Frame: Freeimages.com / Billy Alexander;
Dice Image: Freeimages.com / Armin Mechanist;
Numeral & Compositing: Mike Bourke

I’ve been asked a number of times what advice I have for a beginning GM. This 15-part series is an attempt to answer that question – while throwing in some tips and reminders of the basics for more experienced GMs. This is the first of a trio of articles that will carry this series through it’s half-way mark and beyond.

There have been 140 articles here at Campaign Mastery tagged as relating to “Adventure Creation”.

That’s a lot of advice, some of it probably redundant, and a lot of it specific to one particular subtopic or aspect of the craft.

It certainly raises the question of whether or not there is anything more to say. And, to be honest, I’m not sure that the following article will contain all that much that is new or revolutionary; what it will do, at the very least, is re-frame that advice in a straightforward fashion suitable for beginners to implement right away.

And you never know, there might be a new thought or idea that sneaks in when none of us are looking!

The Usual Pattern

When beginners first GM, there is a pattern that is so ubiquitous it can be considered ‘normal’. It doesn’t always apply in every case, but the majority of GMs who are honest with themselves will recognize similarities between that patten and their own experiences.

The pattern is the result of ignorance becoming experience and an inevitable process of learning what works and what doesn’t. I’ve divided the early stages into four stages of development; these may be experienced for just a short time or may be the GM’s modus operandi for months or years.

The First-Stage Adventure

Typically, the first adventures – in D&D / Pathfinder terms – is a dungeon consisting of individual rooms with individual encounters within. These are usually emplaced with little or no connection between them, and often too close together for real believability. At best, there will be a coherent origin story for the dungeon, of little or no relevance to the encounters.

Always assuming, of course, that the GM doesn’t start with a canned third-party adventure module.

The Second-Stage Adventure: The Mega-dungeon Option

When the GM advances to the second stage of development, one of two things tends to happen: either the GM is encouraged sufficiently by their first experience that they go bigger and better, or someone has pointed up the logical inconsistencies inherent in that first dungeon and they go right away from the dungeon concept for an adventure or two. I’ll deal with the latter alternative in a moment; first, let’s talk about the GM’s first home-grown mega-dungeon. That’s certainly the approach that I took, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

This mega-dungeon (a term that didn’t actually exist when I crafted mine) is at least four times the size of the first, if not 40 times. I went from a six-room dungeon to a multi-level monstrosity with about 600 rooms, each and every one of which had something of interest. As the D&D equivalent of an anecdote collection, it was wonderful; as a coherent piece of design, it was… limited, at best.

But everything else is typically magnified. I didn’t make the mistake of putting a Dragon in a 10′ x 10′ room (something that I have seen others do in similar circumstances), but I DID have a dragon on the 17th subterranean level of the dungeon – with the only way for it to get there being through 8′ wide corridors. Some things I got right – if I indicated a wall as a line, it was defined as extending 1′ out from that line (which is why the corridors looked 10′ wide on the map but were only 8′ wide “in reality”), and I had actually thought about ventilation and how it reached the lower levels (little portals into the elemental plane of air and giant dragonflies trained to use their wings to blow the fresh air through the dungeon – but with no explanation as to who created them or where they had come from, so it wasn’t a perfect solution).

As is usually the case, by the end of that mega-dungeon (and I admit mine was much bigger than most), I had become acutely aware of its shortcomings – the lack of a meaningful plotline creating a narrative ‘thread’ through the ‘adventure’, the fact that there was no real depth to the setting and surrounds, the absence of PC-NPC interactions of a non-violent nature, and the total absence of any sort of society or ‘campaign’ background.

The Second-Stage Adventure: The Long And Winding Road

The other route that is commonly taken by a GM, if they are made aware of the logical ‘holes’ in their game world in the course of their first adventure – which often happens if they have more experienced players – is to eschew the most improbable elements completely. Dungeons? They make no sense, except in the traditional usage as a place to imprison people. Unbelievable varieties and proliferations of monsters? That makes no sense, so they begin thinking about ecologies and dominant populations in different regions of the world. The focus shifts to the journey and what you encounter during its beginning, middle, and end; and each journey is then followed by another, and then another.

There are some problems in common with the mega-dungeon approach; there is still usually minimal or no narrative thread connecting the whole of the journey. It’s a trip from A to B to C with no significance beyond the fact of the journey itself. It also tends to suffer from too much smallness in too large a framework – an open-air mega-dungeon of isolated environments that don’t really interconnect or interrelate.

In both cases, the ‘adventure’ is just a bunch of stuff that just “sort of happens”.

