TEXT:  
   
   
  
   
  THE ANATOMY OF 
  ADVENTURE 
   
   
  THOUGHTS ON ADVENTURE SCENARIO DESIGN FOR 
  ROLEPLAYING GAMES 
   
   
   
   
  M.T. BLACK 
   
   
  COVER BY MATTHEW WHITBY 
   
   
  This work is copyright 2020 M.T. Black, all rights reserved. 
  For more information go to my website: mtblackgames.com 
  
   
   
  Foreword: The Horns of Elfland ............................... 1 
  1. Goblins in a Cave ..................................................... 8 
  2. Second Album Syndrome .................................... 20 
  3. Nightmare in Amber ............................................. 27 
  4. The Maker and the Marketer .............................. 34 
  5. The Dungeon as Toy ............................................. 42 
  6. The Lich that Got Away ........................................ 50 
  7. Meaningful Choices ............................................... 58 
  8. Steal like an Artisan .............................................. 68 
  9. There’s a Robot in my Dungeon ......................... 79 
  10. Let the Dice Talk ................................................. 86 
  Afterword: I have Not Yet Begun to Write ............ 98 
  Bibliography .............................................................. 101 
  
  1 
  Foreword: The Horns of Elfland 
  Foreword 
  The Horns of Elfland 
  O, sweet and far from cliff and scar 
  The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! 
  Alfred Lord Tennyson 
  Certain episodes from childhood are indelibly carved into the mind, 
  and for me the following scene is recorded in deep, vorpal strokes. I 
  was about nine years old and walking with my mother through a 
  narrow, dirty shopping arcade in southern Sydney. We happened to 
  go into a tiny toy store, and while my mother talked to the shop 
  assistant, I wandered up and down the two cluttered aisles.  
   
  Then I saw it. Sitting in a wire display atop a wooden shelf was the 
  Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. I learned many years later that this 
  was the second version of the Basic Set and was written by Tom 
  Moldvay. At the time, all I saw was the stunning Erol Otus cover, 
  which depicts a warrior and a sorceress in a dark cavern fighting a 
  
  2 
  draconic beast as it emerges from an underground lake. The colors 
  are sumptuous—the warm, subdued purples of the cavern walls, the 
  poisonous green skin of the dragon, the rich crimson robes of the 
  sorceress, and the kaleidoscopic pile of glittering gems spilling out 
  from an old treasure chest.  
   
  The back of the box was just as exciting, as it proclaimed: 
  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Fantasy Adventure game is 
  probably unlike any other game you've played before.  
  In D&D adventures players take the roles of elves, dwarves, 
  halflings, or humans. They will wander through dark 
  dungeons, meet strange wizards, and battle ferocious 
  dragons. Playing D&D is like writing a novel with each 
  player contributing a part...  
  So enter the Gateway to Adventure—step into the world of 
  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS fantasy role playing game, a 
  world of endless excitement and thrilling fun.  
  These vivid images awakened a yearning in my young heart that I 
  barely understood. At that moment, I heard the “horns of Elfland,” to 
  quote Tennyson, and I desperately wished to step through the 
  promised “Gateway to Adventure.” It was another two years before I 
  
  3 
  was actually able to play the game, but once I had, it was the 
  beginning of a life-long love affair.  
   
  That is how I started playing the game. But how does one move 
  from player to designer? It is a perennial question in the Dungeons 
  & Dragons community, maybe because our game is inherently 
  creative. Whatever side of the DM screen you sit upon, you have built 
  something original and wonderful at some time, and probably many 
  things. And at some point, you have idly thought about sharing your 
  creation with the world.  
   
  As a teenager in Sydney, I filled endless notebooks with maps, 
  monsters, and adventures. Getting published was my dream, but it 
  seemed practically impossible. The local RPG-publishing industry 
  was so tiny as to be non-existent and breaching the walls of the 
  overseas giants required resources I lacked. America felt as far away 
  as the Moon.   
   
  It is utterly cliched and utterly true to say that the internet changed 
  everything. By the 2000s, publishers, game designers, and would-be 
  game designers were all rubbing shoulders in cyberspace. It 
  mattered less than ever whether you were in Sydney or Seattle, 
  though English was and remains the common tongue of the hobby. 
  Many of us found it astounding to be able to talk online to those who 
  had founded the RPG industry. It was a bit dream-like, as if figures 
  from history were stepping out of treasured old books and into your 
  life.  
  
  4 
   
  As the noughties turned into the teens, I found myself on the fringe 
  of the old school D&D community. At home I was playing my beloved 
  Basic D&D, and taking my players on a nostalgia-laced ride through 
  the adventures I’d adored as a kid—The Keep on the Borderlands, 
  The Lost City, Slave Pits of the Undercity, and so on. I was also 
  dabbling in game design and published a few things online, though 
  these early writings had few redeeming features.  
   
  Two things then happened to shift my gameplay habits. First, the 
  old school D&D community, blessed by a small amount of success 
  and prosperity, began to fracture quite unpleasantly and I started to 
  back away. More importantly, Wizards of the Coast released the Fifth 
  Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and many old school players like 
  me found the new edition scratched our itch in a way that Fourth 
  Edition and Third Edition had not.  
   
  I immediately commenced a very satisfying Fifth Edition 
  campaign. I also revived my dormant dreams of publishing 
  something for Dungeons & Dragons. The communications 
  revolution of the previous twenty years made this more feasible than 
  it was back in the 1980s, though it still looked difficult.  
   
  The situation improved again in 2016 when the Dungeon Masters 
  Guild was opened. For a share of the cover price, Wizards of the 
  Coast permitted anyone to publish and market D&D-compatible 
  material. They called this “Community Created Content” and the 
  program can legitimately be described as revolutionary. 
  
  5 
   
  I straightaway began publishing on the DMs Guild. My first effort, 
  a book of feats released a few days after the Guild started, was 
  terrible. My second publication, a small adventure called Temple of 
  the Nightbringers, was not terrible. It sold well, received good 
  reviews, and I began to grow an audience. The horns of Elfland rang 
  out once more, though this time I was playing a few notes myself. 
   
  It is nearly five years since I released that adventure, and I have 
  continued to learn, to write, and to publish. Adventures have been my 
  forte, and I have released more of those than any other type of 
  product. I have enjoyed more success than I could have imagined, 
  and at time of writing I have sold over a hundred thousand books and 
  have more than thirty-five platinum best-sellers to my name. And that, 
  in summary, is how I became a game designer!  
   
  Now, I am often asked what advice I would give someone who 
  wants to start publishing RPG adventures themselves. I always 
  suggest the following practical steps: 
   
  Develop your writing skills. I have encountered many people 
  with fantastic ideas who cannot translate those ideas to the page. 
  Roleplaying game designers are writers first and foremost. Just as a 
  carpenter needs to learn how to use a hammer and saw effectively, a 
  writer needs to learn how to use verbs, nouns, and various other 
  grammatical tools with skill. Fortunately, there is a lot of material 
  around, across all media, that can help you write better.  
  
  6 
   
  Learn the style guide. This may seem mundane but learning and 
  adhering to the style guide of whatever system you are writing for will 
  immediately boost the professionalism of your product. For 
  Dungeons & Dragons, the style guide is available on the Dungeon 
  Masters Guild. I also highly recommend Writing with Style: An 
  Editor's Advice for RPG Writers by Ray Vallese, which contains 
  many general principles applicable to most roleplaying games. 
   
  Read good adventures. Find good adventures and start reading 
  them. They will teach you a lot—things like how to structure 
  encounters, how to describe NPCs, how to tie locations together, and 
  so on. Look for modern adventures that are popular and well-rated. 
  You should also consider reading classic adventures from previous 
  editions—you can find “best of” lists all over the internet. I still read 
  old adventures all the time, and I learn so much from them. 
   
  Start short and start soon. It is not unusual to encounter new 
  writers whose first project rivals a WOTC hardback in size and 
  scope. A small number of newbies actually pull these mammoth 
  projects off, but that is exceedingly rare. I strongly recommend you 
  start small. My first published adventure was about 3,500 words in 
  length and ran to 7 pages. People still buy and play it to this day! Start 
  short and start soon. You will learn a lot by simply doing.  
   
  That is the foundational advice I give to everyone who asks, but I 
  have much more to say on this subject. A couple of years ago, I started 
  a newsletter called The Anatomy of Adventure as a way to keep in 
  
  7 
  touch with those who liked my work. Along with discount codes and 
  product updates, I began including the occasional essay on game 
  design, often dissecting my early adventures with the sharp eye of 
  experience and identifying what I did well along with what I did 
  poorly. These proved popular and more than a few readers suggested 
  I put them in a book. That is the genesis of what is now before you, 
  though I’ve substantially re-written and expanded all of the original 
  essays. 
   
  This volume presents an eclectic rather than systematic look at 
  the process of adventure design, but that is pretty typical of the few 
  books in this genre. Having said that, I do provide a step by step “How 
  to write a dungeon” guide in chapter 10, which seems a fitting finale. 
  But you will find the other chapters just as practical, I think.  
   
  If you have enjoyed this foreword, you will probably enjoy the rest 
  of this book. I know that many new adventure writers have found 
  these essays valuable, but I hope and believe that veteran designers 
  will find a few useful nuggets as well. Or, failing that, maybe you will 
  just enjoy a few hours spent with someone else who is passionate 
  about this craft. And perhaps, if we are lucky, you might hear the 
  horns of Elfland faintly blowing once more. 
   
  
  8 
  1. Goblins in a Cave 
  Chapter 1 
  Goblins in a Cave 
  It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to 
  write. Let them think you were born that way. 
  Ernest Hemingway 
  How do you learn to write a roleplaying game adventure? Maybe we 
  should start with a broader question—how do you learn any craft? 
  The primary method is via imitation. The master crafter shows the 
  apprentice how to do something and the apprentice then tries to do 
  it for themselves. When it comes to artistic works, there is a fun and 
  helpful word that sheds light on this process: pastiche. Wikipedia 
  tells me a pastiche is “a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music 
  that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other 
  artists.” 
   
  It is a bit of a problematic term, though, because the word is often 
  used to deride or dismiss a work. That is rather a shame, because 
  
  9 
  pastiche is a great way to learn. The renowned fashion designer Yohji 
  Yamamoto said, “Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. 
  At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” I will shamelessly admit 
  that my early adventures were pastiches of the D&D adventures I 
  loved as a kid. Sometimes the influences are obvious, sometimes a 
  bit more subtle, but pastiches they were. And as I wrote them, and 
  kept writing them, I finally found my own voice.  
   
  In the Foreword, I mentioned my love-at-first-sight experience 
  with the Erol Otus cover of the Basic Set when I was nine. I did not 
  dare ask my mother to buy the box, however. It cost $10, which 
  seemed an impossible amount to someone who received 50 cents per 
  week pocket money.  
   
  But a couple of years later, a kid at school who owned the Basic 
  Set offered to teach me how to play in the school library. My first ever 
  adventure was The Keep on the Borderlands. There were two PCs 
  in the party, bolstered by 10 men-at-arms we had hired. My character 
  was a first level fighter called Zargo, and we started by raiding the 
  southernmost cave on the bottom level of the Caves of Chaos, which 
  is a goblin lair. It was a life-altering experience as my eleven-year-old 
  self entered an almost platonic realm where imagination and will 
  combined in a unique and spirit-expanding way. But I am preaching 
  to the choir.   
   
  In some ways, all of my game design efforts ever since have been 
  aimed at recapturing that magical half-hour I spent fighting goblins 
  
  10 
  in the school library. My first published attempt to do so was Temple 
  of the Nightbringers, which I uploaded to the Dungeon Masters Guild 
  on January 17th, 2016.  
   
  I wrote the whole adventure over a weekend, in a burst of energy 
  catalyzed by years of pent-up creativity. I did not think in terms of 
  explicit design goals back then, but I recall that I wanted a low-level 
  goblin adventure that invoked the experience I had playing The Keep 
  on the Borderlands. It was a self-conscious pastiche, and the 
  following is a “blow-by-blow” account of how I put it together. 
   
  I started by devising a hook: the local lord asks the characters to 
  find and neutralize some goblins who have been attacking merchants 
  on the Long Road, which is a major trade route in the Forgotten 
  Realms. It is a cliched adventure hook, but it immediately captures 
  the tone of the game. The presence of goblins tells you we are in a 
  fantasy setting. The fact that they are raiding caravans tells you that 
  the world is a dangerous place and people cannot simply travel about 
  with impunity. Finally, having the characters sent to deal with the 
  problem casts them in a heroic mold. They are not regular people; 
  they are the saviors of regular people.  
   
