Sit down and shut up. Class is back in session. Time for the second real lesson in this whole simple, homebrew campaign thing. Or maybe the third. Or the fourth. I’ve lost track. I probably shouldn’t count the bulls$&% introduction wherein it took me 5000 words just to define the word campaign — and I didn’t even get it right — so this is the second real lesson. Chronologically. But technically, it’s the third lesson. Or, more technically, it’s the first of two second lessons. Well, the second of two second lessons.

What the hell am I babbling about? Well, it’s like this. I spelled out this step-by-step campaign startup checklist thing, right? This:

1. Write a Premise
2. Make Some Characters
3. Write Your First Adventure
4. Build a Starter Town
5. Build a Region Around the Town
6. Write Your Second Adventure
7. Run the Campaign Until You’re Done

But, as I said, this ain’t really a procedural, step-by-step thing. For instance, while you’re running the first adventure, you’re also making the starter town and the region and planning the second. And also, for instance, you usually end up doing the character creation s$&% and the first-adventure-building s$&% at the same time.

It depends, really. Some GMs like to build their first adventure before they sit through the character generation s$%&. Other GMs like to have the character roster settled before they try to crap out an adventure. And real GMs with adult lives outside the gaming world usually can’t be choosy. They have to schedule the character generation session — or appointments — whenever they can. And meanwhile, they’ve got to build the first adventure an hour at a time, whenever they can find an hour to work.

I’m going to assume you’re a real, adult GM. If you’re not, good for you. Have a f$&%ing cookie and go sit in the corner while the grownups talk. The rest of us will have to do steps two and three whenever the f%$& we can manage them. Preferably as quickly as possible so we can just start running the f$&%ing game already.

That’s why this is really one of two different lesson twos. As to why I’m confused about whether it’s the first or the second…

Look, I ain’t perfect. I put on my skateboard pads one knee at a time like all my fellow kids. And I f$&%ed up. But, really, it’s your fault I f$&%ed up. You always want me to turn this chaotic, haphazard gaming s$&% into simple procedures and checklists. When I wrote that checklist, I knew steps two and three were independent, simultaneous things. But I had to put them in some arbitrary order. That’s how checklists work. I just forgot the order when I started working on this lesson. And I was three pages of notes and outlines into this s$&% before I noticed I was supposed to be talking about character generation.

So… lesson three: writing the first adventure.

From Premise to Adventure

Today’s article’s a continuation of the Let’s Build a Simple Homebrew Campaign series I started a couple of weeks or months or whatever ago. And for reasons I explained in the Long, Rambling Introduction™ above, I’m going off the f$&%ing rails. Today’s Step 3: How to Write Your First Adventure. And we’ll circle back around to Step 2 next time.

Not that it matters. I told you already you can do those two things in either order. Or bounce back and forth between them as your time allows. And once you’ve finished both steps, you’re ready to gather your party and venture forth. To run your first session. And then to move on to town-building, region-building, and second-adventure-making.

We’re On an Adventure!

I don’t want to get bogged down in definitional bulls$&% again. But I do want to remind you that an adventure is a short, self-contained chunk of gaming. Adventures start with goals, end with resolutions, and have a whole bunch of traps and monsters and obstacles in between.

And when you string a bunch of adventures together, they make a campaign.

I also want to point out — just to dispel any potential confusion over this s$&% — that there’s a difference between a session and an adventure. A game session’s a single gaming group meeting. It starts when your players arrive at your house to play D&D — or whatever you’re playing — and it ends a few hours later when you’re cleaning up the mess your players left behind. And trying to figure out who spilled mayonnaise on the ceiling. And how.

Most adventures play out over several game sessions. Ideally two or three. Four’s okay once in a rare while. One’s fine now and then as a diversion. But two to three’s the ideal. That said, if you’re just learning the homebrewing ropes, all your adventures are going to run long. Eventually, you’ll figure out how much your group can get done in one session and you’ll get better at pacing your sessions and keeping your peanut gallery focused and you’ll be able to plan this s$&% better. You’ll start hitting that two-to-three session bullseye reliably.

Unless you’re me.

Or you run online.

Or you’re me running online.

Point is your first adventure should require two or three sessions to play through. But it’s probably going to take three or four if you’re new to homebrewing.

