Plot Point 12 The Bad Guys (Part 2)

’m changing some things up with the blog and looking at a variety of new and old ideas in gaming.  I’d like to spend part of today talking about some recurring tropes and ideas that crop up in fantasy storytelling and how they can be used (and abused) in an RPG to some sort of effect.  Today’s volume is a little different because we’re not going to be looking at a specific instance or idea of a plot trap, but a larger concept that is overarching throughout the fantasy RPG genre and beyond.  When you’re designing an encounter, an adventure, a story arc, or even a campaign, your villains are an essential part of what you’re designing, and you can put a lot of thought into all of the aspects of team “bad guy.” What we’re going to do is take a look at some types of bad guys and how they can scale up to deal with your player characters in interesting interactions throughout the encounter, adventure or potential campaign.  Let’s take a closer look.  

Treasure Hunt Outline

Those of you that have been keeping up with the random things that fall out of my head might know that I'm working on constructing a fairly large scale adventure is a project.  This is my rough outline of the adventure, broken down into key parts and then encounters.  I use the word encounter as a placeholder for any significant event in the story, whether it's a travel sequence, a set piece battle, a dungeon to explore.  As you can see each part has 7 encounters to play with, and this outline features a background, a prepping your adventuring hooks, and then the follow up, and what happens next.  Finally, there are three appendices listed so far, and I will likely add a 4th to include any and all monster statistics needed to run this adventure.  See what you think, see what's interesting, and i'll starting fleshing out the stems of this outline.   Happy Gaming

Monster Mash (Thought processes for Adventure Building)

Hey Game Fans, Some of you might have seen me posting some thoughts and ideas about an adventure i am working on, and part of the process i go through when writing an adventure is to basically whiteboard up a list of monsters that i think i am going to use for the adventure.  Most of the time, this starts with me just tossing up a list of all the monsters and then pruning them down as i move through the ones that i don’t think i’m going to end up using.  So i’m going to share some of my whiteboarding and put up a broad list of monster ideas that i think would be fun to drop on unsuspecting players.  

Social Encounter Building Ideas (Part II)

Hey Game Fans, last week we took a look at some ideas for how to setup your encounters for your role-playing games.  The crux of what we looked at revolved around what you expected your players to gain/glean/suffer for engaging the encounter.  Today we’re going to look at another important part of encounter building, the antagonist.  I’ve called them the Challenge in the past, and i’m sure there are dozens of other titles and names that people have used in the past.  Let’s take a closer look at what the antagonist is supposed to do, and the role they play in the story you’re setting up for your players to experience.