Running the Game: Adventures

Dungeons and ruins

Abandoned underground settings such as dungeons, mines, and ancient cities, as well as above-ground ruins and castles, are wonderful settings for adventures. The ‘dungeon’ is not totally abandoned: it is now occupied by monsters. Some of its traps may still be functional, and there may be newer traps created by the newer denizens.

Dungeons will also often contain clues as to who used to live there, why, and why they don’t live there now.

There are many parts to the fun of dungeon exploration: discovering their existence, traveling to them, entering them, exploring them, and getting out rich and alive.

A variation on the abandoned ruin is the citadel or stronghold created expressly to protect or imprison a special artifact or creature. The traps in these dungeons will often be in full working order.

Kinds of adventures: Intrigue

Adventures of intrigue often happen in cities. The characters might get caught up in a rebellion or in stopping a rebellion, or they might be charged with the investigation of a crime that someone else doesn’t want investigated. Or they discover that there’s treachery afoot—or perhaps they are the treachery.

Adventures of intrigue don’t have to be overtly political. The classic hard-boiled detective story is an adventure of intrigue. If the story has “byzantine” plot twists, it is an adventure of intrigue. That’s what “byzantine” means: it’s from “Byzantium”, the Eastern Roman Empire, which was known for its byzantine plots and politics.

Puzzles and riddles

Whatever other kind of adventure it is, adventures are often puzzles that need to be solved. When you present the other players with a puzzle, you’ll need the puzzle to make sense, so that you’ll know, when they come up with a solution you didn’t think of, whether or not that solution will work. You will also need to make sure that you know of some solutions that will work and place clues around the rest of the adventure, but the most important part of puzzle adventures is letting the adventure react, like an ant-hill, to the probing of the player characters.

Kinds of adventures: Tactical

Where political intrigue ends, wars begin. Characters might join an army and fight in a larger battle under higher command, or they might lead their own troops in battle, or they might act as a special strike force.

Characters also can involve themselves in battle because they are protecting someone or a group of people from another group, as in movies like “The Seven Samurai”.

Sightseeing

Some great adventures can be had simply traveling from place to place. Adventurers can marvel at new cities, meet new people, and see new things. Characters often travel between adventures, and this travel can itself be an adventure.

Sightseeing adventures are often a collection of “marvels”, strange things that they can tell stories about when they retire and return home.

Foreshadowing adventures: Layering

If the characters are going to progress through multiple adventures, you will need to provide layers of knowledge in your world, layers which the characters will peel back like an onion. Clues left in previous storylines will grow to adventures after the characters “solve” or “complete” the current storyline.

Getting to the next adventure

Foreshadowing is a useful way of letting the players know where the next adventures are, but remember that having fun is not a riddle for the players to solve. If you and the other players have reached a decision about where the game should evolve or move, but this also requires some action on the part of the player characters, you’ll need to let the players know this. You’ll need to tell them what their characters need to do, and let them role-playing the characters realizing it. This is often important between adventures, when player character choices determine the next adventure.

Build the town

Many adventures, especially the first, have a town nearby. Towns are complex, and any reasonably-complete description of a town will be unreasonably hard to use. So keep your town descriptions simple. Provide only enough to remind yourself later of the town’s feel. Then you can wing it when players ask for more information.

Name the town. Write a paragraph or two describing what it looks and feels like. If the player characters live here, describe it from the view of the townsfolk. If the player characters are visiting, describe from the view of someone walking into it. Consider putting it in a clearing or a valley so that you can describe it as they come over a hill or out of a forest on the outskirts of the town.

Name the tavern. Write a paragraph or two describing what it looks like and feels like when it’s busy. Name one of the bartenders or barmaids.

Name either the dry goods merchant or the blacksmith. They will have information about the adventure—rumors, most likely—and will volunteer the information as the player characters buy goods. “Looks like you’re setting up for a bit of a walkabout. Hey, be careful out there. You know what I heard?” And then comes a rumor about riches, dangers, and secrets.

Write a paragraph about one of the town leaders. He or she will be how the player characters learn more about the town’s political structure. Don’t worry if you change your mind later, they were misinformed or lying, or there’s been political upheaval.

Write about a survivor. If there are old battlefields nearby, write a paragraph about one grizzled veteran of the war. Or, if there was a disaster long ago, write a paragraph about one survivor. Or if the royal court is (or was) nearby, write about an ancient person who remembers it. This person always hangs out at the local bar that the player characters patronize. The veteran has information that might lead to an adventure! Maybe not this adventure, if you already have a way for the player characters to get there. But sometime later, you’ll discover something useful for this person to say. And they’ll probably partially, but not completely, contradict your merchant or blacksmith.

