How would you design one page adventures?

77IM

Explorer!!!
Supporter
So I whipped this together super-quick just as a sort of concept piece. I think it can be improved. I took Paul Oklesh's adventure for EN5ider and tried to distill the most important parts of it down to one page. It's an 11-page adventure, so this is basically the very core of it. My layout skills are mediocre at best.

View attachment 103390

Quick feedback:
- The design/layout/formatting looks great! But it's kind of busy and hard to read. I think you should expect people to print out one-page adventures, so the bulk of the body text should be black-on-white, and not diagonal.
- I like prose with scannable elements. The bold monster names (standard in 5e) are a great example. I like that you've made NPC names ALL CAPS, although it appears inconsistent, and I think there might be better treatments you could apply, like SMALL CAPS or underline or even bold italics color.
- "Key Locations" and "Other Places" seem like odd categorizations to me. I'd probably have a box for "The Village of Lanidor" and another for "The Tunnel of Love."
- "The Road Into Town" seems largely tangential. The "Village Square" entry is also kind of a non-entry.
- I think "1d4 Random Encounters" would be helpful. The traveling merchants might be one; the flowers in the village square might be another; the innkeeper who needs help could be one. This could reduce the amount of location-based information, giving the DM more flexibility in when/where those encounters occur.
- I really like the "Lvl 2" in the upper-right corner, and the title in the upper-left, because it's easy to scan if you have a pile of these printed out. If you're going to come out with a series of these, I think it would be good to have some consistency around how that information is presented.
- I seem to recall the adventure having concrete rules for what happens if a PC drinks the water! That seems really fun to me. I'd try to squeeze that in somewhere. (Although the doc is already pretty packed as it is...)
 

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Morrus

Well, that was fun
Staff member
Here's a second one. It was a real challenge to fit this all on one page. Definitely teaches you about economy in writing! The text looks a bit wonky in this lo-res image, but the PDF is crystal clear.

sirocco.jpg
 
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robus

Lowcountry Low Roller
Supporter
[MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION], if I can offer a suggestion: please indicate (where applicable) what challenge level each encounter is expected to present. Easy, Medium, Hard or Deadly. This really helps people who need to recalibrate to suit their groups (and means it doesn't have to be reverse engineered!) It can just be a single character at the end of the encounter title.
 


Morrus

Well, that was fun
Staff member
[MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION], if I can offer a suggestion: please indicate (where applicable) what challenge level each encounter is expected to present. Easy, Medium, Hard or Deadly. This really helps people who need to recalibrate to suit their groups (and means it doesn't have to be reverse engineered!) It can just be a single character at the end of the encounter title.

Hmm. I was literally stripping out 2-letter words on that last one to squeeze everything in. I’ll have to think of a super economical way to show that. I’m thinking colours.
 

77IM

Explorer!!!
Supporter
Jon Harper has done a lot of good 1-page RPGs, including some with really good tables o' random stuff. Those sort of tables, tailored to an adventure setting, can both convey the flavor of the setting and can help the DM come up with ideas quickly. Some examples: http://www.onesevendesign.com/
 


Morrus

Well, that was fun
Staff member
This is kinda how it looks with little coloured icons showing the challenge level of each encounter, but I feel it now starts to look quite messy.

Screenshot 2018-11-30 at 21.26.51.png
 

77IM

Explorer!!!
Supporter
I didn't mean to imply that you were.

You asked:
What would you want to see in such a thing? (Assuming such a thing is a thing you might want to see).

Harper's style (notably his use of random tables to generate things quickly) has worked well for me in the past and I might want to see it in one-page adventures.

I absolutely love the idea of one-page adventures and I think 5E is an excellent system for them. My dream is for there to be a "fourth core book" that is just full of 1-page and 2-page adventures. So you show up to run a game with zero prep, but you've got the PHB, MM, DMG, a stack of pregen characters and/or blank sheets, plus a the big book of mini-adventures. (I was hoping the Mini-Dungeon Tome would be this, but it doesn't quite work for me, for a number of reasons. I think the approach you're taking above is closer to what I am looking for.)
 

robus

Lowcountry Low Roller
Supporter
[MENTION=80342]morris[/MENTION], yeah that why I suggested adding them as a single letter in the title, for example:

The Oasis [M]

or

1 territorial ankheg [E]

Wouldn’t that be cleaner?
 

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