An Adventure for the Everyman

You might be wondering how you can possibly do the adventure-building and character-generating in either order. Or even simultaneously. Shouldn’t you know something about the characters you’re writing an adventure for? And shouldn’t the players know what the adventure’s about before they make characters for it?

Yes. And yes. That would be wonderful. Perfect even. But it’s also kind of f$&%ing impossible. Because of how time works. How the hell can both things happen before the other thing? I mean, that’s not Stephen Hawking level arrow-of-time s$&%. It’s just basic cause-and-effect.

Here’s the deal: there’s advantages to doing one — either one — before doing the other — either other. But it ain’t necessary to do either first. And that’s because — thanks to my brilliant instruction — you wrote a premise. Remember the premise:

The Adventuring Adventurers Who Have Adventures

In a fantasy world littered with the ruins of ancient empires and fallen kingdoms, in a dark age of history, a group of humble individuals leaves the simple work-a-day lives of their kin to make their way as traveling adventurers. Though they start as strangers to each other, they soon learn to work together and eventually trust each other as each seeks their own fate and fortune in the world.

After a chance event gives the would-be heroes their first taste of adventure, the party discovers further opportunities for adventure in the world’s scattered villages, towns, and cities. After choosing to pursue a particular opportunity, the party generally prepares in town for their adventure. They buy supplies, gather resources, and seek out useful information. Then, they must usually leave town and travel to the adventure’s site, dealing with the challenges of crossing the untamed wilds. Once at the adventure site, they must overcome numerous obstacles and challenges before resolving the adventure’s major conflict. Victorious or not, the party usually returns to town to claim their rewards, to recover from their tribulations, to sell their treasure, to restock their supplies, to upgrade their equipment, and to study and train and thereby enhance their abilities. While in town, the adventurers often interact with the people of the world. They build relationships and gain a reputation. Those interactions inevitably lead to new adventure opportunities. Eventually, the adventurers will feel they’ve outgrown the particular town they’re in. Or wanderlust will take hold. They’ll move on to some new locale to start the cycle all over again.

As the campaign opens…

The magic’s in that third paragraph. Note how it deftly spells out the game’s starting point so the players can make characters and you can build an adventure that all slot… neatly… into… uh…

F&$% me. I never finished that premise.

Which reminds me of an important topic which I’m going to cover next.

Finishing the F$&%ing Premise

See? This is what happens when I try to be clever. And leave you with a fun between-class bit of homework. But it’s a good thing I did. Because some of you helpfully posted — or e-mailed — your completed premises. And thus, I was able to see just how badly I f$&%ed up explaining this s$&%.

Eh. I’m kidding. You all did fine. You had some good ideas. But I was a little unclear about just what that third paragraph had to do. Not that I could be much clearer before now. Because it ties directly into making characters and building adventures.

It’s like this: you and your friends are going to sit down at the first session and start playing, right? And something’s going to happen the minute you sit down to send your players’ characters off on some adventure. You’ll present a goal or snag them on a hook or incite an incident at them. Whatever. And then, they’ll pursue the goal or resolve the incident. And when they’re done, that’ll lead their characters into the campaign. Which is what the second paragraph of the premise is all about, right?

Well, that third paragraph — the one I didn’t finish — describes what’s happening in the game world — and at the game table — the moment before the PCs get snagged on some inciting incidental hook. What are the characters doing when the players sit down to play? And why are they doing it?

Some of you wrote some pretty grandiose s$&% for your third paragraphs. S$&% worth of a CRPG’s introductory cutscene. The kind that starts, “at the dawn of time, the Lords of Order and the Lords of Chaos were having a debate.” And that’s great if you’re writing a CRPG or a giant-a$& hardback adventure module. But this simple, homebrew campaign s$&% is all about, you know, simplicity.

When the game starts, where are the heroes? And why? What’s happening just before the adventuring s$&% hits them right in the junk?

As the campaign opens, the would-be adventurers meet for the first time at a roadside inn on their way to the town of Acrea’s Hold. Until recently, Acrea’s Hold was an abandoned ruin beyond the reach of civilization, having been ravaged by orcs during the Age of Empires. But the town’s been reclaimed and it’s currently being rebuilt. Its people face numerous challenges on the frontier edge of civilization. And the lands beyond its walls — the Lands of the Forgotten Kings — are dotted with the ruins of a civilization that predates the Zethinian Empire by centuries. Acrea’s Hold is rife with opportunities for do-gooders, fortune seekers, sellswords, sellspells, and explorers. But the adventures don’t wait for the heroes to reach Acrea’s Hold. For at that roadside inn, still days away from the town, the heroes are called upon to resolve some trouble on the road.