Optional: If there is something that this town is known for—riverboats, or the slave-trade, or scholarship—write a paragraph about one person involved in that activity. A riverboat captain, or a boat’s carpenter, or a slave trader or slave from a foreign land, or a scholar, or a bookseller. Describe them from the point of view of someone seeing them pass on the street. This person, like the veteran, will have information about adventures, possibly this one but definitely ones in the future.

Create a list of names. Write down six male names and six female names, with a blank space after each name. When the players need to meet someone new, you can quickly choose a name and write who they are in the blank spot. By writing down names ahead of time, you can collect names that reflect the history and feel of the culture. The Story Games Name Project can be helpful, but I also like to search on “language names”, replacing “language” with a language that’s close to what I want for the town. Then modify the names slightly, as necessary.

The Seven Pillars of Adventure

When you’re writing an adventure, it may help to keep a checklist of seven important parts of an adventure. You can often build an adventure by working through these pillars in order.

Build it one step at a time

Do not create an overarching story. Place many options in each adventure to intrigue them for the next adventure, and then let them choose the next adventure. As they progress through these adventures a theme will emerge, and you’ll be able to craft the wider vision of what’s going on in this world. Know that things are out there, and when the players ask about them, describe them. As they start focusing in on one direction, that’s when you start expanding what you know about that destination. For example, your map might show an abandoned temple in the wilderness, but you’ll put off writing the temple map key until the players show an interest in it.

Encounter entries

When you design adventures, you will often have entries for non-player characters that the characters may meet. Your notes may be as simple as “There are three ogres here,” or it may include a detailed description of the ogre family’s interpersonal relationships and what they’ll be looking for in any encounter with the player characters. For any encounters that the players may end up interacting with—especially if they may end up fighting with them—you probably will want to also note, in abbreviated form, the abilities of the creatures in question.

If the encounter listing involves a location, you may wish to include two descriptions, one for you and one for the players. The following example describes three ogres who are in their lair more often at night than during the day. They are evil, fantastic creatures that fight with spears, have a defense of 2, and have 27, 33, and 23 survival points respectively. The encounter is keyed as “23”, probably on an accompanying map of the area. The first paragraph is for the players; it is what their characters see. This paragraph is usually set off from the rest of the text in some way, and is called “flavor text”. The rest is for the Guide, and may or may not become available to the players’ characters, depending on the characters’ actions.

Flavor text

When writing flavor text or describing an encounter to the players, consider what their characters see, what they hear, what they smell, what they feel, and what they taste. If you find flavor text difficult to write (but find it easier to have flavor text than to describe encounters impromptu), first list what, if anything, the characters would see, hear, smell, feel, and/or taste. List these sensations in order of the most obvious, and then rewrite it as a descriptive paragraph.

Write about the most obvious features first, then the next-most obvious, and so on. This will help to ensure that if you are interrupted by the players, it will also make sense for the player characters to have ignored what you haven’t yet mentioned.

After you write the flavor text, you’ll write information that only the Guide knows, but which the characters might discover through careful searching or judicious use of logic. If you expect to make this adventure available publicly, remember that there is never any need to hide things from the Guide. The more relevant information you can give to the Guide, the more prepared the Guide will be for all the strange ideas players come up with. This is also helpful for you: it is amazing what you’ll end up temporarily forgetting in the heat of a really good game session. I often bold important sentences or sentence fragments to highlight special abilities and triggering events.

Finally, keep your flavor text short. The players are there to act, not to listen. To paraphrase Vincent Baker, things happen in role-playing games because the players say something; cool things happen because the players say something cool. Design your flavor text with that in mind. Let the players be cool!

Encounter detail

Most of your non-player characters will be described as a short list of statistics, such as the ogres in the example grotto. You can find these statistics in the Encounter Guide. Within the encounter description you’ll note the creatures’ needs and motivations.

Some more important encounters will require more detail. Where necessary, you can add the non-player character’s six abilities to the short description, or at least the abilities you expect to need.

Finally, a few non-player characters are so important that you’ll need a full character sheet for them. Usually, this will only be necessary for one or two non-player characters in any adventure. These are the creatures who hold potential of being major antagonists if they survive their encounter with the player characters.

