I love designing adventures! If you’re like me, there’s nothing better than creating a world with words, imagining a maelstrom of conflicts and possibilities into which an unsuspecting group of characters can be thrust. As the words tumble onto the page, the excitement of delivering a great game experience for the players leads me to a deluge of questions and doubts: will this adventure challenge them, delight them, make them think, make them feel, or otherwise deliver on the goals that I set?
Creating an adventure can be one of the greatest joys for a D&D fan, but it can also be challenging and frustrating. With so many great published adventures available, a DM can run campaigns for years and never once have to do more than make a few tweaks. However, seeing the players react to a scenario that you pulled from your own imagination can produce a rush like no other.
Fighting through the struggles of the creative process can be treacherous and frustrating, but the challenge is not insurmountable. I hope that what follows—in this article and in future ones—is a guided tour of the adventure-creation process. I want to walk with you along this path, because I have trod it many times myself, helping others see the wonderful sights and navigate the hidden pitfalls. More importantly, each time I take the journey, I learn something new myself. This is the first part of a much larger series, one which will lay the groundwork for all future installments.
Your Humble Guide
I’ve been running D&D games for almost 40 years, and creating my own adventures for the duration. I’ve been a professional adventure designer for the past 20 years, working for Wizards of the Coast and other RPG companies. If you count my experience being a writer, editor, producer, and administrator for organized-play campaigns like D&D Adventurers League, Living Forgotten Realms, Xen’drik Expeditions, and Living Greyhawk, you could say that I’ve written or been a DM for tens or even hundreds of thousands of players.
Those experiences have taught me a great deal about the game, the people who play it, and the process of creating within it. Much of what I’ve learned has come at the expense of getting things wrong. Many times over! Whether I am writing or designing or developing or editing, however, I am always looking to learn the next lesson, hoping to find the new nugget of truth and wisdom that I can carry forward into my next project.
And that’s what brings me to this point today. The fine folks at D&D Beyond asked me if I would be interested in writing a series of articles on adventure design. As I began to outline what would go into such a series, the inestimable Todd Kenreck had a brilliant idea: instead of just talking about how to create an adventure, why not actually create one, step-by-step and piece-by-piece, as I talk about each of the topics.
And so, intrepid adventure designers, that is what we’re going to do! Through the next several articles, I’ll discuss components of adventure design, and along the way we will create an adventure together. I’ll bring up topics and set us on the path, using comments from readers to guide later parts of the series. When we are finished, we’ll have a good strong outline, and maybe even a few complete encounters, from an adventure.
Charting the Course
The most important aspect of adventure design to remember—and to embrace—is that constraints on design are not antithetical to creativity. Self-constrained design is, in a nutshell, the crux of creativity. With approximately 200,000 current or obsolete words in the English language, and even more words when you throw game terms and other fictional fantasy elements into the mix, you want to do everything in your power to gracefully and elegantly limit your choices while not harming the aesthetic or functional value of your work product. That is best accomplished by constraining yourself.
In RPG adventure design, that self-constraint can take many forms. First, you can work within the time-tested and effective structures that have come before. For example, all adventures generally have a few particular sections that appear somewhere in the text. The names and locations of these sections may vary from product to product, but they all contain similar vital information. Adventure Background is one example. In the Adventure Background, we know we are going to provide the reader—and ostensibly the DM who is running the adventure—important information regarding what happened before the action of the adventure takes place. (We’ll talk more about the best way to handle Adventure Backgrounds in a later article.)
Another way to constrain the scope of your work in adventure design is to pick a theme or two that can act as a focus for your efforts. Think of these themes as “creativity magnets,” which can draw ideas out of your mind and onto the page, always driving you in a particular direction. These themes can steer the plot of an adventure, but they are much more powerful that just story beats or plot points. For example, in an adventure I wrote called Defiance in Phlan, one of the important themes was dragons. Yet a dragon does not appear in the adventure at all.
What kept my momentum moving forward during the design of that adventure were draconic themes and details. If I was ever stuck for a detail or a direction, I just focused my mind on dragons, and inevitably something came to me. Because I was focused on that one motif, what came to mind fit nicely with other details, creating a more coherent mosaic from the disparate pieces. Did I need to describe a statue? It was a dragon statue. Did I need a color? It could correspond to a chromatic dragon. Did an NPC need details? She was a merchant who dealt in dragon artifacts.
Of course, the most powerful and useful constraint is the oft-mentioned but sometimes-scorned outline. If you outline your adventure, you remove so much stress and friction from those mental gears, freeing them up to move immediately to the details of your creation. The brilliant part of outlines? They can be malleable! Once you get deep into the word mines, you might strike a completely different vein of gold. It’s fine to scrap the old outline and follow that new path, because your new ideas already have constraints of their own, which allow your easy access to the story that unfolds before you.