  The adventure opens with the party heading toward the hamlet of 
  Melton, where they are told they will learn more about the goblins. 
  This sort of in media res opening, with the characters already going 
  somewhere and undertaking some task, is particularly good for one-
  shots and for the opening adventure of a campaign. You will notice 
  
  11 
  this technique is used in both the Lost Mines of Phandelver and 
  Hoard of the Dragon Queen. 
   
  Melton (which I invented) is a tiny hamlet midway between the 
  towns of Longsaddle and Triboar, a "middle of nowhere" sort of 
  place. It serves the same “home base” function as the Keep does in 
  The Keep on the Borderlands, though Melton is much smaller and 
  less sophisticated. I followed a pretty classic "town and down" 
  pattern of adventure design here—wander around town and pick up 
  some information, then head down the dungeon. It is a particularly 
  good pattern for your first adventure. Or your thirty-fifth adventure. 
   
  Upon arrival, the characters immediately meet the town constable, 
  and I will tell you now that she is the main villain of the piece. This 
  whole “the good guy was really the bad guy all along” is a bit of a 
  rookie move on my part, as it can easily go wrong. Experienced 
  players will probably smell a rat immediately and might focus their 
  attention on the constable rather than chasing down the goblins. An 
  experienced DM can make that work without much trouble, but new 
  DMs might struggle. I kept returning to this trope in my early 
  adventures. I think I have broken the habit now! 
   
  I put some good color in the muddy little town of Melton. I was 
  trying to capture the vibe of the pub scene in An American Werewolf 
  in London, with creepy and peculiar locals who are wary of outsiders. 
  The characters learn some interesting tidbits, including the fact that 
  
  12 
  the leader of the goblins always wears a mask! Yes, it is all very 
  obvious, but it is fun to play.  
   
  The characters finally pick up an NPC guide who knows where the 
  goblin caves are, and away they go. NPC guides are an excellent 
  element to include in your adventures as they are a useful 
  mouthpiece for the DM, and players always love getting help. This 
  NPC, a half-elf scout named Dawn Mistwalker, stepped straight out 
  of central casting. I would work a bit harder these days to bring her 
  to life by giving her some sort of distinct mannerism or feature. 
  Perhaps she shaves her head or has dark, swirling tattoos on her 
  face.  
   
  There follows a short trek to the goblin hideout, interrupted by a 
  rather nice little fight with a bugbear on a fallen tree bridge. Adding 
  a terrain detail like that increases immersion, and in this instance, it 
  affects the combat in a meaningful way as the party must cross the 
  bridge single file. If I were writing this trek today, I might include a 
  choice of routes and a more unusual monster. Perhaps the NPC 
  guide says, "We can take the long way over the bugbear's bridge or 
  take the shortcut past the giant killer beehive." I did not realize at the 
  time how important it was to build meaningful choices like that into 
  your adventures. I talk a lot more about this in chapter 7. 
   
  The adventurers arrive at the dungeon—and we must take a few 
  moments to talk about the architecture of the location and how it 
  shaped the adventure. My original vision was of a little goblin warren 
  
  13 
  that looked somewhat like the goblin lair in The Keep on the 
  Borderlands, but I could not draw it myself and I did not know anyone 
  else who could. Fortunately, the DMs Guild includes a few old maps 
  that you can use in your products. The best one available resembled 
  a ruined temple more than anything. Fine—the goblins were living in 
  an abandoned underground temple. But whose temple? I looked over 
  the evil gods in the Forgotten Realms and selected Shar, mistress of 
  the night.  
   
  I did a little more research and learned that some of Shar’s elite 
  followers were called the Nightbringers. I decided this temple was 
  one of their old bases, and suddenly I had a name for my adventure: 
  Temple of the Nightbringers. It is a really good title! Furthermore, 
  since Shar is an evil goddess, I decided there is probably some 
  malignant magic still floating around the place, allowing me to 
  introduce some undead creatures and other strangeness. 
   
  There are two important things to note here. First, although I 
  started out with the goblin caves in The Keep on the Borderlands as 
  my model, the location quickly evolved into something else 
  altogether. As Yamamoto said, “Copy copy copy copy. At the end of 
  the copy you will find yourself.” Folk sometimes tell me they cannot 
  get started because they cannot think of a really good idea. Start by 
  imitating someone else’s good idea. If you put the work into it, it will 
  develop into something unique.  
  
  14 
   
  The second thing to note is that a constraint (I could not draw a 
  map) turned into an asset. When I was forced to use the temple map, 
  I ended up creating a bunch of new lore to make it all fit together. 
  The result was a more interesting dungeon than the goblin warren I 
  originally envisaged. In my experience, constraints fuel creativity. 
  This is because you are forced to come up with smart little ideas to 
  overcome the constraint, and these ideas take you in directions you 
  might not normally have considered. Typical constraints for indie-
  creators involve cover art, word length, monster availability, and all 
  sorts of other things. Rather than a liability, your constraints often 
  turn out to be assets. 
   
  Having taken care of the architecture, I needed to figure out who 
  was inhabiting the dungeon. Goblins, wargs, the goblin chief, and a 
  couple of hobgoblin bodyguards make up the goblin gang. These 
  days, I often put a “monster roster” together before I start writing out 
  the dungeon, which has all the monsters I want to include. Seeing 
  them listed together is helpful, giving me a strong sense of the 
  “flavor” of what I am creating. Then, as I write the dungeon, I simply 
  pick monsters off the roster as needed. I find this keeps me in the 
  “creative flow” more effectively than having to stop and think “what 
  monster would be here?”  
   
  I wanted some non-goblinoid-related creatures as well. It was 
  always on my mind to include zombies, but you cannot just put them 
  in a room next door to the goblins, as if everyone is living at the 
  
  15 
  monster hotel. Or can you? The Shar theme suggested a solution. All 
  the necromantic magic floating around the temple caused some 
  corpses to animate as zombies. Where did the corpses come from? 
  Perhaps they were goblin prisoners. And suddenly it all clicked. The 
  goblins locked these prisoners in the room next door to the barracks 
  and listened gleefully as they died of dehydration and starvation. 
  Hey—goblins are not cute, they are nasty! 
   
  A couple of weeks later, though, they began hearing noises coming 
  from the locked room with the corpses. In terror, they nailed the door 
  shut and put up "danger - keep out" signs. Now they cannot sleep at 
  night, the tormentors having become the tormented. That is how you 
  can have zombies living next door to goblins. And that little cycle is 
  very indicative of the creative process at work.  
   
  I used a table in appendix A of the Dungeon Masters Guide to 
  figure out the original purpose of each room in the temple, whether 
  it be a barracks, a kitchen, or whatever.  I use appendix A a lot when 
  I create adventures these days—I talk about this more in chapter 10. 
  One suggestion from the purpose table was a summoning room, and 
  it so happened I had a place on my map with a pool in it. I decided 
  that this was a summoning pool, used by the old high priestess of 
  Shar to conjure fiends. The water is green and glowing, and it turns 
  out she was mid-way through a summoning when the temple met its 
  untimely end (whatever caused that). So, the pool is primed—
  
  16 
  someone just needs to touch the water, and the spell will complete, 
  causing an imp to jump out.  
   
  These little mysteries (a locked door that says, "keep out," a 
  glowing pool of water) are essential to D&D. They are part of the 
  exploration pillar of the game—the players see something that piques 
  their curiosity and want to investigate. If you want your dungeon to 
  hold the player’s interest, you need to pepper it with little secrets and 
  mysteries like this.  
   
  I also included a little puzzle. A weird black disc found in one room 
  turns out to be the key that turns off a force field protecting a treasure 
  in another place. “Lock and key” is the most basic puzzle there is, but 
  players find it very satisfying. It is strange that I do not see more “lock 
  and key” in D&D adventures, and I think designers sometimes 
  unnecessarily reject the simple things that work. I had this in mind 
  when I later wrote Blue Alley (co-authored with Alan Patrick and 
  inspired by Ed Greenwood’s original). The adventure is premised 
  around hunting for various keys to progress and, based on the 
  feedback we have received, it worked a treat. 
   
  There is lots of treasure in this dungeon—far too much. I was still 
  stuck in the old school D&D mindset at the time. In the early versions 
  of the game, you had to pour on the gold because it was the primary 
  means to acquire XP. I have got better guidance now around how 
  much treasure to include in a dungeon (based on the Adventurer’s 
  
  17 
  League guidelines). But if you run Temple of the Nightbringers, you 
  might want to nerf the cash a bit! 
   
  Ok, we have ticked off many of the major elements you expect in a 
  dungeon. We have combat, we have a trap, and we have a puzzle. 
  What else do we need? Someone to talk to! Sure, we have already hit 
  the social pillar pretty hard in town, but I really like putting social 
  encounters in the middle of dungeons. Breaks things up nicely and is 
  very handy if the DM suddenly needs to communicate something to 
  the party, or to bring them back on track. 
   
  I went for a pretty obvious social encounter, namely, a pair of 
  prisoners. About 90% of non-hostile NPCs you meet in dungeons 
  seem to be prisoners! But there are other options, such as: 
   An elemental bound to a room or object. 
   An explorer seeking information. 
   A fugitive from the law, hiding out.  
   The ghost of a previous inhabitant. 
   An inanimate object, given the power of speech. 
   A lost monster who has wandered into the dungeon. 
   Another party of adventurers. 
   A nature spirit or fey who is attached to a natural feature. 
   An ancient guardian who has inhabited the dungeon for eons. 
  I am sure you can think of more.  
  
  18 
   
  In this instance, the two prisoners are working in the goblin 
  kitchen, making a stew. They were captured from a caravan, and it 
  turns out their families will reward the adventurers for returning 
  them to Triboar. This would have been a better hook for the 
  adventure, by the way. Families approach you in Triboar and offer 
  you 200 gp to find their missing sons, last seen heading north on the 
  Long Road. No mention of goblins, so you have the delicious mystery 
  of what happened to them alongside much tighter "win conditions" 
  for the adventure as a whole. 
   
  The characters finally confront the big bad boss and her pet worg. 
  After she is defeated, the great unmasking happens, and they 
  discover it was the village constable all along! It turns out she 
  stumbled upon the temple ruins a while ago and found the "Mask of 
  Shar," a magic item that gave her a buff when she put it on, but also 
  slowly turned her evil. She gathered a gang of goblins about her and 
  commenced her secret life as a bandit.  
   
  Someone wryly described this as a “Scooby-Doo ending,” and I 
  think that is accurate. Back in the days of the original Scooby-Doo 
  cartoon, the heroes would always catch the monster, pull off its mask 
  and exclaim something like, "It's Mr. Jones, the real estate agent!" 
  The ending is very cheesy but, in my experience, it works ok. And it 
  is easily omitted if you do not like it.  
   
  Temple of the Nightbringers was very well received upon release. 
  At the time of writing, it has sold several thousand copies and has a 
  
  19 
  solid 90% approval rating. Lots of people have told me what an 
  effective introductory adventure it is, and for many people, it has been 
  their first experience of Dungeons & Dragons. It was a really good 
  debut adventure and I remain proud of it. I had some trouble with the 
  sequel, however.  
   
   
   
  
  20 
  2. Second Album Syndrome 
  Chapter 2 
  Second Album Syndrome 
  The second album is the hardest to write. 
  Theophilus London 
  I was surprised and pleased by the strong response Temple of the 
  Nightbringers received, so I immediately sat down and tried to write 
  another adventure. The result was Terror at Triboar, written over a 
  weekend and published on February 6th, 2016. The initial feedback 
  was a bit underwhelming.  
   
  There is a thing called “second album syndrome” in the music 
  industry. The idea is that many years’ worth of creative energy goes 
  into your debut album, and then you stumble when you have to turn 
  around and try and do it all again, in a much shorter time frame, for 
  the follow-up. I think I fell victim to this with Terror at Triboar.  
   
  Having said that, I do not regret publishing it as quickly I did. The 
  inverse problem is getting so anxious about making the follow-up 
  
  21 
  “good enough” that you do not publish at all. I have seen many, many 
  people fall into this trap, especially those who have a huge hit with 
  their first product. I would much rather publish a bit too quickly than 
  become too nervous to publish at all.  
   