Designing adventures: Maps

Maps: Grids

You can find square grids for drawing maps at any good stationery market. If you can find “engineering” pads, some lines will be marked with thicker lines, allowing you to easily count large distances on the map. If the small squares below are 5 feet, then the larger squares are 25 feet.

You may add up diagonals in a square map if you add 40% to the length of a square’s sides. For example, if one square is five feet, a diagonal will be seven feet—and the diagonal across a large square is 35 feet. If one square is ten yards, the diagonal will be fourteen yards, and the diagonal across a large square is 70 yards.

I also have some simple blank maps available as PDF files on the Gods & Monsters web site, at godsmonsters.com/Game/Sheets/.

Hex grids are useful for wilderness maps, because they provide more directions. Cells in hex maps have six sides, allowing you to easily add up diagonal directions.

If you need to know the math, the distance between two opposing vertices is twice the length of a side. The distance between two sides (how you’ll normally measure a hex) is three quarters larger than a side.

This means that if you are counting straight across, each two hexes are three times the length of one of the hex’s sides. Usually, you’ll want to provide, on the map, the “diagonal” distance as well as the short or long distance, so you won’t have to do the math during the game. If you use two as the side distance, the diagonal distance is 3.5; if you use four as the side distance, the diagonal distance is seven.

Maps: Walls

In general, your walls on different floors should line up. While there may be walls on lower floors that are not on upper floors, significant walls on the upper floors will almost always be supported by walls or partial walls (such as columns or archways) on lower floors.

Because of this, floor plans for upper floors often look like simplified versions of the floor plans for lower floors.

Maps: Ceilings

In any large stone structure, ceilings will usually be vaulted stone. The floors of upper rooms may be wooden beams spread between the stone ground floor and the vaulted stone ceiling of the roof.

The vaulted ceiling uses the weight of the heavy stone (or other amazing material) to support itself, in a bit of real-world architectural magic. Underground, most rooms dug from the dirt or rock will also be vaulted, so that the dirt or rock doesn’t cave in on itself after the room is carved from it.

Maps: Doors

Always look to the purpose of doors when deciding if they have locks, if they close on their own or stand open, and whether they slide or have hinges.

If in a prison, hinges will be on the jailor’s side, for obvious reasons. Similarly, doors with external hinges usually open toward the defender. Otherwise, the attacker could remove the hinges. Decorative doors, on the other hand, usually open outward.

Some doors use pivot hinges, where an internal hinge runs vertically through the door and connects the door to the ceiling and floor. These can be especially useful for large doors in stone castles and at the gates of cities. They allow the door to open outward while still protecting the hinge from tampering.

Geographical Names

On your maps, you’ll need names, especially for the geographical features that you have (I hope) placed on your overall area map. You’ll want to avoid non-adjective names such as “cliff” or “jungle” or “river”. Each should have a name. You can of course make up strange names in strange languages, but it’s easy enough to evoke mystery and excitement simply by choose a color, a flora, or a fauna.

The cliffs near the coast are mundane. The White Cliffs of Dover are magical. A forest is a forest, but the Red Forest is its own beast. Even coastlines can be enchanted by naming them the Golden Sands, or naming them after a local tribe, such as the Barbary Coast. Faun River has a different feel than Stag River or Reindeer Pass. The Sunlit Grove should be a fine place for a picnic, whereas anyone crossing Old Willow Trail at night without magical protection deserves whatever is coming to them.

And when you start feeling like mixing things up, the Wyrmwood Marshes must be the home of some amazing adventures.

If that isn’t enough, consider replacing the geographical part of the name with body parts. Wolf Pass can become The Wolf’s Throat. The Red Lakes can become the Red Fingers. Stone Giant Hill might be the Stone Giant’s Knees. Other evocative names for geographical features are teeth, maw, hand, bones, backbone, fang, and claw.

It’s a lot more fun to cross the Devil’s Backbone by way of the Lion’s Maw than to cross the Generic Mountains through Mountain Pass.

Another great source of names for man-made features and for things near civilization, is professions, especially professions rarely used nowadays: Miller’s Crossing, Chandlers Dell, Knight’s Road, Woodward Lane, or Divers Alley.

You can add a sense of history to your locations by adding “new” or “old” in front of the name: The New Wyrmwood Marshes or Old Chandlers Road indicate that there’s another older or newer place with the same name elsewhere.

You may very well give your locations their descriptive names first, and then decide what they describe. Cool names can guide you to the content behind the names.

Where is my horizon?

