Using pre-published adventures works pretty well for starting off a solitaire RPG campaign, if you can find one that fits your purposes. However, if you want to do things on your own, either because you have some specific plot device in mind or you can’t find a pre-published adventure you like, it can get a little (or a lot!) harder. In this article, I would like to introduce you to a couple tools that can help you along with generating adventures for your solo games.
One easy-to-use and relatively inexpensive tool is playing cards for trading card games. There are a large number of these out there, though the biggest, Magic: The Gathering, is likely the best for use in a standard fantasy campaign. Some RPGs have card games based on their world, like Legend of the Five Rings and Deadlands, for example, and you would probably want to use those if you were playing a campaign for either of those games.
There are many different ways to approach using game cards to generate your adventures. Let me work you through just one example. Right now I’m looking at an unopened pack of Magic, 7th edition. Let’s open this sucker and see what we’ve got. Hmm. First thing to look for in Magic packs are land cards. This is one of the great things about Magic card packs, as you can use the land cards as a guide to the environments your adventure will occur in. This pack has only one land card, an island. Thus, I will assume this adventure will take place on an island. Next, I look for ‘creature’ cards. I’ve got a few, like an eagle, an elemental, an owl that is a wizard’s familiar, skeletons, a goblin, and an enchantress. Looking at this I see that a number of these creatures (skeletons, elemental, the familiar) work very well as the kinds of things you would encounter around the home of a wizard. Or, in this case, an enchantress. So, the adventure will focus on something going on with this enchantress living on an island.
So, why would anyone care? A number of RPG adventures involve finding something for someone (or yourself). However, I didn’t draw any ‘artifact’ cards, so I’ll ignore that possibility for now. Well, I have both a Rampant Growth and a Monstrous Growth in this pack, so we could say the island has become magically overgrown and monstrous creatures have appeared. Basically, the cycle of life has been magically accelerated for some purpose which we can assume is not good. This could work. I noted that the first card I pulled from the pack was a Cloudchaser Eagle. This is a ‘white’ card (Magic sorts creature and spell cards by their ‘magic color’). The other white cards are Circle of Protection and Pacifism. How about this? The eagle is a pacifist who lives on the island. She saw the magical changes to her home and became distressed. So she used some protective enchantments to try to counter what the enchantress is doing, but realized she needed help and went off to find some heroes to help her.
OK, so it’s not great, and it only works in a high-fantasy campaign with magical talking animals, but it’s a start. I didn’t use some of the cards, of course, as whenever you start down a certain path certain things just don’t fit anymore. That’s fine, as the cards are just to trigger your imagination and get the ball rolling. Other possibilities exist, also. Remember the owl familiar? Well, maybe that represents another wizard that is present on the island. Maybe this sucker’s the real evil one. Maybe he seduced the enchantress, and placed a curse on her (compliments of the Infernal Contract card which I didn’t use in the previous attempt). And so now he has her locked up somewhere somehow and is able to use her power for his nefarious experiments, which have led to giant monsters. Somehow the heroes find out and have to put a stop to him and his evil plans. Maybe they rescue the enchantress and she rewards them. Maybe the enchantress really loves the evil wizard and fights against the heroes. Maybe the enchantress is good but, due to the evil magical contract, she dies if the bad mage dies. Ah, a moral dilemma! All sorts of possibilities. You know, I like this better than the first idea I had.
Once you figure out what you want to do, you can also use the cards to help pace the adventure. For example, let’s say my heroes land on the island looking for the bad wizard. Are they opposed? I shuffle up my creature cards into an ‘encounter deck’ and draw the top card, which is the Sage Owl. Ah! The wizard’s familiar spots the heroes and goes to warn his master. I’d give the heroes a shot at spotting the bird and trying to stop it somehow. If they don’t, then the next encounter is an ambush as the wizard can array his forces properly. Next, I draw Drudge Skeletons, so as the heroes enter the overgrown, swampy forest they are ambushed by a bunch of skeletons (the number depending on how tough my heroes are, of course). Get the idea? I, personally, would plan out what the big finale will be (what the bad guys will be, the specific location, etc.) ahead of time, but you could let random card draws dictate the whole thing. The trick here is to use the cards to spark your imagination, but not rely on them too heavily. Once you get an idea in your mind that you like, go with it and have fun. Don’t forget the basic elements of good storytelling, of course, like an overall villain, a task to accomplish, hindrances to the heroes (monsters, enemy soldiers, natural disasters, etc.), unexpected aids to the heroes’ cause, and stuff like that. I’d plot out at least a basic outline of how things should play to provide some form amidst the chaos, but not so much that the story is written before you sit down to actually play through it.
The book GM’s Survival Guide for the Legend of the Five Rings RPG (L5R), has some additional tips on using cards from its associated trading card game to generate adventures. The author suggests getting a collection of cards (use the booster pack method described above a few times and this will happen pretty quickly) and separating them into different decks, such as an encounter deck, a location deck, etc., and then drawing cards as needed until you’ve got enough to form a good story. The book itself gives more examples, but the intent here is not to repeat that author’s suggestions, but to show that there are multiple ways of using these cards to help plan out adventures.
There is another book in the L5R line that is very helpful, and is a good example of our second tool, Unexpected Allies. This is what is referred to as a “character book” or “NPC book.” This book details dozens of characters to use in your games, either as player characters or as non-player characters (NPC) for your heroes to meet and interact with. Know you want a samurai or thief for your heroes to cross swords with? Just pick one from the book and you’ve got a character with some background already in place, which can help you quickly build your story. Other game lines have similar books, and Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition currently has one, Enemies and Allies. You could use the descriptions in the book to flesh out descriptions for the cards you drew from your card decks, or you could just pick characters from the book and form adventures around them. Whatever works for you.
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