With that, you know exactly where the first adventure’s got to start. At an inn a few days from the starter town. And there’s trouble on the road. The heroes have to team up to untrouble it. All you’ve got to do is design an inn, a road, and some kind of trouble.

How Not to Build an Adventure

Now, look, I can’t teach you how to build an entire adventure. Not today. That’s way beyond the scope of this series. I’d need two or three articles at least. Probably more. Thing is, though, that if you’re starting a homebrew campaign, you’ve run at least one adventure already. If not, go run one. I’ll wait.

All good?

Great. Now that you’ve run an adventure, you know what an adventure looks like. Go write one of your own that fits the premise you came up with. Simple, right?

Okay, maybe it’s not that simple. But I never promised it would be. Well, okay, maybe I did. But, you know what, it’s actually not that hard to build an adventure. Most people struggle because they overthink this s$&%. Chapter 3 of the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide has perfectly serviceable instructions. And the Monster Manual is chock full of ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties to stock your adventure with. And if none of that s$&% works for you, just build a Quick and Dirty Dungeon to start your game.

Adventure building is just another one of those things that require time, patience, and practice to do well. And that you’ve just got to kind of muddle through until you can do it well. Once upon a time, ten-year-old kids made their dungeon adventures all the time. I know. I was one of them. And back then, I didn’t have any sexy gaming genius internet experts to show me the ropes. Hell, I didn’t even have an internet. Al Gore hadn’t invented it yet. Point is, you can make an adventure. Just make one.

But I’m not going to leave you totally high and dry. After all, you pay me to tell you how to do this s$&%. At least, some of you pay me. So I’m not just going to stop here with a “now get out of here you little scamp and write an adventure.” Instead, I’m going to run through a few bits of advice specific to designing first adventures for simple homebrew campaigns. And then, if you’re really good and I have a little extra time at the end of class, I’ll tack on an appendix or two to help you get started if you’re still stuck staring at a blank piece of graph paper and wondering how to actually fill it with adventure.

What Makes a Good First Adventure

Mostly, the first adventure for your simple homebrew campaign is just an adventure. And you write it like any other. But some adventures are better for launching simple homebrew campaigns than others. Here’s a few things you should do when you build your first adventure to give yourself the best chance of getting to a second adventure.

Keep it Short and Simple

Most adventures play out over two or three game sessions. You can sometimes get away with longer or shorter adventures. But keep the first one short. Aim for two sessions. Especially because you’ll probably need three.

To keep it short, keep it simple. Your adventure needs just one, single objective and no side objectives. Plan one climactic encounter or scene to resolve the adventure’s primary conflict. And include five to seven encounters and scenes of varying difficulty. Figure most of them will be combats but include one or two non-combat challenges or obstacles. Include a few non-encounter empty spaces with non-stressful interactions or unimportant decisions and you’re golden.

Keep Eyes on the Prize

Every adventure’s got a goal. But there’s goals and then there’s goals, am I right? Some adventures have complex goals with lots of steps. Some have evolving goals and revelations that change everything. And some adventures are just so f$&%ing mysterious that no one’s even sure what the goal really is.

And those are all great things to do with your second, third, and fortieth adventures. Not your first. For your first adventure, pick a simple goal, reveal it right at the start, and make the whole adventure about achieving it.

Show Off What the Campaign’s About

Your premise describes what you want your campaign to be about. Generally about. After all, campaigns are long things. If you do them right. And variety’s important. Every once in a while, there’ll be adventures that don’t really fit the campaign. Maybe the expedition-based plunder the dungeon then return to town and sell the loot campaign includes an adventure about defending the town from a bunch of vengeful dungeon monsters who got tired of being plundered. That’s cool. Occasional changeups keep campaigns fresh and exciting. Occasional.

But brand-spanking-new campaigns are already fresh and exciting. Because they’re brand-spanking new. So the first adventure should fit — perfectly f$&%ing fit — the campaign’s premise. If your campaigns about dungeon expeditions and returns to town, guess what kind of first adventure you should plan.

