Not so long ago, one of our forum regulars raised the question of how you design good adventures.  It strikes me that how to design adventures is probably an entire series in itself.  I’ll return to the subject again, as I’ve already thought about several ways to build a decent adventure since the question was asked.  Indeed, we’ve already seen several articles which are very much about adventure design, and glancing at these briefly may at least help determine what has been covered.  An Amusing Dungeon, the second article in this series long ago, showed how the juxtaposition of two unrelated but familiar ideas can create very interesting areas for exploration.  We discussed the romantic element somewhat in Embraces.  Contingencies recommended having an alternate plan ready in case the players don’t want to do what you originally expected.  There have probably been others about scenario design; certainly many have been about parts of scenario design.  However, there is still much that could be said about creating the core of a scenario.  There is, of course, no one way, no right way, no magic formula to do this; yet there are a number of ways to approach it, each providing a different sort of adventure.  In creating worlds for Multiverser play I’ve used all of these, in several variations.  They work.

  This week we’ll look at the design of an adventure from the perspective of the antagonist.  That is, you can create the starting point for your players’ story by focusing your attention on their primary enemy.  This creates a rather focused linear game without the feeling that the players are locked into the referee’s plan; the villain will do what he’s going to do unless the player characters interfere, and there is reason for them to want to interfere, forcing him to adjust accordingly.

  There are three questions you should ask to start this type of design.  I say there are three, but I do not mean there is a first question, a second question, and a third question.  Rather, these three questions must be asked very much together, because the answers are so interconnected with each other, and so very necessary to each other, that they cannot be answered in isolation.  These three questions, together, define the starting point for your design; after you have answered these, you can begin the details of the adventure, creating the answers to the next questions that will arise.  Thus as we look at these three questions, remember that they are interlocked.

  First, you must ask who the antagonist is.  This includes what might be called categorical questions, such as whether he is a Drow elf or a Libyan terrorist or a Klingon renegade, those sorts of definitions that place a character within the scheme of the world; but it must be much more particular than that.  You must consider his personality, his motivations, his resources, his support and influence, his visibility.  In short, you must have a picture in your mind of this person, as if he were a genuine figure, a friend, or an enemy, of your own, whom you know well enough to have expectations about his actions and his attitudes.  He may be a shadowy figure to your players and within your game world, but whether he is the wizard Saruman or the Ayatolah Khomeni or Sybock son of Sarek, you must know exactly who he is, how he thinks, and what he can do.

  Knowing who the antagonist is connects him to the answer to the second question:  what is his objective?  Whether like The Brain he is trying to take over the world or like the James Gang merely trying to make himself wealthy by robbing banks and trains, you must know what he wants to do.  Further, what he wants to do must be realistic, given who he is and the nature of your setting.  No one has seriously managed to take over the world since the Caesars (and even that is a matter of definition), although several capable men have tried, and unless you count the conquests of thought accomplished first by Greek philosophy and then by Christianity, all those who even came close, from King Nebuchadnezzar to Adolph Hitler, were at the heads of great armies.  A believable antagonist must have a real chance of achieving his goal, and therefore must be such a person and in such a position that what he wishes to do might be within his grasp.  In some worlds, taking over the universe might be imaginable, even if it is not imaginable by those within it.  It was not conceivable to the Jedi that a Sith Lord could manage to seize control of the Republic and establish a galactic empire, but it was possible given who he was.  Yet there must be some reason to believe that the goals can be reached, or they simply are not credible, and they won’t make for interesting play.  No one is going to be terribly driven to prevent The Brain from conquering the world via subliminal advertising in commercials for children’s breakfast cereals unless there’s some basis in the game world to presume that’s something that might actually work.  This must be part of your scenario design.  Who the villain is, no matter how heinous or how interesting, does not really get you an adventure until you know what he’s going to attempt to do.  What he is going to attempt to do in turn must in part inform who he is.

  The third question in this trinity is of critical importance, and yet is often overlooked by game scenario designers and game referees.  Why do the player characters care?  Somehow we get it in our misguided minds that the player characters care because this is the adventure we’ve created for them.  Frankly, that’s not good enough.  If the Libyans are planning to bomb the Pentagon, why would the player characters do more than phone the army to report what they heard?  If Kray Phalaema is about to lead the Drow armies against the goblin kingdoms, consolidating his power in the underdark in preparation for the conquest of the world, why should our heroes risk their lives in this battle?  You can have a great villain with a truly terrifying yet attainable objective, but not have an adventure if there’s no reason for the player characters to get involved.  Somehow this situation has to impact on something which matters to them, and which matters in a manner and to a degree that makes it imperative that they act, because it falls to them to act, or because they are forced to act, or because they want to act, as opposed to letting the proper authorities deal with the matter.  Does he need something they have?  Does he perceive them as being obstacles to his ends?  Are they in fact the proper authorities in this situation?  Is there something in it for them, something they would find difficult to resist?  Is it just that they know something is wrong, and no one else will listen?  Whatever it is, it must be compelling, or you don’t have a story.

  Clearly, these three questions must be answered together.  In the end, you have your beginning:  you have a real villain with a clear objective whose actions are going to bring him in direct conflict with the player characters at the point at which the adventure is expected to begin.  Now you may start your design.

  Actually, there is only one more essential question in this approach to adventure design.  It is a major question, often requiring a very detailed answer, but it is just one question.  Once you know who the antagonist is, what he hopes to accomplish, and why the player characters care, it’s time to create his plan.  How will he accomplish that which he intends to achieve?  Start from where he is.  Of course, you got to invent where he is when you determined who he is, and you can adjust that at this point if it will make the plan work better.  You must do so from within the parameters of what is known about him and the game world, though.  The sudden announcement that one of the richest and most powerful men in the world lives in that sprawling fortified mansion overlooking the village on the north side that no one ever noticed before today is going to seem silly.  Maybe he has such a sprawling fortified mansion somewhere else, or maybe he has started building one here as he’s moving into the area; he can suddenly become known to the player characters because of new actions he has taken, but you can’t fairly alter the world to make things true which the players knew were otherwise to this point unless those changes happen within the game world on its own terms.  That still gives you a lot of leeway, as there will be many facts about the world unknown to the characters at any moment.  You’ve already got an idea who this villain is.  Start with that, and build his plan from there.

  You don’t necessarily need to have every detail plotted.  You do need to have as much of it in mind as the villain himself would have before he started.  As we considered in Resources a few weeks ago, some villains will improvise quite a bit as they move toward their goals.  However, this particular sort of scenario design is built around the villain’s plan; therefore, the villain must have a plan, and the plan must move forward reasonably successfully and on schedule at least until the player characters themselves interfere or the story reaches the moment of your planned disruption (the complication that requires the villain to make that patch which is his mistake, as discussed then).

  Planning the adventure entirely around the actions of the antagonist works extremely well.  The referee has complete control over the antagonist, after all; he doesn’t have to rely on the players making particular choices to make the plot fall into place.  If the players manage to cut you off at the pass, defeating the villain early in his plan, congratulate them for their excellent play and move to the next adventure.  If they never respond to the villain, the villain ultimately succeeds in completing his plan, perhaps reaching his objective, and you’ve got the start of an entirely different adventure based on that success.  If you’ve correctly answered your first three questions, though, they should become involved early enough in the plan that this becomes their adventure.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.