A solution for busy game masters

This adventure creation method is taught as part of Club Heroes, a Twin Cities program dedicated to turning youth and their parents into Dungeons & Dragons Game Masters.

​Once you, your family or your kids have been bitten by the fantasy role-playing bug, it’s a tough desire to constantly satisfy.
Your work and other tasks take up so much of your energy that it’s challenging to devote the mental effort required to plan out that next family or group Dungeons & Dragons adventure.
To remedy this, lots of folks turn to campaign settings and adventure books that can be purchased at local gaming retail stores. As satisyfing as those can be, they can diminish one of the most important positives from fantasy role-playing games for youth or really, any player – the creativity of these games!
Is there a way you can have both – ensuring your players (especially youth!) are using their creativity in building the adventure you’ll run while making it easy for you, the Game Master, to put it together in a short period of time?
You bet! It all revolves around the idea of using your players’ minds - rather than just yours - to develop this adventure.
To do that, ask your players a series of questions when they create their characters. Here are the questions:
1 _ Name your player-character’s biggest enemy, ensuring you provide a name, race and where this person or creatures resides.
2 _ Describe why this person or creature is your enemy and how they look and act.
3 _ Describe how others in your community view your enemy. Do they dislike him/her like you do? Or maybe not?
Take those answers from each of your players and do a random roll to identify which one of those enemies your adventure will revolve around.
Next, step two.
This requires you to head over to Inkwell Idea’s website and find a product of theirs called “Sidequest Decks.” These are exactly like a deck of cards except each of the cards has a map on the front and a series of adventure steps on the back. They are mini-adventures, really. And the PDFs of these decks can be incredibly cheap to purchase – many around $3! (Find them at store.inkwellideas.com/collections/sidequest-decks)
Remember to use the information you glean from your players’ enemies to insert into the Sidequest Decks’ maps. That way your players’ imaginations can drive the content of your adventure, not to mention make running such an adventure easy and quick for you.
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Heroes B&B Note: Inkwell Ideas is a valued gaming industry friend of ours and has some terrific products for our fellow homebrewers. Check them out at store.inkwellideas.com

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