So, last night – and if you knew when I was actually writing this, you’d know which night that was, but it doesn’t matter – last night, my players finished the first adventure in my new online D&D campaign. Because, finally, after over a year of chaos, I’m actually running a game again. For real. I mean, yeah, it’s just D&D and it’s actually just D&D in a freaking published setting, so it’s like amateur hour. But you take the game you can get. Even if it’s served up with beer and pretzels.

Honestly, I chose it that way. I was suffering from some serious burnout, creative fatigue, and exhaustion and it was keeping me from running games. Protip: the cure for GM burnout is NOT to stop running games. That doesn’t do anybody any good. Don’t take a break, but do make a change. That’s a story for another time though. My point is, after trying and failing to start numerous complicated games in homebrewed campaigns in all sorts of different systems, I finally looked at my players and said, “look, I just need to run a game; I don’t need a massive amount of front-loaded effort, so can I just run some published D&D adventures until I’m back on my GMing feet?” And they were like, “yes, please, just do that so you actually run something because we just want to game too.”

So, I decided to use the The Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide that WotC put out back in 2015 as the basis for an adventure-of-the-week style game. It basically just provides a bunch of world lore about a little chunk of northwestern Faerun that encompasses some of the most iconic locations in the Forgotten Realms. Now, I am not a Realms fan by any stretch. I’ve never run a game in the Realms. But I do have some familiarity with the classic stuff through cultural osmosis and video games. I know Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate and Candlekeep and Waterdeep. I know of them, at least. And I figured I’d just grab some published adventures or convert some old adventures to 5E and transplant anything not already in the Realms to the Sword Coast. And I wouldn’t worry about an overarching story. Just run a different adventure every week for a group of mercenary adventurers forced together by happenstance and adventuring for glory, gold, and the Gods. Or whatever. All of that would let me focus on running without having to weigh myself down with a bunch of planning work that I didn’t have the time or creative energy for.

A week after that decision was made, I was drowning myself in Realms lore, working with the players to detail their character backstories, fitting everyone into different regions and ethnicities in the Realms, and writing my own damned starting adventure after all. Because, it turns out that the moment I turned the pressure down a few dozen PSI and gave myself permission to just engage with the game to whatever degree I wanted, things started to flow again. And I was excited. So, that’s another lesson, I guess. But just about gaming. Not about real life.

Now, I’ve been talking a big game about adventure building lately. I’ve been talking about the components that every adventure needs to have and how vital goals are and how failure should be addressed and on and on. Because, man, do I ever go on. And on. And I thought it might be a good idea to give a bit of an object lesson by taking you through the basic design of my latest adventure. Especially since, even though it was a little clumsy and I’m a bit rusty, it still went pretty great. Even though it didn’t go as planned. Especially because it didn’t go as planned.

So, without further Long, Rambling Ado, let’s talk about how I wrote a pretty good adventure to start off a crappy, adventure of the week campaign set in some bloated, overly detailed world I didn’t write.

Planning – Or Lack Thereof

This is going to be a quick and dirty example of how I laid out the basic, necessary elements for an adventure I ran recently as part of my new campaign set in the Sword Coast region of Faerun in Toril in the Forgotten Realms. Well, I say quick and dirty, but we know that’s a lie. I don’t do anything quick. But it was pretty dirty. And the reason it’s pretty dirty is because I tend to favor Working Smart and Planning Soft. What that means, as I’m sure you remember, is that I don’t write a lot of stuff down. I keep it all in my head. And I tend to plan things out in a general way and pull them together at the table. So, if you’re expecting to see a bunch of maps and encounters and paragraphs of rules and shit, well, you’re going to be disappointed.

But that’s okay. Because I don’t really want to show all of that minutia yet. I want to show you how to lay the foundational elements I’ve been talking about: Goal, Motivation, Backstory, Hook, Structure, Pace, Scenes, Resolution, and Denouement. The things an adventure absolutely must have in order to function as an adventure. And the things you probably should figure out BEFORE you try to run the game. At least, to some degree. Even if it’s just scribbled on a cocktail napkin or stored in your head.