The Third-Stage Adventure: The Grand Railroad

Eventually, GMs tire of the vacuousness of these variations on the same approach and begin to focus on making story the dominant element. Often this happens gradually, without them even realizing that it’s taking place. But a new pitfall awaits; the plot train. The GM becomes so focused on producing a coherent and satisfying story within the game that he begins circumscribing the freedom of the players to make decisions for their characters. In every other way, things start coming together, and the GM learns to craft these great and imaginative tapestries, circumstances and characters and settings uniting in the service of the story, and for a while, players will revel in the sense of purpose to what is happening to their characters and not protest.

Usually, the GM won’t set out to railroad the characters; it will be a defensive response to the players derailing the plotline and going off on a tangent that the GM wasn’t ready for, and that has nothing to do with the narrative that he has envisaged within his head.

Eventually, the players will rebel. This usually happens as a result of a mistake on the part of the GM, a hole in their plot that the players pick up on, some obvious solution to their problems that the GM hasn’t even thought of, and when the GM learns to cope with this problem and give the players their freedom back, they become ‘mature’ as a GM.

It doesn’t have to be that way

It should be clear that this development path is natural and organic, a process that naturally transpires as a consequence of trying to be better at what you are doing, of trying to squeeze the maximum amount of entertainment value out of your game, both for yourself and your friends. Each phase is a natural evolution that derives from addressing the problems of the previous one.

But it’s possible to shortcut the process by learning from others. If you are a player in a game, analyzing what the GM is doing and understanding why they are doing it not only educates you in more advanced tricks of the trade, but gives you a giant step forwards. The internet, where people like myself discuss aspects and elements of their craft, is another giant resource.

There are limits, however; you can become an absolute master of the theory of GMing while never learning how to put those lessons into practice for yourself if you never actually GM a game. When you do so, it quickly becomes apparent that there are wide gulfs between theory and practice, and not everything that you have learned will apply to the real world. The problem is that every GM’s experience behind the GM screen (be it literal or figurative) will be different, and the lessons that apply to one GM’s experience at running a game will be different to those that apply to this other GM with this other group of players.

Ultimately. there is no substitute for real world experience, from being willing to make mistakes and learn from them.

One of the biggest challenges that a GM faces is a new group of players, especially if you’ve been gaming with the same group for a long period of time. Without even being consciously aware of it, familiarity leads to a GM tailoring and customizing the way that they plan and operate to suit the foibles and desires of their regular players, and a new group of players will not respond to the old techniques.

Perhaps the greatest advantage that I had as a developing GM was being part of a large and organized Club, one which (at times) had as many as four or five different RPGs being played simultaneously with 5 or 6 players each. When one campaign wrapped up and a new one began, there was an osmosis from other groups into the new campaign, while players with less interest in that campaign would jump ship and hook up with one of the others. Each campaign thus tended to consist of a loyal “core” of players who came and went infrequently, and a variety of others who would join up for a few months or a couple of years and then move on. The dynamics that the GM had to cope with and build around were perpetually changing and evolving as new players brought new ideas and approaches and priorities and expectations to the gaming table. You were forced to become a better GM whether you wanted to or not – or you dropped out of GMing altogether if you were unable to cut the mustard (or were sufficiently lacking in confidence that you didn’t think you could cope).

Confidence

Speaking of confidence and competence, the one person who is never in a position to give a fair and unbiased perception of a GM’s abilities are the GM themselves; they will always under- or over-estimate their abilities. Unwarranted self-doubt can be crippling, but equally bad is over-arrogant self-confidence. No GM can objectively assess their own abilities.

Instead, look for subjective clues. If you have players who want to play in your game, if you get the occasional compliment from a player, if everyone seems to be having fun, then you are a successful GM.

Contrariwise, however, if none of these is true, that doesn’t make you a bad GM. It might simply mean that what you are offering doesn’t fit the needs and desires of the particular group of potential players that you have around you, that there is a clash of styles, or even that you are being judged unfairly on the basis of past mistakes. The absence of information tells you nothing.

Another phenomenon that should be taken into consideration is that it is very rare for a particular preference for a specific playing style to translate into a natural preference for that style as a GM. More often, the opposite is true. This has to do with the perception of challenge and of the potential for success; we all enjoy a challenge if we think we can succeed, but if success seems out of reach and impossible to achieve, we shy away from the frustration that will inevitably result.

That sounds entirely reasonable until you factor in my earlier comments about confidence and competence. If you can’t accurately assess how good you are as a GM, or your strengths and weaknesses, you can never make an accurate assessment of how successful we will be at any particular challenge.

The only real way to know is to try anyway – and then assess the success or failure afterwards. Never let a lack of confidence hold you back; you always learn more from failure than from success.

