While there is a lot of advice on the internet on how to build a good encounter; mostly use evocative writing and to focus on interactivity, I find there is little regarding overall adventure design. That is, how you string bunches of encounters together into a greater structure and what a good module contains.
I have decided to edit the adventure I wrote for NAP III and have decided to blog about the process as I do so. This is my attempt to tackle the topic.
What is ‘design’ anyways?
To begin I’d like to talk about what I mean by ‘design’. As a sometime reviewer, design tends to be an elegance in how an adventure is structured. Something you kind of know when you see it. It tends to deal with the parts of the adventure that feel the most gamified. It’s easy to spot good or bad writing and great or boring encounters. It’s hard to articulate good or bad design.
However, as an (aspiring) writer of adventures, to me design is the the more critical thinking phase that begins after the adventure is written. I don’t know how other people write adventures, but for me it’s a fairly intense affair where I’m just trying to pump out as much raw ideas, good writing, and memorable images and encounters, all around a couple of central ideas or themes that I explore.
Once this raw creative process is done, and the writing of the encounters edited, the design begins. In this manner I view design as a process of editing more than anything else, more in the same manner that after a movie is filmed the director has to go through all the raw footage and splice it together. Before you edit you don’t have a movie. You have a bunch of raw footage that resembles a movie, but it’s not really a movie yet. Get timings right, character perspective, the emotion of a scene; directors will bring these things out in editing. Or after a book is written a writer has to edit it in new drafts, usually fixing mistakes, rewriting chapters and tightening up storylines. Most often a work of art isn’t done when you have nothing left to add, but when you have nothing left to take away.
We tend to see design as a blueprint, like an architectural drawing, something that was followed. When in my experience it’s kind of the opposite. You write the adventure first, then you go through editing it and impose good design, tighten up the structure remember to add what you forgot and strip out things which seem ancillary.
Or well, that is how I do things.
Well, what makes for good design?
I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and have created the following checklist. It’s a checklist because then it’s easy to go through and impose after. I don’t think it’s fully complete, I’m probably missing some things, but it’s what I’m going to use when editing my adventure. In a very loose order it is as follows.
Good Encounter Design
Adventure Summary
What is really going on
Adventure Hooks
Special Rules
The Approach
Level Design
Encounter Variety and Pacing
Ticking Clocks
Informational Viewpoints
The Map
Treasure Distribution
Good Encounter Design
Encounters tend to be the smallest unit in an adventure. In most site based adventures they are rooms. There has been a lot written about what constitutes a good encounter this on the internet. I’m not going to restate it, I’m just going to link to some of it.
DIY Dungeons - Landmark, Hidden, Secret
False Machine - Sticky Goblins
Into the Dark - Bryce Lynch's Adventure Design Tips Summarized and Explained (Mark 2)
I will say, I’m putting this one first as I think it’s the one thing you have to kind of internalize and get the hang of before you write the adventure.
If you haven’t internalized the above before you write your adventure, to the point where you’re kind of following it unconsciously while you write encounters, then you’ll have to go back after and consciously follow such advice to make sure your encounters are up to par.
If your encounters are not evocative and interactive then no matter how you arrange things, your adventure isn’t going to be great.
Adventure Summary
So, you have a bunch of encounters written. It’s now time to write your adventure summary. Why write it after the majority of the adventure is written? Well, because you can’t summarize something that isn’t complete as it will (and probably should) change a fair amount during the process of writing it. Before writing, you should have a short pitch of your adventure.
For my adventure, I needed to write a high level adventure because I wanted to submit it to NAP III. I thought of Tomb of Horrors.
I thought of it because it’s a tough high level adventure that I enjoy. While I do love tomb of horrors it’s, well, not very scary. In my experience the adventure doesn’t quite live up to it’s cover art (pictured above) that has pretty much been seared into my brain since I was ten.
The whole premise for the lich being in the Tomb of Horrors and creating the trapped filled tomb was he needed the energy from dead and dying adventures to sustain himself or some such thing. It’s a great adventure, but to me, it’s central premise is somewhat contrived. Gary Gygax needed a tough convention module so he wrote a tough convention module.
My adventure pitch kind of began as a reaction to my thoughts on Tomb of Horrors. I wanted to write an adventure where the ending of it truly felt like the dread and horror that was pictured in the above cover art.
The general pitch before I started was:
What if there was a Lich surrounded by a weird cult and the adventure actually kind of otherworldly and scary? and; what if the cult was Buddhist but like evil?
After I had written it things had changed somewhat. The adventure was still a bit of a tomb adventure and still kind of had a lich like monster at the end, but it really leaned into weird Buddhist cult angle. I have ideas of what I’d like to do if I did do more of a ‘pure’ lich adventure, but they'd be for another time.
The general adventure summary I came up with at the end is as follows, a tight 300 words:
One-thousand years ago the Royal Guard of Leon III, the King of Kings, set out into the desert to find and destroy the stronghold of the mad prophet of the eastern wastes once and for all.
For forty years before, upon the desert winds, on the edge of the empire, the Beggar-King had wandered into the city of Jul wearing nothing but a dyed turmeric robe with naught but a simple copper bowl to beg for alms. The Beggar-King he was mocked as, for every night from the gutter he would preach his wisdom with alluring voice. Tales he told of the stillness of the desert; of how the mind could encompass the fullness of suffering; of how peace could be found only in the emptiness of sand. Led by the inward eye that could pierce through the midnight veil, he spoke softly of discordant things.