Usually, the limit to how far characters can see will be some obstruction, such as a building, a forest, or some hills. Mist and darkness also limit vision. Sometimes, however, the characters will be on flat plains on a clear day and the only limit to their vision will be their perception and the horizon. Once something goes below the horizon, it can’t be seen. But where is the horizon?

This unfortunately requires some math. On an earth-sized planet, the horizon for a six-foot tall person standing at sea level or on flat plains will be about 3 miles. This means that they can see features that are at ground level for up to three miles (depending, of course, on the quality of their vision and the size of the object). Features that are higher than ground level can be seen further. For example, two six-foot-tall people walking toward each other could, assuming all other conditions were perfect, begin to see the tops of their counterpart’s head at six miles: once their horizons meet, they are technically in sight of each other.

But, what if they stand on higher ground? This is where the math comes in. However high their eye is in feet, take the square root of that. Then multiply it by 1.346. That’s the horizon in miles.

A thing’s horizon is the same: the square root of its height in feet multiplied by 1.346. To see how far something can be seen, get that thing’s horizon, and add it to the watcher’s horizon. That is the distance at which the tip of the thing begins to come over the horizon.

Thus, the tip of a 200 foot tower could be seen coming over the horizon, by a six-foot person standing on a four-foot hill, at about 23 miles. Of course, this assumes that other conditions are fine, that there are no obstructions, and that the player makes a likely difficult perception roll. But we can also see that fifty feet of the tower will be over the horizon for that person at 19 miles—because that’s the horizon distance for a 150 foot tower.

Characters walking toward a 12,000 foot mountain will begin to see its peaks from 150 miles away.

The horizon is especially useful for describing geographical features as they come into view. You’ve got some leeway if you need it; atmospheric conditions can cause refraction, bringing sights that should be below the horizon into view. And it is still up to you to assign a difficulty level to sighting something above the horizon.

Designing adventures: Treasure

There are many different kinds of treasure, but it usually comes as rewards, money, things that can be sold for money, magic items, knowledge, and equipment.

Be careful how much money, magic, and knowledge your adventures contain; too much, and the game becomes less exciting, too little and it can be frustrating.

Dungeon dressing

“Dungeon dressing” are things that probably don’t matter to the success or failure of the characters, but that add to the experience of being in the dungeon, ruins, or other location. Good dungeon dressing invokes a sense of realism, a sense that this dungeon really did exist before the characters found it. This location, whatever it is, had a use, and evidence of that use remains.

To add good dungeon dressing you need to know what the location was used for. What was it used for in general, and what were the last things to happen there? Did the royal family have a big party before the goblin armies surprised their forces and ransacked the castle? Then the royal ballroom will reflect this—there may be decorations, tables set up, and even leftover food, nearly petrified. Did the goblins break in during the party? Then there may be skeletons, both of the nobles and the goblins, among the party’s detritus.

If this was a place where an individual lived, what kind of an individual were they? Messy? Neat? Self-righteous? Proud?

When describing anything, especially when writing flavor text, consider the purpose to which the structure or room was put. Consider what it was last used for. Think about its light sources, and consider its state of repair. How much natural degradation has occurred, how much has occurred from animal sources, and how much from the raids and ransackings of humans or other intelligent creatures.

Light sources

Rooms do not have to have light sources; they can be completely dark. But usually the former denizens needed some way of seeing while in the room. It may be that they brought their light with them, carrying torches or lanterns. or there may be torches or candles ensconced in the walls. Perhaps windows or skylights allow natural light to enter the room. There might even be magical light illuminating the area.

Candle holders can range from simple to artistically complex. They can be carried, built into the wall or furniture, or in the form of hanging chandeliers. Fireplaces and braziers can provide heat as well as a flickering light.

In the time periods of most adventure campaigns, windows were usually either fully open or fully closed: glass wasn’t used unless it was for decorative purposes. An unshuttered window let in not only light but also breezes or inclement weather. Clear glass was a mark of luxury and status, and in the early period only let in light for illumination. Glass wasn’t clear enough to see through it as we can see through modern glass. It was only in the 1800s that glass-making technology advanced enough to make glass more common in average buildings. Until then, the shutter was the most common way of closing a window to keep the wind out.

Dungeon dressing: Portraits

Portraits are a great place to hide secret spyholes, secret doors, and secret safes. But they also weren’t uncommon on their own. A proud person might have a self-portrait. A dedicated follower might have a portrait of their secular or religious ruler. People might also have a portrait of their spouse, their sponsor, their child, their family, and their ancestors. They might have received a portrait of a friend as a gift.

