Most Adventures are Bad - An Adventure Writing Process

This is an odd post, it’s adventure design advice, specifically dungeon/location based adventure design, but it’s not about specifics, just the process. I have been reading recently published adventures again and I’m not especially impressed. Similarly the recommendations I increasingly see in Post-OSR (often just labelled OSR) spaces are largely for very old adventures from the TSR era. At the same time there’s more new adventures published for OSE, Cairn, and any number of other Post-OSR systems or B/X clones than ever before…

So why do a lot of adventures stink? I mean this, and I promise you my standards are not high, but a lot of what I see published is similar to or worse than the products of forty or fifty years ago - when the idea of the published adventure was still emerging… How can this be? Yes, there are people using “AI” to write and illustrate adventures and flooding DTRPG with them - and they are universally terrible. Also, the barriers to publishing are so low now that there are children publishing childish things, and maniacs hammering out a dungeon in a few drunken hours … I’m not talking about these circumstances. I mean adventures written by people who clearly care, and clearly spent time, but still failed to produce playable adventures…

How does this happen?

I ASK YOURSELF ... WHY IS MY NEW ADVENTURE SO BAD?
Even if it's not. Ask these questions.

• Am I afraid to use my own ideas, did I just rewrite the simplest, most cliched adventure “as practice”...

• Did I have some notes from when I ran a cool adventure at my table … and decide drop them into a layout program... 

• Did I have ideas for each and every room, that are all different and unrelated…

• Did I decide I couldn’t draw maps, so why bother ? Do I think maps aren’t important…

• Did I have one cool set-piece idea and couldn’t think of anything for the other 5-25 keyed locations on the map I have “borrowed”... 

• Have I never played this system before, but figured that every game is basically the same…

• Did I write a “five room dungeon”...

• Did I use a random generator to fill the rooms of my dungeon…

• Did I get bored after the first few rooms and think everything else could just be improvised in play…

• Did I only want to do one part of the process, like design cool monsters, and rush everything else…

• Did I even want to write an adventure or did I write a cool history of a fantasy location and grudgingly add a map and key…

• Have I heard that location based adventures don’t need “stories” or that stories “emerge” from play and take this too literally…

• Do I have the creativity of a doorknob … or did my “market research” tell me people like bland and cliched adventures the best…

Obviously this isn't an exhaustive list, there are lots of other things to do and things to avoid when writing an adventure. Also recognize that of these mistakes none come from malice or personal defect (even a lack of creativity is something that comes and goes). Mostly mistakes come from fear or misunderstanding of how to design an adventure for publication. Writing adventures is a distinct skill, and it’s not one that’s taught anywhere. It is neither entirely a technical process or entirely a creative one. It is not writing a novel or a screenplay because an adventure (at least the location based adventure) isn’t about a narrative structure.

Fear in a Handful of Dust

A Brief Barrow Fields Gazetteer

I was born on the Cidro. The City of Fountains, back during the war. Devil's pox and the proscriptions took most of my family. Left my poor mother, my brothers and me. So I headed north to prospect with the Blockers, they were robbing gems on the Crystal Frontier. In the poisoned dark among the tombs and the haints, were many a young man who took leave of his life.  I could see the blood on the crystal where others had died. I took myself away in the year '85.
 
Here's where I stopped, in the cool shadows of the great silent mounds. The skills that I learned in the gem mirrored halls have served me well here year after year. Most the old dead rest easy, among their bronze and their silver, and I've built a life from their bones and misfortune. But it's all cut and dried now.  I  came off moor when we diggers were kings.

- Robero Dulce, 86, Digger

The Bone Lands, Barrow Fields, Moors Dolorous, the Big Dig … a fragment of the Frontier that stands apart, on the lee slope of the Maiden Tombs.  Soil gone cursed and acidic, but still wetted by downslope fog, the land’s pastures have long transformed into gray moor. Grim and drab, it is a landscape of darting brindled hares, twisting scrub oaks, obscene lichen, spider-faced black vipers, and skeletal euphorbia bramble. Persisting among the moor’s wrack, the legacy of ancient times and ancient death. Everywhere. Bone fragments in the gravel, sigil stones tangled in briar, empty cists open in the sod and the stone topped barrows that loom from the obscuring mist.

This connection to the deep past sets the Bone Lands apart from the rest of the Crystal Frontier, while their uninhabitable harshness makes them just as much an unclaimed waste. The Barrow Fields are a fragment out of ancient day, a heroic age before the Sky Tombs began to plummet in fire from the firmament bringing poison and wonder. Before the Warlock King staked a claim on behalf of Kosse Sildar’s people and brought a new war and new kinds of terror to replace the old. Before even old Kosse Sildar’s and its pompous, chivalric insistence that it was not a servant to the Empire across the mountains to whom it tithed a conqueror’s share of its wealth.