So, don’t expect to get a module you can run out of this. I mean, I got a module I could run out of it. But that’s because I know me and I can run an adventure off the back of a cocktail napkin as long as it’s my napkin and there’s a lot of stuff in my head. And it’s going to take me two articles to lay the entire foundation. But, after I’ve laid all the foundation, if there’s interest in it, I will come back to this and talk about how I built some of the mechanical elements and encounters and stuff. Because there ended up being a lot going on in the adventure and those elements might serve as a good object lesson in encounter and scene design.

Anyway, now that I’ve set the expectations sufficiently low, let’s get designing.

A Spark to Dry Tinder

The hardest part of writing an adventure is having the first idea. The one that gets the whole thing started. You see, even though I laid everything out as a sort of checklist – Goal, Motivation, Hook, etc. – the truth is that you rarely design everything in order like that. You don’t necessarily have to come up with the goal first. And you don’t finish coming up with the motivation before you come up with the hook. Truth is, you tend to bounce around a lot. You come up with SOMETHING first. And then you come up with other things based on that something. And then you come up with other things that reveal problems in the somethings based on the thing. And then you discover the thing doesn’t quite work. So, you have to rework the thing and change the somethings based on the thing. And you keep doing crap like that until you have a list of things that will probably work. And eventually, things get firm enough that you can sit down and start designing the fiddly bits: the scenes, the encounters, and the structural and pacing elements.

And even after you’ve figured out the parts you’re going to figure out and circled the blanks so you remember that you need to fill them in at the table, you still tend to change things before you start running the game. Or while you’re running the game.

The point is, I can’t tell you how to come up with that first idea. But you need that first idea. You need something. And for me, that something was a stealth escort scene. And I can’t even tell you how or why that popped into my head. I wanted a scene where the party was sneaking out of the city – and sneaking someone out with them – while guards were looking for them. I wanted that scene in my adventure.

Okay, that’s not everything I knew. I knew a few other things. I knew that the adventure was starting in the city of Baldur’s Gate. That’s because I had sat down with each player before the start of the campaign and figured out where their characters were from and where they likely were at the start of the game. See, we were doing the standard “unlikely band of heroes thrown together by circumstance because they all happened to be in the same place when an adventure broke out” thing. Remember, this was meant to be beer and pretzels play. I had a down-on-his-luck sailor swashbuckler devotee of Selune, a noble paladin of Helm, and two cloistered scholars, one a cleric of Mystra and one a warlock.

So, I needed a city that had a port and was near a place of learning and that also had nobility. And since I was starting a campaign about adventuring across the Sword Coast, I wanted to start on the edge of the Sword Coast. So, Realms lore fanatics will understand immediately why I chose Candlekeep-adjacent Baldur’s Gate. It’s literally the city that’s considered the GATEWAY to the Sword Coast. But I didn’t want to STAY in Baldur’s Gate. I wanted to get the party moving. I wanted the game to be about exploration and adventure, not urban intrigue. The rest of you just have to trust me when I say it was really the ONLY choice of a starting city for what I was doing.

In the end, that gave me a list of conditions: I needed a scene in which the party snuck out of a city with an NPC in tow while guard patrols were searching for them, I needed to start in Baldur’s Gate, and I needed to immediately LEAVE Baldur’s Gate.

And that, kids, is where adventure design starts: figuring out how the hell to get an actual game out of gibberish conditions and half-formed ideas about nothing.

Setting a Goal

The most important part of every adventure – the defining part – is the goal. I think I’ve said that once, or twice, or seven times. And I know it’s controversial, but I stand by it. The most important aspect of the adventure you’re designing is “what the hell are the players supposed to do to win the adventure?”

Now, fortunately, the crap I’d already come up with lent itself to a pretty obvious goal. If I want an adventure that features a scene of smuggling an NPC out of the city while patrols are looking for them and I want an adventure that starts in a city and immediately leaves the city and goes somewhere else, there is no better goal than “escort the NPC from the city to their destination.” I mean, I hope that logical leap isn’t too much for anyone.

Also note that as important as the goal is, it’s also usually the simplest element to spell out. You can’t do better than “verb the noun” with a few optional prepositional phrases.

Why Is This Happening? Why Do We Care?

I realize that many of you are probably screaming at your computer monitors and iPhone screens right now that that goal is woefully incomplete to base a game on. But, guess what? It isn’t. It’s a perfectly fine goal. All that crap you think is missing, that’s actually part of the Backstory and Motivation. That is, why is this adventure happening and why do the players and their characters care. Truth is, a lot of actually designing an adventure is about asking “why.”

