writing adventures
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Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Wolfgang Baur of Open Design just this morning published a superb private essay on "Why Writers Get Paid." It's a must-read for anyone who wants to professionally write an adventure. It's long, so i'll excerpt the first part and put the rest in a sblock.
------------------------------------
[sblock=Full text](Reprinted with explicit permission. Go visit his web sites!)
--- o ---
Here I am again, trying to close down a first draft that keeps slipping away from me, and realizing that the second draft is actually going to be fairly ferocious on this beast, and the maps are not all drawn and I think there are still some monsters that suck. Or at least need major surgery.
Welcome to the muddle in the middle. In any large project (or even with smaller projects for newer writers), this is the stage where it all goes wrong. It goes hideously pear-shaped. The project is beyond recovery, it’s all trash, ohmigod it’s so much WORK to make it not suck.
Ah ha. This is why writers get paid.
The early stages of a project are always sunshine and unicorn giggles, laughter and frolic, all the tasty outer frosting of the writing cake. I love the early stages. I don’t have to make any hard choices yet. I don’t have to yank entire sequences, or worse, rewrite them to fit new continuity. No, there’s just the Good Parts of writing: making stuff up, setting NPCs in motion, doing up the fun stat blocks and the clever bits of readaloud.
Unfortunately, at some stage the Good Parts dry up. Every writing cake, as it turns out, has a railroad spike hidden in it, and you have to each the whole thing. Once the frosting is gone, there are dull dry bits of iron left, and even those don’t fit together. Allow me to count them for you.
1. The minion stat block with the template that doesn’t quite work.
2. The spell selection that needs tweaking. Because it’s boring.
3. The backstory that isn’t going to untangle itself.
4. The backstory that needs to be cut in half.
5. The shiny intro that … isn’t working.
6. The missing encounters. Where are they?
7. The sections of city detail that are all in your head but still not on paper.
8. The flavor text that has no flavor, but only clichés that need to be terminated and completely replaced.
9. The big finale that you’ve put off writing because you know exactly how it’s going to work. Except that you haven’t written any of it.
10. The mechanics that playtesters flagged, and they are right.
11. The map that is functional but not exciting.
12. The monster write up you kept MEANING to fix.
13. NPCs who seemed engaging but are, in fact, completely lame.
And oh so many more. Drawn completely at random. Completely. At. Random, I swear. Stop looking at me like that, senior patrons.
This is when most people give up. Only stubborn pigheaded bastards continue to bull through the grind of fixing things, smoothing out all the inconsistencies, adding the connecting bits, checking that the logic mostly works (mostly), and that the worst holes are spackled over thoroughly.
Writerly Tip: If the spackle isn’t quite heavy enough to do the job, I recommend mortaring recalcitrant text in place with chains near a cask of amontillado, then bricking them into the wall with courses of stone. That’ll learn ‘em.
Anyway. Toward the end of a project, there tends to be less fine craftsmanship and a lot more covering things up with paint and glitter, but the point is that there’s always a stage where writing is ABSOLUTELY NO FUN. No kittens, no frosting, no unicorns. Certainly no oversexed half-fiendish sorceresses. And just because it’s no fun, that is not the point where you stop and send it in.
On the contrary, this is the point where you dig in twice as hard.
Because if you’re a good writer or hope to become one, you know the manuscript’s every weakness, every hard choice you dodged, every shortcut you took saying “I’ll fix it in the rewrite” (O fateful words!). The mojo is weak and you know it needs work. Now, this self-loathing is perfectly normal and it can be overdone. It’s possible to print a manuscript and go through with a red pen and fix it. That seems hard, and the fixes can take long hours where no word count is added and many of your favorite bits are cut.
Sometimes you do this revision once or twice, if your first draft was sound. Sometimes you do it eight or nine times, if you are perhaps a perfectionist with lots of spare time. And writers who don’t revise or even read back through their work aren’t fooling anyone. (See the Erik Mona interview in Kobold Quarterly if you don’t believe me; he’s seen both sides of this fence.)
That problem at this stage is that most would-be game designers want the process to be fun all the way through, and that’s a recipe for failure. A big part of success in the field is sitting down and working over rules, math, and text for core rules design. For adventure design, it’s writing, weighing playtest results, and rewrites. The important element is that you try to improve your text enough that someone else can read it and enjoy it. You’re manufacturing joy for other people. That doesn’t mean joy for you, necessarily. Or even often, at this stage. It’s joy for them because you’ve honed that joy out of a bitter slab of granite.
