
I wrote the original version of this as a way to explain how to prep an adventure session in DIE. It ended up being something much more about the fundamental structure of an adventure, full stop. You strip everything away, what does an adventure look like? DIE generates a lot of loose ideas, so giving some ideas of how to organise them felt important. Eventually as the core DIE Rituals game actually comes with a self-organising structure, it became less essential to the book, and so was cut. I was never quite 100% happy with it, but everyone else seemed to find it useful, especially folks who I was primarily aiming it at (as in, new folks.) I’ve tweaked it a little here to be less purely DIE – I think these basic structural shape is a useful way to think of prep in any game which works in this mode.
DIE Rituals has a standard format – a series of necessary encounters you complete before reaching the final encounter. It’s written with a self-creating structure – a check-list of necessary encounters you work though, turning the questions to the players when you don’t know what happens next and so on.
However, especially in a longer DIE Campaign, you may want to have a plan for a session, to arrange your material in something you can use, and the players can find their way through.
In practice, it’s merely a more elaborate version of: “Where are they at the start? Where are they at the end? What’s to stop them from getting from the former to latter?”
This is how we conceive of the various “Elements of an Adventure”.
- Gates
- Chests
- Keys
- Signposts
- Smoke Machines
- Menus