Accept Your Own Gifts
That vein of gold I mentioned above is another aspect of the creative process that bears mentioning early (and often). As we create, new pathways in our brain open up to us. We make connections. We get inspired.
A writing teacher from my past called these writerly inspirations “gifts to yourself.” You might be writing along and suddenly you have a mental flash. This could be a character, or an idea for a later encounter, or even just a word. Don’t ignore those flashes. Make a note of them somewhere that you can return to: an index card, a sticky note, a separate file, or whatever works for you that doesn’t involve too much time or effort. Then quickly get back and finish your original thought. When you reach a point where your current reservoir of writing taps itself out, go back to your notes and examine your gifts. Figure out why you might have had that flash of inspiration, and, more importantly, ruminate on how those new pieces fit into what you are working on.
Those gifts may come because your mind has already chosen a theme, or has fixated upon a new theme, and you didn’t realize it until the words accidentally appeared in your mind, or even on the page. Your subconscious mind is always working on a different level, and at a different pace, than your conscious one. These ideas may help you during your initial design, or they may be something that informs and instructs your revisions of your work. They may also solve a problem that you were having with a different part of your adventure.
Recognize Your Strengths
Unless you possess da Vinci-like genius exhibited by only a handful of people (e.g. Christopher Perkins and Jeremy Crawford), you likely have strengths and weaknesses in any project you undertake. Adventure design taps a variety of skills, ranging from writing descriptions to doing math to drawing maps, and many other tasks as well. Figure out what you are good at, and more importantly, what part of the process is most natural to you. Creating maps or other art can be difficult, but progress begets progress. If you are working on something that is not easy for you, and you cannot push through some barrier you face, move back to tackle something that is easy for you, and find a groove there. The forward progress in an entirely different area can sometimes clear away mental barriers, or give you some gifts that you can take to the task that is harder.
For me, mapping is terribly difficult. I don’t have a steady hand. My brain does not process spatial relationships well. Writing a typical adventure tends to result in dozens of crumpled sheets of graph paper littering the floor around my desk. I do, however, love to imagine scenes and put them into words. When I reach a frustration point with my mapping, I stop and attempt to use words to describe the rooms I am trying to draw. What’s in them? What are the creatures in the room doing? What features would adventurers first notice?
When I get those details painted on the page in words, it gives me the focus (and quite honestly, the courage) to go back to the graph paper and reengage the stubborn part of my brain that tries to draw a 10-foot by 10-foot room that is somehow supposed to contain seven Large-sized creatures.
I have heard many other content creators talk about this concept in other ways. Many creators love the math of adventure design: how many creatures of a particular challenge rating are needed to make this encounter hard or that encounter deadly? What creature’s ability, when paired with another creature’s abilities, add a little more spice to a fight? How much or what kinds of treasure will excite a group of players without unbalancing the campaign? These questions require a different cognitive process than, say, describing an NPC or creating a puzzle. Yet these processes can inform each other, unsticking a stubborn mental cog.
Whither from Here?
I hope the discussion so far has resonated with you, whether you want to be an adventure designer, DM, or just want to know a little more about the hobby that we love. Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at discrete aspects of game and adventure design, while at the same time putting those lessons into practice, creating pieces of an adventure that will come together into a whole by the end.
Speaking of outlines, here is a sneak peek at what topics we’ll be discussing over the course of the series. Since I hope to keep the discussion organic and flexible, there is always a chance to topics will be added, some may be combined into a single topic, or a few might be deleted entirely. But such is outlining!
Frameworks for Adventures
- Creating an outline for an adventure, thinking about the presentation of the material in terms of the adventure scope, adventure length, adventure audience, its placement with a large campaign (or not), and more.
Plot Hooks and Opening Scenes
- An in-depth look at how to craft and implement adventure plots hooks and the opening scenes of adventures.
- Common mistakes that designers make when introducing an adventure.
- How to leverage existing game elements like backgrounds or factions to make hooks work better in an adventure.
Encounters and the Three Pillars
- A look at encounters as the building blocks of adventures.
- How to put encounters together, link them, and fit within the frameworks discussed in the previous article.
- How encounters relate to the three pillars of play: roleplaying, exploration, and combat.
- Working with the new Encounter Builder release for D&D Beyond to make it work for people who use the platform!
Boxed Text
- Dissecting boxed text, looking at how to write it and how not to write it.
- When it’s needed and when it’s not.
- Address the heated debate in design circles about whether it is needed at all!
- Discussion on details of setting, and how to find the right mix of putting in fun, flavorful, relevant details without overwhelming the DM.
