Introduction
WelcomeWriting ProcessResources
Adventure Brainstorming
Exciting PremisePrimary ObjectiveSetting and LocationsMain CharactersKey Plot PointsEscalating ChallengesIntriguing Mysteries
Adventure Writing
Outline and SummaryAnswering Open QuestionsWriting DescriptionsCommunity FeedbackPrep and PlaytestDesign and IllustrationsPublishing
Conclusion
Thank you for participating!

Outline and Summary

Congratulations! You have completed the brainstorming part of your adventure writing process! You have filled in your Brainstorming Template, and now you have all the information you need in order to write the adventure. With all the ideas already in place, it will be surprisingly easy and rewarding.

For the rest of the course you will be using your Adventure Writing Template to outline, draft, and complete your adventure.

Come up with a Title

It's time to name your adventure. Come up with an exciting title that grabs people's attention and evokes curiosity.

Try to succinctly convey the core premise of your adventure, capture the story essence, entice people to read (or play) your adventure using as few words as possible.

Alliteration, silly puns, and pop culture references also work great.

Some examples from the adventures we've made before:

  • Do or Dry (an adventure about animals dealing with a drought).
  • Saving Private Mittens (an adventure about players trying to protect a runaway alien pet).
  • Blood of the Hunter (Die Hard in Hogwarts)
  • Golly, gosh, Ghouls! (Emperor has been turned into a Ghoul)
  • The Merry Mice of Mordor (Lord of the Rings but players are playing as mice).
  • Zeppelin Heist (Train heist on a Zeppelin)
  • Damsels and Dragons (Rescue a Dragon from a Princess)

Summarize the Whole Story

At the beginning of your template, write down a very short (3-5 sentences) summary of your adventure.

The summary has two main goals:

  1. Get the GMs excited about the adventure and convince them to keep reading (think of it as a mini sales pitch for the adventure). Help them to decide whether this is the kind of story they want to run. To accomplish that, try to include the most interesting and exciting ideas you have developed during brainstorming.
  2. Help the GM to understand the story without having to read through the whole adventure. Convey as much plot as possible in a few sentences, save them time, give them a high-level map they can easily fill with details as they read through the rest of your adventure.

A good summary is also very useful for other reasons:

  • Help you see the birds-eye overview of the story, get a good idea about whether the plot makes sense and whether the adventure sounds fun to play.
  • When inviting players to your game, this is the description you will use (omitting the spoilers) to make them excited to join.
  • When you share your adventure with other people to ask for feedback, the summary will help you to explain your story without requiring people to read through the whole adventure.

Use these few of sentences to communicate the most important things people need to know about your adventure:

  • What is the main idea for this adventure, exciting premise for this story?
  • What Objective will the players strive to achieve?
  • Why is it important, what's at stake? What makes it difficult to accomplish?
  • What challenges will they face, what will they need to do to overcome them?
  • What complications will they encounter?
  • What will the climax be, the “final battle” that resolves the problem/goal?

Aim for brevity and clarity, rather than beautiful prose.

Summary Examples:

  • Zeppelin Heist
    The players need to rescue a rebellious teenage tiefling who was sentenced to life in prison for a petty crime. She is transported to prison by Zeppelin. Players will need to discover the Zeppelin’s schedule and route, steal griffons to chase it and board it, liberate Anabelle, escape and cover their tracks.
  • Sink or Soar Players are shipwrecked on the shores of the dreaded trash island where ruthless criminals are sent to live out their life sentences. Players must survive a sacrificial ritual, evade a pack of trained sharks, race to the top of a derelict Galleon, and harness the Roc (an enormous bird) - their only chance fly away to freedom.
  • Damsels and Dragons
    The players meet a child dragon, he's crying because an Evil Princess has kidnapped his mom. The players will need to set her free from the Coliseum where she is forced to fight monsters and gladiators for public's entertainment.

Create an Outline

Now, you need to create an outline of your adventure. This is where you combine all the ideas you have brainstormed, put it all together into a list of scenes that flow into each other, add up to an interesting story that makes sense.

You already know the Key Plot Points of your story and the Challenges the players will face, and now you just need to organize them into a list of scenes.

Typical Adventure Outline looks like this:

  • Introduction
    Exposition, setup. Introduce the heroes and the world around them. Where do the heroes begin the adventure?
  • Exciting Adventure Hook
    The first scene that draws heroes into action, and gives them the initial set of tasks to accomplish, leads to follow.
  • [Escalating Challenges]
    Multiple scenes here, one for each challenge the heroes need to overcome as they strive towards their goal.
  • Unexpected Complication
    A more difficult challenge. Crisis, major setback, everything goes wrong? Villain makes a move? A surprising twist/reveal changes the direction of the story. Raise the stakes and threat level.
  • [More Challenges]
    A few more challenge scenes. Heroes dealing with the consequences of the Complication and overcoming more obstacles on their path to the climax.
  • Awesome Climax
    Final, most important/dangerous challenge that resolves the main conflict. Epic scene at a cool location.
  • Resolution
    The aftermath. Possible outcomes/consequences of the adventure. How the secondary plot threads might resolve? How does the world (and heroes’ lives) change after the climax?

