Adventure Design Checklist: Part 2
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.
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.
When I last left off I had completed the following on my checklist:
Good Encounter DesignAdventure SummaryWhat is really going onAdventure HooksSpecial Rules
The Approach
Level Design
Encounter Variety and Pacing
Ticking Clocks
Informational Viewpoints
The Map
Treasure Distribution
I will pick up the process from here. Read my part 1 here to see what I’ve already covered.
Special Rules
Another section you should probably consider and possibly include is if your adventure has any special rule considerations. This generally takes the form of custom things in your adventure that are not really covered in the rules of the game like if the dungeon is full of toxic fumes or there are large area’s where the players will need to fight underwater.
It’s good to consider these things and explain rules for them up front. It’s also good to think about your adventure and if there are any moments that might need special rules and what in your adventure that may not be covered by the regular rules. You’d be surprised about what isn’t in the rules at times, especially if you haven’t formally read the ruleset in a long while and play largely from memory with your own house rules.
The second reason you might want to have a section for special rules is if you are making a high level adventure and want to tweak the players abilities or spells to make things more difficult. I say tweak because generally it’s not fun to outright ban them, but it can be interesting to tweak them to force more creative or unexpected problem solving. It could be simple as having spheres of anti-magic in your dungeon in certain area’s (with whatever generating them being able to be destroyed) to maybe the dungeon itself exists in a pocket dimension or another planet where things don’t exactly work the same as they do wherever the players are from. It’s best to have a reason.
The Approach
This section should deal with the approach to the dungeon. The dungeon should ideally be designed that it could be slotted into any campaign the GM is running. However, the creation of the dungeon and it’s current state shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. The approach to the dungeon should be described in order to help provide context to it and help the GM figure out where they want to place it.
This doesn’t have to be anything complicated. It could be a single paragraph describing the environment immediately outside the dungeon to a couple of encounters on the way to the dungeon. Regardless, the approach to the dungeon should help foreshadow and telegraph it’s themes and dangers to the players.
Crossing the bridge over a moat to a ruined castle in the dark has a way different feel than crossing over one that has strange torchlight seen in it’s upper windows. Each description will telegraph different things to your players and help the GM set the tone and themes of the adventure and you generally want to convey these things as early and consistently as possible.
For my adventure I had the following approach:
It’s nothing too fancy, mainly one encounter with a guide that leads to dungeon location where the players have to figure out how to get inside as the main entrance is blocked:
C. The Facade and Sealed Vestibule
The cliffs on either side rise to reveal a sheltered canyon. In the solid stone of the canyon wall, a monumental façade rises. Towering doric columns uphold a high-pinnacled roof in ancient style. An open doorway, a black rectangle of shadow in the desert sun, stands impenetrable.
The Sealed Vestibule: beyond the entrance in the façade, the vestibule is sealed by massive blocks of stone set with mortar. It was sealed after the assault on the temple by the Royal Guard failed. While the mortar is old and crumbling, removing the blocks would not be an easy feat. There is approximately 10 feet of stolid stone.
Warning Seal: upon the seal a warning has been chiseled. It follows: “This message is a warning of danger. By the gods above let the danger no longer be present in your time, as it was in ours. This is an accursed place. You will die.”
Omar will tell the players he knows of a secret entrance. He will lead them up a narrow path to the hole that looks into 1-1. Rotunda of Ancients.
Level Design
Now we’re starting to get into the nitty-gritty of the actual adventure. We’ll start with level design. What is level design? We’ll I’d kind of define that as designing the overall physical space that will be explored. Not just in an architectural sense, but in the sense that the players will be playing a game.
There are a couple of things I’d consider:
Xander the Dungeon: this is kind of a famous level design idea discussed here. Basically you want to have loops in your dungeon floorplan. The more intersecting loops you have the less linear it will be. Non-linearity will force you to design it without the players encountering things in a certain order which reduces the chances of a railroad. Yeah, things might not happen as you expect, but that’s often part of the fun.