  It is also worth noting that there are a lot of factors outside your 
  control when it comes to sales. I have often seen follow-up products 
  that are better quality do more poorly than their predecessor. Trying 
  to nail down all the elements that affect sales feels like an impossible 
  quest, especially in the microscopic market of indie TTRPG 
  publishing. It is tempting to play endless games of “maybe it was 
  because…” Maybe it was because it is school vacation. Maybe it was 
  because school just went back. Maybe it was because the weather 
  was really good this week. Maybe it was because the weather was 
  bad. And so on and so on. Most such discussions are pointless.  
   
  I have thought about this a lot and come to the following 
  conclusion. Assuming your product displays a basic level of 
  competence (writing, layout, editing, etc.), your success comes down 
  to either good luck (you happened to hit the zeitgeist that week) or 
  good marketing. There is almost a spectrum when it comes to sales 
  success, with luck at one end and marketing at the other. The more 
  marketing you do, the less you are reliant on luck. I talk more about 
  marketing in chapter 4. 
   
  Back to Terror at Triboar. This adventure was very much inspired 
  by Village of Hommlet, though the resemblance is a bit obscure. The 
  
  22 
  great memory I have of Hommlet is wandering around the village in 
  a very freeform way and interacting with a variety of interesting 
  people. It may have been my first experience of an urban adventure 
  and I wanted to capture something of that vibe.   
   
  But there were a few other influences and constraints. I selected 
  Triboar as the location primarily because of the alliteration it 
  generated in the title. More significantly, I decided early on that I 
  wanted to create a horror adventure because I did not have much 
  experience in that genre, and I wanted to stretch myself. I had some 
  images from Creepshow running through my head which I was 
  hoping to work into the plot. I hoped to create something a bit 
  disturbing—though it did not really work out that way, as you will see! 
   
  The adventure starts with some infodump via a too-big chunk of 
  boxed text. There is an election coming up in a couple of weeks for 
  the office of Lord Protector, who is the ruler of Triboar. By tradition, 
  this seven-yearly event occurs on St. Oswin’s Day, which celebrates 
  the founding of the town. I made most of this lore up, by the way, 
  based on a couple of hints from the canonical Forgotten Realms 
  books.   
   
  The characters are summoned to meet the current Lord Protector, 
  Darathra Shendrel. She tells them of some strange happenings in 
  town. People have gone missing, livestock has been killed, and there 
  is a mysterious figure wandering the fields at night. The townsfolk 
  are nervous and whisper about a legendary creature called the 
  
  23 
  "Terror" that is said to haunt the town. The voters are unhappy and 
  Darathra wants the characters to figure out what is really going on—
  before the election takes place! Yes, I have made her rather more 
  cynical than how she is portrayed in Storm King’s Thunder.  
   
  Darathra has a single lead for them to chase up, a crop farmer 
  whose wife and child went missing a few nights ago. When I write 
  investigation scenarios these days, I usually make sure the quest 
  giver has at least two leads to share, and sometimes three. Whenever 
  you can, you want to give the players meaningful choices to make.  
   
  The adventurers then wander about town and the surrounding 
  farms, following leads and picking up bits of information about the 
  Terror. I created a dozen encounters for the town, labelling half of 
  them “clue encounters” and the other half “random encounters.” The 
  clue encounters eventually lead to an old graveyard outside town, 
  while the random encounters were there to spice things up.  
   
  Players can get frustrated by too many meaningless encounters 
  when they are in the middle of a juicy investigation, so I suggested to 
  DMs that they only use a few of the random encounters. Despite this, 
  I have heard about groups getting bogged down in town, as they grind 
  through all the random encounters. Some Dungeon Masters have a 
  “completionist” attitude, and that is something to be aware of when 
  you create a list of encounters like that. These days I would be more 
  likely to provide just two or three such encounters.   
  
  24 
   
  There is one interesting random encounter with "Sharkey's Men" 
  (thank you, Tolkien). Sharkey is a criminal boss who is backing a rival 
  candidate in the election and he warns the party off from helping the 
  Lord Protector. If I were writing the adventure today, I might well 
  develop that into a subplot of one or two encounters, climaxing in a 
  showdown with Sharkey.  
   
  I did not really know how to plan an investigative adventure back 
  then, and I found it pretty difficult to link the clues together. These 
  days, when I create an investigation, I draw a “clue map” in the form 
  of a flow chart with boxes and lines. The boxes are locations while 
  the lines connecting them are clues, with everything eventually 
  leading to the resolution. The chart ends up looking a bit like a 
  dungeon map. My goal is always to give the adventurers a few 
  different paths to get to the final goal, so they have meaningful 
  choices to make along the way.  
   
  In Terror at Triboar, the clues ultimately lead them to an old 
  graveyard outside of town where they meet a wraith who explains 
  what is going on. The Terror is actually Sir Oswin, the founder of 
  Triboar! He is under a curse that causes him to rise from his tomb 
  every 50 years as a ghast and menace the town. 
   
  The adventurers stake out the tomb of Sir Oswin and destroy him 
  when he rises that night. It is a bit like modern Americans staking 
  out Mount Vernon and destroying the risen corpse of George 
  Washington. At this point, I realized my adventure was not very 
  
  25 
  terrifying, and some elements of it were quite amusing. I had 
  somehow ended up at the Army of Darkness end of the horror 
  spectrum.  
   
  Once I realized this, I decided to drive the irony home a bit more. 
  The Lord Protector is grateful for the destruction of the Terror and 
  invites the adventurers to give the Sir Oswin commemorative speech 
  on Election Day. And so, they stand at the tomb, speaking the praises 
  of the person whose undead remains they recently destroyed! It is all 
  very silly in a very D&D sort of way.  
   
  One interesting footnote. I released this adventure in February of 
  2016. In September that year, WOTC released Storm King's 
  Thunder which detailed the entire town of Triboar, and I had to do 
  some hasty revisions to ensure it all reconciled. This is one of the few 
  times I have made extensive changes to an adventure after 
  publication.  
   
  Terror at Triboar did not get the same acclaim as Temple of the 
  Nightbringers on release, but it received better reviews as time went 
  on. It currently has an 88% rating on the DMs Guild and is a platinum 
  bestseller. I have always considered it one of my lesser adventures, 
  but re-reading it now, I find a lot of things to like. I especially like that 
  I put together a fun, easy-to-run investigative adventure in about 
  3,000 words. As my writing became more fluent, it became much 
  harder to keep the word count down.  
  
  26 
   
  Terror at Triboar may have failed as a horror adventure, but failure 
  is merely an invitation to try again. And as it happened, my next 
  adventure would succeed brilliantly in this genre.  
   
   
   
  
  27 
  3. Nightmare in Amber 
  Chapter 3 
  Nightmare in Amber 
  If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a 
  hundred, you have the odds in your favor.  
  Edgar Rice Burroughs 
  I released Shadows on the Long on March 2nd, 2016. It was my third 
  published adventure and the first one I consider to be really good. It 
  was very much inspired by Castle Amber, the wonderfully 
  imaginative module written by Tom Moldvay and published by TSR 
  back in 1981. Moldvay based large parts of his adventure on the 
  stories of Clark Ashton Smith.  
   
  I see Castle Amber as a sort of "haunted house," and I chose that 
  genre for Shadows on the Long Road. I based the backstory on a 
  Clark Ashton Smith tale called The Nameless Offspring. In my 
  adventure, a rich warlock named Gideon Saltmarsh marries against 
  the wishes of his fiendish patron, and his wife later dies giving birth 
  
  28 
  to a horrible creature. There is more than a hint that the patron might 
  somehow be the father. Gideon raises this infernal Offspring as his 
  own, and discovers it has rather grisly appetites... 
   
  The party gets involved when they find themselves surrounded by 
  mists and come across a well-lit mansion. Yes, the old "surrounded 
  by mists" adventure hook—it was fresh in the late 70s!  They knock 
  on the mansion door and are invited inside by an old man, Gideon 
  Saltmarsh, and his gnome servant, Grundy. Gideon seems friendly 
  enough, sharing a feast with the characters and playing some games 
  with them. The most memorable of these is a wrestling match with 
  Gideon’s servant, a minor flesh golem called Magnus.   
   
  The adventurers retire for the evening, but sometime after 
  midnight they are set upon by a group of thugs. After the thugs are 
  dealt with, the adventure becomes a dungeon crawl through the 
  mansion, with the adventurers encountering all sorts of nasty things. 
  A few highlights include a ghoul chained up in a room, a grim chapel 
  with an evil tome, and the ghost of Gideon’s wife, whispering sadly 
  to herself in her old bedchamber.  
   
  As the characters explore, they gather clues and slowly piece 
  together the disturbing backstory. They finally make their way to the 
  basement and find a pen filled with terrified people who Gideon plans 
  to butcher and feed to the Offspring. Here is how I described this 
  scene: 
  
  29 
  A row of iron bars cordons off one side of the room, and beyond 
  those bars is the most pitiful sight imaginable. A great mass of 
  people, all stripped naked, are crammed into the pen, wallowing 
  in the mud and their own filth. Some are moaning, some are 
  calling out in terror, and others merely rock back and forth in 
  silent anguish. 
  It is a harrowing scene, and several people have written to tell me 
  how much it affected them. It was based on the basement scene from 
  The Road, which disturbed me terribly when I first saw it. The movies 
  and TV do spectacle well, so do not be afraid to riff off something you 
  see there. 
   
  A large ogre, who serves as Gideon’s butcher, is in the next room, 
  which is slick with blood and gore. Having dealt with the ogre, the 
  characters come upon the Offspring itself, a vicious yet pathetic 
  creature. Upon killing it and Gideon, the mansion begins collapsing. 
  Should the characters escape, they find themselves (and anyone they 
  rescued) back on the main road, the mist gone and no sign of the 
  mansion.  
   
  It is the backstory that really makes this adventure work. Many of 
  the villains, even the genuinely evil ones, are tragic figures 
  themselves, which gives the whole thing a grim poignancy. I based 
  the map on a real medieval manor map, and then let the backstory 
  drive the encounters in each room. For example, there was a chapel 
  
  30 
  on the map, so I came up with a suitably macabre encounter with an 
  ancient altar and an evil book. There is a lady's chamber on the map, 
  and I placed the ghost of Gideon's wife in there, floating around next 
  to her wedding dress. This is another example of a constraint (the 
  map) driving creativity.   
   
  I littered the mansion with clues about the backstory. These took 
  the form of paintings, books, furniture, engravings, NPCs, and so on. 
  Secrets and clues are a great way to transform a good dungeon into 
  a great dungeon. They do not have to reveal the whole backstory in 
  an info-dump manner; you just need to share a few key elements and 
  you will find players are quite ingenious at putting together the whole 
  story. Mike Shea calls secrets and clues the Dungeon Master’s 
  “secret weapon” and I think he makes a strong case. Mike notes: 
  Secrets are powerful magic… they build a rich texture for PCs 
  to discover. When we think about the tools we need for the 
  three pillars of exploration, interaction, and combat; a list of ten 
  secrets is as valuable to exploration as monster stat blocks are 
  to combat.  
  Bringing the physical dungeon to life is always a challenge to do well. 
  By this stage, I had discovered the simple trick of using google 
  images to help me describe a location. So, for Gideon's bed chamber, 
  I'd google something like "medieval lords’ bedroom" and use the 
  
  31 
  image to help explain what it looked like. I still use this method today 
  when I am struggling to visualize something. 
   
  Looking at the descriptions now, some of them are a bit wordy, but 
  many of them are concise and evocative. Concise descriptions make 
  the location very usable at the table, as the DM can quickly grasp 
  them and keep the game flowing. Evocative descriptions bring the 
  location to life in everyone’s mind. Concise and evocative—this is my 
  mantra, especially when it comes to boxed text.    
   
  This adventure is by no means perfect, and I can see some glaring 
  mistakes. For example, I literally describe the front hall twice, once 
  at the start when the characters are shown through to the dining hall, 
  and later on when the adventure moves into "dungeon crawl" mode. 
  The first description is completely redundant, and these days I would 
  just say, “Grundy leads the characters to the Dining Room (location 
  1 on the map)”. I make the same mistake with the dining room 
  description, and I would find a way to tighten that up as well. 
   
  My mechanical inexperience is also evident. I wanted the party to 
  face a flesh golem, but since the adventure is only level 3, I went to 
  the trouble of stating up a "minor flesh golem.” What a waste of 
  time—if doing it now I would just use a regular flesh golem with 
  minimum hit points and change the melee weapon immunity to 
  resistance. Also, the flesh golem, the butcher, and the Offspring are 
  all similar monsters—big brute-style things. If I were doing it again, I 
  would combine the flesh golem and the butcher into one character, 
  
  32 
  and make the Offspring a bit more distinctive, perhaps even 
  Lovecraftian. 
   
