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Adventure Axioms and Campaign Construction
Well, dear readers, it's time for another episode of "Rodney's Self-Important Gaming Analysis" in which I lay the intellectual smack down on you with regards to roleplaying games. Last week I was chatting with Rich Redman and the Game Mechanics in their weekly chat and the subject turned to adventure design somehow. This reminded me of a little prep exercise that I did when preparing my ongoing Stargate SG-1 Roleplaying Game campaign. So, here goes nothing.

I have come to the conclusion that there are really a small and finite number of possible adventures out there for any roleplaying game. They have many possible faces and a variety of settings but, in the end, all adventures are the same. This is similar to the idea Joseph Campbell presented called the monomyth, which basically stated that there is a single story or myth that all other stories throughout the history of time have been derived from. I believe that there is a similar concept in adventure design (which makes sense given that running adventures is essentially a form of storytelling) which states that there are only a small number of possible adventures that exist, and that all other adventures are merely derivatives of this with new settings, villains, and so forth.

The list of possible adventures is as follows:

1. Locate/obtain person or object
   
2. Kill/Destroy person or object
   
3. Observe person or object
   
4. Protect person or object
   
5. Move person or object
   
6. Explain a series of events
   
7. Survive a series of events
   
8. Any combination of the above

Now, granted, this is a very simplistic list, but at its core it defines what all adventures are about. I will refer to these as my adventure axioms for the remainder of the post so that you know what I'm talking about.

All adventures are just versions of these axioms. Most dungeon crawls are a combination of #7 and #1 (survive the dungeon; obtain the treasure) often with a dose of #2 thrown in (kill the dragon) for good measure. But as you can see, these axioms span multiple genres. One of my players' favorite adventures in my last Star Wars d20 campaign saw them hunting down a dark Jedi on the windy world of Eraydia, forcing them to travel to a huge floating village to talk to the elder and fight said Jedi on the perilous rooftops of the planet's main ground-based city. The adventure started out as a #1 (locate the dark Jedi) but then morphed into a #6 (as they tried to explain what had happened to cause the city engineers to lose their memory) and finallyi into a #2 (as they dueled with the dark Jedi on a narrow bridge between two buildings). This seems simple, and at its core it is.

You may be asking why this is relevant. I'm glad you asked, because I was going to tell you anyways. At first glance this is useless information; great, my adventures fall into broad, generalized categories, what good does that do me? Well, recognizing this fact can lead you to be a better Gamemaster because you are now stepping back to look at your adventures from a storytelling standpoint. Take a look at your last five or ten adventures. What categories do they fall in? If you look at five adventures and three of them are in the #2 category, it may be time to spice things up a bit. You may be in a creative rut. Similarly, if you look at your last 20 adventures and don't see a single #3 in there, then it's time to run a #3 adventure. It'll spice things up a bit, and that way your players won't be stuck doing the same old thing over and over again. The problem is that most Gamemasters don't consciously realize that they are doing the same thing but with a new coat of paint over and over again. You can only invade so many Death Stars, rescue so many princesses, and assassinate so many evil overlords before you start to lose interest in the campaign.

Another benefit to using the adventure axiom approach to adventure classification is that it can help you plan out a campaign and design adventures. Many Gamemasters will plan out a handful of adventures in advance. For my SG-21 campaign, I planned out 22 episodes (missions) for the party, the same number as a standard season of the Stargate TV show. When doing so, I sat down and came up with a good distribution of the axioms over these episodes before I even came up with the ideas for the adventure itself. This allowed me to ensure that they would be ordered in a way so that the campaign's adventure types wouldn't get stale. I was then left with a list that simply had episode numbers and axioms; it was then time to design the adventures. I knew I wanted a #4 to kick off the campaign, so all the questions I needed to ask were already laid out for me: who are they protecting, from what, how are they going to protect them, etc. The adventures practically built themselves from that point out.

Now, this is no great leap in game theory and I know that no one is going to laud my genius theory, but just something this simple is an incredible aid in adventure design. Since most adventures are actually combinations of the axiom, you can even spice up normally bland adventures with them. Say you have a #2 planned, to kill the leader of an opposing spy agency. In the middle of the mission, change it to a #3 so that they have to get information out of the leader, and then a #4 when they learn he's going to defect. If you run a campaign of bounty hunters in Star Wars, you're going to run a lot of #1 and #2 adventures; so, while every adventure might be a #1 or a #2, you can add to that adventure by also making it a #7 as well.

Next time your campaign feels like it's in a rut, or you have a hard time figuring out what kinds of adventures to run, try out the axiom method. See if it works for you; it may not, but it has done wonders for me.