为storytelling collective网站的课.
因为节约时间(偷懒)大部分是copy&paste(再放送).
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Just do it
Today’s milestone: Try writing 500 words within the next 3 days.
We recommend following the Writing an Introduction activity for this milestone if you’re not sure where to start.
A 500-word introduction section in your adventure will set the Game Masters running your adventure up for success!
Remember to include all of the details a GM needs to facilitate your adventure at their table — don’t leave any surprises until the end of your adventure.
Having a hard time staying motivated or focused while writing? Here are some tips and tricks:
- Visit the Moodboards & Playlists as Author Resources article under Onboarding.
Make a moodboard or playlist to inspire you. We want you to be in love with your adventure concept! There’s no such thing as loving your own idea too much.
- Set a timer.
Parkinson’s Law, which states that “work expands to fill the time allotted.”
Try setting a 30 minute timer to focus ONLY on writing.
Don’t worry about how good it reads; just get the words out of your head.
Check out a tool like Forest to gamify your time-setting; a Pomodoro Method tool like Pomofocus; or a simple tomato kitchen timer (”pomodoro” means “tomato” in Italian, by the way!).
- Try dictation.
Sometimes staring at a blank page can be a deterrent to making progress.
Speak your ideas aloud to a friend, or to yourself, and record it (or use a dictation tool — Microsoft Word has one built-in).
Once you’ve articulated some of your thoughts, get the file transcribed OR type it up yourself to get into the groove of writing.
How To Go From Outline To Draft
Set Expectations
Put simply, the goal of this lesson is to turn your outline and notes into the beginnings of a working draft.
It is important to note I specified “beginnings” and “working.”
The lessons following this one will hone into different aspects of your adventure, and it is expected that you will elaborate on your draft to reflect this.
I generally only consider a draft to be complete when it is ready for editing, meaning that you’ll be working on your draft for the majority of this workshop’s lessons.
Do Research
This is a good time to either start or revisit research.
Why are other adventures arranged the way they are? What works? What could be clearer?
You should be asking questions like these while looking at the work of others, and then applying them to how you approach your draft.
Of course, having adventures on hand also means you have something to refer to when you get stuck, as well as a clear idea of what you are striving towards.
Break It Down
This is when you should be looking at your outline or notes again.
If you’re going straight from mind maps, you might want to write down the contents of each bubble into a document.
Personally, I tend to write outlines with clear sections that contain only what’s important for the adventure.
I generally don’t dwell on the finer details in my outlines, leaving that for the draft.
This means that by this stage I have already broken down my outline into smaller more manageable chunks.
Actually Beginning To Draft
A basic outline, broken down into different sections, might already be enough for you to begin transforming it directly into a draft.
However, you might find this to still be overwhelming and too big of a task.
At this stage, I personally like to start a new document.
This document preferably has a template, such as the one supplied with this workshop, that matches with the sections I divided my outline into.
This is my personal workflow because writing everything from scratch allows me to build excitement and momentum at a quick and steady pace, letting me to complete drafts in a matter of days if I’m motivated enough.
Let yourself experiment, because even trying strategies will help bridge the gap between outline and draft faster than having no idea at all.
In your living document, answer the following questions.
What adventures have you researched for your draft?
Is there something about them that you want to emulate? completely go against?
How would you describe your outline?
Is it detailed? brief? Is it actually a mindmap?
Are you going straight from outline to draft?
If not, what are the intermediate steps that you’re doing?
Are there any particular obstacles between you and starting your draft?
If so, how do you plan on tackling these obstacles?
Do you think the upcoming lessons will significantly change parts of your adventure?
If so, which lessons? Or are you expecting all lessons to change your adventure?
Player Choice In Adventures
Jacquaysing The Dungeon
The term “Jaquaysing” refers to Jennell Jaquays. Her body of work is vast, but for this lesson, we’ll be focusing on her most famous adventure, The Caverns of Thracia.
Thracia is famous for its non-linear design.
There are three entrances and multiple routes through the inside of the dungeon.
The first level contains two obvious routes plus hidden routes behind secret doors etc.
Down on the third level, there aren’t any obvious “best routes”.
PCs are free to go wherever they please, exploring and discovering things based entirely on their own decisions.
There are three simple things to remember when “Jaquaysing” a dungeon:
- Provide multiple access points
- Provide multiple routes through the dungeon
- Reward careful exploration with secret or hidden routes
You may worry that providing multiple routes will mean that players miss some of the things you’ve included in the adventure.
Remember that if there’s an encounter you absolutely want the PCs to hit — maybe because it’s important to the story you want the adventure to tell or simply because it’s really cool and you’re proud of it — you can still build the adventure so that the group will encounter it.
Think of the necessary encounter as a pinch point that all the other routes funnel towards.