Portraits can give clues to the state of life in the ruins before they were ruins. A portrait made before the mad prince’s room was boarded up might show a doorway where there is no doorway now.

Notes and books

Some kinds of people like to keep diaries; others might keep simple notes. Diaries of important or brilliant people can be as good as tutorials. A military leader’s diary might have more than information about the way the battles went, it might be a resource for ensuring that battles go well. Diaries can also provide clues to the layout of a building, or about rooms that aren’t obvious.

As children, we played in our secret attic playground. As adults we planned our wars there.

Professionals might also have copies of important books relating to their fields. Hobbyists might have books relating to their hobbies. Military leaders, surveyors, and guides might have maps.

People in the past were often much better at drawing than the average person today. It was a useful skill in an era before cameras. Diaries, notes, and maps often contain drawings to supplement the text.

Hobbies or preoccupations

Depending on the time period and the culture, certain hobbies may be prevalent. Many people grow or collect plants, or collect and perhaps catalog rocks, gems, insects, animal heads, or drawings of any of those. Some might collect marvels, or things that were marketed as marvels. Even in the real world unicorn horns were a popular item. All unicorn horns in a fantasy world don’t have to be real either.

“Naturalists” might also have the rudimentary tools of scientific inquiry. Scales, magnifying lenses (if your technological level allows it), flasks of various liquids, furnaces, bellows, and tongs might each be useful to various experimenters.

Dungeon dressing: Furniture

If people lived there, the kinds of furniture they kept can provide insight into the kind of people they were and the things they did. Besides normal furniture such as beds, bureaus, tables, and chairs, rooms might contain chamber pots if the structure didn’t have indoor plumbing. Kitchens were often completely separate to avoid a cooking fire burning the main building down. Were musical skills common? Musical instruments might be kept for playing or merely as decorations, like dress swords.

Dungeon dressing: Clothing

The kind of clothing a person wears tells something about them and their profession. Many professions have uniforms such as military uniforms, clerical robes, and chef’s hats. People have clothing for specific purposes, such as dances, dinners, walking, and sitting. Warriors might have weapons and armor designed solely for parade. Some professions will have functional clothing such as chefs’ aprons or warriors’ swords and armor. Sometimes they’ll keep these in special rooms. Others will keep such clothing in their main room, or in a small room (such as a closet) off of it. Depending on how the location fell into ruin, there may be clothing of different kinds on the dead (if there are any), or set out waiting for their owner to return and prepare for tea.

The material that clothing is made from, and the colors that clothing is dyed, provide more than clues to the culture that made and (possibly) wore the clothing. It provides information about the plant life that the makers used, who they traded with, and even how they used their tools.

Stylistic fads and lost motifs

If you’re familiar with architecture, painting, or any form of art, you know that there are styles and motifs that come into and go out of favor over time. The presence of these features tell us not only when the structure or item was created, but who created it and who influenced them. Stylistic variation provides information in the same way that layers of sediment and human remains do for geologists and archaeologists.

Sometimes such styles evolve naturally, and sometimes they are born from some popular or visionary artist. Including such stylistic markings adds verisimilitude to your ruins. Ruins of different ages will have different styles, and be inspired by different designers or sources.

Perhaps more interesting are the lost motifs that were once universal but have now all but disappeared. These indicate massive social or political upheaval—the kinds of things that make ruins for adventurers to explore. An observer unfamiliar with twentieth century history in our world would notice the near-universal use of the swastika in commercial, functional, and other art up until the forties. It appeared in postcards and in native American-inspired and Near East-inspired art. Go on any tour of a house built before the forties and you’re very likely to see decorative pottery and tapestry that includes the swastika symbol on it somewhere.

After about 1940, the swastika nearly vanished from popular culture. Where it continues to appear, its meaning is completely different, cluing our theoretically ignorant visitor into the fact that something major happened involving the swastika.

Clues like that to this kind of major event will not be obvious to the player characters immediately. It will only become apparent over time, as they observe (through your flavor text) art objects in the abandoned areas they explore.

Mysteries and clues: Abduction

Role-playing games are interactive in a way that other games have not yet reached, and which current technology cannot reach. Player characters can interact with every single part of the game world, regardless of whether the Adventure Guide has previously considered that part. Because you have a high-level overview of what is going on, you can extrapolate consequences you didn’t previously think of in response to the strange and wondrous things the player characters try.

