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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stormonu" data-source="post: 6238525" data-attributes="member: 52734">For the "one session" adventure I self-published (The Tangle), its about 10K words and 18 encounter areas (4 main encounters).  Not including map, art or graphic design, it took about 15 hours of work.  Grand total with the map and other work, it took about triple that.As a comparison, a second "one session" adventure I self-published (The Aurora Hold), is 13K and 10 encounter areas (4 main encounters).  It took only about 8 hours of work, as a large portion was randomly generated, then "mopped up" as part of the module's playtest.For a third comparison, another self-published adventure (Dragonriders of the Dark), is 19K and 54 encounter areas (7 main encounters).  In play, it takes about four six-hour sessions to complete the adventure.  I bring it up because while the initial draft of the adventure only took 4 hours (due to using a random dungeon generator program), it took over 20 hours to straighten up into a decent adventure - most of which came about through the playtest.  I mention this because I learned from this venture that making random dungeons is a poor method of making a quality, publishable dungeon.For the actual adventure I made back in the 90's (The Winter Tapestry, Dungeon #79), it was 19K words (it's pretty wordy - an overland adventure plus the adventure location with about 30 areas total) and probably would take about four six-hour play sessions to complete.  It took me a month / about 35 hours to complete.  That's not including the 3 revisions to the text, maps or art (I did a basic isometric map and two graph-paper maps and a rough of the "tapestry" adventure hook - TSR did the final maps and artwork).One thing I that hasn't been mentioned before is playtesting.  Make sure any adventure you put together gets playtested, at least twice - once after initial design and then again after revision.  Preferably NOT by the author running it themselves (but on-hand to make notes).</blockquote>

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