Adventure Recipes

These procedures help you build an adventure skeleton or outline. You’ll then go through and flesh out the details of the adventure, including adversaries and locations. As you play, you’ll keep adjusting to fit the events of the game. Anything you haven’t already introduced can be changed as needed. Just like with any recipe, you’re meant to adjust the details to fit your group’s preferences. You might stray far from your starting point, and that’s OK!

These recipes use six steps. You might want to look ahead to your future steps and make choices out of order based on what’s most important for you to convey. The catch-all term “opposition” refers to the various adversaries and obstacles the PCs will face. The opposition should be thematically consistent, but not necessarily monolithic. It might contain multiple individuals or groups, who might not get along with one another.

• Styles (page 41): The overall vibe of your game, such as a gritty game, dungeon crawl, or high adventure. These frameworks offer guidelines for the number of sessions and types of encounters that work best.
• Threats (page 43): Thematic dangers to incorporate into your game, and ways to evoke them as you play. The style and threat are the core parts of your recipe.
• Motivations (page 44): Determine more specifically what the opposition’s goals and motivations are.
• Story Arcs (page 44): This section gives you guidance on how to construct story arcs that will play out over your adventure and maybe beyond.
• NPCs and Organizations (page 45): The characters and factions you include should fit the theme.
• Mechanics (page 45): Your last step is adding in the individual creatures, hazards, treasure, and so on.

Motivations

Think about your opposition, and what their goals and motivations are. The motivation of the opposition needs to match your threat. If you have multiple adversaries, their motivations should all work toward your theme, but they might have different goals and act more as rivals or enemies. Motivations should be more than one dimensional. There should be a reason for every action the opposition takes—not necessarily a good one or a smart one, but a believable one. Be true to each character!

Consider these questions so you can use the answers when deciding what the opposition will do.

• What does the opposition want?
• Who or what does the opposition fear? (And no, “the PCs” isn’t an answer.)
• Why is the opposition sure to succeed? If the PCs don’t do anything, what makes the opposition unstoppable?
• What are the opposition’s weaknesses? How can they be bribed or tricked? What’s something they ignore that might be used against them?

NPCs and Organizations

Allied, neutral, and adversarial NPCs and organizations can all contribute to the theme. You’ll want most to follow the theme directly, like the examples in Threats on page 43. However, you can add a few counterpoints to the theme. For example, a horror game might include one or two NPCs who are more hopeful, either to grant respite from the dread or to kill off to show just how bad things are. Including NPCs who aren’t adversaries makes the world feel more real. It also increases the stakes, as PCs have people to care about, protect, and socialize with. You’ll often find that NPCs you create will become more or less important than you expected. You can “demote” an NPC if the players don’t find them interesting or “promote” them if the PCs like them more than expected.

Mechanics

Last of all, you’ll fill out specific encounters, NPCs, treasure hoards, maps, and so on. For many games, you can save most of this work for between later sessions, spreading out your preparations over the course of the game.

You can find more detail on these in the Core Rulebook:

• Treasure guidelines (page 508)
• Accomplishment XP (page 507)
• Environments (page 512)
• Building Encounters (page 488)
• Hazards (page 522)

You can also find more information on these in this book:

• Building your own creatures (page 56)
• Building your own hazards (page 74)
• Building encounters (page 46)