I’m on record as saying it would be impossible to create a simple, step-by-step process for RPG adventure building. And I stand by that. When it comes to making adventures, everyone starts in a different place and every adventure looks different. Every adventure needs different s$&%. But that hasn’t stopped people from demanding that I invent just such a process. And I’ve never been one to back down from a dare, however impossible or useless or stupid the dare. I have the scars to prove it.

Thing is, I’ve got something like four aborted series of articles that started with me promising that I’d show you how to build a nice, simple adventure. And if I can fail to follow through on a promise like that, I can definitely fail to offer a single checklist in a single article. So, here we go: I’m going to give you a nice, short, simple adventure-building process. And I mean that. I’m going to do this quick and dirty. Because that’s what people asked me to do, even though no one seriously believes I can do anything in less than 4,500 words.

So, that’s two impossible things I’m doing this morning. I’m giving you a short, straightforward adventuring building checklist. And I’m doing it in 3,000 words or less. And in the interest of winning this bet, the Long, Rambling Introduction™ is now over.

Angry’s Impossible Adventure Building Checklist

I don’t follow a simple, straightforward process when I make adventures. Adventure building is messy by its nature. And trying to give someone a checklist would be like teaching someone to paint anything they wanted by telling them what color to start with and what brushstroke to lay down first. That said, the Internet’s Patron Saint of Happy Trees and Calm Creation for Creation’s Sake, Bob Ross, managed to do exactly that. And if he can do it, I definitely can. After all, I run on passion and anger. And that s$&% has to be good for something.

If I did use a process, the one I’m going to give you is the one I probably would follow. And to make it easier to write this s$&%, we’re all going to pretend I actually do follow it. That’s just so I can say things like “I do this first” instead of “here’s the thing I’d do first if I followed this process, but I don’t because I’m a f$&%ing artistic genius and above such things and I’m only pretending there’s a process for all you peons who wish you were me.” That takes too long to type and I’ve got a limited word count.

This isn’t anything new, though. I lie like this in all my articles. I’m too lazy and scatterbrained to actually do the things I say I do. I don’t even use my homebrew rules after I finish testing them. “Okay,” I say, “that works. And now I never have to use this s$&% again. Thank God.”

Consider that caveat number one. I’m lying when I claim I follow this process but I’m not lying when I say I would follow it if I had to follow a process. Or if I was trying to learn how to do this for the first time. At least I’m owning the lie this time.

Caveat number two is that you can do any of the s$&% I’m about to lay out in any order you want. You can start building an adventure around anything. You can start with an idea for a goal or a setting or a scene or a climax or a villain or an NPC or a bunch of random bulls$&% from some crappy adventure generation table. And the more adventures you make, the more you tend to do things out of order. I’ve been building adventures for 30 years so I don’t do Bob Ross anymore. I paint my adventures like Jackson F$&%ing Pollock.

Caveat number three is that this simple process will get you a functional, fun adventure, but it’ll also get you a simple adventure. It won’t get you a masterpiece. That said, you can actually build a masterpiece if you push on this framework a little. If you twist and tweak. Hell, even though I don’t follow this framework precisely, all the adventures I build are just complex variations on this same theme. And I’m pretty sure you can build just about anything like this. Even big, open, sandbox games.

And that’s the caveats out of the way. And I’ve wasted 750 words on introductory crap. If I’m going to bring this hole in under par, I’ve got to start swinging my club at the meat.

Step 1: The Goal

Whatever inspiring idea you started with, your adventure needs a goal. What’s it about? What are the heroes trying to accomplish? What will it look like when they win?

Remember that Dungeons & Dragons is not a game. It’s a game-building engine. It’s Super Mario Little Big Dream Maker. The adventure you’re building is the game. And games need goals. Goals give the players context for their decisions. If they don’t know what they’re trying to do, they can’t make useful choices and they can’t work together.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have an adventure where the players get to pick a goal or pursue their own goals. You totally can. In fact, the idea behind a well-written sandbox adventure – which is an advanced topic for another class – is that sandbox games have lots of possible goals and the players can pick which ones to pursue when. Once the players have picked a goal like “let’s explore that haunted mine” or “let’s go gather flowers for the alchemist” or “let’s do whatever pays best,” the game plays out just like any other. The players go to the haunted mine or the Forest of Cursed Petunias or raid the Castle of Evil-But-Rich Monsters and have an adventure just like any other.

And just as the players can’t play an adventure without a goal, you can’t build one without a goal. The goal is the through-line. It ties everything together and gives you context for everything you make.

