Image by Marlon Nainggolan from Pixabay

I didn’t quite get the next part of the Sixes System written up in time – I’m only a few hours short of target, having written almost 6000 words, but time has run out. So I’ll use one of my standby articles and finish the Sixes System up for publication before next week’s disruption.

Have you ever bought a module and started running it, only to discover that at least some of your players have already read it, and may even have played it or GM’d it for others? It doesn’t happen every time, but very little deflates a campaign more quickly.

I try very hard to assume that this could be the case every time I crack open a commercial module – either it’s no good, or it’s already been read.

The obvious solution is to change the content – and if you’re going to change the content anyway, you may as well integrate the contents more tightly into your campaign while you’re at it.

There are a number of constituent parts that can be altered relatively easily. In increasing order of severity, these are:

1. Narrative
2. Context
3. Characters
4. Locations
5. Encounters
6. Maps
7. Antagonist
8. Pacing
9. Outcomes
10. Plot

Ten components of the module. Change them all and there is very little left of the original; it becomes simply a skeletal outline upon which you have built a very different structure to that which was originally present. But if you’re going to go that far, why not simply write your own adventure in the first place?

Since changing nothing is out of the question unless you are certain that the players don’t know the adventure, and changing everything is going too far, the optimum solution has to be somewhere in between.

As a general rule of thumb, changing 1/3 to 1/2 of these ten items is usually more than enough to make a canned adventure almost unrecognizable.

Which ones you choose is something that can’t be reduced to a hard-and-fast rule. That’s because, the better the original module, the more strongly these ten items will interrelate and interact. Sometimes, changing an item on the list will be easy, and sometimes, hard; sometimes it will have negligible impact (and is hence a waste of time even if it is easy), and other times it will have a profound impact on the adventure within the module.

The only thing you can do is read (or at least skim) the module and then consider each item on the list until you find which items will yield the maximum positive impact for the minimum effort.

Let’s consider the ten options in more detail.

1. Narrative

Changing the narrative is the easiest thing to do, and has the least impact. In effect, you are changing anything and everything that has to be described, without changing the tactical interpretations that translate those narrative elements into game mechanics. That constraint undercuts and minimizes any benefits from this change – if made in isolation.

Nevertheless, this is a great way to put your own stamp on a module with minimal effort, and that alone can be enough. There is an added benefit in that you will become far more familiar with the contents of the module, making it easier to run.

And, once you commit to more substantial changes, it is essential that those changes be reflected in the narrative; once you remove those key words, “in isolation” from this type of change, all bets are off.

2. Context

Context means three different things when discussing third-party modules. First, the background that doesn’t interact directly with the content of the adventure; second, with the background that does interact directly with the content of the adventure; and third, with the motivations for, and restrictions on, actions by both PCs and NPCs within the adventure.

Remote Background

Altering the remote background of an adventure has no direct impact on the adventure, though it may introduce or lessen time pressures, etc, that may have a secondary effect. If there are no Orcs or Goblins in the adventure, the breakout of war between Orcs and Goblins will have minimal impact.

Contact Background

If there are Orcs or Goblins in the adventure, though, that can be a different story – or it might be plausible that the participants haven’t heard about the outbreak of conflict yet, and might even get the news in the middle of the adventure. I love making this sort of change to adventures because they tie the adventure into the campaign, making it less a series of events in isolation and more of a seamless tapestry.

To be clear, I recommend doing this anyway, to whatever extent is necessary, at least in terms of the current situation within the campaign. But this is also an opportunity to evolve that background by advancing plotlines that aren’t even part of the adventure as published, taking advantage of the contact between background and adventure to bring that background to life.

If a war were to break out between Goblins and Orcs (to use the same example), and the PCs are not to be directly involved (yet or at all), what makes the better choice: simply telling the players that it’s happened, or having them be in the middle of an adventure involving Goblins and/or Orcs at the time, so that the events can have a direct impact on the campaign and not simply be wallpaper? My vote is for choice #2 – and, in fact, since I try to pre-plan everything, this might even be the reason for my purchase of the adventure.

Motivations & Restrictions

When you change the context in which decisions are made, you risk changing what the logical decision should be. You may also impose restrictions on what choices are valid ones for a character to make. Even when that’s not the case, it gives the character something that they can and should address in enacting their choices. “This war won’t last forever, and I intend to be ready to capitalize on the peace that follows.”

When the campaign circumstances impact on the choices, motivations, and restrictions within an adventure, you are reshaping the skeleton of the entire adventure. This can result in superficial changes, or it can completely rewrite half the content. The more significant the changes, the more you make a canned adventure part of the campaign, and the deeper the impact. A degree of judiciousness is called for.

An alternative formulation

Everything in the ‘context’ section assumes that you are changing the adventure to integrate the campaign background. It would be remiss of me not to at least mention the converse approach: changing the background to accommodate the adventure as written.

This turns a canned adventure into a driver of background events, and that can be a useful tool to possess. But if the changes are too sudden and widespread, this can also stress plausibility to the breaking point.

Used with care and planning, this can be an entirely valid approach.

