Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 76 - Customizing Prewritten Campaigns

Episode Date: June 6, 2021

Prewritten modules and adventures are a DM's friend.  They are simple, canned documents that you can insert into your world as needed but they're better if you customize them; make them more integrated with your game world, your players' characters, and important NPCs.  Don't know where to get started?  I'm here to help.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 76 of the Taking 20 podcast. This week about customizing pre-written campaigns. This week's sponsor is Wayfinder Maps. We've got the topographical map you've been looking for. What a relief. Please like, rate, and or subscribe on your preferred podcast site and or on YouTube. I would greatly appreciate it and it would help the podcast continue to grow. Your gaming group is not typical, and that's a good thing. Your group has their idiosyncrasies

and preferences. Your group definitely has the type of game they want to be in. Hopefully the genre and focus of a pre-written adventure that you want to run aligns with the type of adventure the players want to be in, but the odds of perfect alignment are almost zero. Writers of pre-written campaigns will focus on different aspects of the role-playing game. Wilderness exploration, combat, puzzles, infiltration and sneaky sneak, dungeon delving, politics, or social encounters. Your group may want more combat and fewer puzzles. They may love dungeons but hate open wilderness exploration. Maybe you and your players expected more social encounters,

but the adventure's been nothing but infiltration of this organization, that business, and this other town. No problem, my friends. Give the players what they want. It's what we should do as DMs. But Jeremy, the adventure I purchased doesn't have any social encounters. Its pages are stuffed full of dungeon delving and world exploration. How am I going to shoehorn a social encounter in? Where would I put it? And while we're at it, who peed my pants? I can help you with all those questions except for the last one. That's going to be a mystery that you have to solve. Before you purchase a pre-written adventure or

campaign, you need to remember that the vast majority of these are written to the middle-of-the-road gaming group. A typical gaming group, if you will. They are written to appeal to the widest possible audience. From brand new DMs through ancient, grizzled, experienced blowhards like myself. Storylines tend to be very clean and sanitized. Most of them are either entirely self-contained or written to integrate into a predefined campaign world, such as the Sword Coast, Galarian, Kryn, the Inner Sphere, or wherever. You can't blame the authors for doing this. Why write an adventure that only appeals to a very narrow set of potential adventurers? This module is for mature players who want to dive into a dungeon on the elemental plane

of fire and solve nearly every encounter with lots of sexy sex with beings made of fire. That's hot. Nothing more topical or relevant than a Paris Hilton soundbite. Welcome to peak 2005. Good lord, I'm old. I mean, you could write an adventure like that, but chances are you're not going to sell a lot of copies. So they write it for a four- to five-person party with a little bit of everything and a longer adventure, or tailored to a specific type of adventure if it's a one-shot or very short module.

to a specific type of adventure if it's a one-shot or very short module. Now before we get started, I want to remind you that customizing does not have to mean you have to do a wholesale rewrite. While there are a ton of ways to customize an adventure, I'm going to break it into two broad categories. The changes you can make before the PCs begin the adventure, and the changes that you can make because the PCs are in the adventure. The first type is adjusting an adventure while you're preparing it

and before the PCs interact with it. And in my mind, there are many different types of adventure customization you could throw in here. So let's take them from easiest to hardest. The easiest change you can make is changing quest givers and NPCs. It is so easy to reskin and replace generic NPCs with ones from your world or with NPCs of your own making.

To quote one of my coworkers, easy peasy lemon squeezy. For example, replacing Felwynn in Half Reach with Lady Maria Von Goldenfart as a kidnapping victim by The Feathered. You can replace these at will, all you have to do is remember the substitution that you made and be consistent about it. The next type of adjustment you can make is adding generic homebrew content like monsters, items, etc. to make the adventure more your own. Again, fairly easy to do. Just add in the material that you would like, that you feel is missing from the adventure. Third type of change, changing combat. Changing the quantity and type of monsters and NPCs the PCs will face in the adventure. You can do it on a small scale, like changing a single combat from drakes to hippogriffs. Just be consistent with the types of creatures in your world and the environment that you would find them in, and you're golden here.

If you're going to replace mermen, for example, you'd have better luck replacing it with another type of underwater creature or modify an existing creature to be an aquatic subtype. But you can also change combat large scale, changing the entire adventure Rise of the Drow to Rise of the Centaurs. This is harder than small scale changes, but still doable. The fourth type of change you can make is to change adventure locations. Different terrain, different country, different continent, different planet, or hell, even different plane of existence. Move keep on the borderlands from a swamp near the Caves of Chaos to a desert near the ruins of Al-Qadesh. You may have to change monster types to match because there's not a lot of lizardfolk in the deserts of your world. You may have to make them humans or desert giants or something that would naturally