Encounter Flow
- Examine the art and the craft of putting together encounters in a way that leads to organic, fun, and challenging game play.
- Touch upon the concept of story beats, and how to use different kinds of beats to keep the players happy and engaged.
- A general discussion of narrative structure, and the concepts of short and long rests as a narrative device as well as a game mechanic.
Rewards in Adventures
- How to creating adventures with rewards in mind: experience points, milestones, wealth, magic items, levels, and other kinds of rewards.
- Highlight the risks inherent in giving out too many rewards to soon, how to pace yourself, and alternate rewards that players will love that won’t unbalance your game.
Challenges, Resolutions, and Consequences
- How to create challenges with the tools a DM has at hand: monsters, traps, hazards, obstacles, puzzles, and character choices.
- Look at how to allow different methods of resolution, and determining consequences for success and failure of those differing methods.
Thinking Like a D&D Designer
- A look at what it means to create D&D content, specifically adventures, in the larger sphere of the hobby.
- It provides tips on good writing habits, ways to make better use of your design time, and steps you can take to up your design skills.
Proofreading, Playtesting, and Publication
- Illuminate the big steps necessary in going from writing for yourself to writing for an audience.
- Cover the concepts of playtesting with outside sources, as well as polishing the piece, getting maps and art, and thinking about the content from a marketing perspective.
Homework
The next article begins our adventure design in earnest, but I need your feedback! In the comments below, talk about your experiences with adventure design, whether for your own home game or for publication. What themes have you used to constrain your design? What gifts have you left yourself that heightened the power of your design? How do you tackle designing an adventure when the blank page stares back at you?
Shawn Merwin's professional design, development, and editing work in D&D has spanned 20 years and over 4 million words of content, ranging from third to fifth edition. His most recent credits include the Acquisitions Incorporated book, Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, and Storm Lord’s Wrath. He is also the Resource Manager for the D&D Adventurers League’s Eberron: Oracle of War campaign. Shawn hosts a weekly D&D podcast called Down with D&D, and he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can follow his ramblings and musing on Twitter at @shawnmerwin.
I often make an open world for the players and use their complex backstories to make an epic adventure.
This way, they can feel like it is their choice.
This was a blast to read! I am very excited to check back in with your articles in the future.
As far as planning and constraints, I try to consider what theme I want my game to have. I am currently working on a large scale campaign with the theme "power comes at a cost" and "real goodness is difficult to embody". My players, the NPCS, and the villains all find their allegiances changing often as they make decisions to empower themselves that hurt others.
I think in the future I would like to try and build a more open world where the players decide what the story looks like!
Can't wait for the next instalments!
my group and I have been players under a amazing older dm (we are on the younger side) for 2+ years.
and now I'm after trail and error my campaign is the one that stuck, and im our dm since no-one else who tried it wants to put the effort in.
I LOVE BEING A DM, since April.
I need some help though, I don't like my latest adventure...
this plot arc so far: -players home town attacked by pirates, one of the characters is a pirate hunter (these pirates are infact the ones he's hunting but he doesn't know).
-through map found in a earlier adventure and some hints so they travel to islands where they are told of the story of a now dead alchemist pirate (a other character is a artificer who has amnesia.)
-WHAT NOW?
I tend to select themes based on successful media, then put my own twist on them. Most recently I've used the story behind some music that I love, putting the adventures on the sea in search of new continents. My themes were ironically not seafaring or exploration, but survival, dragons and nomadic peoples of history.
Some of the gifts I left myself while I was designing NPCS were "what if every powerful npc was a dragon?" And "what if the 'main quest' was creating artifacts... The first powerful npc they meet is a fortune teller... Deck of many?" I used this to shape milestones and encounters. Having the party capture dread wraiths, or collecting wishes from genies.
When I'm staring into that great white abyss that is a blank page, I tend to ask myself Weston's like "What if <popular media> was a DND game? The main character would probably be a <race and sub class>..." And I start to plan adventures around those characters, that tie to points in the media. Then if I feel like it's not telling my story correctly, I start stripping out the media content and adding bits of my own flair until I feel it's right.
Great article! I'm currently trying to design a campaign for my group (it will be several months before we get to it, we rotate which one of us is DM). I'm trying to create my own realm for this campaign, along with some of my own races etc. I have a villain/plot in mind, but I still need to flesh it out. This is my first campaign I have designed, and one of my first times as a dungeon master. How much is too much to prepare?
I've definitely had a fear of the blank page as well. What I try to do is think of past sessions where I as a player enjoyed, and try to focus on those aspects.
