Musical Inspiration Challenge

I decided to embark on a challenge for myself, a sort of thought experiment. In this case designing an adventure, based on random songs that came up on my iPod. This is dumb obviously, but pushing ourselves outside of the normal creative areas can sometimes help us to shake out new ideas. Restriction breeds creativity after all. This is why random adventure designs and the stuff are so popular with GMs, I reckon.

The adventure I’m going to design is going to be based primarily on Pathfinder RPG, but given that I don’t intend to get too specific about crap like trap placement, adventures or the feat selection of monsters, it should hopefully be more useful to other people.

Ok, so to put things in perspective, I’ve got close to 2.4k songs sitting around on my iPod, it’s a moderately eclectic collection and unfortunately is for the most part comprised of weird music.

I’m allowing myself Mulligans on overly long purely instrumental tracks. I’ve got some stuff from the Skyrim soundtrack that go on for about 20 minutes are basically background music. So I won’t be using stuff like that. Also, no podcasts or comedy segments (No Dead Ale Wives, Despite being on my iPod)

The way I planned for this to work is that I’d take about 12 songs. These songs would be used as below:

1.)    The Inspiration for the Adventure.
2.)    The Antagonist. Adventures can have many opponents. It might be a person, organization, or the environment itself.
3.)    The aim of the conflict. Why is the antagonist doing what he is doing? Why is the hurricane dangerous, etc.
4.)    Why should the players care?
5.)    The theme of the ‘dungeon.’ Dungeon of course being used in the sense of the site for our adventure. 
6.)    The first complication! This is the first of our two twists. This one is tied with the adventure directly, namely it’s what makes our situation more..complex. Weird items. Odd developments. Strange rules or situations. Or the like. 
7.)    Encounter 1.  The first of our encounters. Adventures in my opinion usually need set piece encounters, memorable stuff for the players to remember. An adventure should have two or three of these.
8.)    Encounter 2.
9.)    Encounter 3. The Final Battle.
10.) Reward. What do the players get for all of this trouble? What’s the carrot on the stick.
11.) The second Complication! This is the one for oddities and weirdness encountered on the adventure.

Having established these ground rules (oh my dear Lord this is going to be a disaster) it’s time for us to begin..