This is no argument for the glory of the Barrowland’s past. Write no poems on the glory of an age undreamed of. The ancients rotted the land as thoroughly as The Warlock King’s demon hosts, Kosse Sildar’s excesses, the Empire’s casual plundering, or the chromatic blight that leaks from the Sky Tombs. Acid soil, haunts, and foul beasts are not the only legacy written on the land by the Chariot Kings and Palace Queens of old, but they are of a lot with the rest. The hulking barrows, deep pits, and stone dolmens contain silver baubles, green bronze, mountains of ancient bones … all tainted with hard death, and blood sorcery.

Geographically the Barrow Fields remain a strip of land some marches deep that runs across much of the northern Frontier, just beyond the foothills, from the Emperor’s Ribbon to the river. They straggle down toward deep desert, ending in a series of rugged bluffs near the Silver Highway to Old Argento. For the discerning Gem Robber however, they are a “hole in the map”, largely free of fallen crystals and occulith, but full of a particularly distasteful sort of danger that makes them unworthy of notice.

In the Bone Lands they feel different of course, everywhere has its local pride. Pride in the least of things. For the hardy few of the Bone Lands that’s pride in hard graft and the desecration of the ancient tombs. There is one valuable that the desolate moors are rich in…the ageless dead. The men and women of the Barrow Fields, proudly proclaim the title “digger”, and mine time yellowed bones by the ton … for ancient bone, steeped in rotten spellery has no modern equal as sorcerous fertilizer. Throughout the Empire, “Maiden Tomb Bone” or “Barrow Meal” is a panacea for the ongoing agricultural decline. In the failing fields of Green Hive, Syndicators plow it under to revive alchemically enhanced crops and in the gardens of Dawn Rill the gardeners feed their prize topiary on the Barrow lands’ residual magic.

AN INTRODUCTION TO DUNGEON CRAWLING

You want to run a “Dungeon Crawl” adventure… Not just an adventure in a "dungeon", but a Dungeon Crawl - that distinct, classic mode of RPG play about exploring a fantastical space, obtaining its treasures, and unraveling its secrets ... while surviving its dangers. Notably, the first rule of Dungeon Crawls is that surviving dangers does not always mean destroying or even overcoming them.

Dungeon Crawls should emphasize the tense experience of exploring a wondrous and dangerous location. These adventures will be more enjoyable if the referee pays attention to and uses the full suite of exploration rules while omitting even traditional rules that limit them, such as “darkvision” or “infravision” as a natural ability for characters. I encourage you to play with turnkeeping, encumbrance, and random encounters so you can experience how these mechanics work together to make navigating the fictional space tense. To help, this essay offers advice and even some streamlined alternatives to some classic exploration mechanics.

However, beyond mere game mechanics, this style of RPG depends upon utilizing a set of procedures—rules about how, when, and in what order the characters can act—that should make navigating the unexplored depths meaningfully tense. In particular the classic version of Dungeon Crawling relies on three ideas, and their corresponding rules, without some version of which the adventure is likely to be a less enjoyable experience.

1) Turn Keeping: Turns are important! They are the foundation on which all other Dungeon Crawl procedures are built. Though the Exploration Turn or just “Turn” is commonly described as ‘about ten minutes of time within the game world,’ it’s best not to get hung up on exact measures of time. This is a game, and like many games it is organized by turns. One player goes, then the next—or in this case: the player group goes, then the environment reacts through the referee. Because of this it’s more useful to think of Exploration Turns as an abstract unit representing the amount of in-game time it takes to perform most useful actions: moving, examining a room, or interacting with some object. After the players act, the setting acts and takes its own ‘turn’ by depleting the party’s supplies and checking for a random encounter. Of course some useful actions may require multiple Turns, and that creates greater risk.

2) Limited Supplies: Attrition is one way a Dungeon resists being explored. Players are rewarded for learning a Dungeon’s secrets by being able to venture further while enduring less attrition. Hence encumbrance rules (either based on coin (CN) weight or a “slot” system) are an essential limitation on the player’s resources. Time spent in the dungeon expends resources, especially light, and players must retreat before being trapped in deadly darkness. Encumbrance and supplies also force players to make decisions about what treasure to take. 

3) Randomized Risk: Dungeons are filled with tricks, traps, foes, puzzles, and confusing passages. The safest way to deal with them is to slowly and cautiously move through the space checking everything with the infamous  10’ pole and other tools. This makes for a tedious evening of adventure gaming. Besides the depletion of light and other supplies, the counterweight to player caution is randomized risk. Random Encounters are rolled once per Turn or two, and threaten the party with a potentially hostile creature that offers no or very limited rewards for fighting because most or all character advancement comes through recovering treasure. Worse, Random Encounters will often be more powerful than the party, as it is not essential to fight them and they represent the manifestation of risk for players who push their luck too far.

