Let’s Design an Adventure: Adventure Hooks and Opening Scenes

You’re in a tavern. (Well, not you personally. Or maybe you are! If you are, I wish I were you.)

The trope of starting your adventure in a tavern is overused because it works, and works very well. A D&D tavern is a public space where anything could happen, where anyone might be found, and where the elements presented are basically safe and well understood by both players and characters. And that’s very much the heart of storytelling: you start your reader in the known, where they feel safe and grounded, then you move them into the unknown, where the conflict and the drama can be fully expressed.

The “you start in a tavern” trope gets used for good reasons, but it gets overused to the point of being a satire of itself. How can we take the best parts of the trope, give them a little pizzazz, and make an adventure opening that resonates with players and DMs alike while still being functional?

You May Ask Yourself, How Did I Get Here?

A major problem with starting in that ubiquitous tavern? It’s too easy and too comfortable. That’s the problem with any so-called “no brainer”: it requires no brains at all, and that’s dangerous territory to be in when you’re creating. If no thought goes into it, it’s far too easy to miss things that go wrong, or to lose sight of new elements that could make your creation unique and memorable.

One of the most sobering things I was ever told in my creative writing classes was this: when you write a short story, unless you hook the reader in the first half-page, they’re unlikely to finish. With a novel you might have a few pages instead of a few sentences, but the same holds true. That tension of creating the perfect opening is one of the challenges and thrills of fiction writing, and while the same sort of razor’s edge audience-grabbing might not be necessary in adventure writing, it’s still important to start as strongly as you can.

When you’re writing your adventure opening, remind yourself that players and their characters are likely going to need to answer two questions when they sit down to play your adventure:

  • Where am I?
  • Why am I here?

When we think about typical adventure design and game play, those two questions are generally answered by the DM or the adventure designer. The “where” is the opening scene, and the “why” is the adventure hook. “You’re at the Inn of the Welcome Wench, and you’re here seeking your fortune amid rumors of strange goings-on in the area”: this is my distilled version of the hook and the opening for one of the most famous introductory adventures in D&D history, The Village of Hommlet.

Hommlet, like countless adventures of its time, hands the players the hook and the opening like a parent handing a hungry kid a piece of buttered bread. It’s not very exciting or particularly nutritious, but it holds them over until dinnertime. When we think about adventure openings and hooks in our current D&D climate, we don’t want to think bread and butter. We want to think more creatively. Not only do we want our players eating better, we want them to help make their own snacks.

The Hook Should Bring You Back

So how can we get players to make their own hooks? Let’s start by being honest: as a DM, maybe your home group cares only about the “where” for their characters and not about the “why.” And if you’re writing only for your home group, that’s totally fine. They’re just sitting there waiting for any old piece of bread before they dig into dinner later. They just want to be told where the first fight is, and they’ll get there using any reason you tell them. There’s nothing wrong with that.

However, if you are writing an adventure for publication or distribution, you never know what the characters want—or more terrifying, what their players want. As an adventure designer, be prepared to help the DM running your adventure with a variety of hooks, even if you are the DM. And better yet, let the characters create their own hooks.

If you are still paying attention, you are probably asking, “How in the name of Tymora can I know what every player wants or what makes every character tick?” Good question, intrepid reader. The fact is, you don’t. However, you have tools provided by the friendly and keen creators of fifth edition D&D to help you help DMs.

Backgrounds are a great option for creating a hook that adds a personal touch to an adventure you’re creating. Take a look at chapter 4 of the Player’s Handbook and imagine how someone with that background might have a pre-existing connection to the adventure you’re writing. You can even group them together to cover a wider range, as a charlatan, criminal, and urchin might have similar experiences coming into the adventure. If you can think of a hook for every background in the Player’s Handbook, you have a hook for practically any character in D&D—or enough of one that a DM could work with.

Another set of wonderful tools are the factions. The core rules describe a number of factions important to the Forgotten Realms that characters can join. These factions are more than just organizations, of course. They represent a typical mindset and goal set that are common to many adventurers. If a PC is all goodness and light, that player might place the character in the Order of the Gauntlet. If a PC tends to walk the grey line between good and evil, the Zhentarim is a likely group for them. As you write your adventure, think about how characters belonging to these groups might be introduced to the adventure at hand. The players are telling you what they want when they join those factions. You simply need to create a hook for the faction, not for each individual character. If a character cares about nature at all, they would be hooked by any opening that would interest the Emerald Enclave.

If you aren’t adventuring in the Forgotten Realms, these factions are still useful. They likely have analogous groups in a different world. They might need only slight alterations to be useful in Eberron, Ravenloft, or any of the other game worlds out there, including homebrew ones. Any homebrewed world might have an organization like the Harpers. Moreover, every world has its own factions. The Dragonmarked houses of Eberron make great patrons for adventuring parties, for instance.

If you translate these factions’ goals into potential character goals, and create information these factions might have into rumors that your characters know heading into the story, you have ready-made adventure hooks to provide the characters. While they are not as personal as saying, “Hey there, Betty the Barbarian, the mayor of this town killed your brother,” these hooks are more personal than, “You’re looking for adventure.” The mayor may be suspected of killing a member of a character’s faction, and that hook can carry a lot of narrative and motivational weight as the adventure starts.

