Here are my thoughts on how to write published RPG adventures that do not suck. I will tackle other elements of RPG writing (including home games) in later posts. Publishing an adventure is a whole different animal than creating an adventure for your regular gaming group. The most important difference being that you know your gaming group well enough to tailor the adventure to them almost instinctively.
On the other hand, if you publish an adventure, whether as a freebie on your blog or a paid product, you are creating something that will be played by people you've never met. You don't know their tastes, play styles, or personalities. What's more, you are writing for several potential gaming groups at once, meaning that you will have to account for a wide variety of individual preferences.
All that aside, here are the rules.
#1. Know what makes this adventure special.
What's that? Your adventure isn't special? Why are you wasting everyone's time? Any roleplayer worth his or her d20 can slap together a dungeon crawl in a matter of minutes. Why bother reading your adventure if it can be replicated with such ease? There has to be something that sets your idea apart. Think damn it! Interesting plot twist? Unique boss fight? Devilishly ingenious traps you created? The sheer size and detail of your dungeon? Those are all great. 10,000 word back story about the history of your fantasy world? Not great. Boring. Lame. Your adventure only needs to have one thing that sets it apart from a random slap together. Do one thing well as the saying goes.
#2. Start with the sales pitch.
You make an adventure to publish it, you want people to be interested in reading it, maybe even run it someday. You need a pitch. Fifty words or less about why your adventure is awesome. "There's this dungeon with treasure and monsters in it." That won't cut it. "Beneath Ice Spire Mountain there lies a twisted warren of caves and tunnels where the draco-lich and its minions guard an ancient dwarven mine rich in precious jewels." Basically a fancy way of saying the same thing. As per rule #1, you need a hook, and you need to be able to explain it succinctly.
"Prisoners were once tossed into The Labyrinth of Pain for the emperor's amusement. At its heart lay the path to freedom and a sapphire the size of a man's fist. The labyrinth has fallen into ruin, but an undead champion still guards its prize as well as another, more sinister, secret."
A little better.
#3. Know thy publisher.
A sales pitch isn't just for potential customers. It is also part and parcel of working with established publishers. Before you pitch to a publisher, you need to be familiar with the company, their products, their customers, and their submission guidelines. Sub guides are a freelance writers bible. Ignore them at your own peril!
Your pitch to the publisher needs to convince them that this adventure is worth what you are charging to write it, not to mention the cost of editing, art, and layout. This doesn't even get into the substantial cost of printing if you choose not to go the PDF route. The company has to be convinced that it will sell enough copies of this adventure to cover its investment. A simple calculation comes to mind.
Cover Price x 50% x number of copies sold - production costs = hopefully a positive number.
Keep in mind that adventures tend not to sell very well, as they have a limited audience appeal. A book marketed towards players (character options) has a potential market four or five times bigger than an adventure which is only bought by DMs. Considering that a lot of DMs run their own adventures instead of buying premade stuff, well you get the idea.
So back to the formula. Say an adventure sells for 6.99. The publisher gets 3.49 per sale. If the book costs $100 to make, the publisher has to sell 29 of them to make the tiniest smidgen of a profit. Now, the life of a PDF product is technically unlimited, BUT a publisher doesn't want to wait forever to get their money back because that means they can't use that money to make more products. PLUS, the vast majority of sales come in the opening sales period, when a product is on the front page of RPGNow and not buried fifty deep in the search results. That means you have to convince the publisher that you can sell more than thirty copies of this adventure in a short amount of time. That sounds easy...if you have no idea what you are talking about. On RPGnow, you get "popular copper pick" for selling fifty copies of a product.
The good news is that occasionally a publisher will put out an adventure for the sake of supporting a certain product line. The idea being to boost sales of the main book and keep customers happy rather than making money off the adventure itself.
#3. Take inspiration from the real world.
