Coming up with adventure ideas

The imagination is a funny thing. Or at least mine is. I've written a handful of articles on brainstorming and idea jump-starts, and yet I often find myself looking at the mostly-blank canvas of my current roleplaying campaign with no idea what to paint on it. It seems odd that it's almost easier to decide what to put on a completely blank canvas than it is to figure out how to paint a picture that incorporates what's already there.

One of my favorite idea generators is simply pulling up random words and trying to make something of them. (I've written a couple utilities that do this for me in various ways.) But it doesn't always help… either I'm not getting good words, or I'm just not in the right frame of mind for the words I'm getting. Or maybe I'm just too lazy and I don't want to take the effort to pull something useful out of them. ("counterfeit, catalyst, liquefaction, flew, civic, care, molal, mesoderm, synapse, elute"… there's something there. What do you make of it?)

So I decided to go my favorite route, which is to steal ideas from others. :) I hopped out to RPGNow.com, my favorite vendor of PDF sweetness. There are a lot of interesting plot-generating products out there, most of them for fantasy, and they vary in presentation and usefulness. But what's cool is that most of these products are very inexpensive. For just over nine bucks, I walked off (digitally… my fingers did the walking) with four different products that looked useful.

The first of these are Seeds: Supers and Seeds: Supers II by Expeditious Retreat Press. They have nineteen "Seeds" products for nearly every major genre. Each one is four to five pages (not counting the full-page OGL license), and costs only $1.35 (except Fantasy, which you can download for free). Packed into the handful of pages are about twenty-something short (a paragraph or two) adventure ideas.

These are of mixed quality and usefulness, though for less than a buck-fifty, if I get just one good adventure idea, the product was worth the cost. A very few entries don't seem worth being printed (I'm looking for something a little more novel than "the heroes are plunged into an alternate universe in which dinosaurs rule the earth AND the Nazis won WWII".), but those are the shortest entries. A few entries assume a set-up that seems unlikely (One seed requires that the heroes have a reptilian mutant friend that wants to go skiing, despite cold-blooded. More than one assumes recently retired or deceased heroes.) but overall there are some Good and maybe a couple Great ideas in each one. But I find many of these ideas difficult to incorporate into my fledgling campaign because we have little history and because many of the seeds are too specific. More on that later.

Next up is Superline Gamemaster's Series: A Fistful of Plot Devices, #1 from Ronin Arts. Unlike the "Seeds" line, these five plot ideas, while not full-blown adventures, are very fleshed out. Totalling 16 pages of useful material once the OGL and extras are removed, three or four pages are devoted to outlining the plot idea, then discussing the various aspects and how they might be implemented. The product assumes it's being used with Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds, but it's easily adapted to any superhero roleplaying game. This one also carried the biggest price tag… $4.25.

This is a different creature compared to the "Seeds" line. Seeds makes up for lack of detail by providing lots of ideas. More ideas means it's more likely that something will click. But with only five plot ideas presented in Handful…, you've only got five chances for something to catch hold. They're all well-written, and it's likely that you'll be able to use at least one of them at some point in a superhero campaign. But with two of the five calling for likely death of innocents before the heroes can intervene, some of them may not be appropriate for just any superheroic campaign without careful modification. And a couple of them aren't terribly inspired… evil duplicates of the heroes are on a crime spree and must be stopped, some super-science device has malfunctioned and is about to explode and kill lots of people, and ancient beast has emerged into a time in which it doesn't belong and the heroes have to stop it, for instance. But the detail that the product gives toward how to structure an adventure around these common comic-book events is Good.

Finally, the one I thought would be least-useful, another offering from Ronin Arts… Modern: Six-Pack – Government Drugs. Six pages for $1.99, describing six different potent pharmaceuticals that are kept secret from the public, plus a seventh page of D20 rules about staying awake for more than 24 hours. The product simply describes the drugs and their effects, plus a little about where they came from and who's using them. And that's it… no adventure seeds, no suggestions about what to do with them. Yet because of their "nakedness," they make no assumptions about my campaign beyond the assumption that someone would be making and using this particular drug. And I think I've found more useful (to me) plot ideas out of this product than in the other three, which contain over forty plot ideas.

And I think it hinges very much on two things: the idea assumes nothing about my campaign and it doesn't tell me the core event for the adventure. It's one thing to say, "An experimental power plant has malfunctioned and will destroy the city if the heroes don't stop it." It's another to say, "Experimental Power Plant X-11G, invented by Dr Precocious, can power half of New York City for three days on just one gallon of liquid hydrogen, highly unstable if containment feedback loop is broken."

What's interesting about the latter is that it doesn't say, "Experimental power plant runs amok, news at 11." Yet it can suggest that. Or it can suggest something else… like Dr Precocious coming to the heroes with a story of death threats and attempts to steal the technology from him. Or the almost-complete device being stolen by Megalomaniac and installed on his secret island base… to discover that the plant malfunctions and opens a portal to… what? The first plot suggestion gives a specific direction and I say, "Eh… the heroes saved the city from destruction last week, it's too soon to do that again," or something like that. But just presenting the idea of this power plant gets my brain working, and since I just did the "save the city" thing last week, my brain runs with the idea in a different direction.