Soon his cult penetrated even the most elite. A murmur grew into a clamor and so the Beggar-King led a congregation of followers into the rocky hills of the Eastern Wastes to hide away, but to no avail. After a slew of suicides among the highest in the kingdom, into the desert the royal guard, the hand of Leon, marched. It is not known what they encountered, just that they, and the Temple of the Beggar-King, has been lost to time.
What is really going on
After you have written an adventure summary the next section you should write is what is really going on. Name it however you want, I named mine ‘The Cult of the Beggar-King’, but regardless it should, in plain language, explain what is going on in the adventure to the GM.
It should give a birds eye view of the various motivations and mysteries. It should spoil everything and be as economical as possible. It shouldn’t be a 5 page backstory of people and events that have come before (remember, motivations and mysteries!).
Yes it may deal with past events, but it should put more focus on explaining what the fuck is currently going on in the dungeon and there should be something currently going on in the dungeon. A dungeon, even a tomb dungeon, should be a dynamic thing that the players are stumbling into in media res. Even if those things have been unfolding on a scale of hundreds of years, as in my adventure.
My ‘What is really going on section’ looked like the following:
The Cult of the Beggar-King
The entire temple and the cult of the Beggar-King is near-east themed. It’s religion is very loosely based off of ideas and philosophy from Buddhism but taken to a dark extreme. During the adventure the players will encounter weird things resulting from the metaphysical knowledge and ultimate goals of the cult. The players will likely piece together bits and pieces of this knowledge as they interact with stuff. Things are plainly stated here for the Referee to refer to:
Reincarnation is real. The Beggar-King and his followers believe in it. Upon death the soul is reincarnated in another body, be it a man, woman, child, animal, insect, etc.
Though meditation, one can learn to recall their past lives, slowly descending through the ‘chain’ of being, past life by past life.
Ghosts aren’t the souls of dead people. They are the leftover remains of our past lives, like shed snakeskin left behind after the immortal soul passes on to be reincarnated. This is why ghosts seem to be fragmentary and repeat their actions in life.
… (this section continues for a bit but you get the idea) …
Do not skip this section. Do not think that by providing it you’ll be spoiling the adventure. I can’t tell you how many adventures I’ve read where halfway through I’m confused and frustrated because there is obviously something going on underneath the surface of the adventure (which is good) but it’s so scattered and hard to piece together that I am forced to read the adventure more than once to make sense of it.
If you have a lot of complicated backstory write it starting from the present and working your way backwards. This will force you to explain things in the order the the GM (and most likely the players) will encounter it. You’ll probably also find that some of the backstory is likely unnecessary.
Adventure Hooks
After you write what is really going on. You need to write some adventure hooks. Adventure hooks are hard to write. They should be things beyond ‘the players are paid to go fetch this thing or explore this place’.
I find you know you have a good hook when the hook reveals some information about the adventuring site that changes the way the players will approach it. For example, take the adventuring site of a goblin encampment.
If I tell you that you’ll get 1000gp for killing all the goblins and there is a lot of stolen loot inside, you’re likely to have a fairly neutral approach. You’ll probably just saunter up kick open the door or sneak in and begin the methodical work of killing all the goblins.
However, if I tell you that there are a dozen hostages inside the goblin camp and the townspeople are begging you to get them out alive and will reward you handsomely for doing so then you’ll probably try to approach the goblin encampment more stealthily and tactically.
Likewise, if I tell you that there is a wise looking goblin magi who has begun peering into your dreams using a stolen Palantir and who seems frightened of a greater figure in the darkness, you’re more likely to approach the goblin encampment with a bit more of a sense of cautious wonder. Is the goblin magi good? What is the nature of this Palantir?
The truth is, this goblin encampment could contain all these things. It could contain, hostages, treasure, and a goblin magi with a strange Palantir.
A good hook is one that makes the players feel something and change their approach accordingly. It’s a good idea to include multiple hooks in your adventure as you don’t know under what circumstances the GM is going to use your adventure. Maybe they just want to give the players a bunch of cash to level so they want hook 1, as lazy as it is. Maybe the area they’re placing the adventure in is full of goblin raiders so hook 2 makes the most sense. Maybe they want to put the adventure in some greater arc so they’ll use hook 3 and replace the shadowy figure with a more concrete bad guy from their campaign.
For my adventure I had the following hooks:
Hooks
The cult of the Beggar-King does not wish to be found out. It is not like other cults that wish to spread their beliefs and gain power. The main draw for the players (not necessarily the characters). Is that there is something that does not want to be found out; a mystery that is seemingly resistant to investigation. There are several possible hooks:
The players, upon ascension to positions of power in an institution are granted access to secret archives. While these archives contain many scandalous things, including the legend of the Beggar-King as detailed in the Introduction, any further mention of what happened to the Royal Guard, or the cult, has been struck from the annuals…
In the city of Jul, the legend of the Beggar-King is still whispered. A local cult recently formed around a charismatic prophet claiming to be the reincarnation of the Beggar-King. However...
Due to the Beggar-King's meditations unraveling of the lattice of time, some souls are being reincarnated with full memory. Strange cases occur where babies are born capable of adult speech and thought. However, they are mentally broken from the incomprehensibility of what lies beyond death...
… (this section continues for a bit but you get the idea) …
Anyways, this post is getting a bit long and is more involved then I first intended. Stay tuned for a part 2 and probably part 3. Subscribe if you like my writing and want to stay in the loop.