Between are the Doors: Adventure Generator by OFTHEHILLPEOPLE

Feeling pressed for adventure ideas?  Fictivite passes on a Random Adventure Generator by OFTHEHILLPEOPLE.  This is an 8-page PDF with a d12 table on each one, providing ways to pick

  • Quest Contact, the person or source of information regarding the adventure;
  • The Adventure, the nature or goal of the adventure;
  • The Location, the primary setting of the adventure;
  • The Macguffin, the item (if any) that is the focus of the adventure;
  • The Innocents, characters or creatures related to the adventure, neither protagonist or antagonist but likely sympathetic;
  • The Antagonists, the primary opposition in the adventure;
  • The Twists and Complications, because if it was straightforward it would hardly be an adventure;
  • The Dramatic Conflict, what is bad about successfully completing the adventure.

The entries in the tables are generally fairly abstract.  For instance, The Location contains:

  1. Bandit Territory
  2. Mansion or Estate
  3. Swamp/Flooded Area
  4. Island
  5. A Fortress
  6. Scalding Desert
  7. An Overgrown Forest
  8. Urban
  9. Mountains/Caves
  10. Jail/Detention Camp
  11. Ocean
  12. Underground

with a brief description of what it means and some of the things to keep in mind while designing the adventure.

This can provide a bare skeleton with lots of room to hang detail from.  Looking the tables over, I think it could do a lot to prod my thinking into paths other than I would likely come up with on my own.  Combine it with some of the other random generators (such as the lot at Seventh Sanctum) for names and some other elements, and you have tools to help do a lot of the high-level design work.

Obviously you don’t need to roll on all tables, and you might want to roll more than once on a table to complicate things.  Perhaps the adventure spans several Locations, or a Location consists of multiple elements (a Fortress in a Desert, a Mansion in the Swamp, a Prison Island).  There might be multiple Antagonists — whether they cooperate with each other or not, they certainly don’t want the protagonists to succeed.

One comment

  1. Pingback: Review: Never Unprepared | Keith Davies — In My Campaign - Keith's thoughts on RPG design and play.

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