  There is a very deadly encounter in the adventure that has resulted 
  in numerous TPKs. The adventurers enter Gideon's study while 
  looking for him; Gideon is there, but invisible. He quietly leaves 
  through the door, turns, and throws a fireball at the party! I’ve seen 
  experienced players pick up on the clues that he is present (burning 
  fire, the lantern is on, there is an open book on the desk, no other exit 
  from the room), but it is a very tough encounter for a level 3 party. In 
  hindsight, I would keep the encounter, but suggest to the DM that if 
  a TPK occurs, the party should miraculously wake up in the pen, 
  naked and on 1 hit point.  
   
  There is another design issue that has led to some grimly amusing 
  finales. The basement has a gateway to the infernal plane of 
  Minauros, which Gideon uses to meet with his patron. As I 
  mentioned above, the mansion and basement begin shaking 
  themselves apart when the Offspring is killed. A few parties have run 
  out the gateway, thinking it was an exit back to our world—and found 
  themselves in a hellish swamp with the tunnel behind them 
  collapsing. Oh dear! If I were revising the adventure, I would keep the 
  gateway to hell, but put bars across it.  
   
  But these are all forgivable flaws, I think. The adventure continues 
  to be popular, and I receive great feedback about it even now, several 
  years after publication. I am a little shocked at how dark some of it 
  
  33 
  is, but I remain proud of it. It is a platinum best-seller and currently 
  has a 94% approval rating.  
   
  My next adventure was much lighter in tone, but before I published 
  it, I planned out a small marketing experiment that ended up altering 
  the course of my creative career.   
   
   
   
  
  34 
  4. The Maker and the Marketer 
  Chapter 4  
  The Maker and the Marketer 
  Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to 
  collect money and fame from this state of being. 
  A. A. Milne 
  I have seen the following sad story play out on the Dungeon Masters 
  Guild quite a few times. An enthusiastic newcomer publishes their 
  first creation, full of hope and expectation. They see it slip off the 
  front page with few sales, and then begin desperately asking other 
  creators on social media, “Any tips for promoting my product??”  
   
  Unfortunately, three days after launch is usually too late to develop 
  a marketing strategy.  
   
  If you are creating and publishing your own books, you are 
  wearing two hats. As creator, your responsibility is to make a quality 
  product. As publisher, your responsibility (in this context) is to 
  market the product. You are both the maker and the marketer.  
  
  35 
   
  These roles sometimes come into conflict. Marketing is a bit of a 
  dirty word in the indie TTRPG community. It conjures up visions of 
  greedy multi-nationals foisting soulless products on the unsuspecting 
  masses. For many indie-creators, the desired product lifecycle seems 
  to be something like this: you release your product with no fanfare, it 
  spreads virally, and ultimately becomes a smash hit with you doing 
  no promotion at all, just modestly watching from the sidelines.  
   
  Let me say that I do not think this attitude comes from laziness—
  rather, I think there is a vague feeling that marketing is cheating and 
  should not be necessary if your product is of sufficient quality.  
   
  This is clearly nonsense. I have seen many superb products 
  disappear into the abyss of low sales. There is no inherent justice in 
  the marketplace, no guarantee that hard work and talent will be 
  rewarded. The history of creative endeavor is replete with stories of 
  brilliant artists who were unrecognized and unappreciated during 
  their lifetime. If you want to avoid this grim fate, you need to make an 
  effort to connect your product with the people who might like your 
  product. This is the essence of marketing.  
   
  My first few books sold reasonably well, and certainly better than 
  I expected. But they were nowhere near the top 10 of the DMs Guild, 
  nor even the top 50! At the time, I do not think I used the phrase 
  marketing, but I knew I needed some method of generating more 
  sales if I were to get myself a hit. Just pushing products out into the 
  
  36 
  marketplace and hoping I would eventually get struck by lightning 
  seemed like a recipe for frustration and failure.  
   
  About this time, I heard an interview with Monte Cook, who has 
  run some of the most successful TTRPG campaigns ever on 
  Kickstarter. Monte noted that he had struggled to understand how to 
  make Kickstarter work for him until he began to treat it like a game. 
  A game has rules and win conditions, meaning you can create 
  strategies to succeed. Once Monte engaged his game-playing brain, 
  once he figured out the rules and the win conditions, he devised a 
  successful Kickstarter strategy.  
   
  I took the same approach with the Dungeon Masters Guild, 
  asking, “How does this ‘game’ work and how can I win?” My insights 
  were not especially startling or innovative, but they paved the road to 
  success for me. I will share some of the early lessons I learned here.  
   
  The essential marketing strategy is to expose your product to as 
  many potential buyers as possible. How to do that in my context? 
  Well, the two uppermost strips on the DMs Guild website at that 
  stage were the “Most Popular DMs Guild Titles” and the “Newest 
  DMs Guild Titles.” These were the most visible parts of the site. 
  Being high on those strips gave you great exposure to an audience 
  that was interested in buying D&D books. I could not control what 
  appeared on the “Most Popular” strip, but I could exercise a small 
  amount of control over the “Newest” strip—by releasing new 
  products!  
  
  37 
   
  I came up with the following strategy. I would release 4 products 
  per month—1 paid product and 3 tiny free products. The free titles 
  (which were mostly 1-page things such as subclasses) would keep my 
  name fresh in people's minds and also (hopefully) drive traffic to my 
  paid titles.  
   
  Another pretty obvious marketing concept is brand loyalty. It 
  applies to writers as well as car makers! If someone likes one book 
  you have written, there is a good chance they will like your other 
  books too. I needed to make it as easy as possible for people who 
  looked at one of my products to see my other products.  
   
  These days, the DMs Guild website automatically creates a strip 
  for you called “More from this Title’s Contributors” but that did not 
  exist at first. Drawing on some web programming skills, I created a 
  text file with image hyperlinks to all of my paid products on the Guild. 
  When I created a new product, I added it to this file, then went and 
  edited every other product I had on the Guild and pasted the updated 
  link list in. Since I was releasing so many products, I had to 
  frequently update 20, 30, 40, or more titles. But the end result was 
  that every single one of my products linked to every single one of my 
  paid products.  
   
  Both of these strategies required a lot of work, some of it 
  incredibly tedious. Looking back, I am amazed that I persisted as 
  long as I did. But it was effective. I began to see a steady increase in 
  sales across the board. 
  
  38 
   
  However, I took my most significant marketing step a few weeks 
  after publishing Shadows on the Long Road, when I decided to 
  release my first three adventures as a bundle called the Triboar 
  Trilogy. Although product bundling was well established on 
  DriveThruRPG (and in retail generally), to the best of my recollection 
  it had not been done on the DMs Guild before that time.  
   
  I was selling these three adventures (Temple of the Nightbringers, 
  Terror at Triboar, and Shadows on the Long Road) for $1.50 each at 
  the time (too cheap!) The Triboar Trilogy would sell for $3, giving the 
  buyer a 33% discount. 
   
  I was nervous. My three little adventures were selling nicely, and I 
  did not want to do anything that might interfere with that. Yet I knew 
  that this sort of product bundling was common across the entire 
  retail space, and I figured it must work. I finally mustered my 
  courage, shut my eyes, and hit "Publish." It was a turning point in my 
  D&D writing career. 
   
  If you look at the following table, you can see the results. I 
  introduced the bundle at the start of week 4 (which was June 26th, 
  2016):  
   
   
   
   
  
  39 
   
  Week 1 
  Week 2 
  Week 3 
  Week 4 
  Week 5 
  Week 6 
  Individual 
  $95.50 
  $113.50 
  $118.50 
  $75.50 
  $51.50 
  $65.50 
  Bundle 
   
   
   
  $312.00 
  $282.00 
  $258.00 
  Total 
  $95.50 
  $113.50 
  $118.50 
  $387.50 
  $333.50 
  $323.50 
   
  Although the individual sales took a big hit, it was more than made 
  up for by the bundle sales. I tripled my weekly earnings by releasing 
  a bundle with a discount and The Triboar Trilogy became my first 
  top 10 product. 
   
  Having proven the idea, I decided to crank it up to eleven. I worked 
  extremely hard to release a whole bunch of adventures over the 
  coming months, with the idea of doing a bundle for Christmas. By the 
  time we reached November, I had published fourteen short 
  adventures. I released the Complete Adventures of M.T. Black on 
  November 18th, 2016 for the absurdly cheap price of $7.95 (I 
  increased it to $9.95 a few days later) and went to bed. When I woke 
  up in the morning, I was shocked to see it had hit number one, a 
  position it held for nearly six months. This collection remains 
  popular, having sold nearly 10,000 copies at time of writing, and 
  enjoying a remarkable 98% rating over 100 reviews.  
   
  Because of that product, everyone in the DMs Guild creator 
  community suddenly knew my name (this was not the case before). 
  
  40 
  And because of that product, doors began to open for me, leading to 
  most of the opportunities I have enjoyed since then.  
   
  Writing those fourteen adventures was the making side of the 
  business. Choosing to bundle those fourteen adventures was the 
  marketing side of the business. The marketing went hand in hand 
  with the making. If I had just focused on the making, and ignored the 
  marketing, I would not have had the success I have enjoyed.  
   
  None of the strategies above is revolutionary or original. Whatever 
  credit I deserve lies solely in taking established ideas and applying 
  them to the little marketplace we are operating in. And the strategies 
  above are not necessarily going to work for you today as the scene 
  has shifted. For example, bundles are extremely common now and 
  only a small number sell well. However, the principle of taking 
  established marketing strategies and applying them to the world of 
  TTRPG is always relevant. There is still a lot of potential for folks to 
  distinguish their products via sound marketing. 
   
  These days, a large part of my marketing is done via email 
  campaigns, and I have a mailing list of several thousand people. This 
  sort of marketing is sometimes called EDM (Electronic Direct Mail) 
  and it is highly effective. But I am learning more about this area all 
  the time and you should be too. There is even an online course now 
  called Marketing 101 for ttRPG Creators—I recommend you look it 
  up. 
  
  41 
   
  Marketing is a massive and complicated topic. I find it painful and 
  most of you probably do too. But if you can master it, even just a little 
  bit, it will almost certainly lead to more sales, and hence more 
  opportunity to create. And that is worth a bit of trouble, right?  
   
   
   
   
  
  42 
  5. The Dungeon as Toy 
  Chapter 5 
  The Dungeon as Toy 
  The “joy of discovery” is one of the  
  fundamental joys of play itself. 
  Derek Yu 
  My first three adventures all featured iconic locations—Temple of the 
  Nightbringers in a goblin lair, Terror at Triboar in a small frontier 
  town, and Shadows on the Long Road in a haunted house. I decided 
  to set my next adventure in another iconic location: a wizard's tower. 
  This became Tower of the Mad Mage, which I published on April 7th, 
  2016. 
   
  Aside from the location, I started writing the adventure with two 
  elements in mind. The first was a hook I found online (in a massive 
  list of them), describing a wounded goblin who walks into a tavern 
  and collapses, pleading for help. Second, I wanted to use one of the 
  classic D&D “climaxes” as listed in chapter 3 of the Dungeon 
  
  43 
  Masters Guide; in this instance I chose #10, “A threat more powerful 
  than the adventurers appears, destroys the main villain, and then 
  turns its attention on the characters.” 
   
  These three elements (location, hook, climax) gave me a broad 
  outline to work with. I decided to start the adventure in Longsaddle, 
  an isolated hamlet about a hundred miles north of Triboar. As it 
  happened, I eventually wrote six adventures based around 
  Longsaddle and featuring its famous magical family, the Harpells. 
  But more on that another time.   
   
  I named the goblin featured in the hook Skwelch, and he tells the 
  following story to the characters. He and his tribe fought and killed a 
  dragon inhabiting an old tower in the woods, taking possession of its 
  hoard. Skwelch then fell out with the leader of the tribe, Glubnose, 
  and was forced to flee. He wants the party to accompany him back to 
  the tower and help kill Glubnose, and he offers half the dragon hoard 
  as compensation. 
   
  I sketched out Skwelch's personality in just a couple of lines. In 
  his mind, he is the leader of the expedition, so he constantly gives 
  everyone orders, as well as barking out useless advice during 
  combat. My goal was to make him as annoying as possible since I 
  knew the party could not afford to get rid of him. 
   