Hint: it rhymes with sponge in exposition.

Start with Action

Lots of GMs start their campaigns with roleplaying interaction scenes where the players get to introduce their characters and talk about their hopes and dreams and wander around the town experiencing a day-in-the-life of medieval fantasy heroes before they trip over anything to actually f$&%ing do. And if you’ve ever started a campaign like that — as a player or as a GM — you know that’s a f$&%ing mistake. Players can’t just start living in a world from the word go. Some think they can — those are the ones posting comments right now — but they’re wrong.

Jumpstart the game by starting with a problem. Something the players have to handle. An emergency that demands action. The best way to start your first adventure — assuming the players know the system’s rules — is to say
“roll initiative.” But if that doesn’t suit your campaign — because you want the adventure to be about what the campaign’s about — if a fight doesn’t suit your campaign, figure out what kind of desperate emergency does suit your campaign and start with that.

Give the Players Some Space

The first scene of the first session of the first adventure of your simple homebrew campaign’s an action scene. One where the players just have to roll dice and take mechanical actions. Not one where the players have to be their characters.

That’s what the second scene’s for. The being of characters.

Once the players deal with whatever challenge you fling at them, calm down and back off and let the players — and their characters — chat. And let them chat as long as they want. Within reason. If the players ain’t big roleplayers — if they’re happy saying s$&% like “I’m Derf the Dwarf and I have plate armor and a battleax and a beard” — don’t force them to do any more than that. But if they want to share their hopes and dreams and motives and backstories, give them the time and space to do it.

Think campfire scene after the fight on the road. Think standing around the town square after they’ve driven off the goblins. That kind of s$&%. Leave space for that.

And once the players are done interacting with each other — without you bothering them — be ready to jump in and interact with them a bit. As the world. As NPCs or whatever. Partly to give them a chance to interact with the world instead of each other and partly so you can drive a transition to the next scene. After the PCs have made their introductions, the NPC villagers emerge from their homes and the mayor thanks the PCs and tells them about how the goblins have been raiding more and more frequently and how they’re holed up in the waterfall cave. That kind of s$&%.

Lay Some Groundwork

Finally, your first adventure should set some s$&% up for the future. Now, that might seem tricky. After all, you haven’t written the entire campaign yet. And at no point will you ever have written the entire campaign. You haven’t even designed a town or a region or a second adventure. So what the f$&% are you supposed to set up? Whatever you want. Anything. Doesn’t matter. Just throw some s$&% in that could be s$&% later.

Make an NPC a member of an organization. A guild or a church or something. I mean, you didn’t build a town yet, but you know the town’s going to have guilds and churches. Is there a wizard in the group? He’s going to need to buy wizardy s$&% from someone. So mention a mysterious spellcaster in a tower. Orcs and goblins and barbarians don’t just spawn in camps and caves and dungeon rooms. They’ve got tribes. Are there goblins in your first adventure? Give them a tribal symbol. A bloody claw. Three knives. Paint something on their shields. Now they’re not just random goblins, they’re Bloodclaw goblins. Or the goblins from Three-Knife Hills. What does that mean? F$&% if I know. But I’ll bet you can do something cool with it later.

Point is, make up some random s$&% — names, symbols, organizations, NPCs, locations, rumors, whatever — and throw it in the game now so you can do cool s$&% with it later.

What Doesn’t Make a Bad First Adventure

If you do the crap I described above, you’re well on your way to starting your simple homebrew campaign with a good first adventure. But even if you do all that s$&% right, you can still f$&% up your first adventure. And the easiest way to f$&% up your first adventure is to try too damned hard not to f$&% up your first adventure. Seriously.

See, GMs overthink things. It’s in their natures. And some GMs are auteur snobs with tremendously high standards stuck in their heads. Which are stuck up their a$&es. Point is GMs try way too hard to create high art. And so there’s just some s$&% they won’t do. S$&% they think ruins their art. Unfortunately, that s$&% they avoid? Not only does that s$&% not ruin adventures, it actually makes it easier to write adventures. Especially first adventures. So, don’t be afraid of these things. They won’t ruin your game, they’ll just make it easier to run.

