Since today is both my birthday and Thanksgiving, I figured I’d talk about themed adventures. Specifically I’m talking about adventures built around something that is currently going on in real life, like Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day, a player’s birthday, or any other real life event. These adventures can be fun, have extra meaning for the players, and can give the game master a general framework for their next adventure.

I’ll start with an example of a themed adventure I ran in Shadowrun. A good friend, and player in our roleplaying group, was leaving Reno to go to college in Seattle. So I decided to run a themed adventure about him leaving.

On his last day of gaming with us, I ran an adventure where player group was hired to prevent an NPC from leaving the area. The NPC was leaving Seattle to move to Reno. Since the adventure was a reversal of what was happening in our real lives, this instantly struck a chord with everyone in the gaming group. None of us wanted to see our real life friend go, but we knew he had to. We couldn’t stop him from leaving, so what was the next best thing? The next best thing was preventing this NPC from leaving Seattle to go to Reno. So the basis for the themed adventure was set.

Next I added in some other parts that mirrored the event of my friend leaving. The NPC was a college student and known to hang out in certain college areas. This mirrored the theme of my friend leaving for college. This gave me the physical location of where much of the adventure took place.

And who were the players’ main adversaries in this adventure? Another Shadowrunning group that were essentially humorous mirrors of the players. I took attributes of my players and molded them into what I thought they would be as a Shadowrunner. For example, if you had a big football playing friend, you could create him as a Troll Street Samurai NPC. Or your smart nerdy friend could be a Human Combat Mage NPC. The players had a good laugh once they realized the group they were up against were essentially copies of them with a funny twist.

There were other items I added into the adventure, but you should get the picture. Honestly, once I figured out the theme the actual adventure wrote itself. I didn’t really have to think up many details, I just put in the gaming adventure what the themed event gave me.

Now that you see one example, what themed adventures could you run as a game master? Any event that is happening at that point in time that has significance for your group can be the basis for a themed adventure. If it is Christmas, you could have the players go on an adventure of stopping an evil Santa Claus from delivering bombs to children around the city. If it is New Year’s Day, you could have the players attend a New Year’s Day event gone wrong. If a gaming convention is coming up, you could run an adventure of your players attending a similar convention. Maybe they have to find things that mirror what you are going to the convention for. Once you pick the real life event that your themed adventure, you’ll see how ideas just start flowing into your head as the adventure begins to write itself.

What real life event would you consider running a themed adventure about?