But the thing is, most people don’t ever get through this stage. For me, I have music that helps, uptempo stuff, cheeseball 80s tunes, Britpop, and worse. No, I’m not proud that Mike Oldfield’s “Moonlight Shadow” helps me get in a writing groove, but there it is. For other people it’s booze (not recommended) or massive caffeine or staying up late surrounded by heaps of pens and notebooks. Recite the immortal words of that hack Dr. Ben Jonson: "No man but a fool ever wrote but for money". Whatever gets you hitting the keys.
Everyone finds their own way to a writerly discipline. But until you do, you will fail to design to the standards you set for yourself, you will not meet deadlines, and you may get queries accepted, but you will fail to follow up on those queries in a timely way. You will not publish.
(That last point, by the way, was initially a source of much consternation to me as a young editorial assistant. At TSR we always sent out twice as many acceptances for queries as we could use each month, because we knew half of them would never result in an article. This drove me crazy for a while, especially because some of the queries that went missing were for really cool stuff. I learned that I should never reject myself, which is what those writers were doing. If you are fortunate enough to get a query accepted, write it and send it in. It’s the editor’s job to accept it or reject it. Don’t do the editor’s job, especially in the rejection department.)
Anyway, game designers, artists, and writers are all creative people. Doing our best work is demanding because there’s a level of craft to learn, and a level of self-control to try to be reliably productive even on off days. And it requires a level of willpower to face the problems with your manuscript and be absolutely ruthless about fixing them.
Everyone will have advice for you about how you should proceed and what you should fix. But at the bulldog stage, you need to ignore everyone and just maintain momentum on the things YOU know are broken, and that you can improve. The editor will weigh in with other issues; fine. Plowing through the ugly late stages of a draft is about persistence and self-confidence in the face of rising insecurity. Can I make this character work? Can I meet the deadline? Can I keep it remotely near the requested workcount? Yes, yes, and yes. Be ruthless at throwing side plots and distracting shiny design overboard.
I wish I had some really pithy Pollyanna platitudes at this stage to say that working hard on the draft will make you feel better about it and your editor will hail you as a genius and your work will surely be published to great acclaim. That doesn’t happen.
You may get a sense that the manuscript is as good as you can make it. That’s a fine place to be. You probably won’t love the manuscript at that point, and you’re way too close to it to know whether anyone else will either.
If you wait until you’re 100% happy with a manuscript, you’ll never stop fiddling with it. At some point, you’ll be sick of it, but … content, I suppose. The damn thing doesn’t compel you the way it once did, and you’ve worked all the magic on it that you know, and it’s still not exactly what you might wish but… It’s ok. The editor will probably like it well enough.
Yeah, I know, this is not exactly a rousing endorsement of second and third drafts. But in your designer brain, at some point you may find that you’re just tinkering with the adventure, that all the big problems are fixed to your satisfaction. You're probably still not satisfied with it, but if you catch yourself tinkering just to tinker (like messing with fonts, or punctuation, or Craft skill points), then it is definitely time to shove it out the door.
So that’s my advice. Finish it, and send it in. Hell, I should tape that over my monitor, right next to “Zeal never rests” (motto of HMS Ark Royal).
And will you look at me, I’ve just procrastinated for over an hour. Enough talk about grinding through it: Back to the keyboard! I have many design sins yet to atone for, and I fully intend to bury the biggest ones as deep as I can.
[/sblock]
My sponsorship of this project was so worth it.
------------------------------------
Wolfgang Baur said:
[sblock=Full text](Reprinted with explicit permission. Go visit his web sites!)
--- o ---
Here I am again, trying to close down a first draft that keeps slipping away from me, and realizing that the second draft is actually going to be fairly ferocious on this beast, and the maps are not all drawn and I think there are still some monsters that suck. Or at least need major surgery.
Welcome to the muddle in the middle. In any large project (or even with smaller projects for newer writers), this is the stage where it all goes wrong. It goes hideously pear-shaped. The project is beyond recovery, it’s all trash, ohmigod it’s so much WORK to make it not suck.
Ah ha. This is why writers get paid.
The early stages of a project are always sunshine and unicorn giggles, laughter and frolic, all the tasty outer frosting of the writing cake. I love the early stages. I don’t have to make any hard choices yet. I don’t have to yank entire sequences, or worse, rewrite them to fit new continuity. No, there’s just the Good Parts of writing: making stuff up, setting NPCs in motion, doing up the fun stat blocks and the clever bits of readaloud.