Multiple entrances and exits: you want to have multiple ways to get in and out of your dungeon, preferably with different trade-offs. Main entrance heavily guarded, back entrance not but harder to find, etc. You also want to make sure these entrances and exits aren’t too close together as there’s no point in taking one or the other if they just lead to rooms nearby each other. Additionally, if you have multiple levels, you want to make sure the levels all have multiple entrances and exists to each other and some allow you to skip levels and get further into the dungeon faster.
Verticality: you want to have a rooms with a mix of verticality. The rooms shouldn’t just all be 20x20 square boxes. They should be different shapes and sizes some very big, some very small, some narrow, some hexagonal, etc. The easiest way to get across the differences in room shape and size, and make it meaningful, is force the players to move up and down in space. Things such as narrow walkways, elevated platforms to shoot arrows from, stairs to dash up, chasms to jump, walls to climb, all these emphasize the vertical dimension and the incongruous room shape.
Zones: your rooms should be organized in a series of ‘zones’. I say zone instead of another word as sometimes the zone can be formally named and easily defined, such as the ‘Servants Quarters’ and sometimes they’ll just be more loosely named ‘The Eastern Caverns’. Whatever you do, try to name each zone something evocative. For example in my adventure Temple of the Beggar-King:
I had two main zones in the second level of the dungeon. The Caverns of the Cult, and The Garden without Stars. Both these kind of came about organically, where at first it was all just one level. But as I edited the second draft I found that the rooms could basically be clustered around these two themes or ideas. This is kind of the purpose of zones, to give a broad idea of what this area of the dungeon was used for by those within it. How they shaped it, and how it shaped them. It helps turn your rooms from a series of possibly disconnected tricks and traps into something that helps tell a greater story through the environment.
Evocative Room Names: and last but not least in level design you want evocative room names. This is an often overlooked thing. The name should be short, give a good general idea of what the room is about to the GM, and be evocative if possible. If you’re having a hard time keeping it short then maybe too much is going on in the room and it needs to be split up into other rooms.
Encounter Variety and Pacing
Now, this is closely related to level design but a bit more involved and see’s the dungeon a little more abstracted so I thought it warranted it’s own consideration.
In general I think there are four main encounter types:
Traps and Hazards: passive obstacles which can harm you if you’re not careful.
Combat: aggressive obstacles (creatures) which will harm you if you don’t do something about it.
Tricks: passive puzzles where interaction is generally rewarded if the trick can be figured out (possible with harm dealt out if it is not figured out).
Empty Room: a room with neither obstacles nor rewards. Doesn’t need to be actually empty, can contain environmental clues about history of themes of dungeon.
Along with two that are encountered less frequently but which your dungeon should contain at least one of:
Treasure Cache: a large treasure cache that is relatively unguarded. Usually hidden or encountered after a series of other obstacles. I think treasure cache’s are important as they allow the players to feel like their hard work has been rewarded and they’ve scored the jackpot. Yes, you could probably spread all the treasure contained within throughout other rooms but there’s something psychological more satisfying and motivating when you obtain it in a cache instead.
Social Interaction: there should be at least one person in the dungeon who you can talk to, someone who could be an unlikely alley, provide information, or in general just make things more interesting.
Now a dungeon has good variety if it contains all these encounter types in good numbers. Encounter pacing is a bit more complicated but the easiest way I find to determine it is to simply take your dungeon map and colour code each room based on it’s encounter type:
As you can kind of see in the above map by colour coding the encounters (red = combat, blue = trap, green = trick) you get a very good idea of the clustering of them and how much variety you have. You also get a good idea of where the empty rooms are (gray) and the treasure is (yellow). This helps you figure out the pacing as you don’t want your adventure to be all taxing aggressive combat all the time.
When I did this analysis for this level of my adventure it made me realize that I had to many trick (green) encounters in a row in the center of the map. In a subsequent draft I decided to add a room in the bottom left to create a better loop and change some of the encounters slightly so it wasn’t a line of pure green.
Anyways, this does it for the second part of this series. Stay tuned for part 3!