The Theme of the Adventure

We’ve talked about it before as it affects campaigns, but theming affects adventures too.  What do we mean?

Not every adventure is or should be the same.  Back in our All About Wilderness edition, we talked about missions that brought back that sense of exploration.  That was a huge thing back in the early days of FRPGs, probably because it reminded us of The Hobbit.  The Hobbit was one of the first stereotypes of an adventure.  Bilbo and his dwarven buddies went wandering and ran into a bunch of stuff that wasn’t very friendly.  You know, like an adventurer.

Then again, there was our whole build up to the Holy War.  Within the various discussions there were ways to run it as a religious conflict with angels and demons clashing around the party, often times looking for help.  There are other ways to get into it where it is more of a gritty “Saving Private Ryan” sort of war where the party would feel more like soldiers vs. mercenaries just trying to survive.

We published Little Kingdoms with its campaign Necromancers’ Coup.  Here the theme was all about villagers desperately struggling against the horrors of an undead invasion.  Non-adventurers racing around small villages hoping to save themselves and their neighbors.

But the theming should affect individual missions too.  While a campaign’s theme can be the overarching mood, missions can be different, at least subtly so.  Let’s think through the Endless Dungeon missions.  The overall theme is definitely a dungeon crawl, but that doesn’t mean they should be all the same.  Variation keeps the campaign from feeling dull, boring or stagnant.

Blood in the Slave Pits was themed after making minor monsters fun again.  While the first encounters with the goblins are pretty standard fair, the second half of the mission shows what can happen when even the least bad guys start using strategy and coordination.  This is by no means a dungeon crawl with that feeling of different monsters around every corner, but instead a somewhat planned mission against the possibly too real goblins.

Then this mission, Savagery of the Spider Men.  Now the party is in for a whole different feel.  Is this horror?  No.  But there are a few aspects of that.  Things are supposed to feel weird and alien.  The bad guys can walk on the ceilings and there are a couple of jump scares planned into the mission.  There’s more atmosphere to it.

This is the idea behind the themes.  Going from a gritty mission into a more exploratory one then into one with political issues and encounters keeps the party guessing, but also keeps them entertained.  Switching it up is the idea.  This also pushes the GM.  Trying something new can teach you a thing or two, maybe even teach you that you’re good at something you didn’t know you were good at.  After all, the whole point of GMing is to keep the players coming back and variety is the spice of a PC’s life too.

This post was written as part of the recently released Savagery of the Spider Men aka All About Spiders and Poisons, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with spiders and poison, but with a full defined mission showing both the stats for point-based characters (like in Legend Quest) and class-based characters like in most of the die-20 games.  Not only that, but we get into what it takes for a GM to put a bit of that fear back into your missions (not cosmic horror, but some jump scares and some nervousness).  Some of the sense of uncertainty that FRPGs had when they were new.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 68 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.