So, we have an NPC. The NPC needs to get from Baldur’s Gate to someplace else. And they want the party to protect them. And, moreover, someone wants to keep them from getting out of Baldur’s Gate. Because we want a cat-and-mouse stealth scene about the party escaping from a city while guard patrols are hunting them. And that makes the most sense at the beginning of the adventure when the party is trying to get the NPC out of the city.

Now, there’s a lot of creativity involved here. And it’s impossible to explain how to come up with ideas. Sorry. I can only give some very general advice. So, here it is. First, keep it simple. Just because the ideas behind an adventure are simple, that doesn’t mean the adventure lacks depth. Depth is not a function of the complexity of the ideas, but rather a function of the number of ideas and how they interact. Do not reject ideas because they seem too simple. Or too cliché. Or too anything. In fact, don’t reject ideas. Seriously. Ideas are too valuable to just reject out of hand. It’s hard to come up with ideas. In fact, coming up with ideas is so hard that it’s often easier to massage a crappy idea into a good idea than it is to come up with a brand-new idea that’s actually good. So, be willing to write down your first good ideas and make them work instead of picking through ideas for the best ones.

So, my first idea is a runaway kid. Don’t know why. My brain was just like “what if the NPC is a young runaway?” And I was like “cool, I’ll work with that.” Because I can’t guarantee my brain is going to churn out anything else and I’m on a damned deadline. But then, I have to ask, what are they running from?

And now here’s where I turn from Backstory to Motivation. Remember, you have to bounce back and forth sometimes. And the problem I have is that my adventure is a starter adventure. It’s the first adventure in a new campaign and the characters are strangers to each other and I need to create an adventure that they will get caught up in. Which means, I have to create a situation – and an NPC – that each character will want to get involved in. Remember, Motivation is where you decide why the characters AND why the players will care.

Now, fortunately, I have some stuff going for me. First, the players KNOW this is a game of D&D and that there will be an adventure hook and they will have to accept it so the game can happen. And, seriously, that is something that every GM should be willing and able to take into account. And there’s nothing wrong with taking that into account either. But, the problem is that only gets the players involved. It doesn’t get the players attached. Now, that’s fine for beer and pretzels play. But I always aim for a little more attachment than that. And this is where it helps to know your players. But let’s pretend I don’t know my players and I have to motivate the players on the fly. There’s lots of things that pull people in. And the two that I can play on here are sympathy and curiosity.

And yes, you aren’t misreading. I am talking about motivating the players. The actual human beings at the table. Because those are the people who have to enjoy the game. The characters need motivations too, but the players need motivation more. And if the players are sufficiently motivated, they will find a way to motivate their damned characters. As long as you give them any excuse to drag their characters along, anyway.

Meanwhile, I do know a little something about the characters in play. I have two characters who are generally good characters who will do the right thing to help someone in need. That’s the paladin of Helm and the good-natured swashbuckler who reveres Selune. I have two other characters who are a bit trickier. First, I have a scholarly cleric of Mystra, the generally good goddess of magic. She’s concerned with preserving magic’s good name, with studying magic, and with helping magical folks in need. Finally, I have a scholarly warlock whose patron is an insane nightmare snake from another dimension. The nice thing about him is that he’ll pretty do whatever the voices push him toward. He’s easy to motivate.

So, I let all of that crap mix together in my head with the idea of a teenage runaway and see what pops out. An abused teenager is definitely sympathetic. The players and the good-aligned characters will jump at the chance to help someone like that. If there is something mysterious about the teenager and it is somehow related to magic in some way, I can also appeal the players’ curiosity, the cleric of Mystra’s interests in magic, and arouse the interest of the warlock’s brain snake.

The kid is a magician’s apprentice. But his teacher isn’t the nicest, most supportive teacher around. In fact, he’s downright mean and abusive. So, the kid makes a run for it. But the teacher wants him back. The teacher sends goons to bring the kid back. The party helps the kid evade the goons and then brings him to a place beyond the teacher’s grasp.

