The number one complaint about published adventures is that they are hard to run. There is prep time. You have to read them … usually more than a few times in order to understand what is going on. You might have to use a highlighter on it. Scratch that, you probably have to use a highlighter on it. And then you’ll need to take notes about it. Extensive notes. Sometimes you need to do even more additional work in order to run it. I would hazard a guess that most people think published adventures are too hard to use. That’s what this book is aiming for: to make adventures easier to run and, hopefully, more enjoyable.
This is not a book of DM advice. This is not a book about how to design an adventure for your home game. You might find some words of wisdom herein to help you with aspects of your home game, but the book isn’t targeted at you. This book is advice on how to write an adventure for publication. It’s targeted at the person who is writing an adventure to sell, or give away on the internet, or present in some other public way to have someone else use it.
There’s a key difference between personal use and having someone else use it. When you write something for personal use you have this vision in your head. You came up with an idea and it’s floating around in your head. You imagine a deep chasm, darkness down below, the other side barely visible, a tattered rope bridge, voices and furtive figures glimpsed in the shadows, their yellow eyes blinking in and out, and a dim red glow from below with a low rumbling and the smell of sulfur wafting up. In the notes you jot down it says “rope bridge over chasm.” You know that’s what you meant when you jotted that down on your notepad because you know what you imagined. The words on the page are only a memory cue to recall what you initially imagined.
When you write for someone else you are not trying to cue your own memory; you have a different problem. You have to transfer that vision from your head down to paper and in such a way that it can then get into someone else’s head. They can’t see what’s in your head and there are at least two translations between your head and the gamemaster who’s reading your adventure. Those translations seldom happen successfully, leading to dry and tedious encounters. I would hope this book helps with that.
This isn’t a book about OSR adventure design, or fantasy adventure design. I like the OSR and have certainly learned a lot reviewing OSR adventures, but the advice herein can be used with any type of RPG. Chummer or knight, P.I. or Malkavian: the principals apply. I’m going to focus on using fantasy in my examples but it should be trivial for you to see how these transfer over to your genre of choice. Likewise, I prefer more open-ended RPGs, but the principles apply to plot-based adventures also. Both of these points should be self-evident in the concepts to come.
You’re not going to find a lot of advice in this book about plot, or villains with personality flaws, or drama, or other things of that nature. A lot of advice about that already exists, even in fields such as literature and screenwriting. Besides, that’s not the chief complaint about adventures, is it?