reside there. Fifth type of change that you could make is adding character backstories to the adventure or changing NPC backstories listed in the adventure. This requires work on your part. You may have to change combats, NPCs, locations, and a lot of other things to incorporate all of this. The Big Bad was responsible for killing one of the PC's spouses before the adventure began. This might require you to move the adventure or change the entire history of the Big Bad. Sixth type of change, and we're getting harder, is changing the adventure goals and plot points. From protect the town from troll attacks to rescue the mayor's son from mongrelmen kidnappers. You may be able to keep the location and some NPCs, but a lot of other

things may have to be changed wholesale. Instead of defending the city gates from the trolls, you're infiltrating the sewer lair of the mongrelmen. And the hardest type of customization is customizing adventure themes. The original adventure may have had a theme of power corrupts everyone. Now you weren't trying to change it to morality is circumstantial or progress requires sacrifice. This may require an entire adventure rewrite to convey the theme properly. Now that's all the first type of customization. Let's talk about the customization of your adventure by adjusting what's different based on the actions the PCs take. This is even harder. It requires creative thinking on your part. A lot of my players begin to worry when I tell them that

while they're doing whatever they're doing, clearing a dungeon, exploring ruins, rescuing the kidnapped duchess, or whatever, the world continues to move. Or if you want something that sounds smarter, Tempest Fugit, time flies. The baddies and the NPCs don't idly fret while the PCs adventure. Their lives and their plans continue to move. They will continue to try to accomplish their goal. Now, NPCs may have to make reactionary choices based on what the PCs do. To determine what would be different because of the party's actions, between sessions, think about what realistic consequences would happen because of whatever the PCs did. Did the PCs kill a major lieutenant of the big bad?

That will garner some response from the big bad in some way. He could send stronger and or more opponents at the PCs. He could take a personal interest in the PCs and try to take them out himself. Or most importantly, he could change his plans to make them more likely to succeed and make it less likely for the PCs to interfere. Do you have to modify an adventure as written? No. You can play the adventure as written and DM happily ever after. But suppose you do want to adjust the adventure based on the actions of the adventuring party.

How do you do it? The fundamental building block of adjusting any campaign or session or adventure is one question. What changed because of the PCs? Most adventure paths do a great job of guiding DMs to the next steps of the adventure, assuming unqualified success by the PCs. The adventure assumes the PCs slayed the Hag Queen and her two daughters. They collected the

funereal mask of Dragomir Dimitriova, and they have returned to the town as huge heroes with a big celebration. But what if the PCs didn't have an unqualified success? Maybe they slayed the Hag Queen, but they missed the two daughters. The adventure assumes they're dead, but they aren't in your campaign. How does that change the story going forward? Will the sisters slink off into the darkness and disappear from the narrative? If so, that's fine. But they could also collect resources, try to gather power, and try to thwart the PCs' plans going forward.

So how do you actually customize a pre-written campaign? The bad news is I can't tell you how to customize a specific campaign in your specific group. Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for? What I am going to do is give you a recipe for how you can customize the pre-written campaign for your group. I'm not going to make the coffee table for you, but I will show you the workshop, show you where the tools are, and how to run the machines. Hopefully both of us emerge with a coffee table that isn't too wobbly

and the same number of fingers we had when we walked in. So come here, Frankie Four Fingers. Calm down. Here's how I customize campaigns. First of all, embrace the fact that the first plan you make before the campaign starts for how you're going to customize it is completely useless. Forget it then, what's the point? The plans you make before the campaign starts won't survive first contact with the PCs. Your plan, I'm going to make this random NPC in the opening tavern brawl the big bad of the entire campaign.

When in actualityity one of your PCs shanks that NPC with a broken bottle and he died. Your plan? I'm going to make the town of Felchwood a major quest hub for the third act and the PCs straight up murder the chief of police. In broad daylight. At the police station. In front of 27 cops. Because the chief cut in line in front of 27 cops because the chief cut in line in front of them at the local snack shack. You can't control what the players in your campaign are going to do on a session-by-session basis, and you need to be able to adjust the plans on the fly. Which brings us to the payoff for the number one.

Yes, the plan that you make is useless, but the process of planning is invaluable. The time you spend formulating your plans requires you to analyze component parts of the adventure theme, plot, settings, NPCs, interactions, Big Bad's plans, the storyline, all of it. So how do you do that? Read the entire adventure path or module from beginning to end including introductions, stat blocks, epilogue, and sidebars. Don't worry about making notes yet. Just read it and digest the adventure as a whole. Try to identify what I

call the critical path of the adventure. Critical path is a term I've borrowed from project management concepts. The critical path of a project, one, contains jobs or activities that are critical in their effect on total project time, and two, how these critical jobs relate to one another and what dependencies exist between them. Similarly, the critical path of a pre-written adventure contains the story beats, NPC activities, and set pieces that must happen in order to have an adventure. It weeds out the portions of the adventure that are side quests or activities simply not required to successfully complete it. All those fetch quests to make the PC's equipment better? Gone. All of those delay tactics where the big bad tries to lead the party away from his

actual objective? Ignored. Requests which were a cry for help from this NPC or that shopkeeper that isn't directly related to the adventure at hand, removed. As you read it, try to boil the adventure down to just what is absolutely required in order for the PCs to succeed. Keeping this list in mind will help you stay focused on the required tasks instead of the extraneous fluff of the adventure. All the parts of the adventure that are on the critical path will have to be executed as written or have an equivalent substitute. Whereas all the other pieces can be modified, removed, rearranged, or added elsewhere to customize your adventure. Now that you have the critical path in mind, read the adventure again and start preparing how you would like to run the adventure.

