Adventure Building Seminar, the Final Post

The third and final report from the adventure building seminar 2011.

Day 3: An Event-Based Adventure
Basically, the assignment was to do an adventure where time was a significant factor. These included a commando raid by Greek gods who had to stop the Roman time bomb, a sortie into an elemental labyrinth where the features of each room changed every ten minutes and the PC grew stranger every twenty minutes. And then, there was this...

“Hair monsters have stolen Rapunzel’s hair; stop them before they deliver it to the evil (and bald) witch.”

The adventure involved a wild chase after the hair monsters through a nightmarish land of twisted fairy tales. As the PC chased the hairy bunch, various traps and ambushes sprang into action. Of special note was the Big Bad Wolf who spilled zombies from his stomach every time he was damaged.
Eventually the group caught up with the evil witch and her gang and killed her with an arrow to the back... only to find out this was Rapunzel, whose hair wasn’t stolen yet.

Day 4: A Sandbox Adventure
The most useless day. Freedom of choice isn’t very hot with my players so they understood freedom of choice as, “you’re in a vast emptiness full of monsters who want to kill you. But you can fight them in any order you want.”
So basically you had big battles between random objects – light and darkness, stones and energy, orcs and elves. Blah! Boring! Next!

Freedom. This is how it looks like.

Day 5: A Mundane Adventure
The challenge was to design an adventure that takes place in our world and includes no magical or sci-fi elements whatsoever. Surprisingly, the kids were quite excited about this one. One group played cops chasing criminals who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre (it’s funny how the smiles drained from their faces when I reminded them cops can’t just shoot suspects but have to arrest them and collect damning evidence afterward), the second group played citizens who had to struggle through the unbelievably bulky bureaucracy of City Hall to get a building permit.
The last group went VERY REAL.

Real life meet fantasy. Fantasy - die.

“You play a drug-addicted gambler who lost all his money, a terminal cancer patient who went bankrupt after a nasty divorce and a man with Parkinson's disease whose family had left him poor and lonely. Your mission is to enlist."

This was the last adventure of the seminar, ending the whole affair in a positive note. The DM, the same boy who designed the hair adventure, went out of his way to describe our absolute misery, the apathy of society to human suffering and the cycle of humiliation we went through during enlistment. Eventually (and somewhat surprisingly) we were made a tank crew and won a great battle in a nameless war... and even got medals!

Conclusion
Letting kids DM is an excellent diversion and source of inspiration for your own games. While a seminar is a little too official for a home group, an occasional guest run by willing children is very recommended, especially if you take the time to tickle their imagination by acquainting them with various inspiring works and ideas, including stuff from outside the genre. For older groups, I would even recommend a shared campaign, where the position of DM is rotated between players each month. Your role will be that of a guide and the voice of experience and also of the player from hell (oh wait, that's my role...)
I never tried this, but intend to next year.


Next post will be about moral dilemmas. Prepare the napkins, 'cause you're gonna cry.

Adventure Seminar, day two

Day 1: Non-Combat Adventure
Day 1 of the adventure building seminar was dedicated the non-combat adventures. Some kids understood this as “a ton of traps day” while for most it was a “the instructor went mad, ignore him” day. Fun without violence seems to be unimaginable these days. A sad statement on the affairs of the state. What a sibilant sentence!

Anyhow; one adventure was remarkable for its utterly outlandish premise;

You see this poor guy? Without violence he'll lose his job...

“An evil wizard has made violence impossible. You must defeat him and return violence to the world.”

The universal agreement that there was nothing wrong with this premise was quite astonishing to me. When I enquired whether violence is really such a great thing, everyone agreed that a world without violence would be a better world, but one does need violence because “it’s difficult to kill people without it; you have to poison them and such.”

This more or less summarized the adventure; arrange a series of nasty accidents for your enemies until you reach the sphere of peace and viciously shatter it against a stone wall. Then go on and slaughter orcs and goblins left and right. Afterward, be celebrated as heroes for bringing back the gift of violence to the world.

Had I been the DM, I would have ended this adventure with the sweet irony of the PCs being stabbed to death in a random attack in some nameless alley. But I wasn’t.

