A few months ago, I published my first RPG adventure, War in the Deep, a D&D 4th Edition adventure for Heroic Tier players. Here’s what I learned in writing it.

1. Artwork turns a bland adventure document into an exciting one. I searched Flickr for photos licensed under the Creative Commons for commercial use, and I used Inkscape to create color maps.
2. Most people have black-and-white printers, so make sure your maps are still legible when printed grayscale.
3. Play around with fonts. You can go crazy, of course, which is bad; you don’t want readers crossing their eyes as they read. Fonts must be clearly legible. But a slightly more antique font, reminiscent of 1900’s-era type, for example, can give your adventure text the right tone.
4. Beware text tricks. Adventures use a large variety of types of text; background plot descriptions, dialogue, traditional “boxed text,” stats, headers, and map captions (at least). Make each one distinctive, but not wildly so. You only need two or three different font families; use italicization, bold, indentation, borders, and other such effects to differentiate types of text. (I ended up with one font for headers, one font for text, and one slightly different font for stats because the main text font looked weird at small text sizes.)
5. An adventure’s plot must be railroaded. Unfortunate, but true. War in the Deep is a 4-5 encounter adventure. There’s simply not enough space to wait for the players to wander around investigating plot threads in detail or uncover background plots. So the action must move naturally from one plot point to the next, with little variation. Many stories simply won’t work in this format.
6. Direct players from one plot point to the next; don’t force them. In my first draft, characters would simply insist that the players take up a quest or follow them in a particular direction. Several reviewers pointed out the frustration caused by high-handed NPCs (more accurately: heavy-handed GMing), so I toned that down, while still pointing the characters in a specific direction.
7. Write for the GM, not the players. I wanted to describe the differing personalities of three NPCs very briefly and memorably, so I explained that they act like Han, Leia, and Luke as of the end of Star Wars episode IV. The players won’t ever know this; the NPCs are aquatic elf nobles sitting on a council, so they won’t ever mention Alderaan or the Force. But this shorcut gives the GM a handy hook for each character’s personality, and how they interact.

I’m confused.

I see a lot of articles on the RPG Bloggers Network providing game prep advice. What to think about before a session. What to write down. What to roll up.

Do GMs really have that much trouble preparing for a session?

Seriously. Do we not know how to prep? When I started GMing, I used the advice provided in my GM guide of choice, which laid out the things I’d probably need (maps, enemy stats, etc.).

So, before each game, I made sure I had mapped out any places the players were likely to visit, rolled up stats on any enemies, and figured out what I thought would happen.

Then I GMed. Oh, I’ve tweaked the formula over time—I love world creation, so I suss out lots of details—but I didn’t need to read half a dozen articles about game prep.

And I wonder if other GMs are the same way. Do we really need prep advice? Don’t we know the basics that need to be set up?

I wonder if it isn’t anxiety, stemming from a desire to control the events of the game. Perhaps GMs hope that, with the right prep, the session can go exactly the way they want it to.

Problem is, it rarely does. The story belongs to the players as much as the GM. They have the freedom to pull the story in a different direction, no matter what the GM has prepped.

So, shouldn’t we all just prep the basics, and go with the flow?

Imagine having 100 to 200 role-playing miniatures, in color. Some of them fantasy characters, some of them sci-fi characters, some horror; whatever. And imagine if they cost about 5 cents each, and you could keep them all in a box the size of a hardback book.

I came across these at the D.C. Game Day last year, and I wish I knew the name of the guy who made them. Because they’re ingenious.

First, think about standard RPG tokens, the circular ones printed on heavy card stock. You cut them out and put them on your battle mat. But they’re hard to keep track of, they fall into all sorts of cracks, they flutter and blow around at the slightest breeze, they bend and get creased. They’re a pain.

Okay, so imagine gluing them to the flat side of a washer. Hey. Now they stay put, and they don’t get lost as easily. But you’re still limited to the tokens that your representative game company puts out.

But you’re not.

Go on the web and search for webcomic art. Find some cool web comics. Some will have awesome fantasy characters, some awesome sci-fi characters, some cool monsters; find cool stuff. Drag and drop some great samples to your computer.

Now, open up your favorite image editing application. It can be MS Paint. Crop each strip to just the face of a character (in Paint, use the selection tool, press Ctrl C, then create a new image, change its attributes to 1 pixel by 1 pixel, and press Ctrl V). Save it. Continue for all the strips you’ve downloaded.

