Prep-Tools Part I: Campaign and Adventure Planning
Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane.
GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to contribute with comments about your own tools, tips, and techniques at the end of this post.
Preparation tools are maybe the most important tools at the GM’s disposal. In part I of prep-tools, we cover campaign and adventure planning, which enable the GM to define the stories being told in the game.
Campaign Planning (Long Story Arcs)
With this tool, you are able to create long story arcs that span over many sessions, or may even be open-ended. It provides you with an underlying story, often with a big stake that is normally sharp enough for your players to see the overall story, but flexible enough to allow side-adventures to be easily added and avoid railroading.
Following this tool will make it easy for you to plan the next adventure.
Michael: I currently run a Cthulhu campaign called Horror in the Orient Express. This is a published campaign, coming in four nice volumes. So for this campaign, the books are obviously my campaign planning tool.
For a previous campaign, I adopted the dramatic structure of theatre. Just by defining how many adventures you want to put in each act, I set up how long the campaign will last.
Having such a plan at hand helped ensure each session propelled the campaign towards its end.
One word to open-ended campaigns: It may seem tempting, but in my opinion there is a huge disadvantage: it’s open-ended. It’s hard, if not impossible, to achieve a structure like above. There is no big battle at the end.
In short, it will never end, and if it is not ending in a planned way, it will end in another usually less satisfying way: GM burnout, group-splitting, or change of system.
Da’ Vane: The structure of the campaign itself can have a significant impact upon a game, much like different formats in film and TV.
A campaign can be planned with a large over-arching plot or back-story, giving the PCs a series long-term goal to fulfil as they discover what is going on, what they have to do about it, and then race towards the inevitable climax.
Alternatively, a campaign might adopt a more episodic format, where every adventure is self-contained and there are few ties between each adventure and episode, other than sharing the same cast of characters.
This might be more suitable for a game that features the PCs moving around a lot and exploring new things, rather than taking place in a few locations that the PCs can become familiar with.
Both types can be mixed together as well. A few one-off adventures mixed in with a longer-term plot. The one-off adventures are great for enabling PC goals that may not be critical to the larger plot, but still add to the story.
If you want a shorter dramatic structure for your larger plots, you might want to consider a revised Three Act Structure. Traditionally, the revised version has the second act include a plot twist, often as the antagonists react towards to protagonists’ efforts in the first act. It’s simple, but it works.
Johnn: Another great tool for story planning is the Goal Reversal & The 9-Act Format. For sandbox adventures, I agree with Michael’s advice in some cases. But if you do want an open-ended campaign, here is a great series on fantasy and Traveller sandbox structure.
Adventure Planning (Medium Story Arcs)
It is hard to imagine a GM who is not using a tool to plan adventures. This tool provides you with an adventure you can played in one or more sessions.
You may have different tools for different types of adventures: puzzle based (investigations), event based, location based (dungeons). This tool should provide you a hook and the adventure structure at minimum.
Further good extras are:
- Possibilities for side-adventures to avoid railroading
- Can be centred around the PC
- Being open in the sense that you can easily place it in your world
- Provide you hooks for new adventures or a natural way for a sequel
- Possibilities for twists
- Being open in the sense you can easily alter the adventure if necessary
Michael: Currently, I run three different groups and use three different tools. I’ve already told you about the Cthulhu campaign. The mixed location and event-based adventures are given by the book that the campaign is being run from.
The second group is a D&D group in a self-invented world. Here the adventures rely strongly on exploration of that world, and the basic tool is the world itself with its aspects.
For every aspect of that world I have a list of a few one-sentence adventure seeds, and I couple that with the big list of RPG plots.
The third group is a Savage Worlds – Sundered Skies group (if the D&D can’t take place). As this group is only for replacing D&D-sessions, I need short one-shot adventures here. The sourcebook gives some nice adventure creation-tables, which provides me with short but still different adventure structures. Watching the Firefly television series also helped here a lot.