Unfortunately, at some stage the Good Parts dry up. Every writing cake, as it turns out, has a railroad spike hidden in it, and you have to each the whole thing. Once the frosting is gone, there are dull dry bits of iron left, and even those don’t fit together. Allow me to count them for you.
1. The minion stat block with the template that doesn’t quite work.
2. The spell selection that needs tweaking. Because it’s boring.
3. The backstory that isn’t going to untangle itself.
4. The backstory that needs to be cut in half.
5. The shiny intro that … isn’t working.
6. The missing encounters. Where are they?
7. The sections of city detail that are all in your head but still not on paper.
8. The flavor text that has no flavor, but only clichés that need to be terminated and completely replaced.
9. The big finale that you’ve put off writing because you know exactly how it’s going to work. Except that you haven’t written any of it.
10. The mechanics that playtesters flagged, and they are right.
11. The map that is functional but not exciting.
12. The monster write up you kept MEANING to fix.
13. NPCs who seemed engaging but are, in fact, completely lame.
And oh so many more. Drawn completely at random. Completely. At. Random, I swear. Stop looking at me like that, senior patrons.
This is when most people give up. Only stubborn pigheaded bastards continue to bull through the grind of fixing things, smoothing out all the inconsistencies, adding the connecting bits, checking that the logic mostly works (mostly), and that the worst holes are spackled over thoroughly.
Writerly Tip: If the spackle isn’t quite heavy enough to do the job, I recommend mortaring recalcitrant text in place with chains near a cask of amontillado, then bricking them into the wall with courses of stone. That’ll learn ‘em.
Anyway. Toward the end of a project, there tends to be less fine craftsmanship and a lot more covering things up with paint and glitter, but the point is that there’s always a stage where writing is ABSOLUTELY NO FUN. No kittens, no frosting, no unicorns. Certainly no oversexed half-fiendish sorceresses. And just because it’s no fun, that is not the point where you stop and send it in.
On the contrary, this is the point where you dig in twice as hard.
Because if you’re a good writer or hope to become one, you know the manuscript’s every weakness, every hard choice you dodged, every shortcut you took saying “I’ll fix it in the rewrite” (O fateful words!). The mojo is weak and you know it needs work. Now, this self-loathing is perfectly normal and it can be overdone. It’s possible to print a manuscript and go through with a red pen and fix it. That seems hard, and the fixes can take long hours where no word count is added and many of your favorite bits are cut.
Sometimes you do this revision once or twice, if your first draft was sound. Sometimes you do it eight or nine times, if you are perhaps a perfectionist with lots of spare time. And writers who don’t revise or even read back through their work aren’t fooling anyone. (See the Erik Mona interview in Kobold Quarterly if you don’t believe me; he’s seen both sides of this fence.)
That problem at this stage is that most would-be game designers want the process to be fun all the way through, and that’s a recipe for failure. A big part of success in the field is sitting down and working over rules, math, and text for core rules design. For adventure design, it’s writing, weighing playtest results, and rewrites. The important element is that you try to improve your text enough that someone else can read it and enjoy it. You’re manufacturing joy for other people. That doesn’t mean joy for you, necessarily. Or even often, at this stage. It’s joy for them because you’ve honed that joy out of a bitter slab of granite.
But the thing is, most people don’t ever get through this stage. For me, I have music that helps, uptempo stuff, cheeseball 80s tunes, Britpop, and worse. No, I’m not proud that Mike Oldfield’s “Moonlight Shadow” helps me get in a writing groove, but there it is. For other people it’s booze (not recommended) or massive caffeine or staying up late surrounded by heaps of pens and notebooks. Recite the immortal words of that hack Dr. Ben Jonson: "No man but a fool ever wrote but for money". Whatever gets you hitting the keys.
Everyone finds their own way to a writerly discipline. But until you do, you will fail to design to the standards you set for yourself, you will not meet deadlines, and you may get queries accepted, but you will fail to follow up on those queries in a timely way. You will not publish.
(That last point, by the way, was initially a source of much consternation to me as a young editorial assistant. At TSR we always sent out twice as many acceptances for queries as we could use each month, because we knew half of them would never result in an article. This drove me crazy for a while, especially because some of the queries that went missing were for really cool stuff. I learned that I should never reject myself, which is what those writers were doing. If you are fortunate enough to get a query accepted, write it and send it in. It’s the editor’s job to accept it or reject it. Don’t do the editor’s job, especially in the rejection department.)