(You may not even have to do this much. Many webcomics will have a page devoted just to a list of characters, with facial images already included. Just grab those.)

You now have a bunch of head shots. Drag and drop those into a word processing document. Print it out.

Now go to your local home improvement store and buy a bunch of metal washers; I got 3/18″ washers in bags of 25. Put the washers on top of the faces in your printouts, and make sure they’re a proper size. If not, adjust.

Now you’re gonna make them look fantastic.

Toss your word processing document onto a USB stick or burn it onto a CD, and head down to a nearby office supply store or copier joint. Ask them to print the document out, in color, on nice glossy paper. They’ll show you the papers they have; choose something really nice (you’ll only be using a couple of sheets).

Now cut out the faces, and glue each one onto a separate washer, using normal glue. It’ll stick just fine (though keep an eye on them; mine tend to curl up after I first apply the glue, so I have to press them down once more).

And, boom. You now have dozens and dozens of custom NPCs.

And if you’re in the middle of a game and need a bunch of faceless antagonists, turn your tokens over. The undersides do very well as blank representations of bad guys.

Genius, isn’t it? I just wish I’d thought of it first, in a way. Not that it matters, really, now. I want everyone to know about ’em and start using them.

I’m working on a role-playing campaign setting — a whole city, ripe for adventure. I plan to publish it as one big document, complete with maps, locations, characters, etc.

I decided this setting would benefit from a few appendices that list statistics for the major antagonists, according to several popular role-playing systems. That would mean less work for gamers when they encounter that antagonist.

What systems to use? I wanted popular ones, so I chose D&D 4^th edition, D&D 3.5, and GURPS. Creating the D&D stats was easy, as there are several online character generators for that. But I couldn’t find a good character generator for GURPS.

So I made my own. I’ve posted a GURPS 4^th edition character generator, which includes the complete list of attributes, advantages, disadvantages, and skills listed in the current edition of GURPS Lite. With this, you can roll up a character for a GURPS adventure in less than a minute.

The generator uses relatively simple Javascript, allowing you to save the webpage itself locally to your own hard drive for access if you don’t always have a net connection. It generates the character sheet as a separate page in a separate window. I’ve tested it in Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

As always, feedback is welcome.

I’ve noticed something. Of those wonderful people who think up horrifying monsters for players to encounter during a tabletop role-playing session, many of them struggle with originality.

They strive to create thoughtful histories and almost complete ecologies for their creatures, in the attempt to create a monster that’s not just another vicious humanoid.

I’d like to take a moment to say: They don’t need to.

If I’m questing through a dark, eldritch forest, and something leaps out at me, I want to know how to react. Do I swing my katar at it? Do I make threatening moves? Do I very much not make threatening moves? Do I close in or keep my distance?

If I’m fighting a completely original creature, I’ve no idea how to react to the thing. So I usually have to resort to careful investigation (“Does it seem particularly muscular?”), trial and error (“I poke it.”), or having fun with it (“I rush in and stab it, screaming the whole time!”).

How much fun is that? Not much (for me, anyway). And certainly not if the same scenario occurs for creature in an adventure. I need some facts I can grab on to.

If, on the other hand, I encounter a bear with lizard-like skin, I know roughly how to react. It may spring plenty of surprises on me, but at least I have a framework within which to act.

Which is fundamental to role-playing. One reason for D&D’s popularity is its medieval universe, which is familiar to all of us from reading The Hobbit under the covers as children. We know how to react to most environments in the world, at least basically. The challenge lies in keeping our characters alive and achieving their goals, which usually have nothing to do with the originality of the random creature that drops on their heads as they creep through the Sapphire Caverns.

Now, I love a well-thought-out, unusual creature. I applaud it. But if creature #5 is basically a wolf, don’t worry. It’ll still be fun.

I believe that speed is essential to good role-playing. Think of a good action movie or an engrossing book; the story rockets from revelation to revelation, leaving you breathless. Not that a GM should rush from one plot point to the next, but there’s no point in taking a plot slowly.

Unfortunately, many of the rules and resolution mechanisms in role-playing systems slow down the game as players roll dice and compare numbers. They’re necessary, sure, but the time they consume needs to be minimized.

Enter initiative cards. This one of those little tricks that drastically speed up a game.

