Go Long! Plotting Your First Long Form Adventure

Welcome back and Happy New Year, everyone.

During my article series last year, we talked about how to write and run an adventure, focusing on one-off adventures as they are a great starting point, both as a new game master and as a new writer. In this new series of articles, we will be taking the foundational skills we learned in writing a one-off and building on them to expand that campaign into a multi-session, epic adventure! Okay, it’ll be multi-session, but epic is the eye of the beholder.

We’ll start this first article with the basics of plotting an adventure. Now, there are two ways to go about writing in general, not just for TTRPGs: outlining and pantsing. This is a blog about writing for TTRPG, but the foundations are fundamentally fantasy and sci-fi writing, and I recommend the lecture series by Brandon Sanderson, which I watched when I first learned how to write fantasy (Or at least, a more recent version of it).

Now, as anyone who has ever run a TTRPG session before knows, no matter how much you outline, you will find yourself improvising at some point, and the key to interactive story-writing is to be a master of both. A key aspect of writing is that you can make any novel a short story and any short story a grandiose epic, so with that in mind, let’s take our story from our one-shot writing article and make it into a 3-month long adventure. For those who need a reminder:

Someone has stolen the queen’s birthday cake! Oh, and there’s been a murder.

In the original article, we managed to tie this story idea up quickly in a single session. A cursory examination into the murder itself, finding clues, and ending in a showdown with the culprit. But say we want to expand this into a summer adventure: three months, one weekly session, so a total of 12 sessions.

Believe it or not, our plot will remain relatively unchanged, but what we now have is some time to really explore the murder itself. We can expand story-beats to help play this to a longer session. As I teach by doing, let’s take this and plot out the campaign.

Now, before I get into this, I can hear what you’re saying. You’re railroading. Honestly? Yes, I am. And I’m not at the same time.

The key isn’t not to railroad, because too much freedom can lead your adventures astray. The key is to be an illusion master, weaving a story so intricate that your players will never realise you had the whole thing planned from the start. And in fact, if you’re really good, you’ll even be able to write an adventure with ‘breather episodes’ that allow your party to go off the beaten path to partake in side quests and mini-adventures. The other approach, and my personal favorite, is to use a garden of forking paths. You know the beginning, and you know the end, but how you get there is a little bit up for interpretation. But at the end of the day, there is a start, there is an end, and there are only so many paths to get there.

Let’s take a look at our Queen’s Cake and break out some sessions to illustrate this point. Instead of quick and cursory information gathering at the various bakeries in the area, we can turn each one of these into a session. In each case, we can have the bakery in question also include a combat encounter of some sort, or a devious puzzle laid by the murderer. If we have four bakeries, that’s four sessions on its own. Another way to expand this plot is to spread out these bakeries. In our original story, all the bakeries were on the same street, let’s say in this version they’re in various villages spread out through the kingdom. Here’s where our garden comes in. The players have to visit all four bakeries, but they can choose the order they do them in, thus they have been granted some control over the adventure, but overall it’s essentially the same story.

Another way to add some variety is to add a second plot to the adventure. In our story, let’s say that the baker who originally made the cake needs to make another and requires certain ingredients to do so. Adding a timeline in which this needs to get done creates urgency to the plot, and we can give the party the option to prioritize the making of a new cake or catching the murderer. The best way to avoid stale story plots is to keep certain ingredients close to certain villages with suspect bakeries, thus essentially making two-session pairs. As well, these various ingredients might be guarded by dangerous wildlife or be dangerous wildlife, adding to the adventure. Now the players have a choice when they get to a village. Ingredient hunt, or investigation. And they may surprise you in wanting to pair them off in weird ways.

Just like that, we’ve taken a short one-session campaign and made it an 8-session campaign that the players can wander through in any myriad of ways. Add an introductory session when the murder initially takes place, and one session where they finally confront the murderer, and you are up to 10. Now, this is the part where I personally think there’s some joy to be had. You can expand the final sessions by hiring the party to safely deliver the cake to the Castle and have shenanigans happen along the way, threatening the cake. To truly add spice, have our murderer be the one ambushing the party during delivery.

So, how does that look laid out? Something like this:

Session 1

Orientation/The murder. (Introduce the Arch Bad)

Session 2

Initial Hiring of the Party, initial murder scene investigation.

Provide both missions, the ingredient hunt and the murder investigation.

Session 3 & 4

Ingredient 1 – Bakery 1

Session 5 & 6

Ingredient 2 – Bakery 2

Session 7 & 8

Ingredient 3 – Bakery 3

Session 9 & 10

Ingredient 4 – Bakery 4

Session 11

Delivery of the cake, a roadside ambush.

Session 12

Final confrontation. Final Safe Delivery of the Cake. The Queen’s Reward.

 Closing Thoughts

Now, I could have taken any adventure idea and made a long-form adventure, but I did it with this particular one to show how any idea, however seemingly small, can be built into a longer adventure. You might feel a bit daunted by how fast a session can grow, so I recommend an organization app to help keep things organized. I use Notion, and it’s instrumental in how I keep all my session notes.

This is just the preliminary stage where we’ve established the framework of our adventure. In the next two articles, I’ll be going over worldbuilding to make this idea into a rich kingdom, and then character development to cast our world with characters.
 

Until next time, may the rolls be ever in your favor!

Zia Ellithiel is a game artist and forever Game Master, who has been running D&D fifth edition adventures for over ten years. You can connect with her on Bluesky at @spacegothprincess.