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kevdog45
March 16th, 2016, 21:13
I am getting back into the RPG tabletop hobby after years of computer gaming. I am interested in hearing how experienced GMs go about creating their adventures. What is the process for you? Do you do it in a certain order or on the fly? I'm guessing I will be creating my modules in a structured way, one step at a time, and I just wanted to see what kinds of logic others are applying to their order of module creation.

Zacchaeus
March 16th, 2016, 21:33
I'm guessing that there are as many ways to create a module as there are GMs. :)

I start with a story overview and then generally I'll draw up the maps and handouts. Then I create the story entries with boxed text, prepared whispers etc as needed. If there is an encounter I link the map create the encounter and place it on the map. If there is a treasure parcel then I create the items and the parcel and link that up too. So I take it as it comes as it were, doing things in the order that the adventure flows in.

Having said that I have only made very small modules which I run at things like FGCon so they are very carefully crafted with (almost) every possible outcome and description accounted for. Far more work than you'd want to do for an ongoing campaign.

My campaigns so far have all been published adventures, so pretty much most of the work is already done. For those I read over the text; write in some new stuff where necessary, adjust treasures and encounters if needed and just generally tinker around until it suits the needs of my players. (Who are all very straightforward hack and slash types who want the biggest swords and the more monsters the better :))

Trenloe
March 16th, 2016, 22:10
It's been around for a while, but Xorn's videos are still great to give a grounding in campaign/module creation:

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/filelibrary/tutorial/xorne-building-1a.wmv
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/filelibrary/tutorial/xorne-adventure-1a.wmv

Black Hammer
March 17th, 2016, 00:47
Depends on what I'm running. For a dungeon crawl, you need to do a lot of straight-up prep work (encounters, floor layout), while for the more investigative-style games I prefer to run, I tend to focus on broad research and some vague outlines or flowcharts so the game moves fast while having enough detail to be interesting.