Da’ Vane: I would be a fool if I didn’t mention the D-Jumpers series that I publish over at DVOID Systems, which is the epitome of an adventure planning tool. Being system agnostic, they focus on the ideas and structures to provide adventures of any length, in the multi-genre trans-dimensional design ethos that is D-Jumpers.
When it comes to adventure planning, I find the key details comes down to choices, and therefore you can always take the plot of anything you experience and enjoy, and think about the choices being made and how things could have been done differently.
Changing even just a few choices, along with some window dressing to fit your current campaign, can turn even the most well known and overdone storylines into unique plots that provide a great adventure.
Even if you don’t change anything, chances are your players and their PCs will do things differently, even when given the same conditions, just by virtue of being different characters.
Johnn: Over the years I have used a few different medium arc adventure planning tools. Unfortunately, these books are out of print, but you should be able to get them through used book channels.
- Creative Campaigning, D&D 2nd Ed. Supplement
- Aria Roleplaying talks about adventure structure in the context of a larger milieu
- Dungeon Master’s Design Kit, D&D 2nd Ed. Supplement
A book you can still buy in PDF is Robin’s Law of Good Game Mastering. That offers a great chapter on adventure design.
Preparing Sessions (Short Story Arcs)
Every story can be split into smaller pieces, which are the individual sessions you are preparing as a GM.
The tool needed here sorts out the stuff you need to prepare right now from the stuff that can be left alone for at least one session.
Time is often a crucial thing here, as you don’t always want to read your entire set of adventure notes to see what you should bring to the gaming table this night.
Also, some idea of the overall structure can be beneficial to your session:
- An opener to start the session and get the players right into gaming mode
- Sequence of events (encounters, NPC Interactions, and other actions and tasks)
- Cliff-hanger or resolution of a bigger chunk of the story at the end of the session
Michael: I like to use the “loopy session planning” described by Johnn in RPT#488 and add the above mentioned structures. For the Savage Worlds campaign, I also like the Adventure Ideas from the rule book and challenge my improvisational skills.
Da’ Vane: I prefer a more structured format to my sessions, largely because I like to include my session planning as part of my adventure planning. This way, all I have to do to plan a session is define exactly how much of an adventure I intend to run, and prepare the material that I don’t already have on hand.
If I can, I will try and get players to make decisions at the end of the session, rather than during it, since the outcome of the PCs reaction is often a rather potent cliff-hanger. This gives me time between sessions to prepare for decisions that may have caught me off-guard, and allows for the next session to start with the PCs discovering the outcome of their decisions, often with any relevant action to kick the session off to a good start.
Johnn: Published adventures, if you use those, often come with a structure and you just need to read the background, overview or summary, and part one or first few encounters.
I’d be remiss if I did not mention my ebook, 650 Fantasy City Encounter Seeds. Not so much about structure as ideas for your session’s encounters. To get the ebook, subscribe to the Roleplaying Tips newsletter, or download for free at RPGNow.
Investigation Planning
There is a scene where something happened. The PCs arrive some time afterwards and have to find hints and clues to investigate what happened here. As GM, you have to provide these hints to your players. An investigation planning tool gives you the hints to pass to the players.
These hints may be discovered by gathering evidence, having occurred long before the players entered the scene. The hints might also be acquired through improvisation and experimentation.
In addition, the tool gives you a nice overview, so you don’t forget hints or confuse whether the players already found a hint or not.
Michael: For creating hints beforehand, I try to imagine the scene as detailed as possible. If there is something happening, you almost always have some detail on something.
I also keep track of what moves there and where it stops. There was probably some kind of increasing entropy. These thoughts can lead to hints and clues.
The improvisational tool I use (and kind of rely on) are my players – when they start to investigate the scene, I just have to say “yes” at the right moment. Often, they have some ideas I never would have thought of.