Simplicity

Lots of GMs are just too good for simple, straightforward adventures about rescuing princesses, killing orcs, or plundering dungeons. Those GMs make everything complicated and nuanced and their world is full of gray areas and moral ambiguity and complexity that make it really hard for players to sit down and start playing. Keep it simple. At least at first. And maybe even forever. Complexity and depth and engagement emerge from good gameplay. Not overly complicated adventure plots and backstories.

Cliches and Coincidences

The premise for my simple homebrew campaign involves a bunch of adventurers who meet purely by accident at an inn and then have an adventure fall in their laps. And I guarantee you that I caused more than a few aneurysms with that crap. Not that I’m sorry to rid the hobby of a few auteur snobs.

The vast majority of my campaigns start by accident in inns. And that’s by design. I decided long ago that that was just how I was going to do things. And not one player has ever given a single, solitary f$&% about it. Hell, I’d run four campaigns over six years for one group and they didn’t even notice every campaign started at an inn by accident until I pointed it out. People barely remember how campaigns start. And they don’t care anyway.

Being a GM is hard enough. Go for the low-hanging fruit once in a while.

Published Crap

Speaking of snobby auteurs who do everything the hard way, there’s some GMs who refuse to use monster stats and traps and treasures and plot ideas that come from their game’s published rulebooks. The rulebooks they paid hundreds of dollars for. The s$&% in the book’s perfectly good. Use it.

What’s Your Motivation?

And now I remember why I wanted to do the character generation lesson first. Motivation. I was planning to make a big deal about it. In fact, motivation’s the only fluffy bulls$&% backgroundy personality thing I was going to make any kind of a deal about at all. Every character in your simple homebrew campaign’s got to have a motivation.

Not a goal. A motivation.

I said it ain’t important for you to know anything about the characters before you build the first adventure. And I stand by that. You don’t have to know what the characters’ motivations are. But you’ve got to know that motivation’s a thing. A character’s motivation is the reason why they do the s$&% they do. Especially the adventuring s$&%. Characters motivated by their desire for wealth go on adventures to make money. Or find treasure. Characters motivated by their desire to the be the best go on adventures to face challenges and test themselves. Characters motivated by their desire to serve the greater good go on adventures that involve helping people or slaying evil. See how this works?

Your first adventure starts with a goal, right? I mean, all adventures start with a goal. And those goals are worth pursuing because they align with the characters’ individual motivations. Thus, to get the characters moving, you’ve got to hit them in the motivations. Problem is, you’ve got no idea what will motivate characters who haven’t been created yet. So how can you pull this off?

First, you actually do have an idea what’ll motivate the non-existent characters. A pretty good idea. Because, during character generation, you’re going to make absolutely f$&%ing sure every player picks a character motivation that suits the premise you wrote. Moreover, you’re going to make absolutely f$&%ing sure that every character’s a team player and is, therefore, willing to occasionally go along with something just to keep their place on the team. Smart rogues know it’s worth taking on a low-paying job now and then just to keep their allies happy. Because rogues can make a lot more money as part of a team than they can on their own. Lone wolf rogues don’t slay entire dragons and walk home with entire dragon hoards.

Second, if you’re doing this simple homebrew campaign s$&% right, you’re building yourself a pretty traditional D&D game with a pretty traditional D&D party. Which means any goal that appeals to a few of the four Gs of adventure motivation will probably work fine. Those are Gold, Glory, the Gods, and the Greater Good. Okay, that’s five Gs thanks to alliteration.

Point is, if the adventure pays well or offers any chance to get some treasure, if it provides any chance to test oneself or challenge oneself, if it offers a chance to preserve the natural order of the world, and if it provides a chance to slay evil or protect innocents, pretty much every PC will go along for the ride. If you’ve got a good-aligned priest offering to pay the PCs to slay an evil-but-rich peasant-killing abomination that no one else has been able to defeat, pretty much any non-evil character a player can make will be up for it.

And if that fails, just remind the players that this is the first f%$&ing adventure and maybe they could just go along with this one in the interest of getting the game rolling. For f$&%’s sake.

That never fails to get a first adventure started.

Appendix A: Filling a Blank with Adventure

I can’t teach you how to write an entire adventure in one appendix. And I’m not going to try. But if all the tools you’ve already got aren’t helping you put word one on your blank page, here’s an approach that’ll get the ball rolling. You still have to supply the good ideas and do the math and build the actual mechanical s$&%. But this should help.

