Diamond is an adventure of 30 pages that this week I put for sale on the Dungeon Master Guild website
And well, now that it is published I would like to share the main source of inspiration on which the adventure is based, as I consider it good to share the creation process to see if that encourages other people to create materials related to the hobby.
Okay, before we start, please note that I'm going to tell a big SPOILER about the adventure, so if you are interested in experiencing it, please don't continue reading.
After reading Eberron-Rising from the Last War, I was fascinated by the kind of adventures proposed in the city of Sharn, a monolithic metropolis with the air of a great capital of the modern world, where imposing buildings are mixed with neighborhoods lacking basic services. A city where crime, corruption and abuse prevail over the desires of any renowned personality, the city devours you, whether you want it to or not.
As that was the message that the city conveyed to me and taking into account that at least a quarter of the book focuses on elements that can be useful to build adventures in that specific city, I looked for a book, film, musical piece or image that would give me a starting point to start generating the whole adventure. I wanted to focus on espionage and suspense, so I started watching movies focused on the post-war paranoia that emerged during the cold war.
Of all that I came across, the film "Three Days of the Condor" really caught my attention, so I went on to divide the story of the film into its three main acts, and then find a way to convey its content to the world of Eberron.
In order to avoid committing basic mistakes that could leave important information out of the module, I always use as a reference the index of one of my favorite adventures "Better than any man", because I really enjoy the way the pnjs and places of that adventure are presented.
With the foundation ready, I start to distribute the sections and I start writing as I feel like it, I don't have so much to worry about because the different sections already have a title that makes clear the need for content, but to be more specific, what you should never forget is this:
Section to talk about the main npc's, describing their personalities and goals.
Section about the different places where the adventure will take place.
Sections for rules or specific creatures, rules, items or traps proposed by your module.
And what will occupy more space; describing the events that the players will face sequentially.
For the fourth point, which may sound like the most complicated, just go by the structure of the story. Beginning, middle and end, it doesn't really have to be more complicated. Well, you can make everything much more complicated, but the result leaves much to be desired. For example in the adventure "Big Puppet" where it starts explaining everything that is happening practically at the end of the book, what you do is confuse the reader. It is better to explain the events of the module at the beginning or middle of your book.
Diamond's main objective was to take "The three days of the Condor" and place the adventure in the city of Sharn, to begin with I didn't want the adventure to need any external module to work, so I started the module explaining in a general way details about Sharn.
And then I went on to focus on the story of the film, highlighting the elements that I found most interesting for an adventure...And that you should never forget, you are not writing a novel or a story, what you are doing is making a guide that someone else will use as inspiration to create their own version of what you are writing with their gaming group. Or that's how I feel books related to RPGs should work.
Ok...the most important elements of the movie are:
Condor works with nice friends at a place that does things for the government.
Condor goes out for lunch for everyone and upon returning to work finds that all of his friends from work have been murdered
Condor asks for help, but only receives assassination attempts
Condor looks for the best way to hide, in the process he falls in love and discovers who ordered them to be killed.
Condor confronts a corrupt general, but is overtaken by an assassin hired by someone higher up.
They tell Condor that they will let him live for now, because they know that although he knows a lot about the government's dirty dealings, the truth will change nothing.
Very well, my first problem starts with points 1 and 2, since they happen during the first 15 minutes of the movie, but they are vital since they completely change the main character, generating in his being a great feeling of persecution and guilt. In short, for the adventure to work, a bond must be generated with the group of npc's.
So I started to look for the kind of businesses that work in the city of Sharn, immediately it caught my attention to take a theater company and put the characters to role-play within a role-playing game, on the one hand to generate a funny scene, but mainly to produce a closeness with the secondary characters of the theater. However I understand that on many gaming tables, maybe generating a strong bond to later shatter it can be very hard, so I put different warnings for scenes that I consider somewhat heavy.
Apart from the theatrical work scene, there is also another scene where the characters go out drinking with their companions. And for the npcs, I focused on describing a group of tender, flawed, but simple people in love with their profession. So that it becomes very easy for a couple of romances to blossom on the night out.
After the first day the adventurers are asked by multiple means to leave the theater to run some errands and when they return, they will see their companions reduced to rubble. Which starts points 3, 4 and 5 ... leaving love out of the formula. Being the middle of the module I propose what to do according to the routes that the players want to do, being the most common to be chased and observed constantly by the street.
Similarly, they have the option of trying to solve the crime, ask favors to the groups with which they have patronage and seek multiple ways to escape from the city, but if by some miracle they survive to the dawn of the 4th day, the group may encounter the final scene of the film, where one of the government guys tells the Condor that they no longer care and that in the long run they are going to die.
That was the general structure, but with changes instead of the government I put a couple of renowned criminal groups from the city of Sharn, I give importance to different locations of vital importance to escape from the city and set everything straight with a few random encounters that can break or create more tension as decided by the DM.
And so that's more or less how to create a module, maybe a simple one, but I think functional and sure to leave your gaming group with a lump in their throat. I could expand more on the topics of adventure creation, but I think it would be interesting to do it with another one of my adventures.