One model of simple dungeon design involves creating just five rooms:
1: Entrance and Guardian
2: Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge
3: Trick or Setback
4: Big Battle or Conflict
5: Reward or Revelation
It’s very linear.
With only 5 rooms there’s not a huge amount we can do to it.
But we can apply some principles of Jaquaysing to make it more interesting.
First, add another entrance.
Maybe groups can also find a way into the dungeon at Room 3.
Second, we can link rooms to add additional routes.
Clever navigation of Room 2’s roleplaying challenge might open a hidden shortcut to Room 5, bypassing the big battle in Room 4.
Or the reward for reaching Room 5 early might make that climactic conflict in Room 4 easier to deal with.
Even the act of adding a sixth room here opens up a huge number of possibilities; more routes, more exploration, and more player choice.
Here are some prompts to guide your writing:
What is happening in a specific location in your adventure?
What opportunities are players being given to drive the story forward?
What information can you give to the GM to help them roleplay NPCs, villains, or creatures?
What descriptive information can you provide to help the GM convey tone, detail, and atmosphere?
What catalyzes the adventure’s narrative to progress to the next chapter?
Incorporating Player Choice and Avoiding “Railroading”
Engaging Choices
In games, the most interesting and challenging choices for players typically involve trade-offs.
Trade-offs have no “correct” answer, each option in a trade-off has distinct benefits and opportunity costs that must be weighed by the players.
Five types of choices you might include in your adventure are described below.
Mutually exclusive actions
The players have a choice between two or more things they can do or take, but they can’t do or take them all.Risk versus reward
The players have a choice between a lower-risk, lower-reward option and a higher-risk, higher-reward option.Now versus later
The players have a choice between something good now or something better later.
Or, the players are given a limited resource and if they use it now, they can’t use it later.Resource trade
The players have the option to trade a resource they have for something they don’t.
Typically, the resource being traded for is useful in a different pillar of play (combat, exploration, or roleplaying) than the resource being traded away.Dilemma
The players are forced to give something up or choose between two or more negative outcomes as punishment for some failure.
Players must work out what they can afford to lose or which negative consequences they can best mitigate.
When to present choices to the players
When designing your adventure, consider the moments listed below as opportunities to present one of the choice types described in this lesson to the players.
A choice can be implied by the fictional scene, explicitly described by the Game Master, or presented as part of a game effect.
When the players come to a major juncture in your adventure’s map
When the players arrive at a fantastic or perilous location for the first time
When a player is struck by a powerful monster attack
When a player defeats a powerful monster
When a player falls victim to or disables a trap
When a player suffers the effect of a curse or disease
When a player solves a puzzle correctly or incorrectly
When a player pleases or angers an NPC
When a player unleashes the power of a magical item
When a player communes with supernatural powers
When a player dies or escapes death
At a dramatic moment in your adventure’s narrative
While every choice should have stakes, not every choice in your adventure needs to be life or death.
Save the most consequential choices for your adventure’s most dangerous threats or dramatic moments.
Avoiding “railroading”
When players talk about feeling railroaded, they’re typically describing a play experience where:
- They weren’t presented with meaningful choices
- They were presented with choices, but those choices were meaningless, misleading, or obvious
In both cases, players are expressing frustration over a lack of agency over how an adventure unfolded—they feel as if they were pushed along “on rails” toward a predetermined outcome.
Improving railroading choices
- Give each option in a choice unique benefits and drawbacks that must be weighed by the players
- Avoid presenting only the “illusion” of choice—make each choice you design have some impact on the adventure
- Don’t present “trick” options or shut down an option after presenting it as a viable choice
- Don’t knowingly present “no-win” choices to the players or present a choice between heeding the call to adventure or going home
- Give advice where possible on how to handle the players coming up with options not explicitly described in the adventure text
- Playtest to ensure that a choice is clear and that no one option is always preferable
Each player has their own idea of what constitutes railroading.
Be sure to set expectations in your adventure’s introduction or marketing copy as to the degree of freedom players have so that potential GMs can find the right group.
The Five Senses Guide to Creating Atmosphere
Atmosphere in Storytelling
Atmosphere encompasses everything about your story, including the thematic elements.
For example, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is set in the frigid locale of Icewind Dale.
Thematically, it’s a horror adventure.
The atmosphere of this book is cold, dark, and ominous.
Isolating these elements (no pun intended) helped inform not just my narrative design choices, but the actual words I used and the senses I employed to immerse players in the atmosphere.
Atmosphere is a powerful literary device; it’s the undetectable differentiation between a good adventure and a truly great one.
Over the course of a literary career, atmosphere can evolve into your niche or specialty.
Think of your favorite author, gamemaker, or filmmaker.
Do they have a recognizable style that immerses you in their stories?