Step 1: Come Up with a Premise

Come up with a goal. Doesn’t have to be a great goal. Just a goal. Any goal will do. Then, come up with a thing that’s in the way of the goal. Doesn’t matter what it is. That’s your adventure’s premise.

Remember: don’t be a snob. Keep it simple.

Valuable medicine has been stolen by orc raiders. The heroes are tasked with going to the orcs’ lair in some nearby ruins to get the medicine back.

Step 2: Summarize the Adventure

Reread your premise. Isn’t it great? Doesn’t it just promise grand adventure and excitement? Sure it does. So imagine what that grand adventure and excitement looks like. Seriously. Describe how the adventure goes in your head. Write it down.

Remember to start where your premise says the adventure has to start. And try to include all that s$&% I said makes a first adventure good. If you can’t work it all in the first time through, reread and then rewrite the summary. Keep doing that until you’ve got something that works.

The heroes arrive at a roadside inn just after it’s been pillaged by orc raiders. Most of the orcs have retreated, but a few stragglers and their wardogs are looting what’s left. The inn’s landlord and the other guests are hiding in the inn’s locked and barricaded cellar, unbeknownst to the orcs. The heroes kill the orcs and their doggies.

After the heroes introduce themselves to each other, the landlord and the inn’s guests emerge from their hiding place and thank the heroes profusely. A traveling merchant discovers his pack mule was slaughtered and his saddlebags were stolen. Unfortunately, it contained rare medicine needed in Acrea’s Hold. The merchant begs the party to help. He offers to pay them and also to put in a good word with the Trade Guilds in Acrea’s Hold if they help. The landlord says the orcs have been a menace to travelers and suggests they’re probably holed up in a nearby ruin. A traveling scholar with an interest in the ruins asks to tag along.

The party treks across the wilderness and confronts the orcs in the ruin. They fight orc savages, wardogs, and the berserker leader of the raiding party and recover the merchant’s bags. They discover the orcs are members of the Black Fist tribe, whatever that means. The party discovers some small treasures in the ruin and also a tablet covered with ancient, indecipherable writing. The scholar — if he tagged along and if the party kept him alive — claims the tablet.

When the party returns to the inn, the landlord and the merchant hail them as heroes. The merchant and the scholar join the party for the trip to Acrea’s Hold.

Step 3: Break Your Adventure into Acts

Take your summary and find the acts. Break it down into two or three broad parts during which the party’s trying to do some kind of specific something in pursuit of the adventure’s goal.

In Act I, the heroes fight the orc raiders at the inn and are then tasked with recovering the medicine from the orc’s camp in the ruins.

In Act II, the heroes travel across the wilderness to the ruins where the orcs are holed up.

In Act III, the heroes explore the ruins, kill the orcs, recover the medicine, and loot the ruins.

Step 4: Distribute Scenes and Encounters

With the adventure broken into acts, figure out where the gamey encounter and non-encounter scenes go. Figure you’ve got five to seven actual challenges to spread around. And a few non-encounter, non-challenge scenes. Spread them amongst the acts where you think you’ll need them.

Act I’s got one encounter — the fight with the orcs — and a non-fight interaction and exposition and quest-giving thing.

Act II’s a travel act. One small encounter is good enough. And maybe an interaction with the scholar if they bring him along.

That leaves me three or four encounters for the orc camp in the ruins in Act III. Perfect for a small dungeon.

Step 4: Come Up with the Encounters

Now that you know how many encounters you’ve got to work with and what’s happening in each act, figure out what the encounters actually are. Not mechanically. Not yet. Just brainstorm some ideas for the different encounters. Come up with a list you like. And make note of how easy or hard you think the encounters should be.

Try to stick with easy and moderate encounters, but end on a hard encounter as a climax. And try to include one or two non-combat challenges or obstacles. And remember, non-encounter interactions and decisions don’t count as encounters.

Act I’s easy. The party fights some orc savages and wardogs. Then there’s the non-encounter interaction first with each other and then with the landlord and the merchant and the other guests.

Act II can include a road obstacle of some kind. Maybe a washed-out bridge forces the PCs to find a way to cross a river swollen with snowmelt and spring rain. Or I can just throw some kind of wild animal at them. The scholar adds some challenge to whatever encounter happens because he’s a non-combatant non-adventurer.