When your adventure involves a mystery, you’ll need to take advantage of this. You will never place all the clues that can exist, because the world is too big for that. You can’t foresee all of the possible clues that might exist; there will almost always be more than you can think of during the design process. This doesn’t mean that your mysteries are doomed to failure; it means you need to be open to the players searching in unexpected places for unexpected clues.

Because the player characters see the world through you, they must act abductively; they can’t just deduce the solution from what you tell them. They must poke and prod the world to uncover more clues. When they do this, they must think out loud, so that you know what theory they’re testing and what clues they’re looking for. If their theory is correct and it means that the clue they’re looking for must exist, then the clue does, in fact, exist—regardless of whether you have it in your notes.

They’ll basically be making science: constructing theories, making predictions based on those theories, and testing those theories against the world by looking for the clues they predicted.

You will need to encourage them to do this. It isn’t enough for them to tell you that they are examining the bedsheets. They need to tell you why they are examining the bedsheets. They need to explain that they don’t think the victim ever reached the bed, and so there isn’t going to be evidence that it was slept in.

If they don’t do this, you need to ask them to do it. If they try to hide their logic from you, you’re going to miss some brilliant deductions, and they’re going to not get the clues that really should be there.

Often, when their theory is wrong, it will not only not produce the clues they were expecting, it will produce clues to another theory. For example, not only do the bedsheets reflect someone having slept in the bed, they also contain hairs that do not belong to the victim, or it looks as though three people slept in the bed.

The consequences of not finding clues

Not finding clues does not have to stall the adventure. Not finding the clues will have consequences, and these consequences will mean that the adventure continues. Some clues grow bigger over time. The body in the attic is causing a blood stain in the corner; that stain will grow bigger the longer it takes them to find the body.

Many clues are not just one-time/one-location things. Some clues are events that keep happening: the dog that didn’t bark when the intruder stole the horse barks every time a new person approaches the barn. Clues like this don’t stop happening just because they’ve already been seen once. If they did, they wouldn’t be clues. The clue is that the dog barks at everyone except the culprit.

For those kinds of clues, the consequence of not finding the clue is that the clue becomes more obvious.

In other cases, the consequences of not finding clues is that the nature of the adventure changes. If the mystery is how to stop a murderer from murdering again, at some point the murderer will try to kill again. Either they’ll succeed, and the new murder will produce new clues, or the player characters will be in a position to stop the new murder; the adventure will shift from solving a crime to stopping a crime in progress.

The same can be true of greater mysteries: if the mystery’s solution is that an evil wizard is attempting to summon a demon, and the wizard successfully summons that demon, the adventure will shift from stopping the summoning to stopping the demon. It will shift from stopping something from happening to stopping something that is happening to ending something that did happen.

Creature level

Most of the grunt encounters of an adventure (you might also hear them called “disposable NPCS” or “mooks”) will be lower level than the player characters. For example, at first level the characters might encounter goblins or xolome, at second and third level orcs, skeletons, or walking corpses.

There should be a handful of potential encounters in the adventure that are the same level as or a level higher than the characters, perhaps with special abilities: a large spider or skeleton for first level characters, a crown of eyes for second-level characters, or a giant snake for third or fourth level characters.

The main opponent for an adventure should be higher level than the characters. A good rule of thumb is to take the highest player character level, and then add half the number of characters in the group.

Because creatures can also have special abilities, “stocking the dungeon” is a skill that you’ll want to learn: watch how easy or difficult the adventures are, and how that affects how much fun the adventures are to play. Then, in later adventures, adjust the kinds of creatures involved accordingly.

If the main opponent lacks any special abilities or is of animal intelligence, you’ll probably want to give it two or three extra levels to make it more challenging.

Creature variety

I find it adds a sense of reality, or grounding, to use only one or two special creatures in each adventure, and slowly cycle in new creatures as the characters gain experience.

In their first adventure, the characters might strive against goblin clans. In their next adventure, their opponents are goblin clans and orc taskmasters. As they delve deeper into the dungeon or forest, they find themselves up against orc clans and maybe an ogre or two, and suddenly there’s an element of the undead starting to show: skeletons, maybe the wandering dead. The next adventure involves stranger undead, and maybe the next one is mostly ogres with a smattering of orcs and goblins.

Every once in a while, throw in something completely different: they need to pass through a misty valley far from civilization, and the valley is filled with dinosaurs! Or, throw in a dungeon level filled with creatures of the chaotic mist, or a village that’s been taken over by giant spiders.