I also need the advanced preparation tool, because sometimes all I get from my players is: “I got a 28 in Search. What have I found?” For keeping track of the clues, I’m quite satisfied with the one-sheet-mystery.
Da’ Vane: The key for a good investigation is logical information. In most cases, the PCs have a reason to investigate what happened at a scene, and these reasons will determine the sort of information and clues the PCs are hoping to find.
In most cases, this information should be useful, and thus should lead the PCs somewhere, even if it is to another location with more clues to uncover so they can find out more about what is going on.
If the PCs are investigating a murder, they will most likely be interested in the motivation and identity of the murderer to track them down. They may learn this from the nature of the attack, the murder weapon, or other clues such as who the victim was.
On the other hand, if the PCs are looking to find out other information, such as where and how a secret entrance might be located and operated, they will be looking for different information – signs of furniture being rearranged, strange breezes, or an space unaccounted for between this room and the next.
As a big fan of the espionage genre, this is something I am quite familiar with, and espionage games often provide a great deal of tools for this type of play which can easily be adopted.
Investigations are generally split into two, with the first half being the doing side of the investigation that involves gathering the information, in which case the GM should provide as much information as possible.
Johnn: A couple of articles from the RPT archives you will find useful:
Puzzle Planning
Puzzles can be a great benefit to your adventures. Getting puzzles can be a puzzle in itself. Your puzzle tool provides you with a puzzle that has to be solved in-game or out, and it defines the rules and the solution. It may also give you hints on solving the puzzle that you can give out to your players if they get stuck.
Michael: I personally don’t like much the idea of solving puzzles out of game as a metaphor for solving puzzles in-game, but you may disagree. So real-world puzzles can be a tool.
I like to use riddles and poems. There are a lot of pages on the net where you can find poems and search for poems with certain key words.
For example, if there is a poem about fire, there are certainly some lines in that poem describing fire without saying the word “fire”. I can then use fire for the solution and take these lines of the poem as a hint. However, overall I’m not the big puzzle-fan.
Da’ Vane: It is worth mentioning that puzzles come in many forms, and are not necessarily limited to riddles and word problems the PCs need to solve.
One of the most common types of puzzle encountered in roleplaying games is the murder mystery, or investigative adventure. It works by having the PCs follow a trail of clues through a series of locations to the end.
By obscuring the clues, and making the players think outside the box, these become actual puzzles rather than simple skill challenges.
Another trick that riddles and puzzles provide is using limited information or misrepresentation, combined with player preconceptions and assumptions, to hide what is otherwise an obvious fact.
This makes most puzzles a case of finding out the missing information – and it is the form of the puzzle that normally defines how the information is hidden and where the solver should look.
Often, puzzles are the second half of investigations, representing the thinking side of the investigation that involves finding and using the information, in which the GM should provide as little information as possible.
Johnn: Some great RPT resources for puzzling GMs:
- Use Logic Puzzles to Develop Plots and Stories
- Puzzle props
- Inspired By Song: Use Song Lyrics To Generate Adventure Ideas
- Rhyme Clues For Your Campaign
Prep-Tools II and III
We hope you found this week’s toolbox a handy guide for helping you plan and build your game.
Next, In part II, we will cover encounter planning, which covers what the GM needs to prepare for actual play.
Going one step deeper, we also land at single encounters. The tools you use here should provide you with the details you need for playing out a certain scene or an encounter.
In part III, we will explore preparing and running NPCs in your games, to make your games feel more alive and realistic.
About the Authors
Michael Beck considers himself a novice GM, but is encouraged in sharing his tips at www.spielleiten.wordpress.com (German language). Having played RPGs for roughly 10 years now, he accepts the challenge of living with his girl-friend, two cats, a non-finished PhD-thesis and two running roleplaying campaigns.
