Friday, June 12, 2009

adventure writing advice??

(If you are one of my players.. please don't read.. hehe)

So I working on my one-shot Earthynn story that I am running at GenCon. Its going to pre-gen charcters.. probably level 12 (wanted to try some higher level 4e). It involves a wizard's tower, a mysterious city and a gold dragon. I have lots of col ideas for it.. the adventurer are going to start with "amnesia" and there will be a long running skill challenge throughout the story involving them regaining their memories... there are some cool puzzle rooms in the tower... the city itself is full of illusions... there is an Eye Tyrant at work behind the scenes... I have lots of cool ideas.. but when I actually sit down to assemble them into a concrete adventure... I get nowhere...

How do I start, where does it go from there... basically I am just looking for tips on structuring the adventure.. should I start just by writing up encounters? Does it benefit me to draw out maps first? should I detail all the ideas I have as individual encounters then find ways to tie them together? Do I write up an outline and stick to it?

The gaming group I will be running this for (and the one that will eventually be the long-running Earthynn campaign) are a varied lot... some are new to DnD, some are very casual players, and others are very hardcore players... so I am trying to be prepared for all fronts...heh

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Personally, I usually start with a couple of encounters just to get myself writing and a lot of the details get hammered out in the process. For example, what I would do with what you have now is design the Eye Tyrant encounter and think about how important it is to the adventure. Then I would sketch out a few maps, like the tower, and by then I would have a good feel for what else I want in the adventure.
Thats a little "stream of conscious" but I hope it helps

Pondrepof said...

hmm.. yeah that helps. Just start making encounters and the rest will (hopefully) come organically ...