One of the things I have started doing to help flesh out characters while solo roleplaying is using "pre-adventures." These mini-adventures have helped produce story hooks, NPC interactions, as well as more in-depth interactions between the characters.
So What Are Pre-Adventures?
Pre-adventures are quick and dirty adventures that I write up before the "real" adventuring begins. To be honest, I’m not sure where I got the idea–from someone else (that I can’t remember to give credit) or if I came up with it myself.
What I am calling "pre-adventures" are not full adventures, but also not just a couple paragraphs of backstory. They are something in between. As you think them through, you generate story hooks for future real adventures, as well as lists of NPCs for future use, as well as other details about the characters and the setting.
I don’t want to go through the effort of doing a full adventure, but just want to preset the landscape for the campaign to come. The point is to just do a walkthrough of 3-5 short adventures to help get a feel for the characters and their interactions, then see what information I can glean from them.
So How Do I Do Them?
The method I use for my pre-adventures is pretty simple. I think of concepts for about 3-5 adventures that my party of characters would have already gone through. (Remember–this is past action that leads up to Day One of the campaign). These adventures could have all of the characters, or just part of them.
I then flesh out the adventures just enough to be able to come up with how the story went. This includes the essential plot, villains and NPCs. Some adventures may be straightforward, but I also tried to throw in some kinks and twists that make things more interesting.
Then, I run the party through the adventure in my mind–no dice rolling. I wrote down as much detail as I could quickly, documenting the main plot points, who the party interacted with and how things turned out.
I then went back and asked myself questions about the adventure: Why did things turn out that way? Who else did the party meet? How did those interactions affect the outcome? What will this mean to the characters later in the campaign? How did this affect the relationships between the characters?
I took the answers to these questions and fleshed out the writeup, giving more details to the character relationships, NPCs encountered and story hooks for future adventures in the campaign. The point here is to look for reasons why things happened the way they did, and come up with ideas for how to use them later on.
So What Do I Get Out Of Them?
In running through these little adventures that run up to the actual campaign, I found that I got a ton of ideas and information about characters–a lot more than I would have just writing down a few paragraphs of text.
This includes more detail about the characters themselves. Characters always develop through actual gaming, so while this is not quite real gaming, it is close enough to generate more detail about them. This includes some more ideas about their history, their motivations and their personalities.
It also gave me a lot more information about NPCs and their relationships to the characters. This was a big one for me. I was really surprised how much more detail I got by thinking through the NPCs that the characters encountered, what those encounters were and what they meant for the future.
I also got more detail about the campaign setting itself. This was a big help. I’m trying to be less anal and let the campaign setting grow itself through play (more than I would have in the past). By working through these pre-adventures, I got a lot more information about the setting because I had to generate it through play. That will pay off a lot in the actual campaign.
Finally, I got a lot more story hooks than I would have thought I would. This was the true benefit. Every interaction, every fight, every encounter–these created story hooks I will use in the actual campaign.
Now all of this could have come from just actually playing the adventures themselves, right? True, but that would have involved more time and work on my part. I still want to play out combats during the real adventures, and flesh out some more details about the settings, but this lets me bypass these and just get the details I want quickly.
So–all of this was a lot more fun than I expected. It helped solidify the recent history of the characters, and really got me excited about playing them. And all of the information I gathered felt more real because it came organically, from something close to actual play.
So what do you do when playing solo? Do you bother with any of this? Do you do it differently? Or do you just jump in to the actual adventuring and take off running? Let me know in the comments!
Marko ∞
(Originally published on middle-lands.com, on 8/9/2019.)
