Microadventures
December 13th, 2011
Hello everyone, and welcome to another exciting edition of Grave Plots, where we bring you new plot hooks and adventure ideas each and every week. A short while ago I found myself in a rather peculiar position at the game table. Through a combination of oversight, inconvenient happenstance, and general bad planning we somehow ended up with a mere two hours for D&D.
This wouldn't normally have been that big a deal; after all, I'm confident that two hours is a normal game session for some groups, and even if it isn't, well, that’s still two hours of continuing the adventure. But as it happened, we had just wrapped up an adventure, and though we could have just kept going, the next thing we were planning on doing (after some taking care of a few minor details) was to spend a lot of time as group outfitting a pirate ship with all kinds of custom gear and crew, and knowing the group it probably was going to take a lot longer than we had, and probably wasn't the sort of thing that could be done at home.
Having no desire to leave that kind of messy metagame-type session half-finished so that everyone could forget what they had been wanting for the ship during the intervening week, I scrambled to find a string of encounters to occupy the game time so that we could reach the comparative safety of the next week’s normal (and much longer) game session. In the end, it turned out to be something of a moot point as the group spent the entire two hours getting up to what essentially amounted to their own highly entertaining hijinks, with me just sort of playing along.
Still, it got me thinking about whether or not you can have an adventure in just a couple of hours, in essence having a one-shot (a one session game) that didn't require you pull a couple of all-nighters to actually accomplish the game in one session.
The answer, as best I could come up with, is yes – sort of. You can't really accomplish a full-sized adventure in that time, not unless there is virtually no roleplaying going on and the group happens to be both full of players who are very good at efficient D&D combat, and very focused on the task at hand. Even a mini-adventure like those found in The Book of Beginings or The Song of Fodin will probably require a standard five- or six-hour game session to complete, and might require multiple game sessions depending on the adventure in question and how much roleplaying around your PCs want to do. The solution, then, is what I'm calling the microadventure; that is to say, an adventure which will likely take between 2 and 3 hours to complete, and if you haven't already guessed, that is what I would like to talk about today.
Microadventures
As you might imagine, the most important thing about a microadventure is that it is short; after all, it’s right in the definition that it not last long. If a campaign is a series of novels, an adventure a Hollywood film, and the mini-adventure a one-act play, then the microadventure is a power metal song on the fantasy media allegory scale. Due to its short length, the microadventure is kind of a restrictive medium to work with, but if you are looking for something quick and dirty, the microadventure might just be for you. Keeping that in mind, there are a few things we need to keep in mind when creating our tiny adventures.
The first thing to remember is that we won't have a lot of encounters. But we will need to have encounters, since no matter how grand, an encounter does not make an adventure. Since we are trying to squeeze in our adventure under the 3-hour mark I would imagine you have time for between 3-5 encounters. In general I would recommend sticking to 2-3 combat encounters and turning the rest into non-combat jobs, since, at least in my experience, combat tends to take longer than non-combat encounters. Still, you need to do your best to tell a proper story with your encounters; just because your adventure is short doesn't mean it has to feel like a rush job.
Which leads me to the next important point when making a microadventure: don't skimp on the narrative. Even though you’re making a short adventure (ok, an extremely short adventure), you are still creating an adventure, and it shouldn't feel like a simple stream of encounters when your PCs are plowing through being all heroic.
Start with a strong beginning; this should be an easy way to get some real millage towards making the microadventure feel, well, adventurous. A compelling hook, particularly something dramatic and time-sensitive will work well. So, for instance, a haggard farmer bursting through the inn door shouting that the bandits who kidnapped his daughter are getting away will be better than a count who wants to see them concerning a ransom note he received. The hook needs to demand action right away: the more time the PCs are given to sit around planning, the more likely you won’t be able to reach the climax in time, so be sure to engage the action as quickly as possible.
The more direct your approach, the better, and in this case you needn't even really have a lot of hook so long as you have a good way to get the ball rolling, such as a dread pirate ship bearing down on the PCs. If you really are time-pressed and looking to run a one-shot that absolutely needs to be a one-shot, you could even forego the set-up all together and just make it part of the narrative, setting the PCs on the dread lich's doorstep and telling them that Lord Farandawy sent them to destroy the lich's curse and recover the chalice of rime. Personally I wouldn't recommend this; it just feels more heroic for an adventure to have a proper start and this gives you a great opportunity to slip in a quick encounter (particularly of the social variety) before the action even starts.
Next, you need the sort of body of the adventure; this is probably going to contain one or two combat encounters and should serve to give your PCs a good idea of what the adventure is about. Sometimes this will be as easy as choosing encounters which will illuminate everything the adventure is about. For instance, if the PCs are plumbing a tomb ruled by a necromancers, perhaps they can face down animated corpses and a wicked apprentice/enforcer who calls out for her master’s forgiveness as the PCs cut her down. This might instead involve selecting the appropriate ambience: a dread altar and occasional glowing occult symbols might lead the PCs to suspect that the baroness may be up to more then just hiring a master thief. Just like a regular adventure, this portion of the microadventure serves to build tension and give the PCs a chance to do some heroing and feel good about themselves before they face the climax.
Speaking of which, the climax is the most important part of a microadventure, since it’s short enough to be wholly dominated by this one moment. This will almost certainly be the most important encounter, and should really feel like a climax. This is even more important than it normally is, since the adventure's length requires the pirate captain to sell his own viciousness to the PCs, and requires that that dragon be as big and mean as his reputation. As ever, your climax should build off of the rest of the adventure and bring it all to a draw. If it’s a combat, it should be the most impressive combat, and if it’s anything else, it had better be a damn sight more impressive than the combats so far or else it will end up getting outshined as a moment by the time Tommy killed the minotaur with a critical hit from his +1 flaming burst shocking burst thundering scythe.
Finally, the adventure needs a resolution. This should be directly related to the climax: the PCs killed the dragon and so the princess is rescued, or they slew the swamp demon, ending the corruption. Requiring a further step will only waste precious time and take away attention from the climax. This kind of adventure really lends itself well to high action adrenaline-pumping kinds of games, and saying, “Well, now that the demon’s dead we can take his locket to the altar in town and destroy it to end the curse,” or worse, saying, “So now the bandit chief is dead, let’s go explain things to the governor, who's going to try to stiff us on the gold unless we succeed on a Diplomacy check,” just derails the whole point of the thing.
Well, that’s it for this week’s Grave Plots; I hope to see you all next week for more great plot hooks and adventure ideas. Until then, allow me to wish you all the best in your gaming endeavors.