Crap. That took a lot of words. On to the next step.

Step 2: Boring Gamey Details

Now you have to decide the boring s$&%. How long should your adventure be? What level should it be? How many players can play? That kind of crap. If you’re making this adventure for your home game, you know most of those details already. But if you’re building for publication, now’s the time to decide who the adventure is for.

When it comes to length, I always decide how many sessions of play I want to waste on a given adventure. I really don’t care too much about how many levels the players will gain or anything like that. It’s about sessions. That will tell me how many scenes and conflicts and things I’m gonna need. Which I’ll start explaining in the next step. Which is now. Because I don’t have the word count to keep babbling about this.

Step 3: The Central Conflict

So, there’s a goal, right? Well, what’s the biggest, baddest, most troublesome thing between the heroes and that goal. What’s preventing them from just winning right now? The central conflict will – among other things – define the last challenge the players face before they win. Because once the central conflict is resolved, there should be nothing else in the way of the goal. Everything else is small potatoes. We call that a climax, kids. This is Narrative Structure 1-0-F$&%ing-1 here.

Now, the central conflict doesn’t have to be a boss monster or villain. It can be anything. Any group. Any force. Any challenge. Any conflict. When you’re looking for lost treasure, the fact that no one knows where it is provides the central conflict. I mean, it could. It depends. Because you can pick whatever you want to be the central conflict. Do you want the adventure to be about finding a lost treasure or do you want it to be about racing a rival pirate to the lost treasure? See what I’m saying?

Here’s the thing, though. If your central conflict is something big or vague or nebulous or conceptual, you want a proxy to represent the conflict. If the central conflict is that the townsfolk hate the heroes, have a single, rival NPC represent the town’s hatred. When the PCs win that rival over in the last encounter, the rest of the town falls in line.

Got it? Moving On.

Step 4: Plot Points

Now it’s time to figure out what major steps the players have to take to win the adventure. You can write a simple list – that’s the easiest way – or you can come up with a prose description of how the adventure should play out if the heroes do everything right. Just remember you’re not describing every encounter and challenge. You’re describing the major steps that add up to the goal. The sub-goals. Surprisingly, there’s a simple formula for this. I wish I could tell you what it is, but I don’t have the word count.

Ha! I’m just f$&%ing with you. The secret is that you need one major step or plot point for every one or two sessions play. That keeps you from overcomplicating short adventures and ensures that long adventures have enough lesser climaxes and reversals and victories to feel good.

Step 5: Scenes

Now, take all the sub-goals – the plot points – in your adventure and take the main goal of the adventure and assign each one to a single scene. Remember, in the Angrycan Church, a scene is a continuous chunk of action in which the heroes are trying to accomplish a specific thing over the course of several encounters that occur in a certain place over a certain period of time.

Scenes are narrative tools. The rules for what makes a scene a scene aren’t too specific. The location can be big or small. An entire dungeon or a single level in that dungeon. A whole town or a single building. A tiny tangle of trees or an entire forested region. And a scene can play out over minutes or hours or days or weeks. The important thing is that moving from scene to scene is significant. It feels like a big change. It’s not like walking from room to room or building to building. It feels like going somewhere entirely different.

If you’re following the complex math I’ve been using, you’ll have figured out that a scene takes one or two sessions to play through. And since each scene involves a significant development in the adventure, that ensures you’ll have a nice narrative structure however long your adventure goes. See how this all ties together?

And now I really have to struggle with the word count. Because now, for each scene, you have to take a few steps. That’s right, we’re doing interim steps. Call it the Lightning Round.

Step 5A: The Scene’s Setting

Every scene is limited to a single setting. As I said, the size can vary. And the setting can even be nebulous. “The wilderness between the town and the dungeon” is a totally valid setting.

Step 5B: The Scene’s Central Conflict

Remember what I said about the adventure’s central conflict? This is the same thing but smaller. Since every scene has a plot point or goal, every scene needs a major conflict. What’s the biggest, baddest thing keeping the players from getting what they want from the scene. Remember that boss monsters and villains aren’t the only choices but if you decide to do something nebulous – like “the wilderness hates adventurers” – you’ll want to have a proxy step in for some kind of climax. That proxy doesn’t have to be an NPC or monster either. The last riddle the party has to solve to unlock the vault or the swollen, raging river the party has to cross are both fine proxy climaxes.

And don’t forget that you can tie a scene’s central conflict into the adventure’s central conflict. If the central conflict of the adventure involves a powerful cult and the proxy for that conflict is the cult’s leader, a lieutenant or spy from the cult makes a good source of central conflict for an investigation scene in town.