(Possible spoilers for the Mines of Phandelver adventure below)
My very first time dungeon mastering was the town of Thundertree in the Mines of Phandelver adventure. Most of the city itself was pretty lackluster, but then came a fight with a dragon. The dragon was supposed to flee once it reached half health, as it was a bit strong compared to the party's level. However, the party seemed to actually enjoy the challenge, so instead of flying away, I had the dragon swoop back down, destroying the floor, and crashing to the level below, sending the PCs flying to various places across the room. My group loved this combat, and it was the first thing I was proud of. I'm going to try to incorporate more interesting fights in my campaign.
Great article. Looking forward to this series
I found that one of my strengths is improving NPC's in my world. Giving them a singular theme that quirks, ideals, and desires stem from really helps. Breathing life into the characters in the world is by far the most enjoyable thing, but it's more difficult when it comes to giving them a sense of belonging without them being the anchor in an open-ended world. Am I wrong to keep the campaign slightly rail-roaded by having them bound to their Merchant NPC who promises them riches and adventure? They so far haven't mentioned wishing to leave his employment, but I am more afraid of where my campaign will go after that. I use the adventures to supplement this and tweak them as needed, but I feel tied down by them at times as well. This is where I think my ability to make the NPC's have personality helps me the most, when I'm not sure where to go, I allow the social role-play aspect of D&D shine. Well, what do my characters want and is there a reason to stay there. If my NPC truly wants them to stay, well maybe he bribes/lies to them. This campaign is going to lead into a 1000 mile trip from Waterdeep to Baldur's Gate (With some dungeon crawls and world-building).
It also helps that I spoke with the players in session 0 as well. Two of the characters are very well anchored to the world and reasons of their own to get to Baldur's Gate, but he other two joined later in the campaign and are a bit chaotic in nature. This dynamic works well because the two more seasoned and anchored players guide them in-game while the chaos provides some improv on my part. I also jot down notes on how I roleplay the NPC's for future reference. Nothing is more embarrassing than changing how an NPC acts towards the party for no reason (Unless you improv twin brother which I totally did and they were almost none the wiser).
I think the hardest thing when it comes to the world for me is also Map-Building and techniques on how to do this. Should I internalize the maps, traps, and monsters better before my sessions so I don't keep referencing the book or my notes? I AM NOT ORGANIZED, but I love DM'ing... Curses...
I’ve always struggled with outlining a 1-20 level campaign using one over arching story.
This looks brilliant, Shawn! I'm really looking forward to it.
I'm excited by the potential of this article series. I've never tried to create my own adventure or campaign, but I've been thinking about doing it for a while now. This will be a great help in getting started.
How do you cope with stopping to write down your "gifts to yourself" when they won't stop? At some point one has to actually create.
The blank page has not been an issue, but I do like the recommendation to take a break from something challenging to break up mental blocks with easier tasks. I find map making, art, and encounter math more challenging than the writing.
This is so helpful! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
I am incredibly excited for this series as a new DM who is about to undertake a homebrew campaign and adventure. This article was very well written, and even though it was just a taste of what is to come, I already find myself intrigued and inspired.
I tend to write the highlights of my campaigns; the over-arching plot, the antagonists and their goals and personalities. Then, I use the PC backstories to weave together a canvas upon which the story that we tell together takes shape. My aims are usually for character growth within the story. So I will confront the characters to their fears, I will give them moral choices and, when I'll use their in-game comments to change or adapt what I had in store for them. (for example: one of my players decided to chant in Swahili for her druid spells, then from now on, the secret druid language will be Swahili). (If the rogue looks for the local thieves' guild and I had not thought of adding that element to my campaign, I'll spend a few hours putting a thieves' guild together for the next session, which ill become either a source of succour or of additional problems for the PCs). And I always pay extra attention to their actions because it is a living world and every action has a reaction that may cause ripple effects in the game world.
I can't think of a way that my method could become a publishable product. lol
Thanks for the read Shawn!
More than any techniques I've used in the past, I'd like to relate what I'm hoping to learn in the near future, which is how to take a successful session run for a home campaign and turn that into an adventure that anyone can enjoy. Looking forward to digesting your future tips!
This is a great way to create games that you DM. If you are writing an adventure that someone else is going to DM, you don't have that luxury. Be in later articles I will talk about shortcuts you can take to hook characters even when you don't know the characters who are playing your adventure.
Interesting combats (and other encounters) will be a big part of the article that covers encounter design!
I advise making side quests that all connect discreetly to the main quest which has the bonus effect of giving your players xp and knowledge on what they might be going up against in the future, such as maybe that dead pirate alchemist isn't really dead and came back as a Lich.
This is a great idea. I'll see what I can do in future articles to get that sort of process codified a bit.