How to Write a FF Adventure: Part III

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THE DESIGN PROCESS

Before you begin to write any adventure you need to sit down and decide upon several factors. First, to get your adventure right, you must choose a genre and setting; is the adventure going to be a heroic fantasy, epic sci-fi, frightening horror, mysterious modern supernatural or murder mystery, etc. The Gamebooks Creature of Havoc and Crypt of the Sorcerer painstakingly developed Allansia within the Gamebook and expanded on events and locations that have been touched on in previous titles. This has always proven popular in Fighting Fantasy adventures and including small references to other books, events, characters or places such as Firetop Mountain, Fang, and Port Blacksand can help you also add atmosphere.

With this in mind, you now need to come up with a general plot. This will determine the outline for the main adventure and the path your hero will follow towards the end. Take the time to develop plot ideas and the plausible chain of events based upon your chosen genre, as everything that happens in the adventure and the reader will support your original idea. Many amateur adventures we have received often evolve from the writer’s experience with recent events, literature, games or movies, TV, cartoons they have seen.

The simplest method to generate a Gamebook plot is to break it down into four basic components. What is the background? Setting off and the adversary? During the quest and the final goal? Reaching a conclusion and the final adversary? For example: A plague has begun to devastate the town and surrounding farmlands of Silverton and the wizard Yaztromo sends you to investigate. The hero discovers from the outset that a Necromancer in the Silver Hills is the cause and sets off from Darkwood Forest. The wilderness is explored including abandoned ruins, forests, caves, the Dwarven village of Mirewater and finally Silverton. The hero marches to the Silver Hills, where he is pitted against a coven of chaotic spellcasters and the vicious Necromancer herself.

As you can see, by breaking down the adventure into each of these components you can focus on each element one at a time, and save valuable time. With careful planning and simple descriptions you will be able to quickly outline the main plot of your adventure and the story you wish to tell. With plenty of notes you can then play around with the framework and how you would like it to develop. What events will happen in the adventure, what characters or monsters will become the opposition in encounters, what obstacles and objects will determine the path of the plot?

Map all of these ideas down until you get a general outline, and then take the time to explore and enhance these until you have a picture of your adventure. Don’t map in too much detail, as you need to decide upon a wide range of Gamebook processes detailed below. Add a few subplots or multiple paths. With enough planning you will see that everything builds around what you have written and the common amateur Gamebook traps of having too many encounters, too many die rolls and too many instant deaths can be avoided.

Third, you need to determine the length. How many paragraphs will the book possess? A typical Fighting Fantasy Gamebook will have 400 paragraphs; however a small enjoyable adventure may have 50 that can be developed later. This will be one of your first main challenges as a Gamebook writer, as many feel the urge to create as many choices as possible in each encounter. Even with 400 paragraphs you are quite obviously limited on the number of paragraph choices that you can provide a player at every turn, so careful planning needs to be taken to provide the most obvious and also the most interesting choices that will become available. A good rule to use, when writing encounters is to always write them several times in different ways, and then play through them to determine which you feel will be most enjoyable for the reader.

Fourth, how complex will the adventure be? Will you fill the adventure’s paragraphs with numerous battle encounters, challenging puzzles, traps, item collecting, new attributes and subsidiary plotlines or other "paths" that your hero can choose to follow?

The fifth stage takes the fourth stage further. You now begin writing the adventure, starting with the paragraph 1 and conclusion (which could be paragraph 400 for example). If there is more than one ending, plan these in advance. A common technique used in some Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks is to hide the ending of the book on a paragraph other than 400 (for example the as of yet unpublished Moonrunner ends at paragraph 99). Let’s take at the many Gamebook devices in turn: