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by Filipe Faria
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The main job of a Referee is to create adventures that the players will enjoy. They do not create stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, but they create situations with locations, NPCs, problems, and complications, and potential solutions for the player characters to interact with and, as a result, create a story.
The Five Questions
When creating an adventure, you can begin trying to answer five important questions about it: “Who?”, “What?”, “Where?”, “Why?” and “How?”. This helps you organize your thoughts and makes you focus on what really matters in the adventure.
Who?
Who are the main movers and shakers? What are their assets? What are their weaknesses? What do they want? What motivates them to do what they do? Think about all of these questions and how each of those individuals relate to one another. Are they rivals? Allies? Enemies? How could they meet with the PCs and how would they relate to them? Try to create individuals and factions that can be manipulated by the PCs in interesting ways if they are clever.
What?
What is happening? What are the PCs trying to accomplish? What are the NPCs and factions doing and how is this affecting the PCs? What is the goal of the adventure? What’s it all about? This question is maybe the easiest to answer, but it is also the most important. Referees need to make the “What“ interesting and uncertain to incite the players to interfere. The actions of the player characters need to be able to affect the outcome of any situation, for better or worse.
Where?
Where does the adventure take place? Where are the characters going? Where is the treasure hidden? Where are the NPCs and factions usually located. Try to think about at least three provoking and interesting locations for the PCs to explore. Define a theme for each of them, like a theme park, something that will stick in the players’ minds. Think about a place and start adding strange things, things the PCs can interact with, things that set it apart from other similar locations. Picture in your mind’s eye what’s it like there, what would someone see, smell, feel and hear there, and write down a few words to remind you about it. Ideally, adventure locations should be like a toy play set, with a strong theme and lots of things to mess around with.
Why?
Why is this happening? Why should the characters care? Why are the NPCs and factions involved in this? Having a clear idea why things are happening and why are the NPCs interested in it can really help the Referee to improvise when things go out of the rails (and they will). Additionally, having an idea why characters would care about what’s going on in the adventure will help you prepare more interesting hooks to get them without making it seem forced. These may not actually end up being the reason the PCs get involved, but it helps building the game world to think about them.
How?
How are the events are going to unfold and involve the PCs? How are the NPCs and Factions going to react to the PCs actions? Are they likely to oppose them? Help them? Ignore them? All of these answers need not be set in stone, but they help the Referee think about the many possibilities of the game and be more secure while improvising developments during play. How everything will actually turn out will certainly diverge from what’s planned, but that’s part of the fun!