Do I have to mention that the central conflict in the adventure’s last scene is the central conflict for the adventure?

Step 5C: The Scene’s Stakes

What’s at stake in the scene? How does the scene affect the adventure as a whole? If the players win, do they get anything apart from just being able to continue? If they f$&% up the scene, can they continue the adventure, or is the adventure over? And if they can continue, how does their f$&% up hurt their chances in future scenes.

This can be the hardest part of adventure building and I could write a whole damned article about how to add stakes to scenes and encounters. And I can’t believe I just wasted over 30 words pointing that out.

Step 5D: The Scene’s Structure

You need to decide – in general – how the encounters in a scene fit together. Is it a gauntlet where encounters fling themselves in the party’s path? Is it a branching path or flowchart or dungeon map? Is it an open morass with encounters floating around that the players can ping-pong between? And are the encounters all planned? Do some of them pop up at random? Or pop up at specific times and in response to specific things?

You don’t have to map the scene yet. Just have an idea of what the map – or list or timeline or whatever – will look like.

And remember that it’s good to have a mix of structures in a long adventure. Move between open scenes, linear scenes, and branching path scenes. It adds variety and improves the pacing.

Step 5E: The Scene’s Length

I know I said that scenes should stick around for one or two sessions, but you’ve got some wiggle room here. You can have a half-session scene. Or you have a scene that lasts as long as three sessions. Don’t go longer than that. And if you go shorter, you don’t have enough meat to make whatever you’re doing a scene. So revise. But mostly stick to scenes that last for one or two sessions.

And now that you’ve defined each scene, it’s time to finish the adventure with the last two steps.

Step 6: Map and Populate the Scenes

This is the most complicated, longest, meatiest part of adventure building. Map each scene out according to its structure and fill in the encounters. Or come up with a bunch of encounters and then connect them together according to the scene’s structure. I wish I could give you more advice than that.

And I can!

Every scene has a central conflict, right? The last encounter in every scene – the climactic encounter – is about resolving that conflict. So you’ve automatically got one encounter you know you have to design and you know where it goes in the structure. Like the scene where the heroes save the rival’s life during the typhoon and win him over.

Beyond that, if you’re going with scenes that last for one or two sessions, you’ve got room for one or two major encounters. Those are big, significant obstacles that are in the party’s way. Maybe they tie into the central conflict of the scene or adventure. Maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re big things in the way. Just not the biggest things in the way.

Aside from the major encounters, you also have room for two to four minor encounters. Those are small obstacles that usually don’t tie into the central conflict at all. They’re incidental things. The rats in room 6. The con artist at the festival who tries to rob the party. They might cause minor setbacks or offer minor rewards, but the adventure doesn’t really hang in the balance. That said, the more complex and interconnected your scene, the more intertwined and substantial even the minor encounters will be. A murder investigation can hinge on a very small encounter.

By the way, if you’re running a long adventure, you can build each scene as you need it. When the party gets close to finishing one scene, you start building the next. That way, you don’t have to do as much up-front work and you can tailor and tweak the scenes based on how the adventure plays out.

Now it’s down to the wire. I’ve got a couple hundred words left and I’m on the last step.

Step 7: The Hook and the Resolution

There’s two more scenes that every adventure needs. Every adventure needs to start with a hook and end with a resolution. The hook presents the players with the goal and gives them a reason to care about the goal. The resolution provides the payoff. Presenting goals and getting the players to care about them is really tricky. I wish I had enough of a word count to give you some advice. Sorry.

Oh. I probably shouldn’t have to explain this, but if you’re populating the scenes as you go, you have to start with the hook. You can’t save it for the end. Unless you’re doing some nonlinear, deconstructive bulls$&%. And don’t. Because you’re no Chris Nolan. Trust me.

And that’s it. That’s a quick and dirty, step-by-step adventure building process in under 3,000 words. I actually f$&%ing pulled it off. And now I’m going to shut off my word counter for just one paragraph to say this:

Dance for your next article, kiddos. Coming up with this process and writing this article was actually kind of a fun challenge. And I feel like I can do more with the stuff I came up with. So, what would you like me to do with it? I can analyze each step in excruciating, Angry detail and offer all sorts of advice. I can go through the process of planning a simple adventure by following these steps. I can talk about the ways to twist and bend and tweak this framework to do cool things. I know lots of you want more adventure building content. What do you think I can do with this process to help you the most?

Dance in the comments. Dance.