Imagine a 3×5″ card that contains the following information:

• Character Name
• Initiative score
• Max HP
• Current HP
• Standard attack
• Vulnerabilities

Imagine writing up one of these for each character (player and non-player). When a battle begins, write down the initiative scores, and order the cards by that score.

Boom. You call out the name of the player on the first card. The player attacks an NPC. You pull out the NPC’s card, note any damage, and slip it back in. You then flip to the next card and announce that player’s turn.

And battle zips from one player to the next. No need to write down a temporary initiative list, and all vital stats are in one place.

Even better, on subsequent battles you just sort in the appropriate NPC cards. Takes about ten seconds to set up for a battle.

It’s greatly sped up my games. I’d prefer to just do away with initiative altogether, but that’s another blog post.

All right, I admit it: I play Dungeons & Dragons. This may horrify some of my evangelical friends, but trust me: there’s nothing wrong with it.

You may ask, why play D&D when it has so many negative connotations? Why not use one of the hundreds of other role-playing systems out there, like FUDGE or GURPS?

First, I’ll use Saalon‘s metaphor: D&D is like Microsoft Windows. Everyone uses it and it works okay, though it’s kinda bloated and sometimes confusing.

I contend that World of Darkness is like the Mac, and FUDGE/GURPS are like Linux, but those are different subjects.

So, I play D&D because it’s a standard. It provides a common context for discussing role-playing with others, and if I’m playing with a bunch of folks I don’t know, D&D’s a convenient default.

But that shouldn’t be the only reasons. I play D&D because it’s fun. It’s exciting and adventurous; it feels like a big, epic fantasy action/adventure movie.

Well, the current 4^th edition feels that way. I also played 3.5 Edition, which felt more like an overly-long series of fantasy novels.

4^th Edition D&D provides a huge world, brimming with possibility. There are dozens of fascinating races, all scrambling over an ever-evolving world of good, evil, conflict, and flashing steel. You can throw yourself into combat, or negotiate with merchants, or haggle with kings.

(Can you tell that I love setting?)

The system works quite well, too. It’s a heavy system, compared to all the others out there, but it works. You choose values for six core attributes, such as Strength and Intelligence. Your race and class (profession, like cleric or warlord) may improve those numbers, and will give you access to a menu of powers. Some powers can be used as often as desired, others only once per battle, and others once per day. You then choose from a set of skills, which are all affected by your attributes (a high Strength score makes you better at Acrobatics).

I’m not as crazy about the two-step combat mechanic, where you roll a 20-sided die to see if you hit, then another die (number of sides depending on the weapon) to determine how much damage you do. Combat can grind to nearly a standstill as half a dozen players roll their dice in turn.

But even that has its charm, with players picking out a shiny d8 or d10 to roll their damage.

It works. D&D is fun. It’s goofy, and overly complex at times, but it’s a fine way to spend a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, romping through a huge fantasy world and baring your teeth at dragons.

There are worse ways to spend a Saturday.

Before I published War in the Deep, I wanted to be sure I was publishing a good-looking, professional adventure. So I bought a few.

D&D adventures are of startlingly high quality, even those made by individuals. Of course, the official, published, $30 adventures look fantastic, though I knew I wouldn’t achieve that level of quality on my first attempt.

I did have some minimum standards, though:

• There had to be maps, using standard squares, in color.
• (Thanks to Johnn Four) The colors had to be of sufficient contrast that they’d print beautifully in black-and-white. Most folks still don’t have color printers at home, after all.
• The adventure had to work with a range of player levels. My players advance so quickly that an adventure designed for one level would only be useful to me for a couple of months, and even those designed for a few levels would be too limiting.
• There had to be artwork or pictures.
• The document had to start with an overall explanation of the adventure as a whole, so DMs could decide if it was right for them.
• Each creature had to have a complete stat block.
• I couldn’t use a standard computer font (Times New Roman, Arial, etc.).

I satisfied all those criteria. The adventure is for characters from level 1 through 10 (the Heroic Tier), with maps created in Inkscape, and using Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos of underwater scenes. Of course, I’d like to have done more with it, like use artwork instead of letters for items on the maps, and use the two-column layout that RPGers seem to love—but nothing’s ever perfect. I’m satisfied, and I learned a lot for the next adventure.

What about you? What standard elements do you need in an adventure?

New players are a fact of life for GMs. They may have never played a tabletop RPG before, or only using vastly different systems. How do you introduce yourself? How do you lay the ground rules?

I’m still figuring it out, but I do have a few things I make sure to go through.