Together these three design principles and their supporting mechanics create the tripod that holds up a Dungeon Crawl. Though some may seem silly in the abstract, without them exploration becomes far less exciting and tense.

A Few Crystals More 1 - Magic Rules for My Games

I've been running an ongoing Crystal Frontier campaign using the "Fistful of Crystals" ruleset for the past several months, and at the same time finishing up editing and layout on a larger dungeon for publication - the Iron Barrow.  Both projects mean that I've had to take a long look at how I treat spells and magic users.

Below is a set rules and in world explanation for how I see sorcery in my games, and the rules I use to make it more interesting. In the attached document I've also included examples of several starting grimoires and a grimoire of high magic - an necromantic text that effectively provides a "Necromancer" Subclass.

Stena the Beautiful - Plague Prophet, Lich
and Antagonist from Bones of Bronze

Sorcery on the Crystal Frontier

Standard magical practice comes from many traditions, and each magic user is likely to command only the one they are originally taught or naturally adept at. Only through long study and the discovery of specialized, advanced forms of magic can sorcerers switch this focus, and again, only to a particular field or magic. The nobility of the Empire, would quibble with this distinction, claiming that their academic arcanism is the study and knowledge of magic itself, but this is a theoretical debate - Imperial wizards simply cannot perform the feats of sorcery that other magical traditions excel at.

It is more common to think of the majority of magical arts, including arcanism, as “common spellery”, or simply as “magic”, with numerous distinct, but related traditions. This means that only followers of a tradition may use its spells, but that there is enough similarity in the way the forms of common spellery function for practitioners to transcribe spells from one tradition to another, much as one might translate between languages. 

More advanced, or at least unique, fields of magic exist as well. These are sometimes referred to as “Mantia” or incorrectly as “High Magery” and though not always more powerful or complex than common forms, function in unique ways that are antithetical to the forms of common magic.  The practice of a Mantia is an all consuming study for a magic user who undertakes it and they such practitioners must rely only on their own research or spells from within the tradition to expand their spellbooks.

GYGAX'S FORTRESS

Gary Gygax is probably the best known name in Role Playing Games -- still, nearly 15 years after his death. Considered Dungeons & Dragons’ co-inventor and principal author of most of its early material, “Uncle Gary” was also a tireless promoter of his game and of role playing games as a whole. For the hobby’s ½ century Gygax’s name has been synonymous with it, he shouldn’t need an introduction, but it's still worth taking a close look at his adventure design legacy. Specifically how Gygax designed his dungeon adventures.

Gygax was author of many of the best early adventures for Dungeons & Dragons including: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, Vault of the Drow, Village of Hommlett, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Tomb of Horrors and of course Keep on the Borderlands, likely the most played Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time. While some of his adventures, such as Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Tomb of Horrors, were at least significantly the work of others (Kask and Lucien respectively), though Gygax undoubtedly had a hand in them as well. His output was prodigious and his foundational adventures are still well known today. I’d argue that adventure creation, rather than rules of mechanics, was Gygax’s greatest strength as a designer. With Arneson, Gygax wrote a system of adventure or dungeon design into the 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but he didn't follow it long, and certainly not in his published work, instead innovating and diverging from his own early advice to pioneer a new style of adventure design. Yes, his most important contribution to the hobby was likely organization and promotion - and the hobby of role playing games owes him a great amount of credit, perhaps even its existence for his efforts there - but Gygax’s adventure design still stand tall a half-century later, and it's full of useful lessons and techniques. 

Gygax &  Design
Like all good designers, especially early in the hobby, Gygax’s design has its own flavor and concerns. For Gygax adventure design is most often focused on the nature of the forces opposed to the players and potential environmental factors or conflict among these enemies that the players can exploit. He was first a wargamer, and his signature adventures are far more “sieges” or “infiltrations” then they are “explorations”, though this is not universal or absolute. Gygax’s adventure writing itself is marked by an relative indifference to map design, and the use of sparse keys that offer the minimum of environmental detail while focusing on the monsters encountered and their military strategies or behavior.

Gygax designed a variety of scenarios over his long career, but the central challenge in Gygax’s best known adventures, at least the ones where he’s clearly the sole designer (again, not Tomb of Horrors or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks) is one of military tactics or strategy. In a Gygax adventure the party will succeed if they can outwit, destroy, suborn, or bypass a hostile, organized force more powerful than them. Examples of these forces include the giants in the Against the Giants modules, the humanoid tribes in Keep on the Borderlands, or the mountain giant and his flunkies in the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. In all cases the party is unlikely to survive a direct confrontation with the forces against them, and instead needs to use schemes, things they discover about and within the dungeon, or subterfuge to overcome them. Often these solutions require that the party access the enemy base/dungeon without alerting its guards, and then conduct a campaign of theft, assassination, and sabotage within.

