Shaka When the Walls Fell: A Reflection on Designing My First Adventure

Last week I talked a little bit about plot structure and the adventure Red Hand of Doom. I also extrapolated a little bit on the design principles of Clarity, Direction, Synthesis, and Reference. Since one of the goals of this blog is learn how to create useful prewritten adventures, this past week I took the opportunity to create my own adventure for Star Trek Adventures, and the adventure titled Til Contract Do Us Part is available in full here.

In this post, I am going to talk a little bit about my design process, and what it means to improve at something as subjective as writing an adventure. This being said, I want to set some expectations for this to help ensure that this week’s blog post is productive for me, and you, the reader:

• This adventure was written in less than a week’s time. This is a practice run for me to understand what the design process even feels like. I hope you won’t judge this adventure based on the quality of its plot, but rather if it is decent enough to use at your table.
• I would absolutely love actionable constructive feedback that doesn’t talk about the content of the plot! If you successfully run this adventure, your feedback would be especially useful for me.
• How did the module assist in Clarity, Direction, Synthesis, and Reference? In particular, was the Clarity and Direction good enough to make Synthesis easy?
• What should I avoid doing next time?

With all of this being said, let’s get into the design process.

Beginning Design

Having run and reviewed several Star Trek Adventures scenarios, I have a pretty good idea of what sorts of adventures I’d like to see more of: investigations, and Lower Decks. I was a little bit disappointed that most of the adventures in the Lower Decks sourcebook weren’t particularly funny, so I knew I also wanted to try my hand at an adventure that was funny.

Next, because I wanted another Lower Decks adventure, I went looking through the sourcebook to see if I could come up with a good plot, and there was Mission Brief in-particular that caught my eye: “Custody Battle.” In this mission brief, two rulers of a planet are getting divorced, and then some other stuff happens. The plot there didn’t capture me, but the concept did .The elevator pitch for my adventure, if I had been writing it for publication, would have been something like: “A comedy investigation scenario for Lower Decks characters involving divorcing rulers of a planet.”

After establishing the basic premise, I moved to what my design goals should be. These are what I came up with.

1. The adventure should be runnable in one 4-hour session.
2. The plot’s quality is secondary to module’s usability.
3. The adventure should adhere to the principles of Clarity, Direction, Synthesis, and Reference (CDSR).
4. The adventure should be funny to run and amusing to read.
5. Designed for Lower Decks characters.
6. The adventure should adhere to the three-act structure every other Star Trek Adventures scenario uses.

The first design goal was obvious to me. I like to run the game as a series of one-shot adventures, and I would love to have another Lower Decks adventure in my back pocket for my own purposes. The second design goal was a necessity. I could either worry about if the plot was good, or if the adventure adhered to CDSR. If I lingered too long on the plot, I would not be able to get this adventure done on time for the blog post the blog post. Deadline trumps originality. Design goal three should be self-evident, since I believe good adventure design comes from these principles, I should probably try to adhere to them in my own work.

Design goal four was a personal goal. As I stated earlier, the Lower Decks sourcebook was lacking in jokes, and I didn’t really find any humor in the pre-written scenarios. Some of the mission briefs were funny, but in general the book’s tone fell flat for me. The entire time I was reading through it my only thought was “man, I could have written so many good jokes for this book.” Although, I must admit that the page of Tamarian Phrases was a really, really excellent choice, and legitimately gave me a chuckle.

Seriously, what a gift they gave us.

Design goal five was a shoe in: I believe there is a lack of adventures intended for Lower Deckers, although there is one particularly excellent one in Lurkers by Christopher L. Bennett Since Lower Decks was the show that indoctrinated me into the Star Trek fandom, I am constantly thinking about what sort of absolutely stupid scenarios some ensigns might find themselves in.  And while I don’t imagine I’ll write anything close to as good as Lurkers, I do want to give GM’s something useful for that sort of campaign.

Design goal six was not a choice I was happy to make. I would have been much more comfortable writing up something that more closely resembles my session notes, spicing it up, and calling it a day. But we’re not quitters here, and I think by forcing myself to do a bit of design outside of my comfort zone, I will be able to identify areas of improvement more easily. As a bonus, the scenario will be more usable for Star Trek Adventures GM’s. Anyways, improvement is the ultimate goal of this project, so I forced myself to do it and I think the adventure is for it.

Finding the Funny and the Baddies

The next question I had to answer was “what is actually funny?” My go to answer, and something that is a recurring theme in all of my games, is bureaucracy. I don’t know why; I just think super litigious characters who take bureaucratic processes to absurd lengths is funny. And since the comedy of Lower Decks often comes from the main characters (mostly grounded) dealing with absurd things, Eventually I landed on the following idea:

The players explore a planet where everything can and must be owned.

So, now we’re on to something. I just had to find my villains, which was actually super easy for me. I love family betrayal as a go-to theme. It’s super common in mysteries, so I just decided that the brother and sister of the two monarchs really wanted them to divorce, so that they could marry and be in charge and not have to join the Federation. Also, I decided this was a Second Contact mission because there needs to be more of those for us Lower Decks fans. There, done. Easy.

