The Joys of Internal Logic

When I first started playing RPGs in general and D&D in particular back in the early 1980's, my father set down three iron-clad rules:

1. I had to maintain a B average, with no single grade lower than a C
2. I had to be actively involved in at least one school-sponsored extra-curricular activity.
3. Internal logic always had to apply. The elements in the games I played had to either possess a precedent (historical, literary, cinematic, or mythological) or else could be logically inferred from such a precedent. There were to be no dragons living in a 10'x10' room on the sixth level of the dungeon.

Rule #3 was always the hardest to apply, if for no other reason than that the published modules at the time lacked such internal logic. When I pointed this out to him, my father simply made the suggestion that I make changes to the published adventures. At the time, this was (to me) the height of sacrilege...but I quickly realized the wisdom of his suggestion and would eventually incorporate the philosophy into my own games.

My first experience with using such internal logic in my own games came when I was in college and was running an AD&D campaign of my own. I had run the PCs through The Village of Hommlet, and they had settled into the town as their base of operations while I cast about for some additional adventures in the area. Then, one day while re-reading through the adventure Chagmat from Dragon Magazine, it occurred to me that the druid Cosmo in the adventure could just as easily be Jaroo Ashstaff from Hommlet. I re-wrote the premise for the adventure; rather than searching for missing village girls, the PCs were searching for the local druid, who had vanished while returning from a druidic conclave.

Adventure followed upon adventure, and my original spiral-bound notebook of conversion notes quickly turned into a three-ring binder...then a series of three-ring binders. It wasn't long before I was using elements from one game system in another -- such as when I converted the old Top Secret Lady in Distress adventure for use with the Hero System Danger International campaign that I was running...and then, in the aftermath of the adventure, had the cruise ship run aground off of a tropical island that was essentially a mash-up of D&D's Isle of Dread and the island from Lords of Creation's The Horn of Roland adventure module. 

(The end of that adventure was amusing in itself, with the PCs collaborating with Cyrano de Bergerac in an attempt to capture evaporating morning dew and use it as a "lifting gas" to free the cruise ship from its grounding.)

These days, of course, I do nearly all of my adventure creation on a computer. An extensive video library provides me with not only inspiration and precedent, but also images that are often useful. OCR scanning, a comprehensive suite of word processing and image manipulation software, and an extensive collection of reference materials (online AND offline) allow me to create adventures in nearly any setting and/or genre.