Here's how the Wild Rat Chase outline could look like:

  • Arriving at the Capital
  • Meeting the Rat
  • The Rat's Story (Claim to Throne)
  • Meeting the Minions
  • Escape through the Streets of Cypress
  • Kerfuffle at the Town Square
  • Sneaking into the Castle
  • Breaking into the Vizier's Tower
  • First Floor (Rowdy Receptionist)
  • Second Floor (Vizier's Office)
  • The Fascinating Laboratory
  • The Dangerous Observatory
  • The Wand Floor
  • Final Showdown at the Throne Room

Your outline doesn't have to be that long though, you can start with the followig 5 scenes, and expand as needed:

  • Challenge 1 (Adventure Hook)
  • Challenge 2 (The first significant milestone)
  • Challenge 3 (Twist/Complication)
  • Challenge 4 (Dealing with consequences of complication)
  • Challenge 5 (Climax)

Write down the scene headings describing what's going on in your adventure.

When you're choosing what to title your scenes - go for clarity over cleverness. The adventure is the document that you (or another GM) will want to use to quickly understand the story, so it's best to use descriptive titles to make this as easy and convenient as possible.

Summarize the Scenes

The next step is to create a short summary of the scenes. Under each scene heading, briefly (in 3-5 sentences) describe what happens in the scene. Imagine playing through the adventure as players, imagine running the story as the GM, write down things you wish to remember about the story.

For every scene, you want to make sure to mention 4 things:

Scene Template

  • Location - where does the scene take place?
  • Characters - who will the heroes encounter there?
  • Challenges - what challenge will they need to overcome?
  • Leads - What important information will the players learn about the story? How does it lead them to the next scene?

Most of the time you will have one scene per challenge, and each scene will take place in its own location.

Just like with the outline, this step tends to be pretty easy, because you already know almost everything that happens. It doesn't demand a lot of creativity - just summarize your ideas, tell yourself a story, and make sure it makes sense.

Don't try to be too artistic at this step of the process, we will write good descriptions later on. Now your goal is to just convey the information - you want your scene summaries to contain everything you know about the story.

List the Open Questions

The process of outlining and summarizing the story almost always reveals a number of open questions - plot holes, inconsistencies, things you haven't thought about during the brainstorming phase, missing information, things left to figure out about the story.

That is perfectly normal and expected. Add the open questions you encounter to the list of Questions and Answers in your Brainstorming Template, add the things you'd like to improve to the ToDo list.

You can also just use placeholders. If you don't know the character's name, just write [Orc Warrior's Name], if you don't know some details about the challenge the players are facing write [Exciting Chase Scene].

When you encounter something you don't know - don't stop to figure it out. Write down the open question or use a placeholder, and continue outlining and summarizing, write down all the things you do know about the story.

The goal is to quickly go through the outlining/summarizing process and quickly get an overview of the story, without ever getting stuck at a question you don't yet know how to answer.

At the end of this process, you want to have a clear summary of everything you know about the story, and a list of specific questions that you still need to figure out.

Run through the adventure in your mind

To notice the remaining missing pieces in your adventure, do the following things:

  • Picture yourself running the adventure. Imagine sitting at the table and GMing the story your players, describing the scenes.
  • Visually imagine the scenes, try to vividly picture what's going on, try to see the whole story as a movie in your head.
  • Imagine the adventure from the players' perspective, imagine playing through it as your own character.

Notice all the gaps:

  • The moments when you can't picture what the scene looks like.
  • The moments when you don't know what happens next.
  • The moments when you'd ask some obvious question or take some obvious action as a player, but don't know how to respond to it as a GM.

Add the biggest, most noticeable gaps to the list of open questions. Don't try to account for every small detail - just focus on the things you would find the most difficult to improvise during the game.

Activity

  • Come up with a title.
  • Write down a 3-5 sentence summary of your story.
  • Write down the list of scene headings, one for each plot point and challenge.
  • Write down a 3-5 sentence summary of each scene. Where does the scene take place, who will the players encounter there, what challenges will they need to overcome?
  • Run through the adventure in your mind, and notice all the gaps.
  • Write down the list of open questions you still need to figure out how to answer.