Show Don’t Tell (or Tell, Don’t Show)

Now let’s talk about opening scenes. Your adventure’s opening scene is the first impression you’re making on the DM, and by extension the players. These opening scenes are powerful simply by their placement at the start of the adventure, in terms of not only the story that is unfolding, but the tone of adventure as well. As I have mentioned many times already, that tone is vital to the DM’s understanding of your adventure and the players’ enjoyment of the adventure.

One of the most common pieces of writing advice is “show, don’t tell.” Like most advice, this is solid advice… until it’s not. In most cases in fiction writing, showing is more powerful than telling. However, telling has a power to it as well, making it an essential part of a writer’s toolkit. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” is one of the most famous openings in literature, and it’s memorable for telling the reader that the story to follow is complex and simple and heroic and tragic all at once. Twelve short words carry so much narrative weight because they tell the reader rather than attempt to show.

More valuable writing advice, even for adventure writing, is this: “show if you can, tell if you must, but don’t do both.” Because we must remember, as we write our adventures, that despite my earlier advice, we are not writing fiction. D&D adventures are more like technical writing than creative writing, because it is important that the reader (the DM) understands the intentions and mechanics of the work, in addition to the potential for the stories that may unfold.

Describing a troll’s lairs with poetic language might be fun, but it doesn’t help the DM understand the layout and the mechanical elements of the area. Setting forth logical connections between encounters is more important than writing entertaining text. That doesn’t mean, of course, you can’t write entertaining and evocative prose; however, if you can tell the DM something in 20 words rather than showing them in 100, use the former approach rather than the latter.

All of this advice goes for any part of the adventure, but the adventure’s opening is particularly crucial. You want to set the stage, as quickly and efficiently as possible, without leaving too many gaping holes that the DM is then forced to fill in. Of course, some DMs like that flexibility and have no trouble adding their own flavor to your adventure, but just as many DMs buy a published adventure exactly so they don’t have to fill in those gaps. Those former DMs can always cut things out, but the latter have a harder time adding things. Serve the largest audience you can.

Finding the right level of completeness versus ease-of-use is always a moving target, from adventure to adventure and audience to audience. It’s most crucial in this opening scene, where attention is most focused. So, what are some shoulds and should nots in opening scenes?

Set the scene, but get the characters making choices and telling their own stories as quickly as possible.

This is another reason why the tavern is so tempting. You say, “You’re in a tavern,” and the scene is set pretty well in many players’ minds. Unfortunately, that scene is probably different in each player’s mind, but at least it’s a comfortable place for them. In as few words as possible, tell the characters where they are; show them some details that are important to plot, scene, character, etc.; give them a reason to be where they are; and then get to the most important question in gaming as soon as you can: “what do you do?”

Establish tone and theme quickly.

If you’re writing a mystery, let your opening create a sense of mystery. If your adventure is taking on a horror theme, add details that are disquieting and move the characters quickly out of their comfort zones. This doesn’t have to be over-the-top, but details matter. If an adventure is going to be particularly bloody and violent, have the characters see a townsperson with a bloody nose pass them on the street. That might take you an additional 15 or 20 words to add, but it is memorable and sets a tone. It’s a big payoff for a short investment of words.

Don’t give every detail within the first three minutes.

Even if you have created the most brilliant and elaborate plot for your adventure, which the players are going to adore, let them tease out those details with their actions and questions rather than getting it in large chunks of exposition. Presenting the scene is good; bludgeoning players with endless details is not. I’ve heard that the human brain can only remember 10 things at once. Sub-human brains like mine? More like three things. Give the basics, and then provide a path to learn more.

Provide differing paths, or types of paths, to learn the same information.

If it’s important that the characters playing your adventure know the town’s special laws right at the start, and also quickly know the names and personalities of the town councilmembers, and the exact locations of murder sites, and the current motivations and alibis of the suspects in those murders, use different vehicles for transmitting that information.

The laws can be put on a handout for easy reference, and the locations of the murder sites can be provided on a map handout. The sheriff with a unique accent can speak the names of all the suspects and describe their alibis, while the town councilmembers can be introduced through roleplaying with the party at a public event (and also provided in a handout). These varied approaches to introducing details has a better chance of sticking in the players’ minds than just hearing them listed by the DM in a monotone reading voice.

Get to the action as soon as you can, whatever that action might be.

If you need to start in media res, do that!

Oops, Latin is a Dead Language

In media res is a Latin phrase meaning, “I don’t want to create fancy hooks and openings for my D&D adventure.” My translation might be a little off, since the days of my college Latin classes are long gone, but I think that’s a pretty accurate translation.

Or maybe it means, “in the middle of things.” Either way, the idea is a sound one. All of the advice I’ve given leads in that direction anyway. If you start with the players in the middle of some action, where they are talking and making decisions rather than just listening and absorbing information, their minds are likely in a better place to absorb that information actively rather than passively. Educational theory backs this up. Active learning often matches or outperforms passive learning, and multiple modes of learning are generally better than a single mode.

If you think the players of your adventure appreciate a good combat, start your adventure with “Roll initiative.” Players who prefer to have tons of information before making decisions may feel lost for a moment, but there are ways to alleviate that. Allow each character to ask one question as they take their turn in combat, such as “where are we?” or “who are we fighting?” Before the end of the combat, the characters will not only know the situation, they’ll have paid better attention than they would have if you’d started with, “You’re in a tavern.”

In the next article, we’ll create an opening for our in-progress adventure, and we’ll talk about one of the most controversial topics in adventure design: boxed text!

What's your favorite opening scene from an adventure you've run? Let us know in the comments. 


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.

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