As you envision DMs running your adventure, consider what might be helpful or fun if it was represented visually in a handout for the players. Puzzles that have moving pieces or that are highly detailed can benefit from a handout. More importantly, providing handouts of letters or journals or other things the characters find can deepen the player’s experience, and also take some of the workload off the DM. What you are talking about is not a Danish phenomenon. Many American DMs (and others I know from all over the world) run their games with a more improvisational style. And that is perfectly fine. But I am focusing in my articles on a more formal style of adventure design, with an eye toward creating adventures that you might want to publish, so you have no idea who your players might be and what their desires might be. I hope that improvisational DMs can still take some pointers from these articles, but I am definitely not focused in that direction. Do any of your encounters contain elements better represented in a map rather than strictly described in the text? Most DMs and players appreciate maps, especially in areas with dungeons or other complex encounter areas. Items currently discounted by other promotions are also not eligible for additional discounts via discount codes.

When I was young and foolish, I’d brag about not needing outlines for my writing projects. Outlines were something that other people needed. My “brilliance” could carry me forward without any need for pesky planning! In the case of the adventure we’re going to create together, let’s set some guidelines. We need it to be playable in 4 hours, because we’re going to design it for a standard convention slot. (Designing adventures for organized play campaigns also brings this limitation to your design.) This means I need to be very deliberate in the number of encounters, where they take place, and how much time each should take to resolve at the table. (If you are writing an adventure for a home group with no time limit, you might not need to do this, but it is good practice to set some limits anyway to focus your design. You can always remove the limits if necessary.) First, it would be useful to see the end product of these principles and ideas, like a couple of examples.Years later, I’m now older (and still foolish)—but I’m less foolish about the power and utility of outlines and planning. The lesson I’ve learned over the years, slowly and often painfully, is that although I wasn’t actively creating outlines before I started writing, I was passively outlining as I wrote, usually at the expense of many drafts of a project—and far too many wasted words. I thought I was saving time by not planning ahead, by not creating an outline, but I actually was wasting so much time haphazardly and inefficiently doing the work of outlining without even realizing I was doing an outline. High-falutin’ ideas aside, common sense dictates that adventures written for yourself to DM for only your home group in 6 hours will be different than one to be played in two hours at a convention and run by DMs you know, which will itself be designed differently than a 12-hour adventure that you are writing for publication in a hardcover book. Ponder the function, then you are ready to start outlining the form. These sprues will feature minis with a variety of head, weapon, and accessory options that can be mixed and matched to your heart’s content. Keen to give your dwarf a mug of ale rather than a shield? No problem. Want to add a creepy would-totally-murder-you-in-your-sleep gingerbread man from the Night Hag set? Go ahead, you brilliant weirdo.

Architect Louis Sullivan famously created the axiom: “form follows function.” Taken at its most basic level, this principle states that the form something takes is inherently informed by that thing’s purpose. Sullivan’s protégé, Frank Lloyd Wright, broadened that philosophy to explain the idea more clearly: “form and function are one.” For the adventure I plan to write over the course of this series of articles, this is my working introduction. It can obviously change if my design takes me in a different direction, but I can use it as my guiding star as I start my design:

Whilst we will do everything we can to meet the delivery times above, there may be factors outside of our control and we cannot guarantee delivery within this time frame. I have noticed a distinct shift in the modules coming from WOTC. Descent into Avernus is a wonderful example. [Warning some spoilers] Being an adventure designed to progress PC's from level 1 to level 11, and transitioning across five major chapters (particularly chapter 3: Avernus, which could of used some sub-division), you have a choice as a module author/DM. Do I try to continuously branch out the major possibilities a party might go within the frame of the story, perhaps expecting the DM running things to ad hoc the elements I didn't write about; vs. railroading the story and removing player agency (which is one of my disappointments with Descent into Avernus).