1. I describe my policy on character death, that while I don’t actively try to kill player-characters, neither will I re-arrange the laws of physics to prevent willful character death.
2. I explain what I love about GMing. This lets players know what to expect from me. I explain that I love to create worlds, so my games tend to be expansive and original, but not heavily detailed.
3. I describe what excites me in players. I figure, as a player, I’d want to know what sort of player the GM expects. Heavy role-playing? Intimate knowledge of the rules? Whatever. For me, I love players who really get into their characters, and who are ready when their turn comes up in combat.
4. I describe what gets me angry. I think this is vitally important, yet I never see folks write about it. What are those hot-button issues? Let’s get them out in the open, so they don’t surprise anybody. Mine are dealing with too many questions at once, and stubborn insistence on looking up every rule even when it halts gameplay for 10 minutes. So I explain that I’ll sometimes come up with a reasonable temporary ruling if a rule look-up takes too long.

I also talk about a few of our house rules and social policies, such as:

1. Cell phones should be turned to vibrate or switched off.
2. If anyone has to leave the table, they should announce where they’re going. They can leave instructions on what to do with their character while they’re gone. If they don’t, and they’re gone for a full round, we’ll skip their turn for that round.
3. The GM is happy to keep character sheets if players have trouble remembering to bring them.
4. We use “luck tokens,” which can be turned in to either immediately succeed on a die roll, or add one fact to the world. The only restrictions on the latter are that the new faact cannot change history, and that if a luck token is traded in to immediately resolve a fight or problem, the players get no experience points for it. Players start with one luck token per session, and win more for good role-playing.

Once I began explaining this to new players, everyone gets up to speed much more quickly, and we don’t spend valuable playing time with unhappy players.

How do you tell new players about house rules and such? And what are your house rules?

When last we left our adventurers, they were swimming north in hot pursuit of Princess Teela, who adamantly refused to return to her parents until she’d wrought vengeance on the sahuagin for their invasion of her country.

Endings are crucial. I can forgive a rocky beginning, and I can push through a dull middle, but a bad ending will ruin a story for me.

The ending has to feel bigger than the rest of the story. It may not be flashier, or have more action; that depends on the type of story. But since this is a war story, I wanted this to have a big war ending. I wanted the equivalent of ending Wolfenstein 3D by fighting a powered armor-wearing Hitler.

This meant two things: a battle against a powerful enemy, and a battle against the sahuagin king. However, according to D&D lore, sahuagin kings are simply more vicious than the others; they’re not inherently powerful enough to take down half a dozen seasoned adventurers.

So I could have gone in two directions. I could have increased the sahuagin king’s power, by giving him some magical artifact. Or I could add a separate, powerful martial character.

I chose the second route, though I just realized that I could have tied the adventure together much better by going the first route. The sahuagin king could have stolen the magical artifact that the players are seeking from the merfolk king, and that could be giving the sahuagin king the power to raise this army. Ah well.

So I created a separate martial antagonist. Since this adventure is designed for Dungeons & Dragons, I figured I should put a dragon in somewhere if I could, so I decided that the sahuagin king is pushing a priestess to summon a white dragon to do their bidding. (For the record, this would never have worked.)

So, the players venture northward, and come upon a huge sahuagin city, which sits mostly empty as the army is down south fighting the merfolk. But a strange glow is coming from a temple in the city. This is the only distinguishing characteristic.

So the players travel there, and navigate through its twisting passages to a large, amphitheater-like room in the back. There, they find the priestess, holding an orb and murmuring a ritual, while the sahuagin king and a bunch of bodyguards stand nearby, watching. The water swirls around the priestess, and small wisps of light flash in and out of existence within it. The players can just make out the ghostly form of a dragon inside, slowly growing more distinct.

So, the players must fight the bodyguards first (who rush towards the players immediately to prevent them from getting to the king or priestess), then the priestess (who has plenty of spells), and the king (who is a very good fighter). After their defeat, the war is effectively over, and Teela can return to her father and people.

And that’s the adventure: 3 to 5 encounters (depending on the number of sahuagin raiders that the DM decides to toss in), moving logically from one location to the next: the western sea, the aquatic elves, the merfolk capitol, the northern front, and the sahuagin capitol.

As you can see, my adventure creation method involves consequences. At each stage, I look for a next step that’s logical and interesting. Logical because the alternative frustrates players; interesting to keep players engaged.

Works well for me. Now to design the next one….