Da’ Vane, or Christina Freeman in the real world, is the owner of DVOID Systems, and the primary writer of their D-Jumpers series of products. With an academic background in science, especially socio-psychology, she is what many would regard as a “know-it-all.” However, the truth is that she doesn’t know everything about everything, but she knows a lot about a lot, especially about her passions which are games, stories, learning, and people. She is a consummate geek goddess, and yes, she is single if you feel like tracking her down and hitting on her some time….
- GM’s Toolbox – Introduction
- Prep-Tools Part I: Campaign and Adventure Planning
- Prep-Tools II: Encounter and Scene Planning
- Prep-Tools III: NPCs
- World Building Part I: Geography and Landmarks
- World Building Part II: Communities and Politics
- World Building Part III: History, Mythology and Stocking Dungeons
- Running the Game I: Creating the Mood
- Running the Game II: Notes and Organization
- Running the Game III: Rules and Combat
- Beyond the Game I: Handouts and Props
- Beyond the Game II: Roleplaying and Reality
- Beyond the Game III: Learning to Become a Better GM
- GM Toolbox: Conclusion
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June 20th, 2011 at 1:33 am
I don’t understand the structure of this article. “Campaign Planning” is a tool?
Could we maybe have subheadings explaining what angle each different commenter is taking? Perhaps they would be like “Tool One: Published Adventure Books,” “Tool Two: Three Act Structure”?
June 20th, 2011 at 6:44 am
Hi Noumenon,
Good call on the sub-headings. I’ll try to add them into the series as it goes along.
“Tool” in this series is a bit of an abstract concept, as discussed in the introduction.
There are three tools in this article – long arc campaign planning, medium arc, and short arc. Like three different types of hammers. Each section describes options or “brands” of each hammer with links to hammer use tips.
Imagine a brand new GM comes to you and says, what do I do? You might say they need in their GM toolbox a campaign plan. That’s what this post was about today.
Johnn recently posted..Managing Intraparty Conflict
June 20th, 2011 at 12:59 pm
After reading this post, one question came to mind.
Does the game system interfere in campaign / session planning? If this interaction exists, to what extend will this interference hinder, and how to fix it?
June 20th, 2011 at 6:43 pm
@Tudor: An excellent question, worth a blog post of it’s own to explore. In summary though: While it is possible for the game system to interfere with campaign / session planning, it tends to operate at a different level, translating the events that are taking place into hard numbers for the game system to interpret. Some aspects of “game system” that are a little softer and more metaphysical in nature, like the descriptions of spells or powers, can have an impact at the planning level though this is still rare.
Since the problem only arises rarely, it can often take GMs by surprise when it does occur. Fixing the problem is as simple – and as difficult – as having the rules memorised, or close to it. Since most people don’t, the only ‘solution’ is to read the spell and monster descriptions and equivalents each time looking for ways they can get in the way. That takes an unreasonable amount of time, so people tend to live with the danger and only consult the rules concerning anything the plan specifically calls for – if you plans revolve around a ‘meteor’ spell, check the mechanics of that spell thoroughly; otherwise, don’t worry too much about it.
June 21st, 2011 at 1:20 am
The theme of some game system is certainly influencing the campaign/adventure-planning: A Call of Cthulhu Campaign has different goals and preconditions compared to a D&D-Campaign. So does this influence my tool-choice for campaign/adventure planning (i think to understand Tudors question now, did i?), do i need different tools for different game systems, or are universal tools out there? I could start the Horror-in-the-Orient-Express-campaign in my D&D group after some transformation. How long would it take until my players recognize that? If i’m doing it right they will just wonder about the rapid increment of horror elements. I will try a mild version of this and generate the next D&D adventure with the Savage Worlds source book.
There are Campaign- and Adventure-Planning tools which are quite universal (like the big list of RPG-Plots), but they may not fit perfectly and may need a bit adapting to the game systems theme. There are also tools being more specialized for one genre or even game system (often coming from this game system), they are more powerful in that system, but if you change system you need to change your tool also. There is also the possibility to alter a tool, so it does fit the new game system, but this may result in a genre-mix and they might be not as powerful as before.