  To my surprise, Skwelch proved immensely popular with players. 
  I have had many people write to tell me how much they liked him, 
  and in several instances, he ended up becoming a permanent 
  
  44 
  member of the party. It was one of the first times I realized how very 
  satisfying it was to create a memorable NPC.     
   
  I included a few little encounters between Longsaddle and the 
  tower. I often feel obliged to do this to enforce the idea that the 
  wilderness is dangerous and that it takes effort to move about. But in 
  this case they are unnecessary, and these days I would most likely 
  say, "If you want some encounters before getting to the tower, please 
  use the Tier 1 Hill Encounter table in Xanathar's Guide to 
  Everything."  
   
  As an aside, there are other things you can do to convey the feeling 
  of distance travelled without bogging the party down in unnecessary 
  combat. For example, ask one player to describe a problem they 
  encountered on the journey, and another to describe how the 
  characters overcame the problem. Getting the players to roll dice to 
  determine who makes up the problem and who makes up the 
  solution is a way to gamify the experience a little more.  
   
  Towers, especially small ones, present a challenge to the 
  adventure writer. They often serve up encounters in a linear manner, 
  whereas you usually want the dungeon architecture to give your 
  players some meaningful choices when moving around. I worked 
  pretty hard to squeeze little corridors and rooms into the tower, so 
  the players had a selection of doors on every floor. 
   
  But there was another problem. In my first map, it was self-evident 
  which door would take you to the stairs leading to the next level, 
  
  45 
  meaning the characters could easily bypass about half of the 
  encounters. So, I came up with a new plan that messed around with 
  door placement to try and prevent people from marching straight to 
  the top floor.   
   
  As part of my research, I looked at how wizard’s towers had been 
  presented in older adventures. I was a bit disappointed by how 
  mundane some of them were. One thing about a wizard's tower is 
  that it should feel magical—it is a chance to break out some gonzo 
  ideas. And so, I included things like an air elemental playing a set of 
  pan pipes, an attack by flying cutlery, and a stained-glass window that 
  came to life. One room featured a diary that sprouted legs and ran 
  away from the characters when touched, which provided a lot of 
  entertainment to many parties. Those examining the diary learn the 
  identity of the tower’s creator, one Hugo Harpell, a now deceased 
  member of the Harpell wizarding dynasty.  
   
  These sorts of encounters play into an idea which I call “the 
  dungeon as toy.” What I mean is that our adventure locations should 
  be interactive. Yes, there should be monsters to fight—that is the 
  combat pillar of play. Yes, there should be people to talk to—that is 
  the social pillar of play. But the locations themselves should contain 
  things that you want to pick up and touch and play with. This is a big 
  part of the exploration pillar of play, and I think it is neglected. Pick 
  up the diary and it grows legs. Touch the holy orb in the chapel and 
  
  46 
  a glass knight steps out of the window. The treasury looks empty but 
  actually has an invisible treasure chest in it.  
   
  Pools, fountains, statues, altars, tapestries, paintings, obelisks, 
  shrines, and thrones are all wonderful for turning your dungeon into 
  a toy, though you can and should use more mundane objects as well. 
  The trick table in appendix A of the Dungeon Master’s Guide has 
  some good suggestions for effects. It is also a great idea to embed 
  secrets and clues in interactive objects.  
   
  These toy encounters work best when you introduce a bit of 
  verisimilitude, rather than just have random effects associated with 
  random objects. So, leaving an offering on the altar to the god of 
  healing restores your hit points. Touching the statue of the 
  necromancer causes it to morph into an undead monster. The King’s 
  secret diary is hidden behind a tapestry depicting his greatest victory. 
  That sort of thing.  
   
  I put a lot of this sort of interactivity into the tower, and I now think 
  that is one reason the adventure has proven so popular. Almost every 
  room has something to play with. I did not realize how universally 
  applicable this idea was, though, and it is only in some recent 
  dungeons that I have put renewed emphasis on the “toy” approach to 
  location design. For example, here is the boxed text from an 
  adventure I published a short time ago called The Eye of Klothys:   
   
  
  47 
  This dome-shaped chamber has whitewashed walls defaced 
  by charcoal scribbles. In the middle of the room is a brass 
  tripod supporting a hefty candle, while a broad clay jar sits 
  against the wall in a pile of rubble. 
  This room provides ample opportunity for exploration, as there are 
  all sorts of things for the characters to interact with. You can read the 
  charcoal scribbles, look at the brass tripod, examine (or light) the 
  hefty candle, or investigate the clay jar. Players love these sorts of 
  rooms, provided the interactions lead to interesting results. 
   
  Let us head back to Tower of the Mad Mage and look at the climax. 
  The characters finally get to the top floor and face off against 
  Glubnose and the remaining members of his tribe. But just as the 
  fight starts, there is the sound of something heavy landing on the roof! 
  Yes, it turns out that Skwelch lied—the goblins did not kill the dragon 
  after all, they merely scared it off. The players need to decide: do they 
  help Glubnose, do they help the dragon, or do they retreat and fight 
  the winner? It is a fun little dilemma. 
   
  When I played this adventure with my home group, the dragon 
  wiped out the goblins with a single breath. She then advanced on the 
  characters, who were standing at the door to the chamber. The whole 
  party fled—except for the fighter who decided his character would 
  not run, even in the face of certain death. And so he stood alone, 
  facing down the evil draconic creature as it slowly crept toward him. 
  
  48 
  It is hard to convey how heroic this moment felt at the time, and it 
  still sends a small chill up my spine thinking about it. His companions 
  thankfully returned, and together they enjoyed a famous victory. 
   
  Tower of the Mad Mage is one of my most popular adventures, 
  having sold thousands of copies and enjoying a rating of 96% from 
  nearly 50 reviews. The feedback has been enthusiastic and generous. 
  People appreciate how easy the adventure is to run, they enjoy the 
  variety of encounters, and they love Skwelch.  
   
  But one review, received well over a year after publication, will 
  never leave my heart: 
  I ran this game for my brother and his childhood friend along 
  with their now pre-teen sons. When asked to do so I was a little 
  nervous because my own campaign takes up so much of my 
  time so I plunged onto the DM's guild website and, after reading 
  many reviews, settled on "Tower of the Mad Mage." 
   
  The adventure is a very easy read and doesn't take long to 
  prepare. It's well laid out and a DM can easily skip over some 
  parts if they wish for time or simplicities sake without losing 
  much. The theme is classic D&D - goblins, magic, fighting and 
  decision making. If you're looking to run something dark or 
  heavy on roleplaying and intrigue, then this may not be your 
  best bet. If, however, you want to start a standard campaign or 
  
  49 
  wish for a way to introduce players to the game in a single night, 
  then this is a great choice. 
   
  The players I had were a mixed bag of experience; my 
  brother and his friend had played together in the 80's and I even 
  found a couple of their Red Box dice to put out on the table. My 
  brother has been teaching his son 5th edition, so that was easy. 
  The final two players were new to the game entirely but had a 
  good understanding of it by the end of the night... 
   
  I'm afraid I have to end this on a sad note as my brother's 
  friend passed away two nights ago. Though feared, it was not 
  unexpected. I would be lying if I didn't say that this gave our 
  session a somber feeling, or that I didn't have to sit by myself 
  for a while and collect myself after the session ended. It was, 
  though, an excellent experience as, for one night, they got to be 
  teenagers again throwing dice at imaginary monsters. So I wish 
  to give my thanks to the author for creating something well put 
  together and helping me give them one last adventure. 
  This is why we write. The games we play are not an escape from “real 
  life,” they are a different and intense and profound experience of life, 
  one that is just as real and full as any other. And the world would be 
  so much poorer without them. 
   
   
   
  
  50 
  6. The Lich that Got Away 
  Chapter 6 
  The Lich that Got Away 
  If you want to be a writer, you must do two things  
  above all others: read a lot and write a lot. 
  Stephen King 
  I released Little Shrine of Horrors on May 12th, 2016, and it is an 
  adventure that proudly wears its heritage on its sleeve. I created it as 
  an homage to Gygax's renowned module, Tomb of Horrors, which 
  was published in 1978 and had already established a legendary 
  reputation by the time I started playing D&D in the early 80s. I often 
  met other players, either at school or at conventions, who would say, 
  "Have you played Tomb of Horrors yet? You have to check it out!" 
   
  My home group finally got a copy of this coveted module and had 
  a lot of fun poring over the text and the book of illustrations that came 
  with it. We never played it, though, for several reasons. Firstly, we 
  had all read it! Secondly, we were not high enough level. But finally, 
  
  51 
  and most importantly, it had the reputation of being a "killer" 
  dungeon, and no-one wanted to risk their precious characters. 
   
  Soon after I started publishing adventures, I knew I wanted to 
  write a little deathtrap dungeon in homage to Tomb of Horrors. And 
  while I say homage, I think it ended up being something of a parody. 
  The name Little Shrine of Horrors simply popped into my head, 
  inspired by the musical, Little Shop of Horrors.   
   
  I had two design goals. The first was to create a Tomb of Horrors 
  style adventure for lower-level characters. It seemed a great shame 
  that people should have to wait until they reached level 10 before 
  having this sort of experience (sure, there were some older 
  adventures around filling this niche, such as The Mud Sorcerer’s 
  Tomb, but I couldn’t find much for Fifth Edition). In the end, I created 
  this adventure for characters of levels 4 or 5. It is worth noting that 
  this sort of level targeting was a bit of a rookie mistake. Permit me a 
  digression to explain what I mean. 
   
  The Dungeon Masters Guide defines 4 tiers of play, each 
  representing broad power bands spanning the character levels. Tier 
  1 is levels 1-4; tier 2 is levels 5-10, tier 3 is levels 11-16, and tier 4 is 
  levels 17-20. These are not arbitrary numbers—the cut-off points 
  represent places where Fifth Edition adventurers suddenly become 
  significantly more powerful. For example, at level 5 (where tier 2 
  starts), martial characters get an extra attack, while spellcasters get 
  access to third level spells, such as the devastating fireball. 
  
  52 
   
  Because of these power jumps, creating an adventure that covers 
  a whole tier is usually easier than creating something that crosses a 
  tier threshold. And if you scale over the entire tier, you vastly increase 
  the marketability of the product. If I were writing Little Shrine of 
  Horrors today, I would make it scale over levels 5-10. Both the 
  Dungeon Master’s Guide and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything 
  contain manual methods for scaling encounters to different levels, 
  but there are many tools online that will do it automatically. End of 
  digression.  
   
  My second design goal for Little Shrine of Horrors was to create 
  a dungeon that was beatable. Gygax designed Tomb of Horrors to be 
  a killer, partly because he was dealing with very experienced players 
  with very tough characters in his home campaign. Indeed, he used to 
  carry a copy of the manuscript around in his briefcase to humble any 
  fans who were boasting a little too loudly about their mighty 
  characters!  
   
  In practice, this means there are several "insta-death" style traps 
  in the dungeon, and numerous points where luck seems more 
  important than skill, which diminishes the playability of the 
  adventure. Indeed, according to folklore, the first person to beat the 
  dungeon did so by taking in a small army of servants to walk ahead 
  of him and trigger the traps! I wanted an adventure that would 
  challenge the characters without undue risk of a TPK. 
  
  53 
   
  In my adventure, an evil wizard created the deathtrap dungeon so 
  he could watch in amusement while adventurers died trying to defeat 
  it. An oldie but a goodie, though I included a twist that I will explain 
  later. One notable feature was the identity of the creator. I had 
  become quite familiar with the Harpell wizard dynasty in 
  Longsaddle, having dealt with them in Tower of the Mad Mage. I 
  decided that the dungeon architect was one Lucien Harpell, who was 
  an awfully bad egg. The name Lucien was not random—the person 
  who suggested Tomb of Horrors to Gary Gygax in the first place was 
  a fellow named Alan Lucien. 
   
  It is interesting to see how the Harpell family was starting to 
  develop in my little conception of the Forgotten Realms. The first 
  Harpell wizard I wrote about, Hugo Harpell, was thought insane. 
  This new wizard, Lucien Harpell, was a sociopath. I eventually wrote 
  six adventures about the Harpells, and while some of the wizards in 
  the family were benevolent, most of them were morally ambiguous. I 
  thought this made them far more intriguing than the kind-hearted 
  clan presented in the official material. 
   