Nor do you have to choose one technique and stick with it exclusively; there is absolutely nothing wrong with a hybrid approach, a push-pull integration between background and adventure. The ultimate expression of this technique is choosing a canned adventure because it mandates the changes that you want/intend to take place within the background – to set the stage for one or more future adventures.

3. Characters

I’m talking about changes that are more substantial than merely changing a character’s motivations, here. Species, race, class, and profession, and circumstances – they are all on the chopping block. Instead of a Fire Mage being the main bad guy, maybe now it’s a fallen Paladin.

The important thing is to ensure that any such change has its logical ramifications expressed throughout the adventure – our fallen Paladin shouldn’t do things the same way, or even do the same things, as the original Fire Mage would. And people won’t react to the character the same way, or to his or her actions.

As with background changes, character alterations can be superficial (the character is a supporting cast member who only appears in one scene or encounter) or can reshape the entire adventure, or anything in between.

I talked in the previous section about contextual changes resulting from the campaign background being reflected within an adventure as an ideal way to bring the background into focus and make it seem dynamic and evolving; so I should not neglect to point out that just because the adventure doesn’t have an Orc or a Goblin in it (as published), there is nothing wrong with inserting such a character into it purely to achieve this – but it will integrate all the more seamlessly if you can replace a key piece of adventure infrastructure with such a character.

4. Locations

If you simply transplant an adventure setting from one place to another, whole, it might be a superficial change. To actually alter the location is something rather more substantial.

Ideally, every character has a reason for being where they are found within a plot. Why does this house suit them better than that one? Why do they live in this town, and not the one a few hours down the road? A character’s location should be an outgrowth of their personality and circumstances – and, to whatever extent that is not the case, they should make efforts to reinvent and redecorate their location to suit themselves. The longer they have resided in that location, the more it should become like an old comfortable shoe, an extension of who that character is.

Sadly, few adventure designers think very deeply about these questions. Environments are often superficial, just tacked-on infrastructure, with little more than superficial nods to the residents.

Changes made to the environment within an adventure should therefore also be reflected in the characters who abide there. If an adventure has a priest from a small chapel and you replace that with a decrepit cathedral, you are not only adding to the history of the locality (why was a cathedral built here? Were there enough worshipers to justify it? Or was the builder operating under the ‘field of dreams’ theory? What happened to the worshipers that the place is now in disrepair? What impact does the change have on any encounters in the location?) but you should be materially amending the character of the priest, and arguably, making him a more interesting character.

Consistency, as always, is important.

5. Encounters

Changing the content of encounters, potentially opening or closing outcomes from the encounter, are an obvious change, and something that some seem to do without rhyme or reason. For that matter, a number of commercial modules used to give the same impression of the encounters with which their pages were populated, so this is not exactly a new problem.

One thing that being restricted to once-a-month game-play within any given campaign does is force you to clear out a lot of deadwood. No encounter can stand unless it advances the plot in some respect; there just isn’t enough playing time to waste on it, otherwise. IF an encounter doesn’t advance the plot, then there are only two choices: add a minor strand to the plot, or cut out the encounter in some way.

Note that establishing or sustaining an atmosphere (or verisimilitude) is a perfectly valid justification for a particular encounter. Even if I were to suddenly find myself able to GM a campaign twice a week, I would remain parsimonious in terms of encounters; each would need a clear reason to be part of the adventure. I would sprinkle in more encounters of the atmosphere/plausibility type however.

The better-written an adventure is, the more changing encounters within that adventure will change that adventure in consequence. I always find it helpful, when prepping a canned adventure, to make notes identifying the reason an encounter is to take place, from an authorial meta-game perspective. If no reason is obvious, you need to first question the need for the encounter, and second, to give it a reason to exist if an encounter is desirable for some reason, such as pacing, or because something is logically going to occur at some point. These metagame justifications define the purpose of the encounter and are the only thing that needs to be preserved. If you can change the encounter to do more than simply satisfy that purpose, you will materially change the adventure for the better, and make it more your own in the process. And sometimes, that can be enough.

6. Maps

Changing the map can come with changing the location, or it can be entirely separate as a consideration. This is especially true of D&D-style “dungeons” whose artificiality as a concept bothers me a lot more than it does others.

Altering the flow of encounters, altering the sequence of events, has an obvious level of impact on the adventure. If you don’t do so, then you are altering the micro-environment within which the encounter takes place.

Make sure that your changes are rational and have sensible consequences. Do that, and you can be sure that the adventure you deliver will have significant differences to the published module – but it’s a lot of work, and there is always a sense that the changes have been simply tacked on.

My approach is this: if changes to the context and location demand it, make changes to the map – if not, don’t; there are other choices that can have a much better bang-for-buck ratio.

7. Antagonist

I’ve touched on this already, but it’s worth revisiting. Changing the antagonist of an adventure should be a fundamental change to everything within the adventure, from the context to the setting to the incidental encounters. This is the type of change that impacts almost everything else (and so can be a lot of work) but it also provides a guideline to follow (if interpreted correctly) that can make that work a lot easier.

There is also a middle ground in which the adventure’s antagonist is nothing more than a hired gun for someone else. This can result in minor changes to the adventure on a nuts-and-bolts scale and sweeping alterations in context and the big-picture of which the adventure is but a part – something to contemplate if time is a factor.