I've done a fair share of travelling in my time. From the various "monkey temples" of southeast Asia to the ruins of Ayutthaya, from Mammoth Cave in Kentucky to the ice festival in Harbin, China where I stood in a full-size castle of ice, I've seen lots of things that have been great inspiration for dungeons and adventure locations. I'm not bringing this up to brag about how awesome my life is (which, by the way, is pretty freaking cool). What I'm saying is that inspiration is all around you if you look for it. Using actual places as inspiration for your game locations adds a level of realism because it is real. Things naturally make sense in a way that doesn't need to be explained to the players.
That abandoned factory near your house? What if kobold's took it over? Your favorite hiking path in the mountains? What if it lead to the home of an ancient sword master who hasn't been seen in years? What if he designed it to be full of challenges to test potential apprentices like "The Quest" episode of Teen Titans? You can take maps of real locations and turn them into dungeons with little to no effort. You don't have to go someplace to use it in an adventure module. I've never been to Paris, but the empire of the dead sounds like a great place to stage an adventure.
#4. Random encounters are only random for the DM.
The players should never think to themselves, "hmm, this came off of a random encounter chart." Every encounter should seem to happen for a reason, like it was a planned encounter. When I make random encounter charts, I always put in a couple of sentences that provide context for the encounter. Too often people involved with RPGs (especially of the D&D kind) assume that monsters roam around attacking every living thing on sight for no discernible reason. Monster descriptions back this up some times. However, it only takes the slightest effort to make a random encounter make sense. A party of armed strangers is going to seem threatening to most onlookers. Maybe a group of elves is tired of human poachers trespassing in their forest. Or Hobgoblins on patrol assume the adventurers are enemy scouts. How about a group of young orcs eager to prove themselves in battle?
There are lots of ways to add this tiny bit of detail to any random encounter and add depth to the story or tie it in to a larger narrative. Bandits rob the party on the road: five armed travellers must be guarding something of value. A monster is hungry: its normal prey has been driven away by the magical blight that the heroes are investigating. Demons attack from nowhere: a mad spellcaster was dealing with things he couldn't control and now they are on the loose.
#5. Place treasure in places that make sense.
Just like rule #4, treasure should never seem random to the players. The placement of material rewards should make sense without having to be explained. Maybe I am the only one, but I used to play video games thinking, "Who puts three gold coins and a sword in a barrel and then leaves it next to a bunch of empty barrels?" or "Why is this treasure chest sitting in the middle of the woods?"
Dragons collect hoards of gold. We know that, so of course the dragon's lair will be filled with treasure. If the party stumbles across a gang of marauders fresh from a recent raid, of course they're going to have something worth re-stealing. But what about other encounters? How do you make that make sense? Why did those orcs attack us with axes when they had this +2 longsword in their treasure stash? Why are these bandits robbing us if they have hundreds of gold coins already?
I once played in a game where the party was attacked by some kind of demon-horse creature. After it was over the DM announced, "You search the body and find 100 gp." We all looked at each other across the table, "Where does this thing have a bag of gold stashed, and who was reaching up there to check?" The DM just shrugged, "It says standard treasure, that's what I rolled. Why does it matter?" A fellow player faithfully roleplayed his character reaching inside a dead horse's rectum before shouting, "Hey guys, I think I found something!" When the laughter died down, we agreed that he earned that particular bag of gold and no one else had any interest in splitting it. The DM was understandably frustrated with us derailing the session like that, but it was really his own fault. He could have said it had a saddlebag, or better yet, saved the treasure to add to a later score, one that made more sense.
When does treasure make sense? When that badass fully-equipped boss whips out a flaming sword on the PCs. That tough fight makes the party feel like they've earned a reward. How about when they find equipment on the body on the body of a dead adventure? That adds a sense of foreboding to your dungeon. A locked chest in the bed chamber of a lord who died from a mysterious curse that wiped out everyone in the castle? The additional contents of the chest help create the sense of lives cut short unexpectedly.
#6. Little details count.
