Beg, Borrow and Steal

When the Riders on the Storm (abbreviated hereafter as RotS) campaign entered its second year (with no sign of slowing at the time), I gained a reputation as one of the leading game masters in the area. I was approached by a handful of people (both locally and on the net) that asked how I did it. "How do you keep a campaign from going stale?" they ask. "I have a hard time keeping players interested for more than a couple of months before they want to move on to something else."

Well okay... only one person really asked, but I'm sure many of you are wondering.

So, as a public service to present and future generations of Game Masters, I will expound upon another of my "Secrets of Great Game Mastering".

Beg, borrow and steal.

I have run into uncounted GMs who have a mental block when it comes to creating adventures for their groups. They are convinced that unless they come up with something original, something cutting edge, something revolutionary, something... "Wow!" their players will not be satisfied. Even I have fallen into that trap from time to time.

The trouble is, quite often a great idea on paper winds up falling flat in its execution for one reason or another. In RotS, the second major adventure was a great idea -- the Dream Stalker. I had it all envisioned, it was going to be one of the best adventures I had ever written, and would surely live on in the minds of the players.

There was just one problem. Christmas came right in the middle of the story, and in the shuffle, I lost the notes that had detailed the conclusion to my 'epic' (indeed, I'm not sure now I had a good ending in mind -- otherwise I wouldn't have forgotten it in the first place). Consequently, when we returned, the pacing was off, the end unsatisfactory, and it ended up being something other than what I had envisioned.

I was, fortunately, able to salvage some of the ideas and turn them into a running plot in the campaign (which is probably what I should have been searching for all along, but that's another story). I didn't let an early setback kill my enthusiasm for the story I was telling.

That's actually tip number 1 -- keep at it. Don't give up on an idea if it doesn't work quite right, or isn't received as well as you had hoped. If you are excited about your game, the players will be excited about your game (and if they aren't excited, why are they playing in it?).

But the real point of this essay is to go into how to come up with adventures. Beg, borrow and steal. View everything as potential adventure material. Don't limit yourself to stuff you read in the source books. Every book, every movie, every TV show, every pundit spouting off on the net can provide the kernel around which a great adventure can be formed. Here are a couple of examples from my own campaign.

The hardest part of any campaign is to find some way to bring the characters together -- particularly if they have been created with wide-ranging and different backgrounds. So when starting RotS, I needed a way to bring the original four members together in a way that didn't seem overly contrived.

I found it in an old TSR adventure, The Veiled Society. With a little bit of modification, it provided the basis for a wonderful little mystery that forced the characters to work together or die. A relationship grew from their shared adversity, and a campaign story line was born.

It is quite common to modify previously published adventures to suit your needs. It requires less work than coming up with a fully original adventure. Change the names, modify a plot point or two to suit your specific needs and voila! You've got yourself an adventure.

For another adventure I was inspired by an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. In the episode Xena and a detachment of soldiers were caught in a fort under siege by a barbarian horde. She had to fight both the physical enemies outside and the emotional enemies (despair and low morale) inside. Naturally, she emerged victorious (after some help from her friend Gabrielle, of course).

I thought it was a great idea. So I added the features I found most intriguing to the story I was telling at that time. The group was tracking down the survivors of a crashed airship, and the survivors had apparently been taken by slavers. The group arrived at the slave camp only to find it under siege by vicious jungle dwelling t'skrang (Velos, for those of you that care). Morale in the camp was low, and the group found themselves forced to cooperate with their 'enemies' in order to resolve the situation and get the survivors out.

So, having found an inspiration for an adventure, how far do you take it? This depends largely on your personal style, and how much can readily be transferred to your setting. If you are using a science-fiction film like Aliens as your inspiration, and you're in a fantasy setting, it will usually require more modification than just changing the names.

When creating an adventure from a source like a film or novel, identify the parts that best serve the purpose. Then select features from your setting that correspond to those elements. Like the jungle dwelling t'skrang replacing the barbarian horde in my example above.

And don't be ashamed of cribbing your ideas from other sources. Those people are paid to come up with this stuff. You, on the other hand, are not (and if you are, you probably don't need this advice anyway). If a player comments in the middle of an adventure, "Hey, this reminds me of..." don't comment. Just smile, and make a note to have the character killed for seeing through your cleverly constructed illusion.

I'm just kidding. Don't have the character killed.

But there is also no need to advertise you steal your ideas. If you let it be known that 90% of your plots are borrowed from other sources, the players will get the idea that game mastering is a great deal easier than it appears (and we can't have that, now, can we?).

So beg, borrow and steal. Peruse source books from other systems (even if you think the system itself sucks worse than anything else on the planet). Read novels. Watch movies. View anything and everything as possible grist for your creative mill. Even if you only end up stealing a character idea for a minor NPC, if you make it memorable (and fun) nobody will care.

The t'skrang lush from the Veiled Society adventure (Bucky) came about on an inspired bit of improvisation. The group wanted to question patrons at the Blue Water Mead Hall about goings on, and I of course had not really prepared any personalities. So I came up with a drunken t'skrang and did my best Emo Phillips impression to get across his perpetual sleepy-eyed drunken state. It was a hit.

So beg, borrow and steal. The less work you have to do, the easier your job as GM will be. The easier your job as GM is, the more fun you will have. The more fun you have, the more fun your players have. The more fun your players have, the longer the campaign runs.

Pretty simple huh?

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