  Little Shrine of Horrors begins when Gunthar Grimm, a fur trader 
  in Longsaddle, posts a notice seeking brave adventurers. Should the 
  characters respond, he tells them he is a wealthy and successful man 
  who is nevertheless beset by regret, having lost the love of his life 
  when he was young. He has recently discovered the dangerous 
  shrine of Lucian Harpell, which contains a magic item that can help 
  
  54 
  him called the Amulet of Lost Dreams. Gunthar offers the characters 
  generous compensation if they will retrieve the amulet for him. 
   
  After about a day of travel, the characters find the entrance to the 
  shrine, which is flanked by a statue engraved with this warning: 
  Yonder lies the Shrine of Lucien Harpell, greatest mage of 
  this or any other age. In the arts of golemancy, artificery and 
  necromancy, his equal has never been known, nor will be 
  again. 
  Cursed are those who enter this tomb. Cursed are those who 
  look upon this statue. Cursed are those who seek his riches. 
  Know that your demise is certain—your lives will be short, 
  and your deaths slow. 
  Read this, fools, and despair! 
  I thought that was a suitably dire warning, and the comment about 
  “golemancy, artificery and necromancy” gives the players a hint 
  about what they will face within. Upon entering the shrine, they find 
  they are trapped and must solve bizarre puzzles and overcome deadly 
  traps to regain their freedom.  
   
  I did a lot of research for this adventure. I spent weeks combing 
  through puzzle and trap books, looking for inspiration. I also looked 
  at every published deathtrap adventure I could find. I wanted to avoid 
  
  55 
  the standard tropes in this genre and give the adventure a fresh feel, 
  and it turned out to be much harder than I thought. I managed to 
  create the dungeon I wanted, but the writing was a real challenge. I 
  planted a couple of Tomb of Horrors easter eggs, though I wish I had 
  included more. If I were cleverer, I would have found some way to 
  work in something from Little Shop of Horrors, too. 
   
  It is tough to get puzzle difficulty right. If you make them hard 
  enough to challenge experienced puzzlers, most groups will be 
  stumped. Create them to be just tough enough for regular groups, 
  and the people who really like puzzles will blow through them. The 
  smart move, commercially, is to create something that will be fun for 
  the broadest number of people, and that is what I did here. From the 
  feedback I have received, most players have found the puzzles 
  solvable and enjoyable. 
   
  Traps are easier to create than puzzles, though good traps take 
  some work. In a trap-focused dungeon, you want to give the players 
  a clue about the deadlier traps. Maybe there is an electricity trap on 
  the door handle, and this just happens to be the one door handle they 
  have encountered that is made of copper rather than iron. This 
  foreshadowing makes it much more satisfying for the players 
  because it gives them the feeling that they can beat the trap if they 
  are observant and clever enough—that is, it gives them a sense of 
  agency.  
  
  56 
   
  Note that I am talking about especially deadly traps here, and in 
  an environment that is packed with traps. I am not suggesting every 
  little pit trap in your dungeon should have some sort of clue or 
  foreshadowing. Having said that, in Little Shrine of Horrors I put a 
  pit trip at every four-way intersection. After they trigger a couple of 
  them, the players should figure out where they are and avoid them. I 
  like putting minor traps in patterns like that, where it makes sense.  
   
  We should speak about the map. I am reasonably pleased with the 
  design, though it is a little too regular for my tastes now. The 
  corridors all run vertically or horizontally, and the rooms are mostly 
  aligned and regularly shaped. The original Tomb of Horrors map had 
  a zany chaos to it, with huge rooms next to tiny rooms and winding 
  tunnels going everywhere. I thought it very ugly at the time, but I 
  admire it now. Tastes mature, I guess! 
   
  When the characters get to the final room, a booming voice tells 
  them the tomb entrance has re-opened, and that they are now free to 
  leave. Should they persist, a climactic battle against constructs and 
  undead ensues. The characters also notice a black curtain across the 
  back of the chamber. Should they approach it, the booming voice 
  becomes rather frantic, demanding the characters leave the curtain 
  alone.  
   
  Yes, this is a Wizard of Oz moment. When the characters throw 
  back the curtain, they discover their patron, Gunthar Grimm, is there 
  in the control room. It was a set up all along! It turns out that Gunthar 
  
  57 
  discovered the long-abandoned shrine a few years ago, and he 
  figured out how to operate it. Since then, he has made good coin by 
  luring foolhardy characters to their doom and stripping their bodies 
  of loot afterwards.  
   
  It is a bit contrived, but it plays very well at the table. My main 
  concern is that it is another case of the "goodie turns out to be the 
  baddie" twist, which I inserted into far too many of my early 
  adventures. The Dungeon Masters Guide even specifically warns you 
  not to overuse this particular twist! Ah, well, I am a slow learner. On 
  the upside, it gave me the chance to write an amusing "man behind 
  the curtain" scene. There are purists who might balk at that sort of 
  thing, but most players I have encountered take great delight in 
  finding themselves in a scene they recognize from popular media. 
   
  I worked harder on this adventure than on any previous one, 
  especially in the research phase, but my labor was well rewarded. 
  The feedback has been consistently excellent ever since I released it, 
  and it is currently rated 94% on the Dungeon Masters Guild. The only 
  tiny bit of criticism has been from experienced puzzlers who find it a 
  bit easy. But the vast majority have found it a satisfying experience.  
   
  Re-reading the adventure now, it is obvious that I had begun to 
  understand the importance of giving meaningful choices to the 
  players. Player agency is foundational to an engaging gameplay 
  experience and is something I spend a lot of time thinking about 
  these days, as I will explain in the next chapter.   
   
  
  58 
  7. Meaningful Choices 
  Chapter 7 
  Meaningful Choices 
  The thing that makes a game a game  
  is the need to make decisions.  
  Greg Costikyan 
  One of the great “aha!” moments in my game design career was 
  realizing how very fundamental the idea of choice is to the gameplay 
  experience. As a consequence, some time ago I shared the following 
  game design tip on twitter: 
  Giving the players meaningful choices will increase their 
  engagement with your adventure. Three things make a choice 
  meaningful:  
  1. The player knows they are making a choice.  
  2. The choice has consequences.  
  3. There is information to inform the choice. 
  
  59 
  This tweet garnered a few thousand likes, and provoked general 
  agreement. Still, I think some of these points are less obvious than 
  they may appear, and I am also keen to explore some of the inevitable 
  subtleties and caveats that get lost in a tweet-length tip. So, let us 
  unpack it a little.  
  Meaningful choices increase player engagement 
  We will start with my opening statement: "Giving the players 
  meaningful choices will increase their engagement with your 
  adventure." This is game design 101 and might seem obvious to 
  many, but it is always worth challenging and exploring the obvious. 
  Let us hear what several game design veterans think about the 
  importance of choices (or decisions) in a game.  
   
  You may know of Sid Meier, who created the Civilization series of 
  computer games. He famously defined games as "a series of 
  meaningful choices," (note that he sometimes uses the phrase “a 
  series of interesting decisions” synonymously.) This statement has 
  been oft quoted (and debated) in the game industry. Meier may have 
  meant it as hyperbole, but at the very least, it affirms how central 
  choices are to gameplay. In his memoir, A Life in Games, Meir 
  expands on the idea a little more: 
  ...the gift of agency—that is, the ability of players to exert free 
  will over their surroundings rather than obediently following a 
  
  60 
  narrative—is what sets games apart from other media, 
  regardless of whether that agency is expressed through a 
  computer keyboard, plastic tokens, physical movement, or 
  entirely in the mind. Without a player’s input, there can be no 
  game; conversely, it takes only a single interaction to transform 
  an observer into a participant, and thus a player. 
  Tynan Sylvester, the creator of RimWorld, says, "Decisions are 
  ultimately what make a game," while Jon Shafer, the designer of 
  Civilization V and Stardock, asserts, "A designer's goal is always to 
  make every decision the player faces interesting." 
   
  Ok, it seems that video game designers are very invested in the 
  concept of choice! But let us listen to someone from the TTRPG field. 
  Greg Costikyan, creator of such classic games as Paranoia and Star 
  Wars RPG, is a well-known commentator on the game industry. He 
  says, "The thing that makes a game a game is the need to make 
  decisions." He spends a lot of time talking about this in his seminal 
  essay on game creation, "I Have No Words & I Must Design." He 
  defines "decisions" as one of the six essential elements of a game 
  (the other elements being goals, opposition, resource management, 
  game tokens, and information).  
   
  Costikyan says that games, "depend on decision making. 
  Decisions have to pose real, plausible alternatives, or they aren't real 
  decisions." He also notes that, "Trivial decisions aren't any fun" and 
  
  61 
  that, "Interesting decisions make for interesting games." Where 
  Costikyan says, "interesting decisions," I have used the phrase, 
  "meaningful choices," but we clearly mean the same thing. 
   
  I could quote many more people, but I hope these snippets have 
  convinced you that choices are at the heart of any game you create. 
  Ok, so how do we make the decision points (places where you make 
  a choice) in our Dungeons & Dragons adventures meaningful? My 
  tweet suggests that three things are involved, so we will look at each 
  one in turn.   
  The player knows they are making a choice 
  For a choice to be meaningful, the player must know they are making 
  a choice. This might seem like a tautology. Players always know 
  when they are making choices, right? No, not always! Sometimes an 
  adventure hides important decisions behind seemingly trivial 
  actions, with the result that players do not realize the consequences 
  of what they are doing. You might call this a hidden choice, and it is 
  generally detrimental to the player’s experience of agency.  
   
  Let us think of a contrived example. The characters are going to 
  see the queen to receive a quest. You privately decide that the queen 
  likes fighters, so if a fighter is the first to address her, she approvingly 
  provides the party with a mighty magic sword. However, if another 
  character speaks first, the queen offers no additional help. In this 
  
  62 
  instance, the players make an important choice (which character 
  speaks first), but they do not realize they are making an important 
  choice. And this robs the decision of meaning and interest. 
   
  What is an example from real-life D&D? One that comes to mind 
  is from the classic Gygax module, Dungeonland, which mimics the 
  Alice in Wonderland story. Here is the situation. When the players 
  reach the bottom of the rabbit hole, they see a table and a bunch of 
  other things. If they immediately stare at the table and do not take 
  their eyes off it, the adventure goes in one direction. If the characters 
  do anything else, the adventure proceeds in quite a different manner. 
  There is nothing to suggest that the decision to stare at a particular 
  object is important. The players do not realize they are making a 
  decision that will have a massive impact on their experience of the 
  adventure. This critical choice is hidden. 
   
  You can usually fix hidden choices by providing the characters 
  with more information. In the first example, you might decide that 
  anyone asking around town learns that the queen has a 
  predisposition toward fighters. This tidbit gives the players a hint 
  about how to handle the encounter, and it rewards them for making 
  the effort to do some research beforehand. The Dungeonland 
  encounter is a little trickier to improve, especially since it happens 
  right at the start of the adventure. Ideally, you would provide a clue 
  somewhere, but I do not really like this choice and would probably 
  eliminate it from the adventure.  
  
  63 
  The choice has consequences  
  For a choice to be meaningful, it must have consequences. Choosing 
  option A should lead to a different experience from choosing option 
  B. Once again, this seems obvious, but in many adventures, option A 
  has precisely the same consequences as option B. Some designers 
  call this a hollow choice.  
   
  I sometimes see a trivial example of this in wilderness maps. 
  There is a fork in the road. Both branches travel in parallel for a 
  distance (without encounters) and then rejoin back into one road. In 
  that instance, the player is making a choice, but it is not a meaningful 
  choice. There are no consequences to choosing the left or right fork. 
  The player thinks they are doing something significant, but they are 
  not.  
   
  Sometimes, hollow choices are a bit more sophisticated than 
  choosing a path through the forest. One typical example in D&D 
  adventures is related to what we call "plot armor." Plot armor is a 
  design device whereby we protect certain NPCs from dying (or being 
  imprisoned or changed in some way) because they are essential to 
  the future story. It creates hollow choices because the players engage 
  with the NPC under the presumption that they can harm, neutralize, 
  or influence the character, whereas their decisions and actions are 
  entirely meaningless.  
  
  64 
   
  There is a subtle example of plot armor in chapter 1 of Hoard of 
  the Dragon Queen. In the closing scene, the characters can choose 
  to fight a mighty half-dragon warrior. If the half-dragon wins the fight, 
  he shows up again in a later chapter for a return battle. However, if 
  the characters manage to kill the half-dragon, his identical twin 
  brother shows up instead! The practical consequence is that you 
  cannot kill the half-dragon in chapter 1. Choosing to fight him or not 
  fight him is a hollow choice.   
   
