Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Shaitan0.2beta 03-07-05, 12:11 PM	What are your adventures, campaigns like? All of D&D material is usefull when making a dungeon crawl, but what about the part of the adventure that leads to the fighting. Now, what I do for an (1) adventure (campaign chapter) is: Step 1) Take abour 8-12 Call of Cthulhu adventures, modify them for D&D, and make them all hapen at the same time. Get the player involved in as many as possible and make most of them connected somehow. Just one of these adventures has more non-combat material then entire D&D campaigns (two or three put together). Step 2) Put about 2-4 shorter or site based D&D adventures in there for the fights. Solution of these provide clues for CoC adventures. Make them connected to CoC adventures. Step 3) Put in 2 comic relief short D&D adventures. Tones down the scaryness. Step 4) You have an adventure. There. That makes a nice adventure. About 10-15 of these makes a nice campaign. Hwo U do it?
Vatras 03-07-05, 03:07 PM	I take a basic campaign line, which will become visible over time (or maybe not, depends if the players look for it), but not become the object of adventure before epic levels. Otherwise I take up something which will take a while to do (like founding a shipping line, building a castle, destroying an evil cult, etc.) and write up the smaller adventures for that theme (the last one revolved around freeing a ruined city from the evil in it and start to rebuild it; took about half a year realtime; sub-adventures were cleaning out the disease ridden sewers, solving the murder mystery of the wizards tower, exploring the temple of a forgotten god, where the undead masterminds have set up their HQ, preventing the wood giant tribe nearby from falling under the sway of a cult who wants to replace druidic worship, and so on). I define campaign as the time of rolling up of the characters until people want to stop playing them (my longer ones took around 5 years; I consider my RuneQuest campaign the most successful I have run...I did everything for it myself, including world map(s), countries, cultures, and religion). After a while players start to develop goals and ideas of their own, on which I can hook up my adventures. One of them wants to find out about the roigins and history of a broken swordblade they found, so I write up a story for that quest (scope of such things depends on how large I guess the players interest is). They want to hire mercenaries, workers and find settlers for the ruined city, so I write something for that goal, playing upon the players poibnts of interest. If and when they establish a colony in the ruins, neighbours will also take an interest and send people to trade and negotiate. I will create the NPCs and their means and goals and then see if the players want do something in one direction or the other. This has the advantage of not having to invent some motivation, as the players are already motivated. Many things at that point become more storytelling than combat (if they want to clear out the drow nearby in the woods, we will probably have one extended tabletop battle...everyone likes to show off and try out some tricks on easy targets :), but whenever the same comes up I will probably not play it out, unless the players really want to; it becomes boring fast). When they get tired of diplomacy and easy things, I always have one dungeon crawl prepared to go.
Elrathh 03-08-05, 10:14 PM	I plan the first encounter of the session. Then I wing it from the small plans (scribbles in a notebook) I have on hand. I should probably stop doing this though, because my lack of dialogue produces Hack and Slash.
Laranis Callirr 03-08-05, 10:32 PM	I look back at my previous session, and do something completely different each time. Oh, and I generally try to avoid dungeon crawls, but I think this next session will involve an incursion into Undermountain for some search & rescue action. :D