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On Writing Adventures
by Mike on 17 June 2019
I've recently been doing a lot of adventure writing, the results of which you can find in the Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot Kickstarter. As part of this project, I wanted to dig deep into what makes great adventures. So, as I did when writing Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, I hit the books (and the blogs) to collect as much of the best advice on adventure design that I could.
Map from Temple of the Forgotten God, one of the adventures in Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot.
This article consolidates many of the sources I discovered and read on adventure design. In the article I describe the source and some of the key tips that stuck out to me.
Chris Perkins on Writing Your Own Adventures. Chris has some excellent advice in this video and summary writeup. Here are a few key ideas:
- Analyze existing adventures.
- What motivates the characters to go on the adventure?
- Adventures need three things: motivation, locations, and a villain.
- Put a unique spin on a common idea.
- Have a kickass map.
- A little silliness is ok.
D&D House Style Guide. This free set of documents from Wizards of the Coast includes the house styles the D&D team gives to freelancers. It includes a short paper on adventure writing. Here are a few key points:
- Focus on the importance of the characters.
- Include a solid credible threat.
- Blend familiar tropes with clever twists.
- Focus on the here and now. Omit verbose backstories.
- Include meaningful decisions.
- Include options for exploration, roleplaying, and combat.
- Offer more than a DM can come up with themselves.
- Include a great map.
DM David on Will Doyle's Dungeon Designs. In this excellent article, David Hartlage discusses Will Doyle's advice for designing great dungeons including the Tomb of the Nine Gods in Tomb of Annihilation.
- Show the final room first. Show the goal.
- Cut the dungeon with a river, rift, or stairwell. Break through a linear dungeon with a feature that cuts through the whole thing.
- Make the dungeon a puzzle.
- Give the players goals that force exploration.
- Give each level a distinctive theme.
How to Write Modules that Don't Suck. This outline for a seminar at a convention by Goodman Games has a lot of fantastic advice in it. Goodman Games ended up extending it into a much longer ebook of the same title. The original is a golden summary of great ideas. Here are a few key pieces of advice:
- Convey the fantastic.
- Produce what home DMs can't produce.
- Put new twists on classic ideas.
- Include a hidden room with cool treasure.
- Make levels distinct.
- Include an intelligent ecology.
- Exude atmosphere.
Kobold's Guide to Game Design: Adventures. This book has a ton of excellent essays on writing adventures. Some of the key points include:
- The DM is your audience. Write for them.
- Give the DM the tools to make a fun game for players.
- Small beats large. Keep it brief.
- Don't bore yourself.
- Read your work aloud.
- Be specific.
- You're doing the hard work DMs don't want to do.
- If Conan doesn't care, neither should you.
Merric Blackman's NPC Advice. Merric Blackman had some excellent NPC advice he posted to Twitter. Here are a few key ideas:
- What do they want?
- How do they respond to trickery, diplomacy, intimidation, or violence?
- Present NPCs as they're intended to be used.
- Important NPCs need more guidelines for DMs.
- Don't force a DM to search for an NPC's information.
- Limit the number of important NPCs.
Wolfgang Baur's Adventure Writer Series includes a number of great articles, though they tend to focus on the third edition of D&D. The most relevant articles include Writing Your First Adventure, Structures and Plot, and Setting the Hook. Here are a few tips from these articles:
- Avoid useless backstories.
- Start strong.
- Trim excess encounters.
- Pick a motive: curiosity, survival, greed, heroism, loyalty, honor, or revenge.
- Make hooks personal.
Jaquaying the Dungeon. This article on the website the Alexandrian offers excellent advice for building exciting dungeons in our adventures. Here are some key concepts:
- Include multiple entrances.
- Include loops.
- Include multiple level connections.
- Offer secret and unusual paths.
Writing With Style: An Editor's Advice for RPG Writers. This is an excellent resource from an RPG industry editor to RPG writers. There's so much good advice in this book that it is hard to summarize in a few bullet points. It's an excellent read all the way through.
Designing Adventures Podcast Series. Shawn Merwin and Chris Sniezak have been running a series of podcasts on designing adventures. There's too many tips to list here but the podcasts are definitely worth a listen.
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