Subtlety is the key to excelling at anything. Don't hit the reader over the head with the key conceits of your adventure. Allow these concepts to inform your writing instead. If your dungeon houses a portal to a maddening otherspace where the reality defies all logic, it is easy to overdo something like that: walls suddenly turning to flesh, monsters that look like they've been turned inside out, gravity suddenly reversing itself.
Consider how you could sell that idea of unrealness using smaller details. The geometry of a certain hall seems all wrong. The players can't explain exactly why, but it is disorienting enough to cause a minor penalty. Torches burn blue and green at random intervals. The door out of a room leads to a room that looks exactly like the room just before it. One of the rats crawling through the dungeon has a third eye.
Too many adventures try to turn it up to 11 with gore, or weirdness, or how EEEEVIL the bad guy is. Forget all that nonsense and think about how you can tweak the little things in an adventure to create the mood you want. Show, don't tell. What do the characters eat at the inn? Its not something that you should spend precious words elaborating about, but it can be important. If the inn has nothing to offer but watery soup and acorn bread, that tells you volumes about the setting without shouting through a megaphone, "These people are poor! All their food is gone!"
#7. Switch it up.
Jaded gamers (especially old fuckers like me) have seen it all and done it all. We have whole sections of the bestiary memorized. We know how to take down your "unique" NPC because we happen to have played a halfling monk / sorcerer once. You need to step up your game in order to catch us of guard.
Creating your own monsters takes away the "yawn, another carrion crawler" factor. It also adds value to your adventure. A new monster is something that a DM can use over and over again, unlike the adventure itself which might get played once, if you are lucky. There are lots of tools out there, electronic and dead tree, that show you how to do just that. This is one of may favorites. Beautiful program for making Pathfinder monsters. Simple and comprehensive. Similar things exist for 5E and 4E as well, and they are also great. Monsters don't have to be all that complicated or unique to throw the players off guard. The fact that they don't know anything about the creature makes it interesting, exciting, maybe a little scary.
On that subject, reskinning monsters is also super easy and keeps players on their toes. A gang of orcs or goblins is as exciting as dry toast. Tell the players that they look like humanoid insects and switch around a few stats, and you have an unexpected foe that is perfectly balanced for its CR.
On the other hand, if you publish an adventure, whether as a freebie on your blog or a paid product, you are creating something that will be played by people you've never met. You don't know their tastes, play styles, or personalities. What's more, you are writing for several potential gaming groups at once, meaning that you will have to account for a wide variety of individual preferences.
All that aside, here are the rules.
#1. Know what makes this adventure special.
What's that? Your adventure isn't special? Why are you wasting everyone's time? Any roleplayer worth his or her d20 can slap together a dungeon crawl in a matter of minutes. Why bother reading your adventure if it can be replicated with such ease? There has to be something that sets your idea apart. Think damn it! Interesting plot twist? Unique boss fight? Devilishly ingenious traps you created? The sheer size and detail of your dungeon? Those are all great. 10,000 word back story about the history of your fantasy world? Not great. Boring. Lame. Your adventure only needs to have one thing that sets it apart from a random slap together. Do one thing well as the saying goes.
#2. Start with the sales pitch.
You make an adventure to publish it, you want people to be interested in reading it, maybe even run it someday. You need a pitch. Fifty words or less about why your adventure is awesome. "There's this dungeon with treasure and monsters in it." That won't cut it. "Beneath Ice Spire Mountain there lies a twisted warren of caves and tunnels where the draco-lich and its minions guard an ancient dwarven mine rich in precious jewels." Basically a fancy way of saying the same thing. As per rule #1, you need a hook, and you need to be able to explain it succinctly.
"Prisoners were once tossed into The Labyrinth of Pain for the emperor's amusement. At its heart lay the path to freedom and a sapphire the size of a man's fist. The labyrinth has fallen into ruin, but an undead champion still guards its prize as well as another, more sinister, secret."
A little better.
#3. Know thy publisher.
