[1]The answer is always more dragons, right?
I feel I kind of suck running published adventures. I have been running RPGs for over twenty years now, but I feel like I skipped a step in the standard GM skills evolution by going straight to homebrew campaigns and adventures. Adventures written by someone else always feel like a bit of a struggle.
Earlier this year, as I was angrily typing away at my computer attempting to hammer a published adventure into something that would work for my group, I pondered why these were almost always a problem for me. It occurred to me that when I first began running games back in 2005, I was doing everything on my own. It was all homebrew, with me coming up with prep, adventures, adversaries, and tying it all to the player characters. Why did I do it that way when most people start by grabbing a pre-written adventure of some kind? And then I remembered. I was desperately broke.
Back then, I was struggling to dig myself out of a financial hole caused by layoffs and unstable employment. There were so many bad temp jobs during the early 2000s. The one constant in my life that kept me sane was my Saturday game group. They started encouraging me to try my hand at running games, so when I finally said yes, there was no extra money to pick up a published adventure. It was all what was in my imagination and the core books I already owned.
Eventually things turned around and my life is comfortable now. Well, other than – vague gesture at the state of the world around us – inflation. I have been able to buy published adventures to add to my book collection and my gaming repertoire. For a few different campaigns, I’ve chosen to run published material. Some have been better than others, but I still struggle getting them from the page to the table.
Now to be clear, anyone running published adventures will need to do some level of work. You can’t just grab it off the shelf and bring it to the table with no preparation and still expect to give your players a good game. I understand this, but I’ve found I have issues balancing the benefits of using published adventures without feeling like I still have to tear it all apart and rebuild it from scratch.
The other day while prepping for my Saturday game, I was growing frustrated because of hidden information that can’t easily be discovered by the players. In the adventure, there is a conflict devastating a region that is the result of someone becoming corrupted by an artifact that wreaks havoc over a large region. While the adventure obviously sets up taking down the big bad, they can’t actually solve the problem until they destroy the artifact. Nowhere in the adventure is set up for the players to learn any of that, let alone the name of this artifact. At least, not that I could find.
I should take a moment and confess something else about the way my brain works and why I struggle with these adventures. When I was in school as a kid and a returning adult student, I could never deeply read textbooks. My process involved skimming and taking notes. That was always good enough to gain the knowledge to pass tests and write papers, but it doesn’t work with published adventures. They’re not textbooks and I’m always missing some important detail not called out in an obvious, skimmable way.
Heck, during one campaign where I was using an adventure series, I had to look in another OPTIONAL adventure to figure out the truth of the series’ biggest mystery. You’d think it might have been important to put that blurb towards the front so the GM could at least understand what was going on and why.
So, here are some things I’ve learned over the years on this subject:
- Published adventures are not GMing on easy mode. While they can be a good way to see how adventures and campaigns can be structured and a good resource for new and old players alike, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to make sure it can run smoothly.
- It helps to create your own notes separate from the text. You do not want to have to page through a book or a PDF in the middle of the game to make sure you have all your details ready. The authors have put together something they hope will help you run the game, but only you know what format is going to work best for you.
- Sometimes you will need to create material that fills the gaps. Good adventures offer hooks that you can adapt to your group, but very often you still need to figure out how to put it in front of your players in a way that makes sense. Sometimes the hooks presented don’t work for your group, or they’re not there at all. What’s going to make your players want to engage with the adventure?
- These are not sacred texts. Unless you are running for organized play or a game company, when it hits your table you can do whatever you want with the adventure. Pull it apart and put it back together again in whatever is going to work best for your group. There is nothing that says you have to stay true to what is written on the page. Add, subtract or modify in whatever way is going to make it fun for you and your players.
Ultimately, your mileage is going to vary. For some people, running published material is the way to go and it makes their lives easier. Some of the heavy lifting of campaign creation and world building has been done for you. But for other people, the effort to adapt to their play style makes it harder. I’m enjoying the material I’ve been working with, but I do wish I had unlimited free time to just do it all on my own.
What are your thoughts on published adventures?