Hi everyone! I'm a pretty new GM. I've only ever played ttrpg as a GM with my kids, using the Hero Kids system.
We've been having a lot of fun running a longer campaign, and my kids were not really interested in the flavor of playing as actual kids (they want to be hulking lizardkin warriors who yeet the bad guys across the room and intimidate even the city guards to let them carry weapons in the city) so I have done a lot of adaptation of the included Hero Kids adventures to fit their style.
What I like to do is pull general plots and encounters out of the pre-made adventures, cut out or change stuff that doesn't fit, and use them as kind of quantum side quests whenever the players want to ask about rumors from the local innkeeper and stuff like that.
I have been mainly designing my own stuff as we go along but those adventures help a LOT with prep and having resources already compiled in a mostly usable way. It also helps me learn a lot about how to design encounters and plots since I don't have much experience.
I'm posting because I am about out of the Hero Kids adventures that I feel like fit our setting and play style and I am wondering if there are any other books that have adventures that can be used in this way that aren't system specific?
I've heard of things like the One Shot Wonders book, and others, or even the actual D&D published adventures, but having no experience with that or with even playing D&D 5e, I don't know how much work it would be to adapt things. So I am wondering if anyone has used resources like that and knows how they are put together would be able to let me know of some good ones to use in this way.
Free resources would be great, but I'm definitely willing to spend money if there are good products.
How about creating your own customized stories, monsters, items, through a fun and entertaining game?
I found Storycaster completely by chance, bumping into its creator in the Fate Discord. I've playtested it a couple of times. They regularly publish adventures created with it for free too. Highly recommend it.
I do, I try to do as much creation as I can to exercise those skills, but having some prepared adventures to steal things from makes it a lot easier. Like going to the gym with a professionally made program before learning to write your own programming. And I don't want stuff so pre-prepared that I don't ever learn to make my own stuff - I'm not so much just running the pre-made stuff as I am dissecting it, trying to understand it, and taking what I like to plug into my game.
When I have prompt or encounter ideas I write them down in a notebook and flesh them out later, but a lot of the time when I sit down to prep it's hard to think of things out of thin air. I'm getting a lot better at creating new things and integrating things the more we play.
So yeah, any resources on how to better design stuff is very welcome too. I have watched a lot of the Matthew Colville running the game videos that have helped a lot (especially the "Prep Can Be Literally Easy and Actually Fun" video)
Something like Storycaster looks interesting. I have heard of some other story prompt / plot cards (Fabula and Narata) and I might look into those too... That kind of thing is exactly what I'm looking for. Something that can help me generate ideas to flesh out into encounters or side quests that I can keep in my GM notes and stick in different locations so when the players decide to go into the mountains instead of the forests I have a general idea of what might be there...