A sales pitch isn't just for potential customers. It is also part and parcel of working with established publishers. Before you pitch to a publisher, you need to be familiar with the company, their products, their customers, and their submission guidelines. Sub guides are a freelance writers bible. Ignore them at your own peril!
Your pitch to the publisher needs to convince them that this adventure is worth what you are charging to write it, not to mention the cost of editing, art, and layout. This doesn't even get into the substantial cost of printing if you choose not to go the PDF route. The company has to be convinced that it will sell enough copies of this adventure to cover its investment. A simple calculation comes to mind.
Cover Price x 50% x number of copies sold - production costs = hopefully a positive number.
Keep in mind that adventures tend not to sell very well, as they have a limited audience appeal. A book marketed towards players (character options) has a potential market four or five times bigger than an adventure which is only bought by DMs. Considering that a lot of DMs run their own adventures instead of buying premade stuff, well you get the idea.
So back to the formula. Say an adventure sells for 6.99. The publisher gets 3.49 per sale. If the book costs $100 to make, the publisher has to sell 29 of them to make the tiniest smidgen of a profit. Now, the life of a PDF product is technically unlimited, BUT a publisher doesn't want to wait forever to get their money back because that means they can't use that money to make more products. PLUS, the vast majority of sales come in the opening sales period, when a product is on the front page of RPGNow and not buried fifty deep in the search results. That means you have to convince the publisher that you can sell more than thirty copies of this adventure in a short amount of time. That sounds easy...if you have no idea what you are talking about. On RPGnow, you get "popular copper pick" for selling fifty copies of a product.
The good news is that occasionally a publisher will put out an adventure for the sake of supporting a certain product line. The idea being to boost sales of the main book and keep customers happy rather than making money off the adventure itself.
#3. Take inspiration from the real world.
I've done a fair share of travelling in my time. From the various "monkey temples" of southeast Asia to the ruins of Ayutthaya, from Mammoth Cave in Kentucky to the ice festival in Harbin, China where I stood in a full-size castle of ice, I've seen lots of things that have been great inspiration for dungeons and adventure locations. I'm not bringing this up to brag about how awesome my life is (which, by the way, is pretty freaking cool). What I'm saying is that inspiration is all around you if you look for it. Using actual places as inspiration for your game locations adds a level of realism because it is real. Things naturally make sense in a way that doesn't need to be explained to the players.
That abandoned factory near your house? What if kobold's took it over? Your favorite hiking path in the mountains? What if it lead to the home of an ancient sword master who hasn't been seen in years? What if he designed it to be full of challenges to test potential apprentices like "The Quest" episode of Teen Titans? You can take maps of real locations and turn them into dungeons with little to no effort. You don't have to go someplace to use it in an adventure module. I've never been to Paris, but the empire of the dead sounds like a great place to stage an adventure.
#4. Random encounters are only random for the DM.
The players should never think to themselves, "hmm, this came off of a random encounter chart." Every encounter should seem to happen for a reason, like it was a planned encounter. When I make random encounter charts, I always put in a couple of sentences that provide context for the encounter. Too often people involved with RPGs (especially of the D&D kind) assume that monsters roam around attacking every living thing on sight for no discernible reason. Monster descriptions back this up some times. However, it only takes the slightest effort to make a random encounter make sense. A party of armed strangers is going to seem threatening to most onlookers. Maybe a group of elves is tired of human poachers trespassing in their forest. Or Hobgoblins on patrol assume the adventurers are enemy scouts. How about a group of young orcs eager to prove themselves in battle?
There are lots of ways to add this tiny bit of detail to any random encounter and add depth to the story or tie it in to a larger narrative. Bandits rob the party on the road: five armed travellers must be guarding something of value. A monster is hungry: its normal prey has been driven away by the magical blight that the heroes are investigating. Demons attack from nowhere: a mad spellcaster was dealing with things he couldn't control and now they are on the loose.
#5. Place treasure in places that make sense.
