Remnants of lost civilizations can even inhabit cavern systems beneath campaign cities, preying on the above-worlders for their goods, slaves, and sacrifices. | |
| Specific Setting II | Mansion of a Lord |
| This can be the home of a villain -- the characters may have to break in and rescue someone or steal evidence, or break out if they've been captured -- or of a heroic ally, in which case it may be used as the headquarters for the heroes' plans and activities. | |
| 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 in 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 | 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. | |
| Minor Villain II | 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. | |
| Ally/Neutral | Talkative Barkeep |
| This classic encounter is the garrulous innkeeper who has information the characters want; trouble is, they'll have to bribe him to get it, or agree to stay at his inn, or buy a lavish meal, or listen to his incessant stories about his career in the army, or whatever. | |
| 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | Love |
| The Master Villain possesses the "weakness" of genuine affection or love -- probably for some NPC, though it could be very intriguing if the object of his affections is a player-character. The heroes can then defeat the villain by holding his loved one hostage, or proving that his loved one will be seriously harmed, betrayed, or killed if the villain keeps up with his activity. | |
| 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 | 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 | Villain Accompanies Party |
| In this distressing situation, the Master Villain, in disguise or his secret identity, accompanies the heroes for much of their quest. He gets to know them, learns their strengths and weaknesses, learns their plans, and just as soon as it's most efficient for him, he thwarts their current plans and leaves. Alternatively, the Master Villain might be with the heroes all along, up to the very end; the heroes know that one of their companions is the villain, and the whole thrust of the story is finding out who he is. This is the whole purpose of most Mystery-type adventures. |
Based upon tables from the Dungeon Master's Design Kit by TSR, Inc.