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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 9356791" data-attributes="member: 20323">Red Hand of Doom looked awesome, and it’s the one adventure I wish I’d gotten to play or run in 3e. There are a handful of Dungeon magazine adventures that were really good and I enjoyed (e.g. Umbra and Dragon Delve)….but they are buried in so many really bad ones. And I've heard good things about PF2e's Abomination Vaults. You definitely have good taste!I usually use short modules or steal adventure sites / dungeons from long adventures - good area design is the most time intensive (for me), so I look for locations that are well done & modular.I’ve also run a few long adventures (e.g. AD&D Hellbound, AD&D Dragon Mountain, 5e Tomb of Annihilation). For example, currently running Rime of the Frostmaiden, which is also a really big adventure like Abomination Vaults (though probably structured a little differently). My prep for RotFM has looked like this...<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Listen to Others: I liked the premise, but then read/watch a bunch of reviews (I normally don't play enough such that I'm running stuff fresh off the press) to identify the adventure's weaknesses – main one being it is 3 disparate storylines that need to be better interwoven (edit: No Fun Allowed's YouTube review series on RotFM helped quite a bit). What I looked for was: is my excitement around this idea strong enough to overcome the apparent deficits I'll need to address. If yes, I go forward. If no, that's not the adventure for me.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Read & Take Notes (Don't Rush It): I spent a month before starting the game just reading the book & taking notes & thinking. Probably a 20-hour process spread out across 4 weeks, so I had to really be invested in the core ideas and be able to just enjoy the process like I might enjoy reading a novel. It was a pleasure, not a burden – if I didn't have that feeling, none of the rest of this would work. Not cover-to-cover (e.g. I skipped keyed area descriptions), but enough from each chapter to get a sense of the flow and problem areas. The most important thing I'm looking for is what the adventure actually IS, not what it says it is. For example, Tomb of Annihilation was billed as a hexcrawl with a ticking clock – already a conceptual mismatch that would require some design work to resolve – but in actuality it's a loose jungle point-crawl to level PCs in preparation for a ruined city and tomb delve. RotFM was marketed as "modern horror like The Thing" but the feel I took away from it was much more "arctic expedition with undertones of a wand-widling wild west & ancient civilizations (with some touches of horror)." It's more about discovery than anything else.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Look for Problem Areas: Specific problem areas I noticed in RotFM (some of which I was looking for in advance) – compelling character hooks, mismatch between tone and execution, problematic themes, and mechanics that just don't do what they're intended to (survival, avalanches, lack of discovery in exploration).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Write Down Key Clues: I don't complete this on my first read, but part of my note-taking is written down key clues that the players need in order to reach the conclusions the adventure drives them toward. This also takes the form of my writing questions when I realize there's a disconnect between Clue A and Clue C – in those cases when I go back over my list of clues, I fill in those blanks with my own ideas. For RotFM this became a list of 16 clues.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Create/Find Resources: When I ran AD&D's Dragon Mountain (a pseudo-megadungeon that's actually a running conflict with kobold clans), I realized it's very vertical with multiple entrances, but all the maps were plan view; so I drew my own vertical map to help orient myself. With RotFM, I realized that I would need a hex map (which became a combo of found/created) and that I'd need a travel times map between the Ten Towns (found on Alexandrian blog). I took notes on early ideas for exploration roles. I rewrote how avalanches work. I added Discoveries to the random encounter procedure. This is probably more a comment on WotC adventures than Paizo's, but if there are areas on the map that aren't fleshed out which definitely need it (e.g. Dwarven Valley), I fill in the blanks with found/created stuff.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Leveling Up As Story: I try to figure out what the best leveling mechanic is for that adventure. Part of this is also understanding what the evolving story of the adventure looks like as the PCs level up. For my (sadly prematurely ended) Necropolis/Hamunaptra sandbox without an overarching story, I used a re-tooled quest-based XP system. For RotFM where the eternal winter is getting worse, I am using clearly articulated quests (which involved jotting down the book's quests for each location) with escalation of cold/encounters/events at each level.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Characters' Impact: Once I had the barebones near the end of that month, I started tweaking things based on the info I was getting about the PCs. For example, one of my players wanted to play a frost-themed fairy, so I changed some stuff to play up Auril the Frostmaiden's fey side. Another player wanted to play a deep gnome, so I sketched out what the Underdark of Icewind Dale looks like, with explanations for why people don't just go underground to seek shelter from the eternal winter.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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