The siege or infiltration scenario is natural enough, it’s the sort of thing that naturally evolves from skirmish wargaming -- where one wants to justify both a small group of characters and provide their player(s) agency within the context of a larger military conflict. In 2002, during a Question & Answer session on ENworld’s bulletin boards Gygax rejected idea that Dungeons & Dragons had an exact analogue to military siege scenarios, stating that “no actual D&D game module I've ever seen has taken the base, sieges, to the 'commando' raid stage, either in infiltrating a fortress of for breaking out of one to wreak havoc on the besiegers lines.” However, Gygax liked the concept, and claimed to be writing an adventure based on the scenario of infiltrating a fortress during a siege … his rejection of the idea appears more one of exacting terminology than to the suitability of the design itself. Setting aside the context of a strictly military “commando raid”, it’s obvious that Gygax often wrote adventures centered on infiltration as a part of a violent conflict - ambushes, evasion, assassination, and sabotage. While there are elements of dungeon exploration involved, including entire adventures written using other design forms, the infiltration scenario is distinct, and Gygax perfected it, even creating special tools to run it more efficiently. 

When interrogating this style of design, the first thing to notice is that the primary source of tension in a Gygaxian Siege is not supply depletion or the pure risk of random encounters, but the larger risk of an alarm being raised. Once the fortress is alerted the adventure will change almost fundamentally as the enemy forces begin to actively patrol, reinforce each other and gather at choke points. A siege adventure is not usually a race against the steady depletion of character resources like the traditional dungeon crawl, but an effort to get as close to one’s goals before the alarm is raised and the enemy begins to hunt the party.

Mont Sainte Bec

THE LAST ROOST OF THE BEAKED GOD

On the ungovernable border land between the North Eastern Crystal Frontier and the Imperial canton of Blackacre, the jagged Maiden Tomb mountains meet the sea, straggling out into the shallow, dark waters as a series of seamounts and spectacular cliffs. This land is home only to neolithic goat-herders, backwards fishing villages, and near abandoned outposts of various powers: Carceral Templars, the Warlock King’s Court, Imperial Syndicates, piratical Smugglers, and perhaps even the Ghouls of the Mud Isles. Rugged and fog shadowed, there are few reasons to come to this liminal land, beyond escape from elsewhere. Yet even here the hand of humanity has left a mark - a great ruin that constantly draws explorers, plunderers and tomb robbers - the ancient monastery of Mont Sainte Bec.

Built onto and within one of the pillars of rock that jut from the broad bay called the Black Mirror, Sainte Bec has stood from the earliest accounts of the region, a monastery that predates recorded history, devoted to the worship of the antediluvian avian deity … the enigmatic “Beaked God” whose worshippers once held dominion over a great dominion. Now in ruins, only two generations ago the monastery was still a place of opulent wealth, tithed by pilgrims for the cleansing songs of its choir and plied with generous gifts. A “Protected Hersey” under the laws of the Empire, the monastery had persisted, outwardly unchanging, collecting tariffs on sea trade and tithes, gaining a reputation for the power of its militant orders (falcon and ebon knights) and the availability of divine succor from its ancient god for those who could pay a high price.

Crystal Frontier - Ongoing Campaign - The Mud Isles

"Vpon the Seuentene Daye of the Seconde Moneth, that same daye were all ye fountaynes of the greate depe broken vp, and the wyir of ye heauens cast wyde."

- Late added marginalia in the Codex of Lead 7:11

Joseph Grady - The Bank of England - 1830
Imagining One's Capital in Ruins...

When the sky is clear and the rain breaks on the coast of Blackacre a brown smudge beneath dark clouds mars the horizon... The Mud Isles are scant miles away over the Silt Straits and Narrow Sea but they are a lost land. Now only known as home to the raft-borne raiders - bands of dozens or hundreds of “Ghouls” - who crash onto the shores of Blackacre almost every Fall. A watchword for cannibal horror and mindless barbarity, the Ghouls of the Mud Isles worship a vile devoured god beyond the understanding of any in the Empire or Resurgent Kingdom — except as a mirror reflecting the dark years of the Demon Emperors. The Ghouls are anathema, even more than the Blackheart cults they resemble and which still infect the Empire. Yet the the Mud Isles are not the waste of bone idols, stinking sucking mud, and festering midden of chewed bones that most imagine them to be. The Mud Isles were once a civilized place. A kingdom that traded with the Empire in ancient times, noted for its devotion to decorum, mercantile avarice, and delicate decor. Some few and foolhardy … or perhaps those who have made dark pacts allowing them the favor and acceptance of the rulers of the Mud Isles … trade there even now, pulling antiquities and treasures from the sunken ruins of the City of Lead.