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 MY NEW ADVENTURE IS 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…

None of these mistakes come from malice, they 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.

SOMETIMES IT'S JUST NOT READY!
Not only do a lot of adventures fail because adventure writing is confusing and can only really be learned through practice, but often people look at the works produced by others and think ‘I could do that” (which is good), without thinking “how did they do that” (not so good)? As part of this, new designers especially tend to bite off more than they can chew because they ignore or don't understand the realities and physical limitations of the RPG adventure format. For example, you can’t easily tell a filmic story with a location based adventure and writing a one page dungeon is more difficult than writing a three or five page one.

It’s also important to know that the bigger an adventure, the more factions, the more complexity, the more rooms… the harder it is to finish - exponentially.  The reason there are so few megadungeons and even fewer remotely decent ones is because they are a huge amount of work. Consider the scope of what you are working on, consider the resources you have, your skills, the other hobbyists that might lend a hand, and most of all how much time and interest you really have for the hobby and the particular idea.

It is also important to read other people's work. It’s important not just to see how others manage various parts of adventure design, but to think about why they do it. Rote copying of another’s style, preferred subjects, and technique will not only fail to produce something worthwhile but you will likely fail to make something that works like the original. When one doesn’t understand how a style of game works or the mechanics of the system one is writing for then one will produce bad adventures for it. A recent mega dungeon I purchased failed in just this way. It had some good ideas and set pieces, but didn’t include random encounters, presumably because its designers couldn’t be bothered to actually understand how a dungeon crawl in a mega dungeon works.  While this adventure has gotten praise and sold a lot of copies … it’s bad. I mention this because it could have been great, there are fun ideas in it and good presentation, but it fails because its authors are simply borrowing from others without understanding how mega dungeons work in play.

HOW BAD CAN IT GET?
Worse. The  difficulties of good adventure writing are compounded when writing for publication.

When I am preparing an adventure for my home game, the end product is very different then when I am writing an adventure for publication. Running your own adventure is easy, a lot can be left out because all you need are the notes and reminders of the adventure you’ve already imagined. When you run a location from your notes it’s already familiar. The writer knows the adventure location intimately and doesn’t need to be told how it fits together, how it looks, or what its themes are. All of this just comes naturally because the writer already imagined it once while designing the thing. The notes themselves don’t need to be long either, hyper-minimalism works well enough because each note triggers your memory of the space as its creator.

The opposite is true of a published adventure - everything is new to the referee running it. Worse, especially if the published adventure includes things from rulebooks or other common sources, the referee reading it might think they understand how the adventure plays because they recognize elements, but have an entirely different idea of how these elements look and act in play than the author. That isn’t always bad, and doesn’t necessarily lead to a poor experience for the players or referee … but it can, especially if the adventure is written to depend on certain expectations and ideas that aren’t communicated, or worse are communicated late. 

Because of these issues a published adventure is a lot more work and has to provide more information in a way that’s much clearer. Presenting an adventure for others to run is even harder than designing a decent adventure!

MY PROCESS
So how does one do it? I can’t tell you the correct way, but I can walk you through the process I use.

1) Think up adventure themes, imagery, and place in my setting. A single set of coherent imagery and themes is a great benefit as it makes writing the adventure (and running it) easier. It informs every other part and makes deciding where and what is in a given location much simpler.

2) Sketch a map. Don’t spend a lot of time here - there will be more maps. I tend to redraft the map after playtesting to help with issues like pacing and navigation based on how my playtesters experienced the location.

3) Write out random encounter tables. Not only will this give you a useful part of your adventure, but it will give you an idea of what lives on the different levels of the thing and starts the process of determining factions and set-piece encounters. You are likely to come back to this and change it as well.

3) Start keying that map. Quickly, just a few notes for each room. Something you can run a game from. Write what comes naturally and flows quickly.  The goal is to get to the notes to run a game from.  Details and imagery are likely to become more clear and refined through play.

4) Run a game. Playtest that adventure. This is essential because it finds weaknesses in the adventure you’ve designed and sparks additional ideas or clarifies the ones you already have.  More important, why are you writing RPG adventures if not to play RPGs?

5) Redraw the map. Still not a final one but getting there.

6) Expand the keys. Make those keys consistent in style and make sure they follow the themes and imagery of the location, which will likely have evolved by now. Add and remove what you need to to tighten up the adventure and make it better.

7) Edit the keys. Or better have someone else edit them.  Your editor will also find things that are off and are confusing.

8) Add hooks, rumors and introduction. Now that you know what exactly goes on in the adventure you can easily sit down and create the introductory materials. You might have had a few from before - but don’t be afraid to toss them.

9) Get someone else to play test the adventure.  Playtesting yourself is good, but handing it to others to play around with and getting feedback is better. They will be confused by stuff you think is perfectly clear.  They are correct.

10) Edit everything again, and incorporate the suggestions of play testers. More editing is better. Always cut if you can, but here it may be necessary to add details and explain what play testers found confusing. Also this is a good time to make sure everything is coherent and thematic -- that names, locations, area numbers and other things like that are consistent.  Use the search function.

10) Redraw your maps one final time. Make them as pretty as possible. Also make sure that your area numbers match and are in the right spots - screwing this up is easy (I add my numbers and the bubbles they’re in using my layout program).

11) Layout and Art.  This takes time. Do it the best you can, or hire people if you must. Do not use stolen art or “AI” nonsense. No matter how good your adventure is (and you’ve put a lot of time in so hopefully it’s good) computer generated and “borrowed” art instantly makes something suspect. It’s like baking a great cake and then frosting it with dogshit. No one will want that cake, no matter how good the inside is. If you can’t draw and don’t feel like learning … try collage using public domain art. Try pixel art. Try taking photos of the model of the dungeon you built using newspaper pulp and plastic clay. Take photos of the creepy hallways under the maritime museum and process them with photoshop. Anything that you make to show your consistent vision of the fantastical space.

12) Publish. Relax and watch as 10’s of dollars pour in. Congrats soon you will be a RPG writing centinnaire with literally several dozens of dollars at your disposal. Or you could give it away for free as a PDF - it used to be more common, but it’s still a reasonable thing to do (free adventures may not gain the traction of ones that are sold as the distribution for them is trickier and people often doubt free stuff).

13) Feel Proud. Really it’s quite a process. Also now that you got something wrong or there are places you could have done better. This sense will grow over time, because if you keep at it you will get better and better at adventure writing. Your first efforts are unlikely to be your best.

This is not of course the only way to produce quality published adventures, but it’s the way I find works for me - I also publish very slowly and irregularly. You may find cutting a step or two is helpful, or that you need more iterations and playtests. The point I hope readers will take here is that adventure writing is a process and can be improved by working at it, by testing, and by editing. Also that creativity is still at the core of adventure design and that there’s no quick checklist of elements or scenes to follow and produce a high quality adventure.