8. Pacing

Tedium – tedium – tedium – ACTION! – tedium tedium ACTION!

This would be tolerable at the start of an adventure – you could even lose the first Action sequence if the “tedium” was sufficiently-interesting roleplay, or of sufficient interest to the PCs. But if that’s the shape of the end of an adventure, it will all fall rather flat.

I’ve written a number of articles on pacing here at campaign mastery, because it’s an often-overlooked ingredient in both single adventures and whole campaigns. Aside from closing up plot holes and integration into a campaign, one of my strongest objectives in revising a canned adventure for use in one of my campaigns is always to tighten the pacing.

This can be tricky, simply because you don’t know which path the players will follow to get to the finish, and don’t want to restrict their choices to achieve predictability. The cure, quite frankly, is worse than the disease!

My approach is, as much as possible, to eschew the map-oriented approach of most dungeons as much as humanly possible. Instead, I will structure a plotline and let the players find their own path through it, adjusting each step of that path to wherever the PCs happen to be, or happen to be going, at the time.

Here’s a fun experiment in pacing. Take a canned adventure that you know well – a dungeon crawl works especially well – and have the encounters take place during overland travel, altering the encounters as necessary. Some encounters will thus occur closely to each other, others separated in time quite substantially. There may even be unrelated encounters along the way – fellow travelers, villages, etc – as usual. The experience will be completely different to that of the canned adventure.

9. Outcomes

How an adventure is resolved is a big part of the content, and often one of the things that the players will remember for years after the rest of the adventure is forgotten. Putting additional options on the table, or taking existing options away, can therefore have a significant long-term impact on perceptions of the adventure.

Which outcomes are possible depends on the tools and circumstances and antagonist and encounters that lead up to the climax of the adventure. So this is not a trivial exercise, though it may not be as involved as some of the others that have been discussed.

10. Plot

Finally, we get to the biggest change of them all, the one that can require everything else to change – an alteration to the story that is being told by the adventure. Typically, there will be relatively small (but fundamental) changes necessary to the first half of the adventure and progressively greater divergence as you approach the climax.

When I ran “Danger At Dunwater” – the AD&D adventure – as a plot in my superhero campaign, I changed the antagonists to mermen, refugees who had fled the destruction of Atlantis, changed the location to Loch Ness in Scotland, and made the central plot a story of conflicting politics within the leadership – one group who thought the time right to come into the open and rejoin the nations of the world, and one who thought that this would be the destruction of Atlantean Society and who were prepared to make any sacrifice to prevent it (including their lives or those of their followers) – making them terrorists with altruistic motives.

Of course, I also had to change the locations, and the principle NPCs, and the pacing, and tie all this into the existing campaign background; about half the original canned adventure was jettisoned, and the rest was altered to some extent, either superficially or substantially, to reflect this changed plot.

In part one of the resulting plot, attempts by the ruling first faction to emerge from their isolation (and the Nessy deception they had been perpetrating for decades) were – somewhat clumsily – sabotaged by the second faction, leading the PCs to become involved. The PCs discovered the Atlanteans, so the ‘first contact’ mission ultimately had to be counted a success – and began negotiating with faction #1. Faction #2, led by the priesthood, then accused surface dwellers of killing the ambassadors and presented ‘proof’ to the court.

In part 2, the PCs had to find a diplomatic solution to this crisis or be imprisoned. The prison would not be able to hold them, but escape would trigger a war between New Atlantis and the Surface world at a time when other problems were becoming critical, and would have a disproportionate impact on the world as a result. In the event that they managed a diplomatic solution, acts of terrorism would begin aimed at disrupting the negotiations, culminating in the exposure of the High Priest which would trigger an attempted coup against the Royal Family who headed faction #1. The PCs could either intercede or not – but if they did, it would destroy what was left of the Atlantean culture, and if they didn’t, their nominal ‘allies’ would be killed and the Atlanteans would become a potential enemy of all mankind. Their best answer was to find a third path, which they did, ultimately reunifying the two factions and establishing an alliance with the rest of humanity.

‘Danger At Dunwater’ is a low-level AD&D adventure. The PCs were veteran superheros on a par with the Avengers or Justice League; quite obviously, it would have to change completely to be compatible with, and challenging to, the PCs. If you were to compare the outline above with the module, you would find a scene or two that seemed to fit, and a couple of the characters would seem familiar, but not much more. You would find greater resonances with the back-cover blurb than with the content. And yet, the end result is both undeniably based on the module, and completely integrated into the campaign.

I’m a strong advocate of writing your own adventures, and there are lots of benefits to doing so. But there can be value in incorporating the creativity of others into your tapestry; entire campaigns have been built that way. And this can take a lot less time than writing an entire adventure from scratch of equivalent length.

If you assume that a well-informed player will have at least heard of the adventure, may have read it, and may even have played through it (as player or GM), and amend it accordingly, the benefits can be tremendous – and you are more likely to keep that player entertained while limiting the damage that can be done through ‘spoilers’. You can turn a bad situation into a win all round.