That’s good. But it’s not good enough. First, there’s some holes in the idea. Second, the motivation isn’t quite strong enough for all of the characters. Why does the teacher want the kid back so bad? If he’s just an apprentice and the teacher doesn’t like him, why expend resources to drag him back? And also, where’s the mystery, really? Where’s the magical intrigue that is supposed to appeal to clerics of Mystra and crazy brain snakes and curious players who like a good mystery? There has to be a little more to the story.

Okay, what if the kid is a sorcerer? What if he’s just coming of age and his powers are just starting to manifest? I mean, I assume that’s a thing that happens to sorcerers when they hit magical puberty. Like the X-Men, right? What if the kid was a failure as a wizard’s apprentice and the wizard had given up on him and was just using him as a servant? The kid just didn’t get magic. He couldn’t master spells or read magic or do anything. But unbeknownst to either of them, he had magic in the blood and one day, sorcery happened. And, let’s make it wild magic. The kid is a wild magic sorcerer. And while he’s no value as a student, to an unscrupulous wizard, he’s valuable in some other way. Like, I don’t know, sorcerer blood is good for some kind of evil magic.

That’s kind of neat. The party gets to escort a teenaged wild mage who can’t control his own magic and periodically explodes across the wilderness. A sympathetic character with powers he didn’t ask for, hunted by agents of his abusive master to be used in some fiendish ritual whose details don’t matter.

So, let’s look at the Backstory a little more. How did this kid end up an apprentice to a wizard if he had no magical talent at all? What if the wizard never wanted him as an apprentice. What if the wizard detected the wild magic whosamawhatsis around the kid from the get-go and was just waiting for it to manifest so he had a useful source of chaos magic blood? He’d be willing to pay for the kid. But who would sell a kid to an evil wizard? A parent who didn’t want him. Now, we could go with the “I sold him into an apprenticeship because I thought he’d have a better life” thing, but we’re going for heavy sympathy points. So, the kid’s own father sold him. How about that? Why? Because the kid’s mother died in childbirth. The father couldn’t handle the kid on his own, didn’t know what to do, and also secretly hated the kid for being the cause of his wife’s death. Then, along comes this offer from this wizard who is like “he’d make a fine apprentice; I’d gladly help you with your money troubles or whatever if you’d let me teach your boy.” Perfect.

Now, you might be asking one of two questions at this point. The first question you might ask is “how much of this detail is actually important?” And the answer is “about as much as I came up with there.” Because I’m creating this kid as a sympathetic character who will beg the party for help and travel with them for days. And if my emotional manipulation works, they are going to care about this kid. So, they are going to ask for details about the kid’s backstory. And that backstory is a nice, sympathetic gut-punch for do-gooder heroes. If they let this kid die or get captured, they are going to feel so guilty. Which is what I am going for as a GM.

The other question you might ask is “how do wizards detect magical talent and what is sorcerer blood good for; none of that shit is in any of the D&D books I’ve ever read. Shouldn’t you explain that crap?” And the answer is, nope. Don’t care. And neither will the players. I mean, the idea of detecting magical potential and the idea of using the blood of magical creatures and children in vile magic are both classic tropes most players will just roll with. And the players will never actually interact with the wizard. So, I only need to have enough detail to explain why the kid is valuable to the wizard so that it makes sense that he’d pay mercenaries to get him back.

Long story short, the Backstory is sufficient as is. Once upon, there was this kid whose mother died giving birth to him. His father was a jerk and sold him to an evil wizard as an apprentice. The kid had no magical talent and he was badly abused by the teacher who had no interest in him as a student. Instead, the wizard was waiting until his wild magic manifested so he could use his blood for dark magic rituals.

And the Motivation is this poor, abused and unwanted kid with mysterious magical powers he can’t control is trying to escape his evil master and get to safety and won’t you all be heroes and help him?

Perfect. Well, perfect so far.

How Can this End?

Once I had the beginning of the adventure firm in my mind – well, squishy because it would undergo some big changes as I kept designing – once I had the beginning of the adventure in my mind, it was time to think about the end. How could the players resolve this adventure? What were the possible outcomes? And when it comes to figuring out the likely Resolution, it’s important to consider both the best case and the worst-case scenario.

So, the party could fail if the kid was either captured and brought back to the evil mage or if the kid was killed. Or, obviously, if everyone in the party died. Now, if the kid did get captured, the party could try to mount a rescue, but that would be a different adventure. Remember, failure doesn’t have to end the campaign, but it does have to mark the end of one adventure and the beginning of another. But what would a good outcome look like?

