The Kobold Guide to Game Design Volume I: Adventures A Compilation of Essays from Open Design By Wolfgang Baur with Keith Baker, Ed Greenwood, and Nicolas Logue Table of Contents Acknowledgments Foreword 1 - The Three Audiences 2 - Shorter, Faster, Harder, Less Small Beats Big Small Writers Starve, Compact Writers Thrive The Art of the Pitch Long But Short Six Secrets of Text Compression What You Gain 3 - Why Writers Get Paid 4 - Fantasy Realism Serious Fantasy Respect for Players and Setting Coherent and Plausible 5 - Worldbuilding Point 1: Gaming Ain’t Fiction Point 2: Genres, Action, and Big Ideas Point 3: Hide Your Work. Bury It Deep Point 4: Logic of the Setting Point 5: Empire of the Ghouls At Last! Pond-Oriented Worldbuilding Conclusion 6 - Pacing Pacing Definition Combat and Pacing Events and Pacing The Secret of Castle Shadowcrag’s Pacing Structure Cliffhangers as a Resting Place Increasing Speed by Raising Stakes Setting Up the Finale Conclusion 7 - Using and Abusing Misdirection Players Making Bad Choices Misdirection in Read-Alouds Fey as a Misdirection-Based Subtype Misdirection and Fairness Treasure Misdirection and Appraise Conclusion 8 - Monster Hordes: Epic Heroism vs. Smooth Skirmishing Page 49 Says “No Way” How to Handle Hordes How NOT to Handle Hordes Conclusion 9 - Stagecraft: The Play is the Thing Structure of the Story Conclusion 10 - On the Street Where Heroes Live: Bringing Towns to Life in a Fantasy Campaign The Basics The Locals Answering the Questions The Trick of Subplots The Law and the Lively My PCs Fought the Law Getting It Right 11 - City Adventures City Types and Party Types City Law and Order Use the Innocent City Characters XP for City Adventures Conclusion 12 - What Makes a Night Arabian? It’s Not Mechanical Clear Heroes and Villains Nested Stories Conclusion 13 - Hardboiled Adventures: Make Your Noir Campaigns Work Everyone Has A Past Big Risks, Trivial Rewards The Ugly World The Role of Alignment Hit the Books 14 - The Underdark The Mythic Underdark Underdark as Wilderness Heroes as Permanent Outsiders Conclusion 15 - Fire and Sword: Inspiration and Discipline in Design Two Kinds of Fire Working With Fire When the Fire Goes Out The Sword The Three-Bladed Sword Conclusion Open Design Projects to Date Acknowledgments It’s impossible to thank everyone when several hundred patrons have contributed their thoughts over two years of blogging, posting, brainstorming, and discussion, but one tries. When you have a mind that works better with fictional names than real ones, it is more of a challenge still. First of all, let me thank all the patrons who have supported Open Design, from Andrew Shiel, the very first patron of the very first project, to the most recent arrival to the community. Everyone who commissions a project makes a contribution. It may be a matter of answering the polls and funding the writing, art, maps, and publication of this work; that’s important for every project. In fact, without it, Open Design wouldn’t exist, and wouldn’t attract the rich commentary and the talented contributors it does. Beyond that crucial support, there are a few people who consistently keep things positive and illuminate. Others have provided support in steering discussions, in providing alternate solutions, careful proofreading, or the little known art of monster wrangling. Patrons have stepped forward for a hundred small pushes in the right direction. In that vein, and for their generous insight, criticism, and imagination, I’d like to thank Keith Baker, Randy Dorman, Clay Fleischer, Gary Francisco, Jeff Grubb, Richard Green, Ed Greenwood, Mark Gedak, Lucas Haley, Benjamin Hayward, Ed Healy, Lutz Hofmann, Christian Johnson, Ken Marable, Ari Marmell, Ben McFarland, Robert Moore, Daniel Perez, Chris Pramas, Kevin Reynolds, Jaye Sonia, Jim Stenberg, Joshua Stevens, Brian Summers, Keith Unger, and Stephen Wark. Open Design would be a poorer community without you. Thanks also to Aaron Acevedo, Johnathan Bingham, Darren Calvert, Lucas Haley, and Jeff McFarland for their art, and Andreas Reimer and Lucas Haley for their cartography. I’d also like to thank my editor, Bill Collins, for his tireless efforts to make this compilation a reality. Any remaining errors are, naturally, my own. Foreword I expected that Open Design would be a learning experience. I didn’t expect that I would be the one doing so much of the learning. I was not a novice in adventure design two years ago, but I had never been asked to explain myself before. I knew that I preferred story-driven adventures to purely combat-driven ones, and that I liked giving Dungeon Masters sandboxes rather than railroads. I have a deep and abiding faith in