Your campaign may be all about your player’s characters’ “adventures,” but designing and running specific, self-contained adventures is about more than just stringing a few encounters together. Here’s why it matters and 6 tips that will help you build adventures that are worthy of the name.
Why Adventures Matter in RPGs
Our last podcast episode talked about designing and running RPG adventures. That made sense: We’d covered building campaigns and encounters, so we decided to look at the thing that comes between them: adventures.
Now, what exactly is an adventure? A lot of the feedback to the episode talked about how adventure is the thing that happens as you go along and play the game. But I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.
To us, an adventure is a self-contained quest that stretches over several sessions, -but not too many. 3 to 6 sessions is a good number, but it could be higher or lower depending on how your group plays. The key is that, during these sessions, the party is going to be focused on this quest.
That’s really what sets adventures apart: They bring focus to the game and let you build something that feels rewarding in terms of challenge, story arc and rewards.
I’m as big of an improvisational DM as anybody out there. But as we talked through the episode, I realized that my DMing would be better if I stopped, focused and approached adventures more deliberately.
The Lost Art of D&D Adventure-Building
Dungeons & Dragons used to be overrun with adventures. The average module was not a hard-cover setting book like we get today, it was a pamphlet with a quest and the encounters and maps to fulfill that quest. TSR released dozens of these! There was even a magazine called Dungeon that printed a bunch of adventures every month.
Maybe that made adventures feel kind of cheap and easy? Why buy a cheap adventure when you could make your own with the Monster Manual and some graph paper? (Which I did, often.) Over time and editions, WotC moved to releasing more robust hardback campaigns like Storm King’s Thunder that take players through half a career (10 levels).
With that move, the focus of storytelling has moved to the long-arc campaign, and self-contained adventures have fallen a little to the wayside in D&D 5E.
But adventures are fun. They’re focused and themed – essentially single, self-contained quests. They’re not as long and heavy as campaign paths, but they’re more rewarding than stringing together a few encounters and calling it a night.
Even if you’re an improvisational DM who leaves the world wide-open for the PCs to do whatever they want (i.e. like me) once the party commits to a course of action, you should design an adventure for them to achieve it.
And if you want to do that, here are 6 things you should make sure you have in the adventure.
1. An Adventure Needs Focus
This is really what sets an adventure apart from open-world gaming. Once the players have decided what they want to do, they have a clear goal and path that you can build around. They have focus. And into that focus, you can now place all manner of things to vex them.
But at the same time, their focus demands your focus. As the players narrow their options and commit, you can and should narrow your campaign building and commit to the adventure they’ve chosen to go on.
2. An Adventure Needs a Theme
Adventures bring focus to your game. Not only is the party committed to pursuing a quest in some version of dungeon, the threats in that dungeon should follow certain themes. If the players are trying to free a town from goblin raiders, you can build an adventure around goblins and their environments. If it’s on boats, aquatic. If they’re trying to overthrow a kingdom, it’s probably an urban setting with a lot of urban, humanoid threats.
The theme helps you cut down your options for building the adventure and helps the players conceptualize the kinds of threats they’ll have to overcome. Surprises are fine, too, but they should make sense within the theme. If the threats aren’t related, the adventure can feel random and less engaging. (Unless random is the theme.)
3. An Adventure Needs a ‘Dungeon,’ Even if It’s Not Really a Dungeon
The things heroes want are never in places they want to go. That’s a rule from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey itself, and it’s a good one to follow when building any adventure.
So, once you know the party’s goal, you need to provide a “dungeon” they’ll have to visit to attain it. Classically, this would be a subterranean cave or tunnel complex full of monsters and traps. But the same idea applies even if the quest takes the players to an emperor’s court.
- The players should be outsiders to the environment who are vulnerable to its dangers and secrets.
- Its denizens are not their friends (although some may be open to being befriended).
- They will have to use all of their wits, skills and powers to make it through.
Somewhere inside the dungeon, the players will have to face a series of challenges/encounters that could prevent them from completing their quest. Navigating those obstacles is what makes the adventure.
4. An Adventure Needs a Villain
Every fight card needs a main event, and this guy is the headliner against your party.
Exactly how dramatic you make the villain depends on the adventure. Early villains (Goblin chiefs) are usually more forgettable than later ones (Demon Prince, Bringer of the Apocalypse). Either way, the villain should be memorable and challenging to the players. It should also have some resources and moves that make it a challenge worthy of struggling through the rest of the dungeon.
The best villains are usually NPCs or legendary monsters, but it’s entirely possible for the villain to be something less sentient, like a curse that must be lifted or portal that must be closed. In a more courtly setting, the villain might be a powerful opposing politician or corrupt judge (in either case, the party must win with words and guile, not straight forward attacks).
5. An Adventure Needs a Logical Series of Encounters/Challenges to Complete
This may seem like a no-brainer, but everything plays out in the encounters and challenges the party must face on the way to the climax and meeting the villain.
Whether these challenges are monsters, traps, legal arguments or trade talks, they have to express everything we’ve talked about above. That means they must:
- Hold the party’s focus
- Embody the adventure’s theme
- Bring the “dungeon” to life
- Tease some of the villain’s powers and persona
That’s why the encounters are one of the last things on this list. Usually, I come up with the big themes and then fill in these details. That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes a monster or set of monsters catches my eye and the point of focus, theme, dungeon and villain are just built to let me play with them.
That interaction is why I say adventures are worth building, even if you’re an improvisational DM. This kind of tight interaction is hard to build on the fly, and it’s fun to play with when you take the time to build it out.
6. An Adventure Needs Rewards
One of the benefits of an adventure being focused and self-contained is the satisfaction of completing it, and that should be expressed in rewards as well. These rewards are more than just the treasure the party picks up along the way, they need to pay off on the themes, monsters and story of the adventure itself.
The end of an adventure should have at least three types of rewards:
- Victory: Adventures are challenging and accomplishing them should feel like the party has beaten a game – not THE game, since that goes on, but a game in the campaign/season. The challenges should have led to a sense of accomplishment.
- Plot rewards: What do the players get for accomplishing (or failing at) this quest? How does it change the story they’re playing in? How does it help them feel like they moved the football?
- Treasure: Specifically, an adventure should leave the party with significant wealth and/or magic items that will change the game for them. That doesn’t necessarily mean these are the most powerful items in the game, but, again, they should be good enough to feel rewarding to the players. It should open up another tier of power to the party.
Those are our 6 tips for building adventures, but there’s probably a bunch of good good advice we missed. Tell us how you do it in the comments below!