Choose your Own adventure paths, Quick plots for time poor GMs

 About 30 years ago, the Fighting Fantasy Novels were published for us teenagers that were just starting down the path of fantasy roleplay. They're simplistic, but written well enough to use for your own games, and if your audience is under 30, they're unlikely to have read them to interfere with the game.

Reusing published works for time poor GMs

One thing that comes up, commonly enough, is the Gamesmaster needing to prepare a lot for play. Its true to say that to run your own game, in your own world, you will need months, if not years of preparation.

I've discussed several ways to speed up those processes, to get your world built faster, with enough depth to springboard into play, but what if you just want a single adventure, just a few sessions long, and you want 'enough' depth to make it interesting , but you need it THIS weekend?

p.s. I consider even published works, to be more work to prepare, as you typically need to pre-read all the entries, the NPC dialogs, and get a real solid feel for what's going on.

One thing I did as an experiment was to grab an old Fighting Fantasy, Choose your own adventure. Forest of Doom. I had a photocopied version, but I understand copies are readily available online.

My players were introduced to the plot, via the intro text, sure I just read it from my photo copies, but my players were as likely aware that I may have written it myself, the only real thing I needed to do was clarify the paths and choices as I went, and rejig the creatures & combat, based on my group size.

I had a group of  four level 3 characters, so I just grabbed the Monster Lore for the creature in the text, and made between three and five of them, based on how my group looked after previous battles.

In my opinion, it was successful, the players got to play out a decent plot, got some interesting puzzles, some interaction with NPCs and Monsters, resolved the quest and it took 3 sessions. because of the plot of Forest of Doom it also left a cliff hanger to go on to the other adventures, Temple or Terror and City of Thieves, We could have scheduled more sessions and played it out, but Covid lockdowns and such.

p.s. Temple of Terror would require you as GM to pre-read the book, and in some books you might want to map out some places, but again, these are pretty commonly found online, so most of the work is already done.