Obviously, this is not the final version of the planet that I came up with, that’s in the adventure. You can read more on my thoughts about what’s funny in ttrpgs and running comedy in the adventure as well.

Rest of the Fucking Owl

After finding my funnies, establishing my design goals and my adventure pitch, next came the part where I made the outline.

Here is my basic outline by Act:

• Act 1: Players do odd jobs for the Er’te conglomerate. Provide hints that something is weird, divorce reveal at the end of act 1.
• Act 2: Players investigate shenanigans behind divorce/murder of the Queen’s lawyer-general.
• Act 3: Players attempt to convince monarchs of the betrayal. Potential shoot-out in the courtroom/scene where the players interrupt the eerily wedding-like final proceedings of a Genicpla divorce.

Then, I drew the rest of the of the owl, adding scenes to the outline. Here I discovered a problem with my outline: The Lawyer General cannot be murdered in Act 1, he has to be murdered in Act 2. Originally act 2 was going to open with a dinner with the queen, she was going to be crying and sad about the divorce, and that was going to be a clue. However, this is a bad adventure design because it’s boring and denies the players agency.

The end of act 1 was already too cut-sceney for my taste, and if I had two scenes like that in a row it would just make for an adventure that is not useable (and GM’s wouldn’t run it. Recalling last week’s discussion of Red Hand of Doom, points of inevitability are where paths lead. If you go directly from one point of inevitability to another, without some sort of challenge (or group of challenges) in between, you end up with a fragile adventure that the players can break. So, I moved the poisoning of Grayvald, the lawyer-general, to the Combat-o-torium scene in Act 1 instead. Something needed to happen in that (already too long) scene, so it was there now. The first act still isn’t flexible enough, the court room scene is way too long, but it’s the best I can do for now.

That all being said, the Grayvald poisoning was still a good change that allowed me to begin Act 2 with a more open structure. I also definitely violated the Three Act Structure that STA scenarios are written in, which is a mortal sin (probably). The more open plot of act 2 now allows plays a chance to develop relationships with both monarchs instead of just Queen Lotsoprop (which was the original plan). This also served two other purposes: directly clueing in the players that the Monarchs were still in love with one another, and providing a suggestion that Nonra and Bringme may know more than they are letting on with their rude and suspicious interferences into basic investigatory matters.

Another change that came about, which is mostly (but not entirely) aesthetic was that I made the Er’te one conglomerate of many. I figured the player characters’ ship would notice if the only away team on a very important mission wasn’t responding. A group of ensigns at an unimportant conglomerate responding to hails from the ship may unnoticed if it’s an away team on seemingly unimportant mission with a minor conglomerate. No one expected the players’ mission to poorly, so that’s why it was given to ensigns.

The third act was a little bit rushed by me in order to get this post out on time (I’m anything if a stickler for deadlines). The players interrupting the courtroom scene was something I had in my head, and I’m not sure it’s quite as effective. Perhaps a shoot-out would be better?

Lessons Learned in Design

While I can’t provide a more thorough reflection on the adventure quality of Til Contract Do Us Part until I’ve had more time to reflect on if I met CDSR principles (and trust me, I plan to), I can provide some thoughts I am pretty sure I will still find true when I look at it after some more adventure design review:

First, I am a very very wordy writer. I think I could take a lesson or two from OSR bullet-point design to help the DM come up with good scenes. I have a soft spot for prose, but I just my writing weighed the scenario’s e’s flexibility down in too many ways.

Second, I had a very convoluted plot. It really should have just been one antagonist, not a pair. I think that’s more interesting, and would have allowed me to better develop the villain throughout the course of the adventure. Fortunately for me, a good plot was specifically not a design goal for this.

Third, I think I made a mistake in plot structure in which I had too many inevitable scenes. The plot ended up feeling on rails, and I think this could have been fixed had I been able to address the second problem.

Fourth, I definitely ran out of steam. A week was not long enough to design an adventure, and it shows as in acts 2 and 3 (just much lower quality, lazy writing). I am relatively happy with Act 1, but it has some flaws that I think made the other acts more difficult to write. Next time, I will be giving myself at least a month to write an adventure, and not give myself such a strict deadline that I would be forced to compromise on basic quality.

Although I have a lot of negative thoughts about my first attempt at an adventure, I do think I absolutely nailed the Genicpla as a race. I absolutely love what I came up with, and I think if people get any value out of this rough draft-quality adventure, it will be the Genicpla. They are a joy to write about and to run.

This all being said, do I think I failed to make a good adventure? Yes, I probably did. Shaka when the walls fell. But I’ll learn from it, and that’s really the point of all of this.

Anyways, that’s it folks! Next week we’ll be headed at Warp 9 to the Third Imperium, where I will be looking at the scenario The Last Train out of Rakkan Goll for Mongoose Traveller Second Edition. Will it live up to it’s amazing cover? Or will the module become derailed due to a classic cowboy shootout? Find out next time and thank you for reading.

Author’s note: I would love constructive and actionable feedback! Thank you!