Anyway, game designers, artists, and writers are all creative people. Doing our best work is demanding because there’s a level of craft to learn, and a level of self-control to try to be reliably productive even on off days. And it requires a level of willpower to face the problems with your manuscript and be absolutely ruthless about fixing them.
Everyone will have advice for you about how you should proceed and what you should fix. But at the bulldog stage, you need to ignore everyone and just maintain momentum on the things YOU know are broken, and that you can improve. The editor will weigh in with other issues; fine. Plowing through the ugly late stages of a draft is about persistence and self-confidence in the face of rising insecurity. Can I make this character work? Can I meet the deadline? Can I keep it remotely near the requested workcount? Yes, yes, and yes. Be ruthless at throwing side plots and distracting shiny design overboard.
I wish I had some really pithy Pollyanna platitudes at this stage to say that working hard on the draft will make you feel better about it and your editor will hail you as a genius and your work will surely be published to great acclaim. That doesn’t happen.
You may get a sense that the manuscript is as good as you can make it. That’s a fine place to be. You probably won’t love the manuscript at that point, and you’re way too close to it to know whether anyone else will either.
If you wait until you’re 100% happy with a manuscript, you’ll never stop fiddling with it. At some point, you’ll be sick of it, but … content, I suppose. The damn thing doesn’t compel you the way it once did, and you’ve worked all the magic on it that you know, and it’s still not exactly what you might wish but… It’s ok. The editor will probably like it well enough.
Yeah, I know, this is not exactly a rousing endorsement of second and third drafts. But in your designer brain, at some point you may find that you’re just tinkering with the adventure, that all the big problems are fixed to your satisfaction. You're probably still not satisfied with it, but if you catch yourself tinkering just to tinker (like messing with fonts, or punctuation, or Craft skill points), then it is definitely time to shove it out the door.
So that’s my advice. Finish it, and send it in. Hell, I should tape that over my monitor, right next to “Zeal never rests” (motto of HMS Ark Royal).
And will you look at me, I’ve just procrastinated for over an hour. Enough talk about grinding through it: Back to the keyboard! I have many design sins yet to atone for, and I fully intend to bury the biggest ones as deep as I can.
[/sblock]
My sponsorship of this project was so worth it.
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Doug McCrae
Legend
1. Open the Monster Manual.
2. Find some CR appropriate monsters.
3. Think of a reason for the PCs to fight them.
4. Complicate as desired.
For example, say I have a level 5 party. A pack of 12 worgs (cr2) could be a good challenge, so long as the PCs don't fight them all at once. 3 or 4 at a time would be reasonable, but I can set things up so there's a possibility of battling all at the same time if the PCs mess up. We'll use an advanced worg as the pack leader - a grizzled old grey-furred monstrosity.
A farmer's son has been killed by the marauding pack. The PCs are passing through a village. He begs the PCs to take revenge on the worgs. If the party are mercenary types he offers them a family heirloom as reward. Or perhaps he knows of a treasure the worgs possess, maybe the pack leader has a magic necklace.
Figure out the rough area the worgs inhabit - a forest, maybe they lair in a cave - their day-to-day activities - raiding decent folk - and your done.
To complicate matters - the worgs are in the employ of an evil warlord who is using them as scouts, advance guards to weaken the area or test defences as a prelude to an invasion. OR the leader of the worgs is a werewolf not an advanced worg, the farmer's daughter. OR the worg cave leads into a larger cave system occupied by a tribe of goblins.
2. Find some CR appropriate monsters.
3. Think of a reason for the PCs to fight them.
4. Complicate as desired.
For example, say I have a level 5 party. A pack of 12 worgs (cr2) could be a good challenge, so long as the PCs don't fight them all at once. 3 or 4 at a time would be reasonable, but I can set things up so there's a possibility of battling all at the same time if the PCs mess up. We'll use an advanced worg as the pack leader - a grizzled old grey-furred monstrosity.
A farmer's son has been killed by the marauding pack. The PCs are passing through a village. He begs the PCs to take revenge on the worgs. If the party are mercenary types he offers them a family heirloom as reward. Or perhaps he knows of a treasure the worgs possess, maybe the pack leader has a magic necklace.
Figure out the rough area the worgs inhabit - a forest, maybe they lair in a cave - their day-to-day activities - raiding decent folk - and your done.
