Help me make a pre-made!

[Pentagon]

Hello community

I am an experienced GM for my sins and have written a lot of my own material, but I've always wanted to write something with more... Polish!

So I want to know, from those of you that use pre-mades, what makes the good ones and what damns the worst of them.

If I give some of my ideas:
I'd love to write something a series that spanned an adventurers career but I'm starting with a city story. Having boffed up on cityscape I have a few of my own ideas.

- PCs backgrounds will be hard wired into the campaign so you'll have additional reactions and options dependent on if you have a noble or a criminal in the party for example.

-for parties starting life in the City I'd like to have contacts that theyre given based on their background and class. So they start out knowing a watch sergeant in the docks or an alchemist at the librarian. These characters would have a part in the story as a whole.

-I want a diverse story that rewards exploring and talking to people. Picking up gossip is instrumental for quests and there will often be multiple choices and the ones players don't do might have consequences for the surrounding setting.

I've got lots more ideas but I'll leave it as that, as the hungry consumer what are the make and breaks of a good pre made?

Pentagon

[ruy343]

I'll be frank: I've used pre-made adventures, and I've never liked them. They never seem to be focused enough on what I consider important in an adventure: which is how to keep the players' sense of adventure up.

However, to answer your question: whatever you want to have be the crux of your campaign (in your case: city intrigue seemed like what you were going for), just prepare for it, and make it interesting to interact with. Here's how I would prepare for it:


Roll up a table with random things that can be learned from failed rumor-gathering checks
Determine who the leaders of the city are, and what guilds hold power; use the guidelines in the 5e DMG for fleshing out those "factions", and roll up attributes, ideals, bonds and flaws for each of their leaders. Determine what it would take for the PCs to end up on these guys' good side.
Draw out a map of the city, lay a paper over the top of it, and draw a sewer network, as well as other paths that urchins might take.
Spend some time coming up with exotic locale within the city, as well as unique defining features of the city. Does it have a clock tower? How awesome would a combat be up there, with all the spinning gears and the very high-up window you could throw enemies out of? Does the city have a palace or castle? What about a combat in the king's menagerie?
Determine what culture the people have there. Are they heavily religious? Do they believe their king to be a servant of the gods, and therefore utter "blessed be his steps" every time they mention his name? How about people who feel differently: what do they say? Are they totally accustomed to adventurers, or do they shun people who walk around heavily armed who don't wear guards' uniforms?


I suppose that what I'm getting at is just focus on the little details like that to flesh out the world you work with (and the ones that can drive the story, and everything else will flow from there.

All the ideas from above are suggestions. I frankly have no experience writing pre-mades, but maybe I should try it...

[Pentagon]

This is really interesting as my plan was to have a really detailed campaign where you could cut it with a knife it oozed character I was worried however that this would put people off.

My core story as it were is about a potential coup which makes it revolve around which leaders die/bribed etc and the players have to make difficult choices over who they save or investigate - the sewers certainly come into it ;)

[Stan]

I HATE railroads and many adventures fail to take into account anything that might veer off the plot. Structure things along the lines of NPC1 wants to do X, if he can't he'll try Y. Also nice, depending on the adventure is a timeline of default events.

Handouts are wonderful. In fact, I often download free adventures and totally ignore their precious text, just looking for handouts to harvest. Maps are important. If you can have an image of what characters see at an important time, it really helps. I also find it more subtle than having to read a description and say things like "one of the door knobs is red." Letters, contracts, anything written so the party has to infer the plot than you feeding to them. Pics of important NPC. A map that can serve as a battle map is nice.

Background info is nice but only if it's organized. I'm not going to reread 4 pages of text to try to remember which NPC had a puppet in their backpack and long histories can get in the way of knowing the current situation.

I've had poor acceptance of premade PCs so I'd assume a 60% chance those get dumped and not hinge the entire adventure on certain PCs.