There is a perception amongst some readers that GMs with as much experience under the belts as I do have achieved some sort of “GMing Nirvana” in which we never make mistakes, running with complete success adventures and campaigns that they could never even dream of. There’s a small grain of truth buried in a whole heap of inaccuracy in such a perception; I can run campaigns and adventures of far greater complexity now than I could a decade ago, or two, or three. But that’s only true because I’ve made mistakes in the past (My Biggest Mistakes [series]) and learned from them – and it certainly doesn’t prevent me from totally messing up, even now (An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session) – and learning from that, too.

I’ll stop learning and improving my abilities when I’m dead and buried, and not before – at least, if I have anything to say about it.

A Better Plan

There are two important contexts from which to view and assess an adventure. The first is as an entity in it’s own right, a discrete piece of gameplay, a narrative with start, finish, and end. The second is as an element in a broader storyline, the campaign. Another way to view the ‘typical developmental path’ that I outlined earlier is to think of it as a process of broadening perspectives from the former to the latter. Railroading happens when the ‘campaign perspective’ becomes so dominant that it crowds out consideration of the adventure as a discrete unit. Having learned to walk the tightrope between these two perspectives is the trait of a mature GM.

Again, there are techniques that can be employed to shortcut this developmental process. I’ve addressed this subject many times in many articles, but thought it might be useful to provide a simpler alternative for the beginner to follow and ‘get their feet wet’.

A Grand Vision

The place to start is by outlining the campaign-wide story, as simply and concisely as possible. Think of this as your internal ‘blurb’ describing the campaign to yourself (it might or might not also be the ‘blurb’ that you use to promote/describe the campaign to prospective players). This could be simple (“A peaceful kingdom is betrayed to an Orcish Alliance”) or complex (“A mad god holds magic for ransom unless his deranged demands are met”).

Once you have this “back cover blurb” for the campaign, break it into logical steps and stages. Take the first example: the stages might be:

1. Establish Peaceful Kingdom – self-explanatory, provides the campaign background, intros the PCs;
2. Establish Status Quo – an adventure into Orcish territory for no other reason than to provide the rest of the background;
3. Create The Orcish Alliance – an adventure in which rumors of the Alliance begin to be heard in a sub-plot;
4. Motivation For Betrayal – something happens that doesn’t directly impact the PCs (another sub-plot) but that will provide the motivation for someone to betray the kingdom to the Alliance;
5. Invasion – for the first time, the campaign-scale plotline is the sole focus of an adventure, as the Alliance invades and village after village falls before them as a result of the betrayal, which is discovered by the PCs;
6. Battlefield Stalemate – the PCs find a way to neutralize the advantage that was conferred by the betrayal, producing a stalemate in the war, and buying them time to dig more deeply;
7. The Architect Of War – PCs discover who was behind both the creation of the Alliance and the betrayal of the kingdom;
8. Broken Alliance – PCs use that information to break the Alliance;
9. Peace In Our Time – PCs negotiate a peace treaty with the Kingdom’s Orcish neighbors, cemented when they save the life of the Orcish Leaders (and themselves) from an assassin sent by the villain in a last-ditch attempt at revenge;
10. The Price Of Treason – the PCs hunt down the betrayer, discovering that the apparent villain was just a flunky, and confront the real architect of the war. Big Finish.

Or to put it another way, the PC’s ordinary lives are turned upside down by someone manipulating events to create War between the Kingdom and the Orcs, and it’s up to them to undo the machinations, expose, and punish the culprits. This outline has things starting slowly and building to a dramatic conclusion.

Strong Characters

Step two is to populate the campaign with strong characters, i.e. characters with depth and interesting personality. Take the betrayer – you need him to be a trusted person with considerable authority (or his betrayal will be meaningless), but with some sort of weakness or dark secret that can be exploited. It would be easier to have his betrayal be overt and obvious, but a lot more fun to have him lurk unsuspected at first, even apparently still loyal but wringing his hands and at his wit’s end, with only one idea to solve the problem – send in the PCs even though “it’s hopeless, there’s nothing [they] can do…”

This is a character who I could really get my teeth into, in terms of roleplaying, and the irony that the one move that he makes (thinking that it will be completely ineffectual) turns out to be the best move that could be made to undo and expose the treachery he’s committed.

Lurking Plots

The result is a ten-adventure campaign that seems completely reasonable on the face of it. The next thing that I do is start working on the background to the campaign, taking care to sprinkle ideas for potential plotlines beyond the main one throughout. Some of these will form the basis of the early, relatively self-contained adventures; others will lie unused and untriggered, just part of the color of the campaign. The primary goal of any campaign background – aside from telling the players what they need to know in order to participate in the planned campaign plotline – is to convey a sense of potential to the players, to create the impression of an environment in which fantastic adventures lurk around every corner.