Just like rule #4, treasure should never seem random to the players. The placement of material rewards should make sense without having to be explained. Maybe I am the only one, but I used to play video games thinking, "Who puts three gold coins and a sword in a barrel and then leaves it next to a bunch of empty barrels?" or "Why is this treasure chest sitting in the middle of the woods?"
Dragons collect hoards of gold. We know that, so of course the dragon's lair will be filled with treasure. If the party stumbles across a gang of marauders fresh from a recent raid, of course they're going to have something worth re-stealing. But what about other encounters? How do you make that make sense? Why did those orcs attack us with axes when they had this +2 longsword in their treasure stash? Why are these bandits robbing us if they have hundreds of gold coins already?
I once played in a game where the party was attacked by some kind of demon-horse creature. After it was over the DM announced, "You search the body and find 100 gp." We all looked at each other across the table, "Where does this thing have a bag of gold stashed, and who was reaching up there to check?" The DM just shrugged, "It says standard treasure, that's what I rolled. Why does it matter?" A fellow player faithfully roleplayed his character reaching inside a dead horse's rectum before shouting, "Hey guys, I think I found something!" When the laughter died down, we agreed that he earned that particular bag of gold and no one else had any interest in splitting it. The DM was understandably frustrated with us derailing the session like that, but it was really his own fault. He could have said it had a saddlebag, or better yet, saved the treasure to add to a later score, one that made more sense.
When does treasure make sense? When that badass fully-equipped boss whips out a flaming sword on the PCs. That tough fight makes the party feel like they've earned a reward. How about when they find equipment on the body on the body of a dead adventure? That adds a sense of foreboding to your dungeon. A locked chest in the bed chamber of a lord who died from a mysterious curse that wiped out everyone in the castle? The additional contents of the chest help create the sense of lives cut short unexpectedly.
#6. Little details count.
Subtlety is the key to excelling at anything. Don't hit the reader over the head with the key conceits of your adventure. Allow these concepts to inform your writing instead. If your dungeon houses a portal to a maddening otherspace where the reality defies all logic, it is easy to overdo something like that: walls suddenly turning to flesh, monsters that look like they've been turned inside out, gravity suddenly reversing itself.
Consider how you could sell that idea of unrealness using smaller details. The geometry of a certain hall seems all wrong. The players can't explain exactly why, but it is disorienting enough to cause a minor penalty. Torches burn blue and green at random intervals. The door out of a room leads to a room that looks exactly like the room just before it. One of the rats crawling through the dungeon has a third eye.
Too many adventures try to turn it up to 11 with gore, or weirdness, or how EEEEVIL the bad guy is. Forget all that nonsense and think about how you can tweak the little things in an adventure to create the mood you want. Show, don't tell. What do the characters eat at the inn? Its not something that you should spend precious words elaborating about, but it can be important. If the inn has nothing to offer but watery soup and acorn bread, that tells you volumes about the setting without shouting through a megaphone, "These people are poor! All their food is gone!"
#7. Switch it up.
Jaded gamers (especially old fuckers like me) have seen it all and done it all. We have whole sections of the bestiary memorized. We know how to take down your "unique" NPC because we happen to have played a halfling monk / sorcerer once. You need to step up your game in order to catch us of guard.
Creating your own monsters takes away the "yawn, another carrion crawler" factor. It also adds value to your adventure. A new monster is something that a DM can use over and over again, unlike the adventure itself which might get played once, if you are lucky. There are lots of tools out there, electronic and dead tree, that show you how to do just that. This is one of may favorites. Beautiful program for making Pathfinder monsters. Simple and comprehensive. Similar things exist for 5E and 4E as well, and they are also great. Monsters don't have to be all that complicated or unique to throw the players off guard. The fact that they don't know anything about the creature makes it interesting, exciting, maybe a little scary.
On that subject, reskinning monsters is also super easy and keeps players on their toes. A gang of orcs or goblins is as exciting as dry toast. Tell the players that they look like humanoid insects and switch around a few stats, and you have an unexpected foe that is perfectly balanced for its CR.
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