Is this helping, or did i miss the point of Tudors question and he was concerned more about rules and mechanics?
June 20th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
The series isn’t about tools, Noumenon, it’s about the toolbox – the place where you organize the tools to perform specific things. In this case, Campaign Planning is a specific task, and there are a number of tools to help you fulfil that task, thus this part focuses on that area of the GM’s Toolbox.
Each commenter is describing some of the specific tools that they use for these tasks – that is, what the contents of their toolbox looks like.
This is why the subheadings aren’t currently included for the tools – the focus is on the toolbox, not to tools. It’s easier to see how the toolbox is organised if you aren’t busy worrying about all the different tools. It’s like seeing how the forest is put together if you aren’t too busy labelling all the different trees.
With that in mind, we’re also throwing the question out to other GMs – what tools do you use for campaign planning?
Da’ Vane recently posted..Farewell to Arms
June 21st, 2011 at 7:57 am
My biggest concern was about the generality/ specificity of the tools.
Thanks to all for the answers.
June 22nd, 2011 at 7:58 am
The game system doesn’t affect the tools negatively, but many systems can affect the tools positively. In fact, many systems have a lot of built in pacing enhancers which can be used to provide even more structure to your games.
For example, one of my favourite systems is Spycraft, which features the Mastermind system – here you create an evil organization for the PCs to thwart, and each step of the organization, with their own Henchmen and Resources and so forth, represented a step in the campaign, was backed by the system. It was flexible and easy to use – and represented the espionage genre very well, but was easily ignored if you wanted a more traditional game. You could also use goal-based mercenary games, modern action games, and so forth, all with the same system.
In general, you might want to refer to the Rules Mastery (http://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/series/rules-mastery/) series for more specific details on how systems might affect pacing. In general, most would combine character advancement with pacing, so the rules for these areas would be the ones most likely to affect how things progress. There’s generally three main methods for character advancement – class & level-based, points-based, and free-form or no advancement.
In general, most of these try to arrange themselves to a “level” of advancement for an adventure in terms of pacing. This is normally enough for about a session or two of play, so is a good rule of thumb. There’s a bit more flexibility with points-based and no advancement styles, but they generally try to pack the same amount of game time into an adventure in terms of pacing. Some systems might run a little faster or a little slower, which is probably the only effect that rules actually have. It’s all about trying to balance gameplay with character growth within the system, and this does very from system to system, and from group to group, depending upon taste.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Farewell to Arms
June 22nd, 2011 at 8:14 pm
I’m not so sure about that, Da’Vane.
I play D&D in two groups, we tried many themes (army’s battles, espionage, horror, mercenary bunch, heroes of honor, …) in different settings, but always (no matter the character background) I saw that the different character (from different players, even in different groups) take the sames skills and feats according to it’s function (stealth, healer, attacker,…).
It’s possible that I have a huge bias in my sample and all the players I know are power players, but, in the few times the group evolved according to the history, nearly every char was killed in regular encounters.
What i’m trying to say is that, to me the D&D system favors certain choices of skills, feats and magics that works fine in the system focus (combat), that the characters background and theirs change according the history is not so important as the right choice of these attributes.
I don’t know if every system is like this, if they focus in some aspect of game play or are more comprehensible, but some systems penalize some themes at the same time that they favor another.
June 22nd, 2011 at 10:46 pm
There’s a danger of drawing incorrect conclusions from the situation you describe, Tudor. Postulating that each combat function has an ‘ideal’ build that maximises its efficiency, and that your players have identified that ideal or something closely aproximating it, then using that as your baseline of comparison for the appropriateness of encounters will bias everyone’s perceptions of non-idealised builds.
Instead of these ‘idealised’ builds being preceived as unbalanced, they become the norm, and the GM becomes accustomed to setting encounters that are more difficult than they should normally be for a group of that power level and number.
