Brainstorming For Tables and Adventure Ideas

By: Ahobo

New and up and coming GMs can sometimes be a little worried about adventure writing. I myself am not much of a writer. I don’t make stories or even think I have the most creative mind. Ideas don’t just spring up out of nowhere.

One thing that has helped me a BUNCH is the idea of brainstorming before you get to writing. In this post, I hope to explain how to use brainstorming to help get Game Masters writing and game groups playing!

Where I First Got the Idea

I am an avid Youtube listener. The first and best video on this topic that I saw was this one by GFC. He has a lot of good vids. I recommend them all.

In the vid, he goes over his method of brainstorming that involves taking 2 passes. First, you dump every word and idea that comes to your mind in a list on a page. After you do that, you go over the list and read each entry. Finally you write the first thing that comes to mind after reading the first entry. Writing that word or idea next to it.

This will result in a list of pairs. These pairs can be used to generate a room idea or an encounter.

Its a simple and effective process. I have always found that it is much easier to be creative when you have something to bounce off of to start. Coming up with something completely from scratch tends to be a lot harder. By first brainstorming you can get something on to the page first and then refine it.

Creating Random Tables

The above method is great for days that you have an active mind and can get “things” out of it easily however, sometimes you can only get a few things out at a time. This next method might work better on those days.

A trick I learned from Chris McDowall of Bastionland fame is a brainstorming trick for coming up with a D6 encounter table.

The trick is, to create a list of 4 ideas or themes or words. A, B, C, D.

Then you can combine the ideas to create a list of 6 unique combinations, like this:

  1. A + B
  2. A + C
  3. A + D
  4. B + C
  5. B + D
  6. C + D

Now you have pairs of themes that you can make encounters off of! And they all fit nicely on a D6. Handy!

The nice thing about this is that you can get 6 ideas from just 4 themes. Its nice for folks that maybe struggle to come up with a lot of “things” at once and prefer to have a faster turn around on refining ideas into something playable.

Tables and Brainstorming

Random tables are one of the best tools that GMs have at their disposal. It is very possible to create entire adventures using nothing but random tables. Its even possible to run a session no previous prep and just roll on tables and improvise as players interact with the world.

Tables can also be used to spark ideas or serve as the basis of your brainstorming.

Lets say you are really not creative today. You cant even come up with 4 themes to make some D6 tables. You can use a table of themes or ideas and let the dice decide what your adventure is going to be about.

Usually, once ya get started its easier to keep going. You can use the ideas that are on the tables as written or you can change them to better fit what you want to create.

The Big Idea

Adventure writing is fun, but it can be hard to get started. Thankfully, you don’t have to come up with something totally fleshed out all at once. You can build up your ideas. Thats the main message of this post. Start small and simple, refine into something usable!