WorldbuildingWednesday - Making Hooks Into Adventures
Welcome to today's #WorldbuildingWednesday post! For those of you new to this series, I'm @oblivioncubed. In this series of posts, I break down how I build a setting, why I choose to build what I do, and hopefully provide you some inspiration to use in your Worldbuilding.
My world - Trothguard - is a setting I've created as a catch-all location for any tabletop RPG games I run, so everything I build is filtered through a lens of 'how will this improve the game for myself and my players?'.
Today we're going to look at how to make our Adventure Hooks into Adventures.
From Hooks to Adventures
If you're new to TableTop gaming, creating your own adventures can sometimes feel absolutely daunting. It can be hard to tell what you might need and how much content to prepare, but I'm here to tell you, it's not as hard as it might seem. You can easily create your own adventures that will be just as - if not more - enjoyable for your players as any published module out there.
When you break down an adventure there are really only a few components at its core that we need to worry about. Or, I should more accurately say - there are only a few elements that I worry about. Broken down to the broadest categories, they are:
- Where does this adventure happen?
- What is the adventure catalyst?
- What is the challenge/encounter to overcome?
- What is the reward?
These four things are what I consider to be the core components of any and all adventure. Deciding what these elements are will get you a long way towards completing a really good skeleton for your adventure, and many of them are likely already informed by the Adventure Hook you created.
For the sake of this blog, I took my friend Grayson's suggestion and we'll be looking at the "Transport Guild Brawls" hook that I created last time:
Recent spats between the two competing transport guilds have escalated into full-on brawls several times over the last month, and someone needs to put a stop to the escalating conflict before it boils over.
We also looked at what kind of worldbuilding we could provide through the use of our hook last time, so we're going to lean on some of those extra details for our adventure preparation. For anyone who missed the last post or forgets those details, that was:
If they're interested in the Transport Guild brawls, we get a great opportunity to showcase the different groups, as well as provide a look at the political and economical sides of Modnae. The fun for the players is self-evident here. A 'Gangs of New York' style brawl between two factions is a ton of fun, and this hook can be provided directly (with players literally seeing - or participating in - the brawl as it unfolds around them) or indirectly (via talk in town leading to a quest-giver).
So, armed with work we did last #WorldbuildingWednesday and a good idea of what we're looking to achieve today... let's look at how much of this we already have just waiting to be plugged into our adventure. Because I'm an old-school Pen & Paper guy, I like to do this on recipe cards whenever possible. As an example, this is from the first game I ran for @lacking and @arcticgypsy:
Where does this adventure happen? Well, we've been using the city of Modnae for this series of posts, so it happens within the city. More accurately though, this brawl will happen within the Transit Tunnels beneath the city, as I think staging it there gives us a lot of advantages. If you wanted to make this a really large brawl, you could have it spill out of the underground onto the surface. The scale of the brawl is really flexible, so whatever works to get your players interested and successfully draw them underground.
What is the adventure catalyst? The real catalyst for everything is the mounting tensions and rivalry between the two Transport Guilds that provide transit for the city. The tunnels they use were never designed to accommodate two separate Guilds, and as a result, there is a constant argument over which guild gets priority at various times of the day or on certain days of the year. This is made worse by virtue of one guild serving predominantly middle-class and low-class citizens, while the other serves predominantly upper-class people and nobility. Each has valid reasons for wanting preference at particular times though the issue has come to a head today with the unfortunate overlap of an important farmer's market festival and the arrival of an important visiting dignitary from Esphar City. The giant brawl itself is going to be the main catalyst for getting our players involved in the quest.
What is the challenge/encounter to overcome? The immediate challenge here is to somehow deal with the brawl. The secondary challenge is to deal with the underlying tensions that caused it in the first place.
As a general rule, I try my best to not worry about how players are going to accomplish the goal. My only concern is giving them a problem to solve, and seeing what they do. Maybe they talk everyone down. Maybe they beat the crap out of one (or both) sides. Maybe they do something else entirely. By leaving them with the problem, it allows me as the DM to react without bias when they come up with an unexpected solution and I'm more readily able to adapt to whatever they do. If I try to plan ways to solve the encounter, I end up unconsciously trying to railroad them into one of the things I planned and that's a terrible way to DM.
Finally, we get to the last major point: What is the reward?
Because this is an adventure that will deal with up to 3 different factions, if the players favored any of the three (Law enforcement, Poor Guild, Rich Guild), I like to have their standing with that group be improved. Depending on their actions, standing with one or more of the others might go down. Beyond that though, we want to give a tangible and physical reward - and an easy one is just to toss some gold to the players. How much will depend on their level. Optionally, you can also sprinkle in magic items, potions, or whatever else seems appropriate for your game.
So, at this point, we have a really good skeleton for our adventure - but it's still not a complete adventure. We haven't decided on who our important NPCs are, and while we have a great catalyst that might be enough to carry us through a 2-4 hour session of gameplay, we don't have anything prepared to help guide the players to achieving the second goal of dealing with the underlying tensions between the guilds. We don't have any maps either - which is fine if you're doing a Theater of the Mind campaign, but lots of people like having maps, and if you're using a Virtual Tabletop, you're almost definitely going to want one.
So we still have a lot to do to turn this Adventure Hook into a fully fleshed-out Adventure.
I was hoping to get through all of that today but, upon review, if I tried to do that this would be a 3000+ word post and you'd all be bored stiff - so I'm going to wrap this post up here for today. Next time, we'll look at adding some flesh to our skeleton, so that what we end up with is a full adventure, ready to run.
Thank you for reading today's #WorldbuildingWednesday! I hope this has provided you with some inspiration!
If there's something else you'd like to ask me about, please do so! I will make every effort to answer it next Wednesday.
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