It’s hard to go wrong with giant spiders, skeletons, and dinosaurs.

The right amount of variety keeps the adventures interesting; too much makes them numbing and too little makes them boring. What constitutes too much or too little will vary from group to group; you’ll have to pay attention to the other players.

Wandering monsters

Wandering encounter charts are an acknowledgement that this is not a board game. You don’t know how long the players are going to have their characters remain in each location. You can’t plan for it by specifically setting each encounter. Your adventure, like their path through it, is not set on cardboard like a boardgame. You need to be able to choose encounters based on their actions and their lack of action.

“Wandering Monsters” are encounters that are not set in advance by the adventure designer. These encounters will be with a creature that inhabits the area the adventurers are in. This flavors an area with inhabitants whose existence is not based on waiting for the players to trigger their scene.

Your wandering monster table also provides you with a simple creature population for the important areas that the adventurers will travel through. Done correctly, this will give you a quick and easy way to see what creatures inhabit the area, and how often, on average, each type of creature is likely to be encountered.

I recommend making a quick overview table first. For example, in a forest far from inhabited areas, you might create a table that emphasizes animals and weird creatures.

This tells you at a glance that in this area, only two percent of the characters’ encounters will be with what you call “civilized folk”. Fully 20% of the characters’ encounters will be with “fantastic creatures”. And 15% will be with inclement weather or other natural encounters.

In nearby areas you can use the same subtables, merely adjusting the percentages on the main table to make the area more wild or more civilized.

If you enjoy improvising, you can stop there and create the rest during the game. If you prefer details, create a separate table for each item on the main table:

You can see that half the time, such encounters will be with humans, and if meeting humans there will be 1 to 20 humans in the encounter group.

There are two items in this list that are further categories themselves: undead, and Chaotic Mist. Presumably, somewhere in this area is a source of undead, and somewhere in the area is a manifestation of the Chaotic Mist. I try to avoid too many levels of tables. One overall table and one breakout table for each entry on the overall table is optimal. But in some cases, such as the Chaotic Mist, or an area where there are lots of undead, it will be easier to segregate those encounters into their own table so that you can see at a glance what’s in the Chaotic Mist, or what kind of undead have infested the area.

Two of the encounters in the sample Fantastic Creatures table have a location in parentheses, rather than a die roll for how many appear. There is a specific Owl Dragon and a specific Green Dragon living in this area, and no more. Encounters will be with that particular creature. You can get more information about that creature by referencing the encounter location.

“Wandering Monster” encounters from these tables may be chosen by the Guide with or without dice. If the Guide decides that there is going to be a wandering monster encounter, and it will be random, a “65” on d100 would indicate a “fantastic” encounter, and a further “59” would indicate a yeti encounter. Finally, rolling two d6 for “1” and “3” would mean an encounter with 4 yeti.

Creating new creatures

When I create new creatures from myths and legends, I like to search a variety of sources. I have a collection of books about mythology and fantastic creatures, and I’ll look up the creature in each of those books, taking note of the parts I want to keep, the parts I want to ignore, and the parts I think might be kernels of more interesting ideas. There will often be references to similar creatures in other cultures, and I’ll follow up on those references. If these fantastic creatures are real, after all, the same creature may well appear under different names in different cultures, even though in real life some mythological creatures are similar only because they spring from the same human need. In your game world, similar creatures in different cultures might be the same creature seen from different perspectives. I’ll also use the Internet as one source for information. Many writers have researched specific creatures of interest and have placed that research on-line.

It is important to reconstruct not just the powers and appearance of the creature, but also its underlying importance, its niche within your campaign world. Find ways to reconstruct the culture of the creature. In real life, the creature’s culture is the same as the culture that created it, but in our “real” fantasy, these creatures have their own culture. Determine the powers the creature really has, as opposed to those that are mythological even in the fictional world you are creating. Look for origins. Where did this creature come from? Look for motives. What do these creatures look for out of life? Are they Evil? Good? Ordered? Chaotic? Or do they not care? Are they related to divinity, or to the faerie, or to the giants? Who put them there? What are they doing now? Where are they going? Are they part of some deeper cause?

Don’t neglect modern mythology either. Many novelists create marvelous worlds filled with unique versions of mythical creatures, as well as with original creatures.

Fuse all of these sources together and you’ll have a creature that, while it is clearly identifiable and could be its mythological counterparts, is also a unique addition to your game world. Every culture remakes its mythology. Be your own culture.

Black River Crossing: Themes!

