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Old 07-27-2011, 09:26 AM   #1
Jason
 
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Boston, MA
Default How to Craft an In Nomine Adventure

GMs: How do you make an In Nomine adventure?

I got to wondering about this in part because of the conversation going in the Starting Characters thread, where some of you seemed less interested in "balanced" stats and powers on character sheets than on story. I think this used to be my approach, but I find that my own players seem to have the most fun when they get to use some of the fun powers on their sheets (and get really deflated when they never have an opportunity to use Lockpicking or the Songs of Affinity or what have you). Recognizing this has noticeably changed the way I design adventures. My typical approach tends to look like:

1. Decide on a seed.
This might be from one of the books, from suggestions in the IN Collection, or just something that occurred to me on my commute. I try to pick a seed that I think will resonate with at least a few of the players/PCs I know will be involved (like Socks and Violence for a group I figured would appreciate humor and mad science).

2. Come up with supporting cast.
I write a page with important NPCs broken into Divine, Infernal, Mundane (and sometimes, Ethereal). I come up with names and a sentence about each. I will probably come back and change it later.

3. Figure out what abilities will likely be used.
This is where my process completely changed. I used to skip right to #4 below, but then I went 3 adventures with one player begging to track someone using their hair, and never having any opportunity to do so. Now I look at all the character sheets and write how each "ability" -- resonances, attunements, Songs, and sometimes Skills -- might come up in a given scene. Sometimes this just helps me mentally prepare for information-gathering results later (so I no longer get stuck when someone resonates on a major NPC). Sometimes, though, I end up coming up with entire plot points and locales based on this. In the one-shot I'm running this weekend, for instance, two PCs have the Dancing skill, and two have the Escape skill. There WILL be a dance club scene, and the PCs will almost certainly get captured at some point.

4. Write out loose notes for several "scenes."
Typically, for a single adventure, this ends up in the format of 3-5 places or situations the PCs might be in, a climax scene, and a resolution/epilogue scene. For each of these, I write a paragraph or so of pre-written text to set the stage for this new location (a bit more for the beginning and end of the adventure), and some bullet points of how things might go if players make different choices. They often end up making choices completely unseen by me, but thinking about it in multiple ways is useful as an improvisational exercise, and helps me not get tied to one way the adventure might go.

5. Stat out some NPCs the PCs might have to fight.
I'm typically pretty lazy with this step, and make the NPCs a lot less optimized than the PCs (so that there's at least some chance they might fail Will-based resistance rolls, for instance, and so I don't need to spend too much time browsing Liber Canticorum). This tends to be the thing I do at the last minute, late the night before I run the adventure.

Wow, this got longer than I expected. I'm going to leave it to you now, as I'm really much more interested in how OTHERS do this than how I do it (which I already know)...
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