the ability of good DMs to take a solid outline and bring it to life for their players. My job, I thought, was to inspire DMs with adventures they wanted to run, NPCs they enjoyed roleplaying, and combats that would be amusing or terrifying. Great. Fine. Wonderful. Now explain how to do that. That’s the part that I promised, but wasn’t at first sure that I could deliver. The early days of Open Design were panic-stricken behind the scenes. What if the commission funds couldn’t be raised? What if everyone just wanted to argue? How would I keep everyone entertained until the project either launched or (shudder) belly-flopped in a big and public way? (None of this came to pass by the way.) I wrote a couple of essays about adventure design to tide people over; private posts and musings that I didn’t think of as part of the project. These essays proved to be immensely popular (with the very small audience of the time), and were later published by Wizards of the Coast as their Adventure Builder series. Others followed, some of them becoming Dungeoncraft entries in Dungeon magazine. They started people talking. Born out of desperation, the design essays became a delight, a way to get out of the small, tactical discussions to take on larger issues of DMing and design, to look at the panorama rather than the cameo or the miniature. Since the end of Dungeon, the essays jumped to Kobold Quarterly, with entries in the Dungeon Design series by Keith Baker and Ed Greenwood. People keep asking for more. I think we might be onto something here. They helped me start a conversation about the issues all designers face. I hope these discussions make you think about what you love best in gaming. I like to think that they may strengthen your designs. Even if you disagree, the conversation about why is the first step to a deeper awareness of what drives your design, whether it is a love of action, setting, character, or plot. Everyone’s approach may be different. But these essays are the children of almost 20 years of design. They’re all grown up, and ready to go out into the world. Wolfgang Baur February 11, 2008 Copyright 2008 Open Design LLC. All rights reserved. Most product names are trademarks owned by the companies that publish those products. Use of the name of any product without mention of trademark status should not be construed as a challenge to such status. Open Design, Free City of Zobeck, Kobold Quarterly, and the KQ logo are trademarks of Open Design LLC. 1 The Three Audiences September 20, 2007 As an adventure writer, you always have three audiences. You need to please all three to be successful. They all want “great adventures,” but that phrase means different things to different audiences. The first is the editor; if your pitch or query is too dull, too mechanical, or too long, you’ll never get it approved. The other audiences don’t matter because they will never see your work. The editor wants to please his readers; he knows their tastes, he knows what’s being talked up on the boards, he knows what products Hasbro’s marketing department will want him to push. Yeah, the marketing angle is tacky, but true. You can get work playing to the Hasbro release schedule, but you’ll hate yourself. I don’t recommend it. To please your editor, write a pitch on a topic that you know his audience loves, and do it in a way he hasn’t seen before. Easy, right? The DM is the audience you need to please next. The person who edits has to like your work, acquire it, and publish it, but someone reading it needs to respond to it. What do DMs like; what do they need? You know all this, but sometimes it’s easy to get distracted. DMs like enough backstory to understand the setup, without so much detail that they can’t import something into their “The players are the ultimate word of mouth authority, who will recommend your adventure or pan it to others, despite never having read a word of it.” own campaign. They need concrete, short readaloud text that sets up an encounter. They need accurate stats, ideally ones that they can’t just pull from the Monster Manual. And they need a compelling sequence of encounters with some transitions. Most of all, it has to be exciting fantasy, with creatures and villains that are ideal for fun gameplay. You will have noticed that the player comes last. The adventure is really for both the DM and the player, yet there is surprisingly little overlap between the two audiences. The DM needs something that gets the players pumped up, that saves a bunch of work, and that makes running the session smoother. The player wants to be the hero at the center of the action: killing bad guys, stealthing around or whatever fits his hero concept.