To complicate matters - the worgs are in the employ of an evil warlord who is using them as scouts, advance guards to weaken the area or test defences as a prelude to an invasion. OR the leader of the worgs is a werewolf not an advanced worg, the farmer's daughter. OR the worg cave leads into a larger cave system occupied by a tribe of goblins.
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Monkey King
Explorer
Doug McCrae's advice seems really good to me. Start with some monsters and see where they take you.
If you're writing them for your home game, I'd say you just need enough notes about the villain and his minions to keep it all straight for yourself. Who are the bad guys? What do they want? And what can the PCs do to stop it?
For each individual encounter, think up one cool visual or sensory or dialogue bit. No more than a sentence or two. That gives you something to work from when the time comes to run it.
Beyond that, you want some cool mechanical tricks, like special terrain from the environment books or a monster with class levels, but you don't need that for every encounter. None of the encounters need to be fleshed out too much: hit points, a MM page number, some treasure.
If you are writing for publication professionally, it's a whole different ball game.
If you're writing them for your home game, I'd say you just need enough notes about the villain and his minions to keep it all straight for yourself. Who are the bad guys? What do they want? And what can the PCs do to stop it?
For each individual encounter, think up one cool visual or sensory or dialogue bit. No more than a sentence or two. That gives you something to work from when the time comes to run it.
Beyond that, you want some cool mechanical tricks, like special terrain from the environment books or a monster with class levels, but you don't need that for every encounter. None of the encounters need to be fleshed out too much: hit points, a MM page number, some treasure.
If you are writing for publication professionally, it's a whole different ball game.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Doug's advice is pretty much what I always do.
If you haven't done it yet, go through your monster books, pick out the monsters you LOVE, write them down, and figure out how they'd all relate to one another, as allies or enemies or simply indifferent neighbors on the opposite sides of a mountain. Once you've done that, you should have some ideas of what stuff to throw at your players at any given level (remembering that you can give them class levels or have them show up in groups).
If you haven't done it yet, go through your monster books, pick out the monsters you LOVE, write them down, and figure out how they'd all relate to one another, as allies or enemies or simply indifferent neighbors on the opposite sides of a mountain. Once you've done that, you should have some ideas of what stuff to throw at your players at any given level (remembering that you can give them class levels or have them show up in groups).
Thornir Alekeg
Albatross!
What I found.. interesting.. Is replace the details directed at writing with a number of software details and you have the same exact results for software development as well.
On topic, some one already suggested a good route to take, another route I have used is creating a rough outline of your idea and then filling it in as I complete different sections. This helps me to keep on target for what I want to accomplish and not get lost along the development process. I will usually do all this on graph paper so I can hand draw the maps with greater ease right there. Once I have that done, then I go to the computer and use Photoshop for my maps, NPC Designer for my NPCs and Word for all of the text.
Note: A normal person should probably avoid Photoshop and use some other tool or just what you did by hand, I am trying to learn how to use it better so I deal with the intense pain that comes a long with it.
On topic, some one already suggested a good route to take, another route I have used is creating a rough outline of your idea and then filling it in as I complete different sections. This helps me to keep on target for what I want to accomplish and not get lost along the development process. I will usually do all this on graph paper so I can hand draw the maps with greater ease right there. Once I have that done, then I go to the computer and use Photoshop for my maps, NPC Designer for my NPCs and Word for all of the text.
Note: A normal person should probably avoid Photoshop and use some other tool or just what you did by hand, I am trying to learn how to use it better so I deal with the intense pain that comes a long with it.
GlassJaw
Hero
Start simple. Brainstorm. Write down some very basic concepts and themes. Flip through some monster books and choose some creatures that you like. Search on Google images for inspiration. Look at maps in other modules and Dungeon magazines for ideas. Just get a bunch of ideas down on paper and don't worry about organization or cohesiveness.
Once you've done that, go back and see what you have. Are there ideas you like better than others? Do some ideas fit in with others? Start to develop a basic outline. Connect the dots.
For me, it's all about brainstorming. After that, the adventures start to write themselves.
Once you've done that, go back and see what you have. Are there ideas you like better than others? Do some ideas fit in with others? Start to develop a basic outline. Connect the dots.
For me, it's all about brainstorming. After that, the adventures start to write themselves.
I'm not sure exactly what the original poster is looking for. If it's advice on how to write an adventure on a professional level, I've got nothing. If it's advice on how to write an adventure for his players, then I may or may not have something, depending on his players.
