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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 9213325" data-attributes="member: 20323">I thought you put together a good list! I'm a very very minor self-publisher and freelancer, but haven't been active in the RPG publishing space for a while, and I'm an outlier when it comes to how I run 5e, so take my words with a big grain of salt...First, what you didn't mention – A Strong Hook. The adventure needs to provide a strong hook for the players to care about it. This is one of the hardest things, at least for me as a writer. Sometimes it hits like a bolt of lightning, and other times I'm scratching my head like a gorilla "they're after bananas maybe?" I've learned to hold a hypothetical hook lightly in mind to begin with, and let it shift and change in response to my writing.This is crucial - the adventure is actually written for the GM. It's the GM's enthusiasm that typically sparks the rest of the players. It's also the most nebulous principle and can take many different forms.For me the key is less about "good" and "quality color" and more about "strategically deployed." For example, Trilemma Adventures is graphically inspirational for me with the black/white hand-drawn iso maps that really give me a sense of the space in a textural/sensory way that 2D maps (no matter how lavish) rarely succeed at. I think, unless you have a stupid art budget, the key is to use the art you can afford in ways that elucidate areas of the text that are trickier to imagine or explain.I'll also add that knowing when to stop with enough detail and keeping the detail focused is really important. Otherwise, it's easy to bury the lead about how the NPC, monster, location, is intended to be presented / the kind of experience it's intended to give players. Clarity and detail? Yes! But also succinctness. Gavin Norman (Old School Essentials), at least from the stuff I've been exposed to so far, is great at succinct clarity.I received feedback from Henry Lopez on a RPG project that I'd fleshed out the cultural details so much that I was losing the sense of the fantastic necessary to grab the reader. So, there's some tension between what you want here and your very first point about inspiration & interest. I think the key is knowing when enough is enough, and how to fuse areas of your adventure manuscript together to make them feel more connected / integral to each other. That's hard to do, esp. if you had a looming deadline or writing partners, but that's a lesson I keep in the back of my mind.One of the things I love the most, and which I hardly see, is when an adventure sets you up to  make BIG choices at points throughout the adventure and not just at the end. WotC books like Descent into Avernus & Rime of the Frostmaiden have interesting varied end states, but the issue is that the players don't get to bask in the outcome of their choices and really see the difference they made. Even embiggening just a few choices even just a bit I think has a big payoff on the players' end.While true, an adventure also benefits from a critical read of the rules. An adventure writer has a rules ecosystem, but they still need to wear a game designer hat, and challenge (or get creative with) what doesn't work. For example, I know from experience that 5e's chase rules will get a resolution but aren't that fun at the table. When I wrote an adventure that involved a werewolf chasing sleds (and vice versa), I knew I had to either cut out that bit from the story OR find a way to gloss over it OR address that deficit in the rules. I ended up rewriting the chase rules for that adventure.This one I always wrestle with. What I think is actually practical is being strategic about where you invest your anticipation as an adventure designer. You can burn a lot of mental energy trying to predict player actions, and that can take you down a sort of tunnel vision that restrains your original spark of "that's cool!" And ultimately, most scenes you can set the ball in motion and barely need to define player actions. What's important is recognizing WHEN I do need to anticipate - for example, countermeasures for a trap? I need to anticipate.</blockquote>

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