Kobold Guide to Game Design, Volume I

How do you design an adventure? Seriously, it’s not as easy as it looks (or as hard as it looks, I guess, depending upon your perspective). I’ve known new gamemasters who could dive right in and tell wonderful stories design balanced encounters, without ever breaking a sweat. I know old hands who’ve been running games for decades who come close to having nervous breakdowns while preparing for weekly game sessions. It’s a skill set some people come to naturally, and some people have to work at.

And it’s a mixed bag, too. Some gamemasters are better at some things than others. There’s a lot to keep track of, all sorts of rules, plotlines, player characters, non-player characters. If you’re new at this, how do you get good? If you’re already good, how do you get better? That’s the whole point of the Kobold Guide to Game Design series. It’s a compilation of essays from Open Design, written by people who actually design adventures professionally, on how they do what they do. If you want to submit your adventures for publication there’s a ton of valuable advice in these pages. If you’re just trying to slap together an adventure for your regular gaming group, there’s still a ton of valuable advice in these pages. Good stuff is good stuff, no matter how you intend to put it to use.

Volume 1 is focused on adventures. There are articles on realism, worldbuilding, and pacing, the standard sorts of fundamental, overarching stuff you both need and expect to see in a book of this kind. There are more focused articles on using misdirection, monster hordes, towns, cities, and even creating hardboiled, noir-style campaigns. There are also articles for aspiring pros, including identifying your audience and a lovely bit called “Why Writers Get Paid”. If you are an aspiring pro, commit these bits to memory, or print them out and hang them on your wall where you can see them. If you’re not an aspiring pro, you might want to read them anyway; it’s interesting to see why some adventures are designed the way they are (keyword: marketing).

The book is a concise 75 pages, and I got something useful out of every page. My copy is now marked up with a highlighter, with page flags to help me locate certain sections and passages. This is, quite possibly, the single most useful book on adventure design I’ve ever read.

Volume II in the series is subtitled How to Pitch, Playtest and Publish. Volume III is Tools & Techniques. Both of those will be covered in separate articles here.