Writing RPG adventures for others

There's a big step between sketching out a role playing adventure to be played by your regular group and writing an adventure for publication and use by others. And that's a step that I'm now looking to take.


However, as they say, before you can walk you have to learn to crawl.

Back in November I put out a request to the people in the Palladium Books: After the Bomb forum to challenge me to write two adventures for the AtB game setting. With in a week, two people had given me my challenges, and since then I've been working on making them a reality.

It took me the better part of a month to come up with adventure drafts that I liked and were approved by the people who requested them, and now I'm working on the main NPCs that will appear in the adventures.

Normally, this is where I'd finish my work for personal use, but when it comes to producing an adventure for use by other GMs, I'll need to flesh things out more. and that's where I hit the proverbial writers block. Much like my art work back in high school (my teacher referred to it as postage stamp art), my creative writing skills could better be referred to as creative sketching. I'm good for a little bit, but after a paragraph or two I seem to loose focus - curse ADD.

So now I'm working on breaking down the adventure drafts into an outlined adventure and then write it. To that effort, I've started looking at how other people have written adventures published in the back of some of the other Palladium books and publications, but they very so much it's hard to find a style I can easily immitate or adapt.

Well, for now I'll just have to keep pushing forward and hopefully come up with something that doesn't to closely reseble a large steaming pile of crap.