When preparing adventures for my players, I try to take stock of what the players themselves enjoy: role-playing, combat, problem-solving, storytelling. If I am uncertain what they want, for example with a new group, I err toward storytelling (because that's what I like most).
Given that, interesting characters, secrets/surprise twists, tough decisions, and intra-party conflict are some of the elements (along with a strong plot of course) that make for good storytelling in my mind.
I'm not great at coming up with overall strong plots, so these I usually steal wholesale from others- comic books, movies, novels, published adventures, games run by other DMs, etc. I don't really care because the devil is in the details.
Before the game even starts, I like to work with the players to generate fairly detailed backgrounds for their characters. I let them do the bulk of the work, but I make a point of tying each of them to an NPC (villain or ally) that will show up in the game, another PC, or both, or more than one of both. This goes along way toward laying the grounds for intra-party conflict- which if not taken too far does as much to drive the game (or more) than it does to slow it down.
I also like to throw tough decisions (with real repercussions) at the party early on in most adventures. For example, I once had the party tracking a collection of dangerous books which had been stolen from a caravan by a mixed lot of orcs and goblinoids. The orcs had gone one direction with the books. The goblinoids had gone yet another direction with prisoners from the caravan. Here the party was faced with the decision of which to pursue first. They went after the prisoners first, allowing the books to slip farther from their grasp and be put to nefarious use. In return, they gained a number of allies and one of the PCs rescued a lost love who unknowingly had been traveling with the caravan in search of the PC. Had they gone after the books first, they would have gained a nemesis in the form of the lost love or one of her family members. I try to plot the consequences of major decisions like this in advance.
Alright, I'm rambling now. I hope what I have had to say is helpful to the OP and maybe some others. It may run slightly contrary to what others have posted, but there is clearly room for both approaches, and they may perhaps best used in conjuction with one another. Heck, I may even break my monster books out as the first step in putting together my next adventure.
Chad
When preparing adventures for my players, I try to take stock of what the players themselves enjoy: role-playing, combat, problem-solving, storytelling. If I am uncertain what they want, for example with a new group, I err toward storytelling (because that's what I like most).
Given that, interesting characters, secrets/surprise twists, tough decisions, and intra-party conflict are some of the elements (along with a strong plot of course) that make for good storytelling in my mind.
I'm not great at coming up with overall strong plots, so these I usually steal wholesale from others- comic books, movies, novels, published adventures, games run by other DMs, etc. I don't really care because the devil is in the details.
Before the game even starts, I like to work with the players to generate fairly detailed backgrounds for their characters. I let them do the bulk of the work, but I make a point of tying each of them to an NPC (villain or ally) that will show up in the game, another PC, or both, or more than one of both. This goes along way toward laying the grounds for intra-party conflict- which if not taken too far does as much to drive the game (or more) than it does to slow it down.
I also like to throw tough decisions (with real repercussions) at the party early on in most adventures. For example, I once had the party tracking a collection of dangerous books which had been stolen from a caravan by a mixed lot of orcs and goblinoids. The orcs had gone one direction with the books. The goblinoids had gone yet another direction with prisoners from the caravan. Here the party was faced with the decision of which to pursue first. They went after the prisoners first, allowing the books to slip farther from their grasp and be put to nefarious use. In return, they gained a number of allies and one of the PCs rescued a lost love who unknowingly had been traveling with the caravan in search of the PC. Had they gone after the books first, they would have gained a nemesis in the form of the lost love or one of her family members. I try to plot the consequences of major decisions like this in advance.
Alright, I'm rambling now. I hope what I have had to say is helpful to the OP and maybe some others. It may run slightly contrary to what others have posted, but there is clearly room for both approaches, and they may perhaps best used in conjuction with one another. Heck, I may even break my monster books out as the first step in putting together my next adventure.
Chad
Thornir Alekeg
Albatross!
Are you asking about writing an adventure for your personal use, or about trying to write something that would be accepted for publication? The stuff Pcat posted is great for trying to write something for publication, and some of it applies to writing your own personal use adventures, but an adventure just for you to DM does not need the same level of polish on it.messy said:allo
ok, folks, i need some help here: i don't know how to write adventures! i've read andy collins' and wolfgang baur's columns at wizards.com, and they didn't help muchso i need everything you can give me:
tips
ideas
links
anything else that might help
messy
I have found that with my own adventures, since I really understand the adventure and its intent, it is relatively easy for me to adjust on the fly if I discover things are not quite right. With a published adventure, you cannot assume the reader will do this, so everything needs to be as perfect as possible.