The first step is to choose three themes. I’m not talking English-major stuff here; I’m talking down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts ideas. What is the monster theme, what is the terrain theme, and what is the dungeon theme? That is, who or what are they?

I like spiders, dinosaurs, and skeletons. I’m going to choose “giant spiders” as the monster theme. There will be spiders in this dungeon.

The terrain can be anything from a city, village, forest, or mountain nook, to a cavern, underground lake, or lava river. What makes up the area around the dungeon? I’m going to choose a forest. A really thick forest.

The traditional dungeon is a series of underground rooms, but it can also be rooms in a single building (such as a castle or manor), a series of natural locations (such as meadows, trees, caves, and natural springs), a cavern complex, or a series of small buildings (such as a village or city block). I’m going to choose natural locations.

So this is my theme: giant spiders in a thick forest, spread around natural locations.

Black River Crossing: Sketch!

The next step is to sketch a simple map. Draw the terrain first, then draw the “dungeon” around or within the terrain. If you’re in a hurry, use a pen: it will keep you from revising what you’ve already done.

You can do this step in a few minutes. You know the terrain, you know what kind of places are in the terrain, and you know what kind of monsters live in those locations. Slap some terrain down, then slap some random places down.

Name and number the locations

You must name the locations. Names help you when it comes time to game: this isn’t just a small building with a spider in it. It’s an outhouse with a spider in it. Or a spider hiding behind Titan Rock. Or the ruins of Old John Grimble’s Farm. Whatever. Name your known locations if you haven’t already.

If you have a simple map, write the names directly on the map; if it’s more complex, number the locations and put the names on a sheet of paper along with the numbers.

This should take a few minutes, maybe ten or fifteen if you have a lot of locations.

Seed it with monsters and treasure

Your locations have titles. Now add your “theme” monster(s). Then, roll up a random encounter or two, or flip through the Encounter Guide to find something appropriate, and add a few non-theme monsters. Add a few words for each location describing what the creature is doing. Hiding? Ambushing? Prowling? Sleeping? Making tea and cookies? (Nothing wrong with putting a grandmother or two in your adventures, living out in the middle of nowhere, minding their own business.)

Now you know where the monsters are and what they’re doing. Which ones are likely to have some treasure? Write it down. Which ones have killed passers-by and are hoarding stolen treasure? Write that down, too, and maybe a note about where the passers-by came from. There may also be remains of their corpses.

If some of the monsters know each other, note their relationships, how they get along. You can make it as simple as “likes” and “doesn’t like”, or more specific such as “property dispute with”, “stole the sardonyx amulet from”, and “ate its cabbage”.

It should only take a few minutes per location to do this.

Add mystery!

Add something out of place: a mystery, puzzle, or anomaly. Something that doesn’t fit this adventure but leads to new adventure. Something for the characters (and players) to talk about. It might be a foreigner’s corpse, a map that’s clearly wrong, a map of a location that doesn’t exist, alien jewelry, a book in an unknown tongue about an incomprehensible thing, a simple note signed by an unfamiliar person in a nearby city. When in doubt, a map is the easiest and most versatile choice. The mystery will often tie into the “something lost” of subsequent adventures.

For this adventure, the meadow is the mystery. It’s not eerie because of the spiders. It’s older than the spiders. If you drink from the well and then rest in the meadow you’ll need to make a willpower roll or fall into a daze for d4 hours. There’s a 1% chance that if you fall into a daze, you’ll wake up remembering a fantastic land, like the Dreamlands of Lovecraft. Obviously it’s a dream… but it felt so real.

If you can’t think of a mystery, don’t worry. You don’t need one for every adventure.

Wandering Monsters

Make a wandering monster chart if necessary. Black River Crossing has spiders, a hermit, a poet, and Grimble’s ghost. It also has rain, fallen trees, sinkholes, and other travelers, most likely—whatever you add to the adventure, since it’s unfinished.

Here’s an example; there is a 30% chance of an encounter every 6 hours. The chance of an encounter can be from every few rounds to every few minutes to every few hours to every few days. Encounters should happen often enough to be interesting. If that part of the adventure is measured in minutes, encounters will have a chance of happening measured in minutes. If it’s a road they’re traveling through and the things they do are measured in days, the chance of encounters will be measured in days.

To more easily assign percentile ranges, go to godsmonsters.com/Guide/monsters/ and list your creatures. It will generate a simple table which you can adjust by percentage; as you change the percentages, it will automatically adjust the ranges for you.