  The fix in these cases is easy to articulate. When you present the 
  players with a choice, make sure there is a different consequence for 
  each option. To use the split paths example, placing an ogre on one 
  path and a chest of gold on the other one makes the choice of way 
  consequential. And avoid giving your monsters plot armor. If the 
  players defeat the half-dragon in chapter 1, let them enjoy a less 
  stressful fight in chapter 3! If the boss monster must communicate 
  with the characters without the risk of being killed or impaired, have 
  it use an intermediary, such as a messenger or a magic mirror.  
   
  Now, a big caveat. Games designers talk about something called 
  the illusion of choice, especially in the context of presenting an "open-
  world" experience to the players. If the characters enter Waterdeep, 
  for example, we want them to feel like they could go anywhere in that 
  huge metropolis, but it is not practical to document every shop and 
  every person in the city. Instead, we document a smaller number of 
  elements and then present them in a way that gives players the 
  
  65 
  feeling that their characters can go anywhere and do anything they 
  wish, just as if they were wandering around a real city.  
   
  Strictly speaking, the illusion of choice is created by presenting a 
  series of hollow choices, but I think this is the legitimate place for 
  them. I prefer to keep them at the margins of the game, such as 
  random NPCs you might encounter in a big city. Even then, I would 
  advise caution. I think that players "sniff out" when there are lots of 
  illusory (or hollow) choices at the heart of the game. They start to feel 
  like they are being "swept along" by events and that their decisions 
  do not matter. And once that happens, they disengage.   
  There is information to inform the choice 
  For a choice to be truly meaningful, there has to be some information 
  available to the players that informs the choice. When such 
  information is lacking, we might call it an uninformed choice, with 
  the player essentially making a random decision. 
   
  You encounter uninformed choices quite a lot in D&D adventures. 
  A good example comes in the classic adventure, Tomb of Horrors. In 
  the original version, the characters enter a metal cubicle with three 
  iron levers. Pushing the levers up enables you to progress, while 
  pushing them down results in a likely fatal fall. There is no 
  information informing you whether up or down is better. And this 
  particular adventure is full of choices like that!  
  
  66 
   
  In my view, Tomb of Horrors would be improved if these sorts of 
  encounters presented the player with more information. Maybe you 
  can examine the levers and figure out how they work. Or perhaps 
  there is a clue elsewhere in the dungeon indicating whether pushing 
  the levers up or down is good. You do not want to give the players the 
  information on a plate, but you do want to reward good play, such as 
  exploration and investigation.  
   
  Having said all that, there are times when uninformed choices are 
  legitimate design elements. In an old Waterdeep scenario called Blue 
  Alley, the players are also presented with three levers to pull, with no 
  indication of what they do. Pulling the left-hand lever showers you 
  with gold, the middle one causes a fake magic dagger to appear, 
  while the right-hand lever causes all of your gear to teleport to 
  another room! The player knows they are making a choice, the choice 
  has consequences, but with no information to inform the choice, the 
  player is effectively tossing a coin. However, Blue Alley is a 
  "funhouse" dungeon, a genre of adventure that involves weird and 
  wacky happenings. The lever trick is fun and has limited 
  consequences, so I think it works in this context. It fails my test as a 
  "meaningful choice," but is a good bit of design for this particular 
  dungeon. Even so, I would not overuse this sort of element. It is fun 
  in small doses. 
  
  67 
  Must every choice be meaningful? 
  My original tweet said, “Giving the players meaningful choices will 
  increase their engagement with your adventure.” This is not the 
  same as saying that every choice must be meaningful in the full sense 
  of the word. I have already mentioned some instances where 
  uninformed and hollow choices can be useful and fun. And there are 
  lots of trivial choices the players make throughout the adventure, 
  such as what to have for breakfast, that do not need to be laden with 
  significance. 
   
  But meaningful choices give players a sense of agency, and this 
  goes a long way toward building up their engagement with your 
  adventure. Choice remains at the heart of the gameplay experience, 
  and all new game designers need to learn how to put meaningful 
  decision points into their games. One great way to do that is to study 
  the work of other designers, and we will explore that idea more fully 
  in the next chapter. 
   
  
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  8. Steal like an Artisan 
  Chapter 8 
  Steal like an Artisan 
  Every artist gets asked the question, ‘Where do you get 
  your ideas.’ The honest artist answers, ‘I steal them.’ 
  Austin Kleon 
  I published my sixth adventure, Wizard in a Bottle, on May 17th, 
  2016, just a week after publishing Little Shrine of Horrors. It is the 
  adventure that first got me noticed by a wider audience, mostly 
  because it was given away free in an early edition of WOTC’s online 
  magazine, Dragon+. 
   
  For some reason I can recall the provenance of virtually every idea 
  I put into this adventure. In some ways, it is a very derivative creation, 
  but I drew a little bit from a lot of separate sources rather than a lot 
  from a single source. By the time it all gets squashed together, I 
  ended up with something pretty unique.  
  
  69 
   
  I sometimes encounter designers who pooh-pooh the idea of 
  studying older games and using them as a source of ideas. Some 
  believe (apparently) that their own creations are completely original. 
  I am a little skeptical about such claims. True innovation is rare, and 
  it is extremely easy to either subconsciously imitate something you 
  have seen before, or to retread old ground without realizing it.  
   
  I’m reminded of something prominent game designer, John Wick, 
  said a few years ago: “The older I get, the more I hear young RPG 
  designers say, ‘Never been done before!’ And then I just point at 
  something Greg Stafford did a few decades ago.” And the truth is that 
  even the innovative founders of our hobby, folk like Stafford and 
  Gygax, were standing on the shoulders of those who came before.  
   
  Should we just give up trying to break new ground because, 
  “There is nothing new under the sun”? By no means! Rather, I think 
  we need to own our influences rather than denying them in a vain 
  attempt to prove our originality. Consciously imitate and learn from 
  the recognized masters. As Yamamoto said, “Copy copy copy copy. 
  At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” 
   
  If “never been done before” is your only design goal, I suspect your 
  project will fail on all creative levels. Firing up the forge of inspiration 
  needs more than a desire to be “original.” Looking at the great work 
  of the past is a good way to gather artistic fuel and may be the only 
  way to ever surpass such work. As the celebrated poet, T.S. Eliot, 
  puts it: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface 
  
  70 
  what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at 
  least something different.”  
   
  Given my views on this, I was rather delighted to discover a book 
  called Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon. The subtitle is “10 things 
  nobody told you about being creative.” His opening paragraph is 
  provocative: “Every artist gets asked the question, ‘Where do you get 
  your ideas.’ The honest artist answers, ‘I steal them.’” 
   
  He is not talking about plagiarism, as he makes clear. Rather, he 
  is talking about actively engaging with the great works in your field, 
  consciously learning from them, and taking what speaks to you into 
  your own work. This is one of the reasons I spend so much time 
  looking at old adventure designs. I enjoy doing so, but I also learn a 
  great deal from the practice.  
   
  As I discuss my adventure, Wizard in a Bottle, I am going to “pull 
  back the curtain” as much as I can and explain the origins of the ideas 
  there. As I do this, I am very aware that drawing a straight line from 
  influence to idea is a bit simplistic. Ideas usually emerge dripping and 
  half-formed from the swirling chaos of our id rather than neatly hand-
  delivered from a single sender. Still, we can often identify a likely 
  primary influence, so I think there is value in this exercise.  
   
  The title of this adventure is one of the better ones I have come up 
  with. I was reading about veteran designer Rob Kuntz's adventure, 
  Bottle City, at the time and was thinking about a "bottle" adventure 
  of my own. The phrase "Wizard in a Bottle" popped into my head, 
  
  71 
  and I liked the rhythm of it. I still do! If I look at my first dozen or so 
  adventures, at least a third of them started life with the title only.   
   
  The premise, when it came to me, was inspired by one of the plot 
  seeds in Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots, which is a great book that you 
  should buy now. This seed (by Kurt Schneider) involved the 
  characters searching for a long-lost adventurer, who turns out to be 
  in suspended animation. I took a couple of key elements and put my 
  own spin on things, also inspired by the numerous "suspended 
  animation" episodes I had seen on Star Trek. It is a classic trope. 
   
  Interestingly, the title and plot outline were not related initially. I 
  have an ideas file on my cloud drive where I jot down random 
  thoughts. "Wizard in a Bottle" was one entry while "Suspended 
  animation adventure" was another. The "aha!" moment came when 
  I joined the two together. The person in suspended animation was a 
  wizard who was trapped, genie-like, in a bottle! Some of my best 
  adventures had their genesis this way, through the amalgamation of 
  two seemingly unrelated ideas. So very often in this business, the 
  magic happens through an inspired combination. Goblins? A bit 
  tired. Goblins riding giant bats? Much better! 
   
  I needed a location for the adventure. Clearly, some sort of magic-
  user had trapped our titular Wizard, and that person most likely lived 
  in a tower. But I had recently written a tower adventure (Tower of the 
  Mad Mage) and was not ready to do another one. The answer came 
  when I was reading through some old Chris Perkins material. His 
  
  72 
  second published adventure, A Wizard's Fate, was set in the cellar 
  beneath a ruined magic-user's tower. This seemed to resolve my 
  dilemma nicely, so I pinched that location. Tick. 
   
  In my adventure, an iron merchant named Ulfgar Longwood asks 
  the party to track down a former comrade who he has not seen for 
  twenty years. The missing person is a wizard named Amilya 
  Greyheart. Through the use of divination magic, Ulfgar has 
  discovered her last known location—a ruined tower a couple of days 
  north of the city. He assumes Amilya is dead and asks the characters 
  to bring back her remains for burial.  
   
  The adventurers get to the ruined tower and must first deal with 
  an ogre who has taken up residence. There is nothing very distinctive 
  about this encounter, and were I writing it today I would be inclined 
  to buff it up a little. One way I do this is with story cubes, which you 
  can buy at your local hobby store. You simply roll up an idea and fit it 
  into the encounter somehow.  
   
  Let us work through a real example. I just rolled up “tortoise” on 
  my story cubes. Ok, when the characters encounter the ogre, she is 
  feeding her pet tortoise and making gentle cooing sounds. This 
  simple addition makes the encounter much more interesting. 
  Suddenly the ogre is slightly sympathetic, and many parties will be 
  inclined to try and talk to her rather than simply fight her. And the 
  idea of this brutish ogre looking after a tiny tortoise is ridiculously 
  cute.  
  
  73 
   
  Giving creatures something to do is one of the best ways to bring 
  them to life. You can transform an otherwise mundane encounter 
  into something special by adding in some action. And actions are a 
  much better way to portray a creature’s personality than a simple 
  assertion—it is the classic advice of show don’t tell at work. In the 
  example above, I could say, “The ogre has a soft spot for weak 
  creatures,” but that leaves it up to the DM to figure out how to bring 
  that information to the party. Showing the ogre gently looking after 
  her pet tortoise is a more powerful way to communicate the 
  information, and much more useful to the DM who is trying to give 
  the scene life.  
   
  The Dungeon Master can take and develop such little seeds in 
  various ways, as well. As the characters eavesdrop, they might hear 
  the ogre saying, “Nice little turtle, you’ll be good in my soup tonight,” 
  or “Don’t worry, Brarg, we’ll figure out how to turn you back into an 
  ogre,” or “I’ve never met a talking tortoise before.” All of this from a 
  single roll of a story cube! 
   
  Following the ogre encounter, the characters must solve a simple 
  word scramble puzzle to unlock the trap door that descends to the 
  basement. I do enjoy these little pen and paper puzzles, though 
  finding plausible ways to insert them into an adventure is a challenge. 
   
  The dungeon beneath the tower has just five or six chambers 
  (depending on how you count them). One of the first locations is a 
  sitting room with a bunch of clay skulls on the wall. Press the correct 
  
  74 
  one and it opens a secret door, press the wrong one and it explodes. 
  This idea is straight out of The Mud Sorcerer's Tomb, one of the 
  most highly rated Dungeon Magazine adventures ever. If I were 
  doing it these days, I would try to customise the idea a bit more—
  perhaps instead of skulls, there is an array of terracotta eyeballs that 
  follow you around the room, for example. 
   
