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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5550547" data-attributes="member: 54877">My methods can be all over the place, and a lot of this happens at the campaign level instead of the adventure level, but usually it is some variation of: 1. Write a loose plot and makes notes about appropriate themes to hit. 2. Select appropriate NPCs or foes or neutrals to interact with. 3. Set up some locations and treasures. 4. Based on the combination of the above, determine goals and means for the creatures. 5. Check to make sure that every important creature, location and treasure have at least one "secret"--and some of the not so important ones, too. If they don't add some. If I've got a good "unattached" secret, attach it, or come up with a person, place, or thing for it to be attached to. 6. Complicate the heck out of all of it, and have that rachet into the goals and means. Probably adds allied creatures, affected neutrals, and some foes as well.  7. Throw the plot and theme away, utterly, and run as almost a pure sandbox. (If the players are really tired or get bogged down, I can dredge up enough of it for ad hoc hooks.) Adventure design for me is a means more of "discovery" than writing. Not exactly brainstorming, which is not my favorite method of discovery, but something closer to Aristotles' "topics" method. The important thing with "discovery" is not to get to wedded to anything in particular that emerges. As you might expect, my notes are rather ecletic, and almost totally unintelligble to anyone else. I'll have extensive notes on things that mean nothing outside that context, and whole cities may get a few lines of memory jogging words. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Naturally, I don't always go though all seven steps, at least not consciously. Sometimes I just know that I want a waterfall location, have it visualized, and that's good enough to go straight to it. Same way with items and monsters.</blockquote>

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