The new tools presented in 2024’s Dungeon Master’s Guide make running a game of Dungeons & Dragons easier than ever. It is, however, still a large book that can be intimidating for people new to the hobby. Creating a unique adventure mixes the creativity of a writer with the improvisation and social skills of a DM.
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Certain parts of the experience will be difficult to prepare for, or you may not even know you need to prepare until you’ve encountered them at least once. This is doubly true when making original content instead of a prewritten module. Here are some tips for creating fantastical adventures.
Start With Your Players
A good adventure should respond to the players and their characters. This means you’ll want to get a feel for their wants and needs before you progress beyond the first draft.
The sheet for tracking types of player motivations is a good starting point. It centers on what the players are hoping to gain out of the game and builds excitement. Use this to identify what narrative and mechanical levers you can create to engage with them.
The game expectations tracker is another useful tool to use here. On top of learning their hard and soft limits, it lets you know what theme they want the game to follow and the expectations for both you and their fellow players.
For public games where you aren’t able to coordinate with your players beforehand, you’ll want to have an
elevator pitch that summarises the appeal of the game
and the style you intend to run in. Be upfront about any potentially upsetting content the game will include.
Choose A Setting That Complements The Adventure
The multiverse of Dungeons & Dragons allows for stories to take place in wildly different settings. Each enables certain types of stories to be told more easily.
The Dungeon Master’s Guide contains plenty of notes about some of the regularly used settings, with special attention given to Greyhawk. This can be a good scaffold to build on, but if your concept for the adventure leans into a different type of fantasy, don’t be afraid to look at other sources or even go off-book.
- If you want a series of adventures in unrelated locations, Spelljammer easily allows for a travelling adventure through worlds that are not narratively connected.
- Eberron lends itself into punk stories, with its growing conflicts driven by advances in magic and technology.
- The Forgotten Realms work easiest without additional work, as classes, magic items, and deities are written with this as the default setting.
At the smaller scale, you want to consider the relevant locations, with the location sheets acting as a useful guide. Even if you’re entirely improvising as you go, they can help you to think of how a location should be designed. A defining trait, local leader, and ongoing calamity are often all you need to tie a location together and give the players something to do.
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Decide On The Scope Of The Adventure
A well-designed adventure is able to stand by itself or transition seamlessly into a broader campaign depending on the player’s response and DM’s intent. You’ll want to decide early on the scope of the adventure and whether you have further ambitions beyond the current story.
- If you want to potentially continue the story beyond the current adventure, leave room for the story to grow. Leave some questions unanswered, even if you know the answer yourself.
- For games where you don’t plan to continue it, have a plan for how to make the ending satisfying. If the player characters won’t be seen again, think of ways to make their story feel complete.
The Dungeon Master’s Guide recommends starting each new group with oneshots, standalone adventures that don’t require a long-term commitment.
Choose A Conflict
Every adventure has themes that play off the setting and characters. You don’t have to commit to elaborate moral dilemmas or political schemes but even a simple dragonslaying story will have a motive.
The conflict tracker is a good way of laying this out. Does the adventure place them in opposition to an established faction, the natural world, or enemies from their own pasts? An adventure can have several ongoing conflicts that interact with each other, such as rushing to slay a dragon before a rival group of adventurers.
Plan Out The Treasure
The new magic item tracker makes it much easier to narrow down how much loot to hand out to your players, but you’ll still want to put in some preparation work on handing it out incrementally. The tracker is divided into four level bands, but you don’t want to give your party all 11 of their magic items the moment before they hit level four.
Consider sprinkling your magic items into places where they will appear in the natural process of exploration. A magic sword can be retrieved from a fallen enemy, and new admissions to Strixhaven might be given an enchanted mascot plush for free.
You’ll want to be a bit more generous with this method as you can’t guarantee they’ll explore everything.
Note items off the tracker as they appear
and if the players are more inquisitive than expected you can make something happen to hurry them along.
Plot Out A Number Of Encounters
The Dungeon Master’s Guide estimates the average group can complete three things in an hour, such as simple social interactions, puzzles, or non-threatening combats. With this as a template, you can work out how much content to prepare depending on how much time you’re planning to play for.
It’s generally worth making some flexibility in your encounter design. Perhaps the party avoids an encounter entirely, moving faster than expected, or is stumped by a puzzle you thought they would solve quickly. The Dungeon Master’s Guide divides encounter preparation into “definite”, “possible” and “unlikely” depending on how liable they are to come up.
Another way of looking at it is encounters can be fixed, modular, or optional depending on how you use them when running.
Here’s how many of each you may want in a three-hour adventure:
|
Encounter Type |
Number per session |
Description |
|---|---|---|
|
Fixed |
Two or three. |
Fixed events are unlikely to change. Unless something goes wildly beyond your expectations, your players will end the adventure by fighting the villain. These are the encounters you want to prepare maps for. |
|
Modular |
Three to five. |
Modular events can be slotted in at several points of the adventure, but are unlikely to be skipped past. If the party hasn’t met an important NPC you can still keep the notes for their social encounter and have them introduced at a later point. |
|
Optional |
Three-ish. |
Optional events don’t add any impetus to the story but can still improve the quality of the adventure. A conversation with an NPC can be a memorable scene even if they never meet again. An optional treasure room doesn’t advance the plot but does make your players happy when they find it. If the party is moving slowly, these can be cut without them noticing the loss. |
Similar to the DMG’s version you’ll want to divide your preparation time to prioritise the encounters that are most likely to occur. If you’re short on time, flesh out the fixed encounters and have brief notes for how to improvise the others.
Not all encounters should be combat (and if they are you’ll want to have much fewer encounters). Most sessions have time for perhaps
one major combat encounter and one or two avoidable scuffles.
