Tonight's blog is about writing adventures, as compared to reviewing existing ones.

Tonight, I'll take my cue from the late Ursula K LeGuin for inspiration.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
- Ursula K LeGuin

A tabletop adventure has got to capture the imagination. But it's also got to draw in the players. It's their time and energy, and the GM has got to give them something to challenge them.

And by that, I don't mean putting them into a dungeon full of random encounters to fight to the death, and traps for the party's thief *cough* Rogue to locate and disarm, because face it - the Old Game is rubbish like that, because parties are all geared to revolve around the big party tank, doing all the hard work (and by that, I mean making mooks disappear like a video game).

Tasks

Dungeon crawls and hexcrawls are, more or less, random activities. You're not running a story, just shuffling pieces across a board or virtual desktop. Even if the party accepts a task from someone, a bag of gold for clearing out assorted monsters from an underground complex, it's still just random crawling through corridors and emptying rooms.

Make these tasks more interesting. Bring in something personal. The party is not going to some Evil Wizard's Obsidian Tower In The East; they're looking for the Vice President's missing daughters. The VP isn't some rando, either: she's one of the party's Contacts, someone they regularly go to for information and, occasionally, sex.

Let them in on an investigation. They can crawl through corridors and enter rooms, but they're not after treasure. They're after information. Maybe evidence. Perhaps a secret.

Characters can also develop through an adventure. A specific character learns that they cannot develop further in their arcane studies without guidance from their mentor, but the mentor has gone missing. Rather than go through a random hexcrawl, they can track the mentor and their captors through wilderness, following their trail.

It would be ironic if they discovered that the mentor had simply gone away on a pilgrimage to see their own mentor and ask the old Grandmaster for advice in developing their own abilities ... or just to sit with the old dude and be with them in his last days on this earth.

Make the tasks mean something.

Local Colour

The world doesn't sit still between tasks. The characters can be led through a living, thriving world, and the players can be made to feel like they are a part of it. A simple mission to buy bread from town can turn into a frantic foot chase as the Adventurer spots a thief cutting some rich guy's purse; or a trip to the races by a character with a background in nature magic can embroil the characters in some act of shady race fixing, forcing them to rely upon their animal control powers, or healing magic, to save the day - as well as their own necks.

Then there is courtly intrigue.

Your home town setting doesn't have to have a bunch of stereotypes running the show - a King, a beautiful Princess, a sneaky, treacherous Advisor, a lean, red-headed roughneck  of a Provost, a fat Sherriff, a greedy merchant. Shake it up. Your ruler could be dead, and the Vizier could be ruling from the tomb, claiming to have necromantic powers to speak with the dead Lord. Or your city could be the capital of a republic, ruled by a President with a Senate governing the affairs of the surrounding region while a Parliament of elected members runs the affairs of the city itself.

You don't need to crib from the Mediaeval England song sheet. Steal from Ancient Rome, no longer an Empire with an Emperor in charge but still run by a faceless, impersonal bureaucracy. The ruling elite may be dust on the wind, but somebody still has to keep track of the revenues and taxes. Maybe the Empire fell, but it was not swamped by a bitter, priggish religious cult which caused the civilised world to burn at the stake and stay in the dark for centuries. A secular world, post-Empire, where - for instance - the Sea People never ravaged the Mediterranean, and the Bronze Age never collapsed, but rather just gently segued into a pastoral, less militaristic Iron Age, less obsessed with warfare and conquest.

Make the setting a source of fascination. Let the local times and mores challenge the characters to want to participate in the living, growing world around them; to participate in their society, and make the players want to care about their characters, their connections, and the culture they are helping to shape.

One For The Memories

As a GM, you can't tell which of your settings is going to be outstanding. You can try to build your setting in detail, scattering interesting NPCs and encounters to be triggered whenever the players send their characters to a specific place - but if they never go there, those encounters will be wasted.

Your best bet is to journal your NPCs' activities, and keep them going, and at the same time encourage the players to keep journals of the characters' adventures - the NPCs they encounter, the Connections they make, the little secrets they learn. Make sure to sync their journals with yours. You don't want to forget that you gave the party's Face a sweet little tidbit of scandal about the President's daughter, for use three sessions down the line.

At the end of the campaign, or when you finish your stories in that setting and move on to another game, you'll all have a journal to take away, full of mnemonic triggers to bring back highlights of the fun you and your players have had. Those journals can even be a resource for you to write down the setting, and even publish it online some time.

Overlook

You're working with the players here, not against them. In the old days, the referee's role was to destroy the characters. Those days were a mistake. Your job is to create a world, in collaboration with the players, as a living place in everybody's imagination which they can explore and change, and remember long after the last dice have rolled.