At one point (and the only time) early in my GMing career, I used a published adventure module. However, I discovered one of my players easily had access to that module. My discovery: in one part of the module, that player corrected me on how the adventure should be run, which told me he knew what was coming. I felt that player was cheating just to get a jump on the rest of the players. That was a mistake I have never made again.
I scoured sourcebooks, created my own dungeons, made hybrids of know creatures, and tried my best to run a few stories, without much success. And then I discovered "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons World Builder's Guidebook" by Richard Baker.
One thing you should know about me is I love randomized tables. The more random something is, the better it is for me. Sometimes, it's a hit, and sometimes it's a miss, but when hits, oh man...!
I used this book in 2022 to write a blog about world building. See link below if you want to revisit it, or if this is your first time here.
https://myworldbuilderblog.blogspot.com/
This time around, instead of focusing on world building, I'm going to be focusing on adventure design. For this blog, we'll be using "Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters" by the authors of GnomeStew.com.
To give you my take, this fabulous book introduces you to taking those plots and turning them into full blown adventures, adapting them to your game. It also gives you a clear picture of "The 36 Dramatic Situations" by Georges Polti in 1895, and tips on how to reskin the plots to fit your game.
In Eureka, there are three major genres: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Horror. As the title indicates, there are 501 plots, and you'll be able reskin a fantasy plot to fit sci-fi or horror, or create different combinations. Each plot comes with a list of sub-genres, whether it be action horror, romance, or western. And different tags like artificial life form, madness, and role-playing heavy, just to name a few.
One paragraph boasts, "If you ran one plot every week, never missing a week, you’d be running Eureka adventures for almost 10 years straight—nine years and 33 weeks, to be exact. (Take Christmas and your birthday weekends off, and you’ve got the full 10 years covered.)"
As a testament, I've been using this book for almost ten years, and I still haven't used every plot in the book.
So, today, I'm going to start with one of these plots... randomly. And I'll fit to the D&D 5e game system because it's the one everyone and their mother knows, nowadays.
Of the 501 plots, I landed on plot number 325, "Lost Highway," a part of the "Recovery of a Lost One" dramatic situation located in the science fiction genre. This adventure plot says it is "Easily adapted to: Anime, Cyberpunk, Horror, Space Opera, Steampunk, Supernatural, and Supers," sub-genre of Sci-Fi. But I'm going to do my best to reskin it to High Fantasy. And to give you an idea of what the plot is about, here is the list of tags included in this plot: "artificial life form, bearers, betrayal, dungeon crawl, innocent, investigative, planet-based, shady, social, stealth, trade, villain," list by author Matthew Neagley.
Next week, I will tackle the first paragraph of "The Lost Highway," show how to reskin it to fantasy, and tailor it to D&D 5e. If you're interested in follow along on this adventure design, I'll be posting one of these every Monday. Until then, keep adventuring.
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