More experienced GMs would look to advance and resolve some of these background plots while seeding new potential adventures into the campaign, ensuring that the world is dynamic and not static, but beginners should crawl before they walk.

Players set the direction, GM sets the context

Reading that campaign outline, or any of the many others that I have shared here at Campaign Mastery over the years, you might get the impression that there is a case of “do as I say, not as I do” taking place – that I am advising one thing and then demonstrating another. How can anything that reads “the PCs find a way to…” co-exist with the notion of player freedom of choice?

The answer is that it doesn’t matter how the players come to the adventure that you have in mind, so long as they get there eventually. The challenge is to permit the players to choose the actions of their PCs and then find a way for those choices to lead them into the plotline that the GM had in mind without force.

A good way to think of the process is the one expressed in the title of this sub-section of the article. Another, even more clarifying, version might read, “The players control the rudder, but the GM controls the winds and current.”

The big secret to achieving this is to be continually aware of the ‘trigger events’ you have buried in the plot and how these will affect NPCs that the PCs interact with. This gives you several paths that can be followed by the PCs into the adventure, and is the RPG equivalent of the “Magician’s Force” or “Magician’s Choice“.

All Roads Lead To Rome

At the very beginning of the campaign, the GM will have no idea of the characters and not much more idea (if any) of the players. Given this state of ignorance, the GM has absolutely no idea of what the players will want to do; all he can do is try to stay one step ahead of them, building the adventure on his understanding and knowledge of the campaign background.

As usual, there is a less obvious easier route – the technique described in the previous section. One event, trivial in terms of the big picture, but important when immediate and proximate, that will connect with a wide range of people and social classes, and then let the PCs find their own path to the adventure.

The Extended Sandbox

The final piece of advice in this section is not to commit yourself too far too soon. At any given time, the state of play should be:

• Current adventure – complete and ready to run
• Next adventure – detailed plans complete, approaching a ready-to-run condition, to be completed 1 game session before it is needed
• Adventure after – rough plans and ideas noted down, focusing on those parts that will be directly connected to by “next adventure”
• Adventures after that – little or nothing done, just a note of resources (characters, settings, illustrations, etc) that have been prepared for earlier adventures but which will also be required for these adventures.

This is called “just in time” delivery, a principle that I learned as an Analyst Programmer. I won’t go into detail here – for one thing, it’s too complicated a subject to fit within the bounds of this particular article, and for another, I’ve already addressed the topic in a pair of articles:

• To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?
• Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity

The Prep Investment

Which brings me to the subject of game prep in general. Getting the amount of game prep that you do right is a an art that none of us ever master, and even fewer can ever be completely confident of having gotten it right. Because it’s generally better to err on the side of caution, we tend to over-prepare. The articles listed above will help zero GMs in on the correct amount of game prep to do to avoid both burnout and under-prep, but there’s a caveat that they don’t go into.

Game prep that is sufficiently universal in application, in the early phases of a campaign, can actually save prep time in the long run. You work more efficiently if not yet distracted by actually running the game, and every hour of prep that is invested in elements that can be applied globally and can channel and direct your creativity in the future (rather than wasting time casting about for inspiration) is an investment in the campaign that will be repaid many-fold before it comes to an end.

In particular, it’s never too soon to start thinking about the problems and reversals that the PCs might face, how they could be overcome, and how everything is to culminate and pay off in a big finish.

In conclusion

There’s always more that can be said on this subject. My draft notes, for example, had me now commencing a discussion of the anatomy of an adventure (A hook to get the players interested, deepening trouble, some early success, events take a turn for the worse, adventure is resolved, plus sub-plots and background developments that connect together with each other and with other adventures to form “the big picture”) but in the end I felt that it was rather redundant and might even get in the way of the advice already offered. As I said at the start, there have been a LOT of articles here at Campaign Mastery on the subject of creating adventures, and there will undoubtedly be more in the future. It’s better to leave something out now and not overwhelm readers (especially beginners) with too much all at once.

Breaking News!

As I was finishing up today’s article, the news broke that for the second time in it’s history, Campaign Mastery is (drum-roll please): An

Congratulations and the best of luck to all my fellow nominees – but right now, I’m on top of the world!!

Voting opens on the 11th – that’s next Monday (US timezone) – and closes on the 21st, just 10 days later. So, if you like what I do here at Campaign Mastery, consider sending a vote my way. Whether you do or not, no hard feelings – it’s an honor just to be nominated!

The next part of this series, due in two week’s time, will get more strongly into the subject of Depth of planning and plotting.