I always think of two of my favorite storytellers, filmmakers Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro; their films practically ooze atmosphere.
There Are Many Words for “Cold”
By nature, adventures are technical documents.
Prose should be clear and concise.
This doesn’t mean that the prose itself can’t be memorable and beautiful; if anything, using fewer words and less flowery language means that we must choose our words better.
The words we use should be evocative and descriptive.
When we can identify the atmosphere of our adventure, we can make better use of words.
I’ll reference my part in Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden.
While working on a draft, I felt like I was using the word “cold” an awful lot.
I made a list of words I could use instead, just to get out of my funk (this is when Thesaurus.com comes in handy; not all synonyms work perfectly, but it can help spark an idea!).
Frigid, frosty, crisp, brisk — all words that have slightly different meanings but are more specific and evocative than “cold.”
Employing the Five Senses
The most approachable way to capture atmosphere is by using the five senses: smell, touch, taste, sight, and sound.
Often writers prioritize sight over other senses, but using all five throughout your entire adventure brings scenes and encounters to life.
The five senses aren’t just for descriptions of settings, although that’s the “easiest” way to establish atmosphere.
How can you use the senses to convey the atmosphere of an NPC, for example?
For example, “touch” is often a difficult sense to encapsulate.
If an NPC has a thick velvet cloak, rather than describing just what it looks like, hone in on the texture; what would it feel like? Does the heavy fabric affect their posture? How can you convey that sense of touch and texture?
Consider a rain-drenched old city at daylight and how quickly the following details set the scene: the scent of petrichor on the cobblestone; the flavor of clean, slightly metallic air; the weight of a damp cloak; the refracting light in a puddle; the tap tap tap of water dripping off of a gable.
Where Do I Put “Atmosphere” in My Adventure?
Many new writers save the good atmospheric details for read-aloud or “boxed” text.
Boxed text is a block of text included in an adventure that is intended for the Game Master to read aloud to their players.
The idea is that read-aloud text helps Game Masters, and takes a bit of the burden off of them, by providing them with exactly what they need to say to convey a scene.
Because read-aloud text is used to “set the scene,” game writers offload all of their wonderful, evocative prose in those sections only but forget to add those important atmospheric details everywhere else!
Remember that a Game Master wants to make use of as much as you can provide to them.
You may consider adding a “five senses” sidebar to every new setting in your adventure.
When the characters leave the city to enter a dungeon, for example, use the senses to establish the change in tone and scenery.
Writing a Conclusion
This is one of the few parts of an adventure that can mirror other literary forms, like novels. Think of how a great novel ends: it usually resolves open threads, and leaves a few things open to the reader’s imagination, so that it’s not too wrapped up (which can feel insincere and overwrought).
Your adventure conclusion can take a leaf out of that book (pun intended).
A one-shot adventure is, by definition, self-contained, so you will want it to have a satisfying resolution — but it doesn’t have to be such a neat and tidy resolution that the players feel as if their choices didn’t have an impact.
Elements of a Conclusion
Consider if yours answers the following questions:
Can the GM succinctly summarize the events of the session?
What information can you provide for them so that they can satisfyingly provide a wrap-up for their players?
Was the main conflict of the adventure resolved? How (or how not)?
Are there remaining consequences for the player characters? If so, what are they? (For example: did they retrieve a lost relic, only to be cursed by a powerful wizard upon touching the relic?)
It’s important to have some of those choices directly feed into the conclusion so the players felt that their decisions drove the story forward, but that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t have a pre-determined ending that the GM already knows about.
Rewards
Typically, a conclusion section of a one-shot adventure includes some information about the rewards the player characters earned.
This can be as simple as an amount of gold/coinage, a fun or unique magical item, or something more intangible and complex (like Renown in D&D).
These rewards may play into the “story seeds” you’ve established. (Perhaps the player characters earned the friendship of a powerful person, who calls upon them in the future to assist them with a quest.)
Be sure to specify how the reward works and, if relevant, how it can or should be divvied up.
Additionally, the GM needs to know how the reward is found or claimed.
Do the player characters have free rein to loot the dragon’s lair at the end of the adventure, or do they have to return to the quest-giver to claim it?
Whatever you determine for rewards, make sure a brief mention of them is included in your introduction section, too, so go back and add it if you haven’t already!
If you’re not sure what to offer as a reward, keep it simple!
Assembling Appendices
Appendices typically consist of things like handouts, creature stat blocks, maps, and anything else that requires too much space and information to fit into the body of an adventure.
While it might make sense in some cases to present stat blocks or a sidebar full of extra details within the body of the adventure, these items should generally be included at the end.
Following is a list of elements you would typically find in an appendix (note that this is not an exhaustive list):
- monster stat blocks
- NPC stat blocks and descriptions
- treasure and magic items
- maps
- player handouts