This is where you start making notes. How do you anticipate the PCs will navigate the critical path of the story? and start preparing how you would like to run the adventure. This is where you start making notes. How do you anticipate the PCs will navigate the critical path of the story? Start thinking about the scenes of the pre-built adventure that you might want to change, whether that's just a few combats or the entire setting. Make your plans that will get demolished as soon as you get one hour into the first session. If time is short or you want to speed up the completion of the adventure, what parts of the adventure would you remove? Are there cool ideas for adventures, settings, combats that you haven't been able to use elsewhere that you would like to use here?

Think about the gaps that you need to fill in with details from character backstories. If you're a minimalist prep DM, see episode 72 for more details about that, If you're a minimalist prep DM, see episode 72 for more details about that, all of this work will now pay off before each session. By doing all of this analysis, you've built your LEGO pieces and you can reassemble them as needed as the story evolves. When your players ignore your hints and decide to go to the gnome town of Grizzle Spittle instead of the ruins of Ahogar Polio, you can insert believable NPC interactions and realistic hints to get the players back on track to the next piece of the critical path. You can get the players to finally enter the jungle to find the ruins, or move the ruins from the jungles where they are to being newly discovered under the gnomish town, and then bam, you're back on track.

Moving on from the how of customization, let's move to the why you should customize adventures at all. Adventures as written assume a very specific set of actions that will occur by the PCs. Being flexible as a DM and adjusting the adventure makes the world seem more real. Tabletop RPGs are not video games. Areas where the PCs aren't don't just unload from memory and freeze in stasis until the PCs return. If the PCs choose to help out the mayor of Grizzle Spittle and his little tax problem, only to discover that when they return to a previous town, the big bad has made off with an important NPC, or attacked the town, and it's largely destroyed, the PCs will realize that their choices have consequences,

and they may not be able to get 100% of the achievements around an RPG table. Another reason is that being flexible with the adventure and adjusting it on the fly will keep you from getting painted into a corner as a DM. Let's say the adventure says that Lenore has the key to the Dungeon of Endless Night and will give it to the PCs when she's rescued from Baron Von Schmasch, who sounds like a barbarian to me. But instead of rescuing Lenore, the PCs steal a ship and go searching for some underwater treasure hoard. If you don't want to adjust the adventure, you could just say that the NPC was keeping Lenore alive for some reason, or had been torturing her for information. Or maybe the NPC was in

love with her and trying to convince her to marry him. Baroness Von Schmasch. That sounds like a busy young woman at a brothel, and I don't blame Lenore for not wanting that title. But if you want to show consequences of the player's choices, like they've just been dicking around and they haven't been going after the critical path of the adventure, you could have Lenore die, change the parameters by which the PCs would acquire the key, and keep the adventure going. Another reason to customize adventures is you can give the players more of what they want. Make securing Lenore's key a social challenge, or more combat heavy, or stealth in to steal it from someone, whatever your players enjoy. You can have custom adventures

available faster than designing everything from scratch. Let's say you find a pre-built adventure that's almost everything that you wanted, it just needs a few tweaks here and there. By learning how to use these customization muscles, you can change that pre-built adventure to make it exactly what you want. Customizing adventures gives you the ability to move the spotlight to players who otherwise wouldn't have it in the adventure as written. An adventure that's written with a lot of melee combat after melee combat after melee combat may leave the player who's controlling a wizard frustrated. By customizing parts of the adventure, you can give the wizard her opportunity to step into the spotlight and be the one who solves a problem, overcomes a hurdle, and saves the day in a crucial moment. Finally, customizing adventures, you can incorporate pre-written adventures into your world.

Pre-written adventures have a lot of great content that you can cannibalize and use in your world. Even the great DMs reuse content. They find a great description of a town, or a magic shop, or ruins, or wilderness area, and they will transplant it wholesale within their world, just making changes around the edges to make sure it fits. Customizing a pre-written adventure can be a lot of work, but it can be extremely rewarding to see your players happy, give them a challenge, and make them feel like big damn heroes,

and have fun doing it. Please like, rate, and subscribe wherever you found this podcast. And if you're so inclined and if you'd like to support the podcast, please head over to ko-fi slash taking20podcast and buy me a coffee. Tune in next week

where we'll talk about some optional rules and methods that you can use to speed up your game. Before I leave, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Wayfinder Maps. They can help you identify those map symbols. They're legends at it.

Thank you again for listening to Episode 76, all about customizing pre-written campaigns. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.