I have this friend. They’ve only run Dungeons and Dragons so far. Listening to them talk about the games they run, they are clearly passionate and their players love the games they make. They have run three campaigns so far, each of them based off an existing adventure path.
And I’ve watched those long-form adventures slowly destroy their desire to use written adventures of playing D&D ever again. After many talks, they are going to be shifting system. I am excited for them that they’re going to be changing up games. However, the process they have been through makes me wonder – is there a point where an adventure can become the problem? How can we recognise that? What can we do? Is there a different way to go on how we use adventures?
In this last part of my series about how we read adventures, I’m going to look at a different take on how we interact with one of the RPG products most ubiquitous products.
When An Adventure Fails
Sometimes, you read an adventure and while you like the concept, you can’t imagine the players you have actually playing through it. Sometimes you get halfway through planning it and realise it doesn’t hold together. Sometimes you are actually deep into a campaign and realise the design isn’t something your group is enjoying or it’s implementing the thing you wanted to enjoy in a way that doesn’t serve the core fantasy you’re after.
Descent Into Avernus is a great example of this; an adventure that promises to be a “Mad Max In Hell” style adventure but starts in Baldur’s Gate, let’s you do a few levels of intrigue and get really attached there and THEN throws you into hell (leaving all your supporting cast behind) and just sandboxes the place with no parts of the adventure actually focused on Mad Max style road battles. Sure it has demon cars. But literally no chase set pieces or car focused missions. Instead the cars are just a method of transport. Depending on how experienced a GM you are, you might recognise this when you read it, or it might be at any point after. But one thing you shouldn’t be doing is continuing with the adventure as is.
Off Book, Not Off Hook
One thing you can do is try to remember what you thought might be cool about the adventure in the first place. Go back and find the bits that jumped out at you and drag the game in that direction.
I don’t mean just reflavour it. Instead just sit down and write out a plan of what you actually wanted the adventure to be and go from there. Even if you still call it the same thing, the players do not care how close your version of events actually stuck to the ‘canon plot’.
Treat the adventure as a sourcebook to the adventure’s location and build your own thing. For example, if I was running Descent, I’d skip everything in Baldur’s Gate where the players are investigating what happened to another town that was dragged to hell. I’d instead have them inside the town as it was dragged to hell and have them in a sort of post-apocalyptic survival story right from the beginning in a town under siege. From there it becomes a fight for survival where they can work out what is going on in a town that is falling to pieces, gain resources by using the aforementioned hellcars to get around and I’d then steal the warlord rules and stats from the back of the book to write a different set of ideas.
You can do this at any point. You can just ditch the path of the adventure and never actually go anywhere near its expected conclusion. The only thing you have to serve are your players. Make sure their expectations are met. Maybe they wanted to meet Zariel after learning about her earlier in the adventure? That’s easy to put in, but it doesn’t have to look like the storyline in the book. Let them guide you.
The truth is most good campaigns look nothing like they did when they started and often don’t have the same objectives. Holding the same objective for over a year of actual play can be draining and make a game go through knots to keep focus. So if you are in for the long haul, changing things up is a really good idea.
The Harvest
Sometimes, it’s totally impossible. You pick up an adventure and read it and just instantly know it’s not going to work. This is when the deep dive begins. Going through the product and looking at what you can pull out to get your money’s worth.
I’ll regularly go through a product I own and list off the monsters, locations, items, NPCs and rules so that I can work out what there is to carve up and use. You can strip anything off a corpse and drag and drop. When I was still buying Wizard’s product (bet you can guess why I stopped), I’d judge if I was going to get an adventure supplement largely by the number of new monsters a book had. I knew that even if it sucked, I’d still be able to use those statblocks.
Take anything you can. Dive back into the book every so often and just see if there’s anything else you can tear off the carcass. Make your ongoing campaign a Frankenstein’s Monster of a thing. Add locations and rooms from one thing, populate them with things from other places. Add in a table from another book to represent a strange environment. Keep mashing things together.
Things don’t even have to be from the same system. You can just catch vibes from a product and sort of get an idea. There’s a few D&D adventures I’d just steal the plotline from and run as star wars adventures – in these it’s not the mechanics I’d be harvesting, but the plot, the theme.
In the wake of the announcement of the new edition of D&D, I’ve seen people saying that the future of this the hobby is going to be a much wider spread of games and ideas than one monolithic company.
In truth it always has been. The heart of the RPG industry has always been in a DIY attitude. Make your own stories, create your versions of worlds. Let that start with your approach to it’s most base elements. Take a thing that isn’t working and forge your own path.
Thank you for being with me as forged my own path through my 150th Genre Police article. Until next time, I’ll see you down the road. Good adventures.
Creative Commons credit: Surroundings of Baldur’s Gate by MapyNiepraktyczne and DND NPCs – Groundkeepers by Daandric.
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Using a published adventure as a Seed for the PCs’ own picaresque detouring is a fun way to start a new campaign. I’d agree it’s a good idea to hold on to the scenario elements you want – treat every plot thread as a guideline than a railroad.