How I wrote 30 adventures in a couple of days.

Ok, I admit, the headline is a bit of an exaggeration. But it's cathy, right!

However, it's not that far of. But perhaps a better wording would be "how I wrote the outline for a 30-adventure campaign in a couple of days".

Anyway, I had an idea the other day, based on the Dawn of Defiance-campaign for Star Wars Saga, and also on the Scales of War-adventure-series for DnD 4th ed. The idea was to write a campaign that took you from lvl1 to lvl30 in DnD 4th. The pace would be 1 lvl/ adventure, so that would make 30 adventures. That felt a bit intimidating, but then I started to divide things up, and after a while I hade a rough outline for each module, stretching from the first one up to the very last one. Here is basically what I did. Hopefully it can serve as an inspiration to one or two of you out there.

I had some vague ideas that I wanted the characters to go from young, "just-graduated" heroes that could do some work for the local villages and towns, up to world-shakers. Thankfully, 4th ed provides some natural spans (level-wise) so that I basically had three parts of the campaign (Heroic, Paragon and Epic).

So, the first step was to write down the theme of each tier, what dangers there where, and to write down a line or two about the archvillain of each tier. For the first tier, it's on a fairly local scale, the villain is a local player etc. It has also the theme of "night", to keep with the Points of Light-setting. Basically, the villages are scattered, the wilderness is wild and everyone is threatened by the unknown. In the second tier, the PCs have some reputation, and all of a sudden they become involved in the politics of the area. At the same time, they have to face bigger dangers. The theme of the paragon-tier is dawn. Both the PC's and the evil around them is waking up, preparing for bigger things to come. The new archvillain is a bigger player (and a supernatural one, at that), who was the driving force behind the villain in the lower tier.
Finally, the last tier is Day, where the players are rulers of kingdoms, and now have to face opposing armies and epic enemies.

With the three tiers nailed, I made three empty lists, with 10 posts in each list. Then I brainstormed and tried to find a number of "one-sentence" plots/ scenes/ ideas. I wasn't satisfied until I had 10 ideas for each tier. Since I already had the basic framework and theme, it was fairly easy to find around 10 ideas for each. One aim I had was to vary myself, and also to use different settings and try to use as much of the rules as possible. For instance, I was keen to try out how 4th ed handles sea battles, so there is a module where the players have to stop a pirate invasion.

With the 3x10 ideas written down, I tried to sort them in some kind of order, so that they start out small for each tier, and then grow to something bigger, preparing for the next tier as the end of the tier approaches.

Finally, for each module-idea, I wrote down 3 additional points. This could be a bit of background, a twist, how it connects to the overall arch etc. The point of the points (no pun intended) was to give each idea a bit more depth and story. When I did this, I tried to look at the modules before and after the current module, to see if there was anything I could tie into it.

Not all ideas where smooth and easy to come up with 3 "sub-ideas" for, but after a little while I had 30 modules, with a coherent story, ideas, twists etc. While they still need to be fleshed out, doing so with the help of for instance the DnD-Insider tools (which I can recommend) will be a fairly quick and straighforward task. (And also, keeping it fairly loose will make it easier adapt it to what the players do and wish).

I'm so far quite satisfied with the results, and will do try this out on other games and settings as well.

So, to sum up: The secret is in

• Divide and conquer - Split the campaign into manageable parts. And then split them into smaller parts
• Use the rule of three - While a bit cliché and corny, in most cases you can always come up with three "sub-ideas" or lines for something. This process can be iterative, so if you want to detail it further, you can always add three points to each of your previous three points.