Build an Original Adventure Part 3

In Part 2 of this series, we wrote our premise and we identified and explored the key elements of our adventure. Now, we're going to look at how to get our players there, and we'll start building our timeline and information pipeline.

Build your hooks. Now we need to hook our players into the town and the scenario. Writing a good adventure hook is an art, but you don’t have to be Picasso to make this work. Start out your campaign by asking your players about their characters - what is their family like, why did they become an adventurer, what do they want. Always tailor your hooks to your players; use their answers to these questions. One of your players had a younger brother that ran away? He ended up in this town and got kidnapped by the cult. Your thief is a treasure hunter? There’s rumored to be a famous death mask at the abbey; no one knows for sure because it was never brought out when the place was abandoned. Your wizard is looking for a particular arcane secret? They heard of a scholar of the arcane who lives in this town - want a twist? Make the scholar a member of the cult rather than a kidnapping victim; things just got more complicated. Maybe your campaign is already underway and you haven’t asked these questions yet? That’s ok, ask them now and write down the answers.

Build your timeline.

Build your information pipeline.

There’s a lot of overlap between these two steps, and really I work on both at the same time. This is the part where we’re going to use our craft to turn this into a story rather than just fast track the players into a dungeon crawl.

First, don’t just hand over your dungeon to the players on a silver platter. Make them work for it. They will thank you. They’re at the town, now they need to find out what’s going on here. The atmosphere is grim and people seem untrusting of strangers, because you say you’re an adventurer but come on, you look like a kidnapper. A couple of social rolls and they will start getting some information, one way or the other! If they are successful in winning the townsfolk’s trust, someone opens up and tells them about one or more of the disappearances and why people are worried. If they fail, the guard confronts them and the captain would like an interview, or they draw the attention of the cult. Think now about what the consequences of such a failure might be - and how the resulting complications could pull the players back into the story instead of giving them a roadblock.

Now, since we’re going to build this information stream to get the players into our dungeon (and invested in saving the victims!), we need to know the timeline of how things have gone so far - and what’s going to happen in the days and hours to come. We’re going to work backward first, then forward.

Let’s say the cultists have staked out the abbey and have been in occupation for a while. It was abandoned and has a reputation for being haunted, so people generally stay away. We’ll say they moved in about 6 months ago with their eye toward making it their ritual site for their summoning. This means they’ve had time to settle in, to get a routine, and to build their cover stories well enough that the townsfolk buy them. It also means that some of the townsfolk have noticed that the cultists come and go at certain times, and someone has probably seen people entering or leaving the abandoned abbey.

Now, the cult didn’t want to stir the hornet’s nest too soon before the summoning, but they need to take what opportunities they can to kidnap the right victims for their sacrifice. They’ve been making connections in the town and they’ve been cultivating certain relationships so that they can pick off the people that they want without a fight that would grab a bunch of attention. This means that they’ve left some tracks in their kidnapping of people as well, and savvy PCs can find and follow these clues. We’ll say they started grabbing their victims and moving them to the abbey 2 weeks ago, and that the stars will be aligned for the summoning ritual 3 days from the PCs’ arrival in the town.

Next, we'll finish building our timeline and information pipeline by working our way forward.