Now, here’s where it’s important to keep in mind that Resolutions have to be Bright Lines. That is, they have to really resolve the adventure. Case in point, say the adventurers get the kid out of Baldur’s Gate and to some other city. What’s to say the wizard doesn’t just send his goons to grab the kid thereafter the party dumps him on the steps of the local orphanage or whatever? That’s not good enough. The kid has to be unambiguously and permanently safe for the adventure to be over. And the adventure is about escorting the kid to safety. The party can’t just kill the goons or kill the evil wizard. In fact, those things may not even be possible. The wizard could just hire more goons. And the wizard might be untouchable by the first level heroes, living as he does in the Upper City of Baldur’s Gate where adventurers can’t just kick down your front door and murder you.

Nope. I need a specific destination which is specifically safe. A destination the party knows is specifically safe. Or the kid does. The nearest dot on the map to Baldur’s Gate is Elturel. At least, the nearest city dot. And reading the description of Elturel, it seems like a pretty neat place. In the current age, it’s a place of lawful-goodness, warded from evil by a golden light granted by some good-aligned god, and protected by paladins, knights, and do-gooders. It definitely seems safe. But I can’t count on the players to pick that specific dot on the map. I need a better reason to push them there. The kid needs to fixate on Elturel as a place of safety. But why would he think that?

What if the kid has an uncle? His mother’s brother. And way back when the kid was young, he and his dad were crashing on the uncle’s couch. And his uncle – who never liked the deadbeat dad and never understood what his sister saw in him – offered to adopt the kid. But the dad had already gotten the offer from the wizard. And the dad didn’t like the uncle. And he wanted to get some money anyway. And the uncle – much as he wanted to – couldn’t bring himself to actually steal the kid from his father and hoped the wizard would treat him okay. But the kid remembered that. Maybe the uncle said, “if you ever get into any trouble, you’ve always got a place here.” And just to lay it on really thick, the uncle is one of the knights or paladins or whatever that protects Elturel. And that all makes the kid’s situation sadder and makes his dad even more of a dick. Extra sympathy points.

So, that’s the Resolution sorted: the adventure ends when the party safely brings the kid to his uncle in Elturel or when the kid is captured by the wizard’s goons or he’s killed. And that also adds a bit to the Backstory too.

All the Fiddly Bits in the Middle

So, now, I have all the basic elements that anchor either end of the adventure. I know what the goal is, I know why the adventure is happening, I know why the players and their characters will care about the adventure, and I know the adventure will end with the kid safely in his uncle’s care or dead in some ditch or locked in the wizard’s tower being bled for potion ingredients. The only thing missing is the middle. You know, all the scenes and encounters and the things the players will actually DO during the adventure.

And really, that’s sort of how it goes with adventure building. It’s a two-part process: anchor the endpoints of the adventure and then figure out the path between those endpoints. And it’s tempting to think of them as the “narrative bits” and the “mechanical bits.” But, that’s a crappy distinction. Because all of the bits are mechanical and all of them are narrative. So, I tend to think in terms of the “squishy bits” and the “fiddly bits.”

So, the stuff I figured out so far? That’s all squishy stuff. It’s soft stuff. Stuff you work out in your head while you’re driving or showering or pooping. The rest of the bits, which I will talk about in a second article, are the fiddly bits. They are the moving parts of the adventure that the players will actually interact with. Encounters, scenes, structures, decisions, conflicts, all that crap. They are the things that hang off the string that’s stretched between the squishy bits.

The thing is, though, what you find is that the squishy bits and the fiddly bits tend to feed each other. For example, I now know that the NPC the party is escorting is a wild magic sorcerer who can’t control his powers. And I know there are going to be some goons hunting the party. And I know the basic structure of the adventure is a road trip between Baldur’s Gate and Elturel. But when I start telling you about the fiddly bits, I’m also going to tell you how I discovered that the adventure foundation was actually crap. At least, it was insufficient. It would make for a crappy adventure without some serious changes.

But, just like I told the players at the end of the first session of this adventure, you’re going to have to wait until next week to investigate the naked woman in the underbrush.

Yeah. Seriously. Because I know how to end on a cliffhanger.