Are You Stuck without an RPG Adventure Idea for the Weekend? Check Your Social Media Feeds.
A DM Should Remember James Dunnigan's First Rule of Scenario Writing for Home Games, "If you see a good idea, steal it."
Finding Adventure Ideas Online
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post discussing my love of running holiday themed role playing adventures for my gaming groups. In that post, I shared an adventure I wrote a couple of years ago featuring the Krampus. It’s an adventure I’ve published before in other places, but I posted it here because I think it’s a really fun adventure written for an underrated role playing game (Shadow of the Demon Lord) and I figured that game masters are always on the lookout for new adventure ideas (which is the purpose of this post).
I shared it for another reason as well. As much as I love running holiday themed adventures, writing adventures takes up a lot of time and I hadn’t written up a new adventure for this year. That’s right, I reused past material and plagiarized from myself in order to provide “new” content for my new Substack. Largely because I want to make sure to write a new Substack entry at least twice a month (missed it by three days) in order to give you all your “money’s worth” for subscribing/reading regularly. In doing so, I was following a piece of advice I read in James Dunnigan’s excellent book The Complete Wargames Handbook where he writes, “Plagiarize. There's no copyright on ideas and most of the ones you need have already been thought of and thought out by more experienced designers. I know, I often steal from myself (as well as others, that's why I'm an expert).” You can find of copy of the book for download over at the Connections UK website.
Plagiarize. There's no copyright on ideas and most of the ones you need have already been thought of and thought out by more experienced designers. I know, I often steal from myself (as well as others, that's why I'm an expert). — James Dunnigan in “The Complete Wargames Handbook”
In his particular case, James is talking about game mechanics which cannot be in and of themselves be copywritten. You can’t copyright the mechanic of rolling a six-sided die to resolve a task, though you can copyright a specific and novel description of how rolling a six-sided die resolves a task in your game. I’ll leave the particulars to copyright attorneys, but neither matters in my “plagiarizing myself” case (I’m not going to sue myself any time soon) or in the advice I’m going to be giving in this article regarding stealing ideas for use in your home games. The key here is on stealing/borrowing IDEAS and not stealing products. I may have given away the Krampus adventure for free, but a lot of creators make their living selling adventures online and I am a strong advocate for supporting them whole heartedly. I back a couple of excellent Patreons for this very reason.
ANY-way, long digression aside, back to the topic at hand.
As experienced as I am as a DM, and I’ve been running games for (cough, cough) years, I often find myself in need of an idea for an adventure. There are a number of published tools that I’ve relied on over the years, including Tom Moldvay’s excellent “Dungeon Master Information” tool on pages B51 to B52 in the Moldvay edited D&D Basic Set.
Over the next few months, I’ll do a series of posts on some of the great ideas/resources in the Moldvay B/X rulebook, but today’s resource is at the fingertips of anyone who is reading this right now, social media.
That’s right, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, TikTok, and any other social media site you can imagine is brimming with roleplaying adventure ideas. Take this holiday themed Twitter post as an example.
This is a really simple set up for the start of an interesting adventure, one that could be the beginning of a campaign or a one shot low level adventure.
How Would I Use the Snowman Idea?
I’d start by asking myself whether I wanted Frosty to be a PC or an NPC. Personally, I like the idea of a Snowman player character and after one quick Google search I found an acceptable Snowman species entry for 5th edition. I really liked some of the traits for this character type, especially these two:
Body Building: If you are surrounded by snow, you can take some to reform your body, you recover 2d4 Hit Points. You cannot do this again until you have taken a Short or Long Rest.
Warmer Climate: If you are in hotter weather, you take disadvantage in Constitution and Wisdom Saving Throws, you cannot recover any Hit Points unless you are in a cold area. Mild Weather does not affect you.
Though I like the idea of a Snowman character, I would limit the species to one player and ask that the other players pick more traditional fantasy species one might find “living together in the same remote town.” What exactly that means will depend on your game, but in mine means the “classic Tolkien” species of Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Human. No. No Gnomes. Especially no Gnome Bards.
After the players have designed their young characters, there are two ways to go. First, you could have the players search for the hat in order to create the Snowman, only to incur the wrath of the Dire Necromancer Hinkle who planned on using the hat to raise an army of the dead but has only raised a small squad of Zombies and Skeletons at this point. Second, you could open in medias res with the hat blowing away from the Dire Necromancer Hinkle during one of his summoning rituals. In this case, you’d narrate the summoning ritual, the wind blowing the hat away, and the awakening of the Snowman. This would quickly be followed by Hinkle sending a squad of undead to retrieve the hat following Raymond Chandler’s simple reflection, “When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This could get to be pretty silly but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. A writer who is afraid to over-reach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”
“When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This could get to be pretty silly but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. A writer who is afraid to over-reach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong. ” — Raymond Chandler
Following this attack, the player characters could seek out who sent the undead to attack them and stumble upon the tale of the Dire Necromancer Hinkle and his scholarly minions.
Getting Adventure Ideas from “Non-Adventure” Prompts
While this idea is a direct suggestion for an adventure idea, you don’t need to limit yourself to that kind of post for inspiration. Twitter, for example, is rich with ideas in unexpected places too. Take this attempt at virality as an example:
At first, this looks like a mere humorous meme, but to the gamemaster this is the perfect inspiration for an adventure. From this tweet alone, I could write a number of adventures. For example, I could start with an adventure based upon the time an Inn called The Befuddled Umber Hulk allowed a Ranger/Druid to house their “pet” Bear within the inn. What happened? Did the Bear attack an evil patron? Did members of a secret society recognize the Ranger/Druid due to the Bear “pet” and attack them in the night? Was the Bear not a pet at all, but a lycanthrope who killed townsfolk living near the inn? (Yes, I know Werebears are typically good, but if Orcs can be Good then Werebears can be Evil. Play with stereotypes to create adventures.) Was the Bear a monstrous companion disguised by an illusion spell that killed townsfolk like the aforementioned Werebear?
As you can see, that’s a lot of ideas from a single prompt from a random tweet, and this was found on a very busy news day.
These are just a couple of examples of inspirational tweets I’ve seen over the past week or so and yet I’ve come up with a number of adventure ideas from them.
What would you do with them? What are some ways Social Media has informed your gamemastering?