The next day, a kid came up with something even crazier...

Day 2: Non-Fantasy Adventure
At first the kids looked at me as if I told them to run without the help of their limbs. Then I explained that non-fantasy didn’t mean mundane, but rather not second world fantasy. Only one kid actually created an adventure free of any fantasy influences at this stage, but I’m afraid it wasn’t very good. The other two, while having strong fantasy elements, were really something though...

Mundane. Utterly mundane.

"You play drug elementals that travel to drug plane to kill the drug hydra to become the emperors of drugs."

Wow, what an insane trip! The kid actually researched various kinds of illegal substances and assigned each player special powers according to the substance they represented. I chose opium, so my powers were  insubstantiality and sleep. We passed through green field, acid pools, illusionary halls and eventually fought the Hydra, who spoke with a Spanish accent for some reason.

There was some plot twist out there, but quite frankly I got a bit too much into my character and don’t remember it. After the LSD halls, nothing could really surprise us. Talking walls, flying joints that burn your eyes, stoner golems - we saw it all.


“You’re a small elf and human outpost attacked by orcs and mindflayers from outer space.”

Possibly the grimmest adventure I've ever played.

We started as commanders of laser batteries, marine squads, fighter jets and so forth. No matter how many enemies we killed, more arrived. We saw our brave lads cut down and die in mud and blood or blown to bits in the trenches and could do nothing to save them. A daring swashbuckling attack blew up one of the enemy space carriers at the cost of two PC lives, but it changed nothing – there were two more carriers in orbit. Things went worse and worse and the last PC was shredded by lasers just before screaming into the radio, “where is the god damn reinforcement we asked for 30 minutes ago!

After the adventure, the DM announced happily that our sacrifice was not in vain – most of the planet was massacred but our families fled to space. I asked him what kept the enemy from intercepting them. He said “oh” and walked away with a mysterious smile.

What can I say – war is hell.

Next post - a taste of bitter, bitter realism. So bitter you might want to ingest something sweet first...

Adventure Building Seminar 2011

This year I ran my third adventure building seminar. It was very different from the first two. In 2009 and 2010, the kids came eager to learn. They brought notepads and pencils and eagerly gobbled my advices on monster and villain design, economical stat blocks, logical dungeon ecologies, classic narrative elements and plot twists, the difference between location and event based adventures, history of RPG settings in general and whatnot. Everyone had his two cents, some even had a few bucks, but their desire to learn was greater than their desire to speak out.

This year most kids were mortally opposed to learning anything. In truth, they would have been quite content if I just sat in the corner and let them DM for each other.

Ha! As if this is ever gonna happen...

A typical adventure building seminar

Instead of boring them with a one-sided seminar, however, I presented them with a series of DMing challenges.

Day 1: A non-combat adventure
Day 2: A non-fantasy adventure
Day 3: An event-based adventure
Day 4: A non-linear sandbox adventure
Day 5: A real-world, non-magical adventure

Each game lasted for about an hour and a half. There were 15 kids and three groups so everyone got to DM at least once. I walked from table to table and tried to make myself as annoying a player as humanly possible. Otherwise, how will they learn and how will I have fun? (plus I had to pay them back for the whole year!).

How my job feels like

On the first day I'd noticed a curious thing. When left to their own devices, the motivation provided by almost all DMs was, "you're hungry. That bastard over there has/is your food. Go get him!" If anyone has any idea what this means, please tell me... I'm a little scared honestly...

After each game there was a class discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of each adventure concluded with my notes and impressions. Surprisingly, the kids were anything but cruel with their critiques. In fact, the only way to get any comments out of them save, "it was fun" was to ask them, "was this the best adventure you'd ever played in your life? no? why not?"

All in all, I quite enjoyed it. It was very different from playing with my peers; bolder and more dynamic on the one hand, but often arbitrary and often railroady on the other (but more on that later.)

So, old folks running for kids, encourage them to DM once in a while. It’s quite the Saturnalian experience!

About the art: these pictures are the work of the insanely talented and talentedly insane Jared von Hindman. His page has many more pics and other cool stuff. Go there. RIGHT NOW!