Naturally, when character designs are used that don’t measure up to this ‘perfect example’, the characters will be quickly overwhelmed by encounters crafted to that standard of ability.
This could easily account for the results that you describe – it’s not that the system focusses on a particular style of play, but that it is flawed – and that’s going to be true of every game system invented by man to some extent.
June 24th, 2011 at 5:07 am
[…] you ever have trouble planning your campaigns and adventures? Well, the Campaign Mastery GM Toolbox series is offering some great tips and tools from a variety […]
June 24th, 2011 at 8:27 am
There’s a certain pressure in certain systems and certain groups to build idealised designs, certainly. It’s a constant topic on many forums dedicated to min-maxing, and quite a few gamers enjoy this side of the game, since it represents that gamist side of the GNS spectrum.
The GM, however, has a certain ability to tailor specific encounters towards the players choices. Certain assumptions are built in however, and need to be identified – for example, the idea that everyone will have some way to defeat enemies that can only be defeated by magical weapons by 3rd level. This is important because changes to these assumption can drastically alter your game.
In general, most systems favour one or two themes over another, and generally this will determine pacing. This doesn’t necessarily affect the adventure or campaign however, just how it is presented, and tackled – a campaign idea played with GURPS might work out very differently to one using Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, D&D, or Storyteller.
For example, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st and 2nd Ed.) are brutual grim systems that do not favour combat – combat is a punishment for when you fail, and PCs die quickly in combat, because even the weakest of foes can kill a PC in two blows. Those tailored for combat might last a bit longer, but are basically designed for when the worst happens – essentially splitting the party in half: those who solve the adventure, and those who save the day when everything goes wrong.
D&D, on the other hand, is all about heroic combat, and very little else, although you do get to do a few other things too in 3.x. Therefore, most of what’s going to happen is going to be fighting, with a few skill checks and other features to provide a bit of variety.
You can run the same campaign with both systems, except that in WFRP, the focus will be on doing things other than fighting as much as possible, because combat is so deadly, although there will be room for one or two climactic battles in there, although even these should have other ways of handling them. Meanwhile D&D will have almost the exact opposite – a lot more combat to make up the action between the climactic battles, with a few skills checks and other features for variety.
For instance, the PCs want to storm a castle and confront an evil baron after finding out he murdered a friend to get components for a ritual for summoning a demon. There’s a climactic scene with the Baron as he completes his demon summoning in the castle. In WFRP, this will largely have the PCs use stealth, bluff, deception, and infiltration, otherwise they risk having to face all the guards in the castle and never making it to the Baron and his Demon. Yet, in D&D, the PCs can fight their way through the Gate Guards, through the Castle, and up into the Baron’s Study, and still have enough resources left to take on the Baron and his Demon – they don’t need to worry about stealth, when they can literally rampage through it with their flashing blades and potent magic, because that’s all part of the system and the genre. The same story, the same scenario, but two different types of pacing because the systems are different. Yet, the amount between entering the castle and defeating the Baron is still about a level’s worth of adventure, in both systems, even though WFRP doesn’t use levels (so it’s about 200 to 300 XP or 2-3 advances depending upon your playing preferences).
Da’ Vane recently posted..Farewell to Arms
June 24th, 2011 at 6:21 pm
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August 22nd, 2011 at 12:23 pm
I noticed a dead link in the section “Adventure planning”, in Micheal’s part : “Big list of RPG Plots”…
August 22nd, 2011 at 1:50 pm
The link should be fixed now, Eric. But that’s the price paid for having a dynamic internet – content comes and content goes, sometimes never to be seen again – it was sheer luck that I was able to find another page to link to..
January 10th, 2016 at 6:50 am
[…] you ever have trouble planning your campaigns and adventures? Well, the Campaign Mastery GM Toolbox series is offering some great tips and tools from a variety […]