Act III’s got to include a fight with orc savages and then a climax with an orc berserker. I can sprinkle some dogs in to balance those encounters. Down a side passage in the ruins, I can include an ancient trap or puzzle lock protecting a treasure. And in another optional room, I can throw in a fight with a creepy-crawly ruins monster. A giant spider or an ooze. Something like that.

Step 5: Finish Drawing the Horse

Believe it or not, you’ve got an adventure. You’ve got a goal, a summary, a structure, and a bunch of encounters. All you’ve got to do now is game it up. Grab stat blocks. Do the numerical encounter balance s$&%. Draw a map. Scatter some treasure around. And then come up with whatever else you can’t pull out of your a$& at the table. Flavor text, NPC descriptions, random world details, whatever. Anything you don’t think you can create on the fly, write it down so it’s ready for you.

And that’s it. You’ve built a simple adventure to start your simple campaign. Nice job.

Appendix B: The Meet Cute

Man, I am really feeling generous today. You’re a lucky bunch of f$&%ers. Let me give you a little extra bonus advice regarding the first five minutes of the first session of the first adventure of your simple homebrew campaign. And that advice is: figure out exactly what you’re going to do in the first five minutes of the first session of the first adventure of your simple homebrew campaign.

Thing is, it’s really hard to start running a game. Even experienced GMs struggle to start gameplay sessions. Even when the campaign’s going on for a while. It’s just really tough sometimes to open your mouth and have a game start spilling out. But the first five minutes of the first session of the first adventure of your brand-new campaign? Those are even harder. You want to talk about starting the brain engine on a cold morning? The first session of the first adventure of a new campaign’s the coldest GMing morning there is.

Worse, those first five minutes set the tone for the session. And you want to set a good tone. You want to start the session, the adventure, and the campaign strong. So even if you’re used to winging it, it’s worth actually planning in detail how you’re going to start your game. Yes. I’m actually suggesting that in this one instance, you actually write down some flavor text you can just read out loud. That s$&%’s like jumper cables for your GMing brain.

Beyond that, though, it’s also worth taking some time to build a strong opening. Despite all I said about cliches and coincidences and simplicity and how no one remembers how a campaign starts, a strong opening makes it a lot easier to run that first session. It settles your nerves and gets the players invested.

So, imagine those first five minutes. What are you going to say to get the game started? And what’s going to happen after that? How are you going to introduce the characters? Introduce the first challenge? Invite the players to act? Write it down. And overwrite. I never, ever tell you to write s$&% down. At least not notes for your game. And I certainly never tell you to write a lot. But I’m telling you. Write this down. And get detailed.

Now, read what you wrote. Is it fun? Exciting? Energizing? Can you make it more fun? More energizing? More exciting? Do so.

I ain’t going to give you a bunch of flavor text, but here’s how I’d actually play the initial encounter in that orc adventure I wrote in Appendix A.

I’d start by secretly rolling initiative for all the PCs behind the screen. Then, I’d put the dogs after the first PC. And the orcs after the second PC. Yep. I’d pre-roll the initiative and stack the order. Because I’m a filthy stinking cheater. And I’d probably do that s$&% before I even came to the table.

Whoever goes first? They get to be the first on-screen character. I speak directly to them. I describe their travels across the barren frontier, their hope of reaching Acrea’s Hold in a day or two, and their arrival at the roadside inn. I’d tell them how they realize something’s wrong. It’s quiet. And there’s a stench of blood on the wind. As they approach the gate to the yard, they can see vicious wolf-like wardogs worrying the corpse of a donkey. The dogs bark and lunge forward, getting ready to charge! They’re going to attack! What do you do?

I resolve the combat round and then the dogs get their turn. And then it’s the next PC’s turn. They, too, have been traveling. Maybe up a different road or across country or maybe just behind the first character but, due to the rugged land, they never saw them. Doesn’t matter. They hear the snarling and barking as they approach the inn, run up to the gate, and see the fight in progress. I drop their mini in the yard. What do you do?

After the second PC takes a turn, the door to the inn slams open. An orc savage emerges. Maybe two. An orc comes out of the stable. The orcs used their moves to get to the door and see what the noise was. Maybe one throws a spear. But now their turns are over. Time for the next PC to arrive. And so on.

And that’s how I’d start my simple homebrew campaign.