  The chamber to the west of the sitting room has a stone pool filled 
  with putrid water. If you approach it, a water weird rears up out of it 
  and attacks. The scene was inspired by the cover of Dungeon of 
  Dread by Rose Estes, the first book in the Endless Quest series by 
  TSR. I loved that book as a teen and adored the cover. I found the 
  book and re-read it a few months ago, and was a bit disappointed, I 
  am sad to say. Sometimes, you cannot go back—you are better off 
  just holding on to that delicious childhood memory. I still think it is a 
  great cover. 
   
  Some of my design inexperience came through in this encounter, 
  though. A water weird is CR 3, and the adventure was written for 
  level 2 characters. This worried me so much that I went to the trouble 
  of creating a "Lesser Water Weird" monster that was only CR 2. I did 
  not realize at the time that a level 2 party can take down a lone CR 3 
  monster without much trouble. And even if I wanted to nerf the 
  monster, a better and easier way is to simply reduce its hit points! 
  The water weird cannot even leave the fountain, so it really should 
  not give the party much trouble. 
  
  75 
   
  There is a treasure vault on the other side of the sitting room, 
  protected by a portcullis with a fun little trap that was inspired by 
  Raging Swan’s Dungeon Dressing book. In their trap, when you 
  touch the portcullis it begins screaming and you take some sort of 
  sonic damage. In my variation, when you touch the portcullis a siren 
  goes off and you must make a saving throw or find yourself compelled 
  to bash your head against the floor. A bit silly but also quite amusing, 
  and I think it is a good example of taking an idea and putting your 
  own twist on it.  
   
  The room immediately north of the sitting room contains a little 
  cabinet of curiosities, which was inspired by a random page on 
  Wikipedia I flicked to one evening. Looking at this chamber now, I 
  wish I had used just a few more evocative phrases to bring the 
  location alive. The standard writing advice of "kill your adjectives" 
  does not apply quite as much in adventure writing, where you do not 
  have paragraphs and paragraphs to build a scene. Sure, using lots of 
  adjectives gives your writing a bit of a pulpy vibe, but D&D was born 
  out of the pulps.  
   
  There are a couple of dust mephits on the grimy floor of the 
  cluttered cabinet room. Gosh, I love mephits! They are one of my go-
  to monsters for low-level parties, and I probably need to be a bit more 
  sparing with them. I think there was a missed opportunity here, as 
  the cabinet of curiosities was full of animal skeletons. A better 
  encounter would be to have the skeletons animate and attack. These 
  
  76 
  sorts of “missed opportunities” are the things I notice most when re-
  reading my old adventures. The experienced eye sees all sorts of 
  patterns that allow you to pull the dungeon together into a cohesive 
  whole.  
   
  An even better idea would have been to have a trick or “toy” 
  encounter here (see chapter 5) rather than a combat encounter. As 
  written, you have a cabinet full of marvelous oddments but no way to 
  interact with them. What if you touch a giant’s spear and have the 
  enlarge spell cast on you? Perhaps a hand mirror shows a recording 
  of a prior moment in the dungeon. Maybe a dream catcher puts you 
  into a deep slumber where you face a nightmare monster. Those are 
  just a few ideas (which I generated using story cubes, by the way!)  
   
  East of the cabinet room is a longish hall before the final chamber. 
  There are nine paintings on the walls, each one depicting a different 
  layer of hell. When the players get to the middle of the hall, two imps 
  emerge from pictures on either side of the party and a nice fight 
  ensues. I was inspired a little by Return to the Tomb of Horrors, 
  which has a round room with a bunch of paintings that were 
  gateways to different places. Of course, the “portal picture” is an old 
  fantasy trope. I think I first encountered it in C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of 
  the Dawntreader as a child, though the idea was most fully developed 
  in Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles, which I read obsessively in my 
  teens.  
  
  77 
   
  So, we get to the final room, and it is an alchemical laboratory. 
  Given the person we are seeking is trapped in a bottle, that is nice 
  and consistent. However, Amilya is not the only one present. If the 
  characters have a look through the lab equipment, they notice that 
  “an alembic on one of the shelves contains a green mist that is 
  glowing very faintly.” These are the remains of the Sorcerer, the 
  person who originally built the tower and basement. In a 
  questionable attempt to achieve immortality, he managed to distill 
  the very spirit out of his aged and decrepit body and into a glass 
  container.  
   
  The Sorcerer has the power to toss about vials of acid and other 
  nasty stuff, and the fight lasts until the character’s find and smash his 
  container. After that, at last, they can free Amilya from her twenty 
  years in suspended animation. I describe her as having “raven hair 
  and a lithe build.” A cliched description, but I was (and am) 
  consciously trying to avoid describing women as "beautiful" or 
  "stunning" or whatever. Not only are they very weak adjectives, but 
  the focus on female attractiveness is tired and unhelpful.   
   
  With the dungeon complete, the adventure rolls into an extended 
  coda (inspired by Kurt Schneider’s plot seed) with Amilya causing 
  trouble as she tries to win back her former fiancé, who has married 
  and had five kids in the intervening twenty years. Truthfully, I am not 
  quite sure that it works—it feels a bit anticlimactic and a lot of folks 
  
  78 
  who run the adventure skip this last bit. If I were writing the 
  adventure today, I doubt I would include this section.  
   
  I released the adventure, and it got good reviews and was selling 
  quite well. Then, a month or so later, the editor at Dragon+ got in 
  touch with me and asked if they could feature the adventure in the 
  magazine. Of course! They paid me a nice little sum and included a 
  code that allowed people to download the product for free. To my 
  delight, the adventure was downloaded several thousand times, 
  which really helped bring my name to a wider audience.  
   
  Wizard in a Bottle continues to sell well and is currently rated 86% 
  by its reviewers. It showed me how important it was to read the work 
  of other people, especially the “masters” in the field, when I was 
  seeking inspiration for an adventure. Sometimes, would-be creators 
  tell me they simply cannot think of anything to write. Skim through 
  an old issue of Dungeon Magazine and you will have plenty of ideas 
  before the end! Or think about one of your favorite adventures, and 
  consider how you can re-imagine that play experience. I have done 
  that more than a few times, as you will see in the next chapter. 
   
   
   
  
  79 
  9. There’s a Robot in my Dungeon 
  Chapter 9 
  There’s a Robot in my Dungeon 
  If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't  
  been written yet, then you must write it. 
  Toni Morrison 
  In chapter 6, I alluded to the legendary TSR adventures of my youth, 
  those that were mentioned in hallowed whispers in the playground. 
  One of these fabled titles was Expedition to the Barrier Peaks ("You 
  go into a crashed spaceship, and you get laser guns, and you fight 
  robots!!! Wow!!!") The concept lit up my imagination, and I 
  desperately wanted to play it. I finally got my chance when a new kid 
  at school produced a copy.   
   
  The designated Saturday arrived, and a group of us sat around the 
  table, waiting for the brilliance to unfold. Sadly, it was a very 
  disappointing game experience. We were confronted with endless 
  identical rooms to enter and search, interspersed with some 
  
  80 
  repetitive fights. We gave up after about an hour and played Game of 
  Life instead. Expectation, please meet Reality. 
   
  I do not think our thirteen-year-old DM was well prepared for the 
  game, but I think the adventure itself has some problems as well. 
  There is a lot of “dead space” in the first few levels, and I feel like it 
  only really warms up by level 4. Yet despite my bad experience, I 
  never quite let go of the "dream" of what Barrier Peaks could have 
  been, and when I started self-publishing D&D adventures, I decided 
  to create my own version. I called it Expedition to the Lost Peaks. 
   
  Here is another example of pure pastiche proudly presenting its 
  provenance on the cover. I will not lie—although these homages were 
  well received by the public, I occasionally worried that I should be 
  doing something more original. But I was encouraged when I came 
  across this quote from W.H. Auden, one of the greatest English-
  language poets of the 20th-century. He said, “Some writers confuse 
  authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, 
  which they should never bother about.” Finding your authentic voice 
  is much more important than being original. And as you find your 
  voice, originality will inevitably follow. 
   
  For those starting out on this creative journey, find something that 
  you are genuinely and authentically passionate about, and do not 
  worry if it has already been done. Do you want to write about a cave 
  complex full of monsters? Go for it—and do not be concerned that 
  The Keep on the Borderlands did it before you. Do you want to write 
  
  81 
  about a charismatic vampire ruling over a small province? Do it—and 
  do not be bothered about Ravenloft. Do you want to write about a 
  dangerous island full of dinosaurs? Go ahead—and do not be 
  troubled that Isle of Dread has already been there. In all these things, 
  if you bring your passion and you execute well, you will create 
  something worthwhile.  
   
  Expedition to the Lost Peaks has proven to be an enduringly 
  popular adventure and is currently rated 90% by reviewers. It starts 
  in Longsaddle, with a Harpell matriarch commissioning the 
  characters to investigate a strange metal object she has learned 
  about in the Lost Peaks. As you have probably guessed, the object 
  turns out to be a crashed spaceship. 
   
  I picked the Lost Peaks as the destination because of the similarity 
  in name to the Barrier Peaks. But it was actually a rather good 
  location for an adventure since the area is relatively isolated—had the 
  spaceship crashed next to Waterdeep, many people would have gone 
  to investigate already. My spaceship is much smaller than the 
  massive craft presented in Barrier Peaks, but that is by design since 
  I wanted an adventure you could run in a session or two. One of the 
  problems with Barrier Peaks is that you have endless identical rooms 
  and you also have large spaces with nothing in them. It is kinda 
  realistic but does make it potentially repetitive and dull. 
   
  My spaceship has two levels, the largest one being the Green 
  Deck, which is like a giant terrarium. Here you have got a self-
  
  82 
  contained little wilderness adventure where you fight things such as 
  bulletes, manticores, chuuls, and other strange beasts. You start the 
  level on an observation deck that gives you a view of the whole 
  tangled indoor wilderness, and in the distance, you see a pack of 
  allosauruses dash off. Throughout the level you hear these dinosaurs 
  call out, so you always know they are somewhere ahead. 
  Foreshadowing a dangerous encounter like that is highly effective.    
   
  There are little treasure stashes around the level where you can 
  pick up stuff like blasters and frag grenades. Finding cool loot is a big 
  part of the fun with science fiction crossover adventures! The high-
  tech items all have limited charges and no obvious way to recharge, 
  so the DM does not have to worry about the characters leaving the 
  adventure with too much firepower.  
   
  To explain why there was loose gear around the level, I created a 
  little story about an escaping prisoner, who was killed while flying 
  through the air above the Green Desk, resulting in his loot being 
  scattered everywhere. There is a friendly treant who tells you this 
  story and also refers to the mysterious makers of the ship. 
   
  This tiny story was not only a fun bit of color, but it also suggested 
  a few encounter seeds, including the discovery of the prisoner’s body. 
  There was a lesson for me here—adventures usually have an 
  overarching plot, often expressed as a narrative question ("where did 
  this spaceship come from?") but you can sprinkle your adventure 
  with subplots as well that are not really related to the main plot (“who 
  
  83 
  was the flying man and why was he a prisoner?”). Laying a few of 
  these across the top of a dungeon is a great way to make it more 
  interesting. 
   
  One way to do this is to imagine the dungeon in its natural or 
  equilibrium state and then postulate an event that disrupts this 
  equilibrium. It might be a prisoner escaping, a new monster moving 
  into town, someone coming here to hide out from the law, or some 
  kind of natural disaster. This disruption to the equilibrium gives the 
  characters a mystery to investigate and can heighten the dramatic 
  tension. Imagine you are invading a goblin den and you suddenly 
  come across a room containing six dismembered goblins. The 
  players are immediately on edge, wondering what killed the goblins, 
  why it did so, and where it is. Subplots can transform an otherwise 
  prosaic dungeon.  
   
  Back to the Lost Peaks. Having cleared the Green Deck, the 
  characters find themselves on the Medical Deck and have some fun 
  playing around with alien tech and also fighting off the security bots. 
  It is clear my inspiration here was the old Paranoia roleplaying game, 
  which I loved when I was a kid. I wanted this level to be a bit zany but 
  also dangerous. I called the robots “guardbots” and “medbots,” 
  which are both terms from Paranoia. 
   
  I threw some body-horror in here as well. You enter a chamber 
  where there are some living heads and a living brain in some jars. 
  “Brain in a jar” is an old trope, but I still find it disturbing, and I have 
  
  84 
  used it in a couple of other adventures, most notably The Clockwork 
  Queen.  
   
  After clearing the Medical Deck, the characters make their way to 
  the Control Room where the ship's computer reveals the big secret 
  of why the ship is there and who owns it. Spoilers—the ship was run 
  by mind flayers who were surveying the planet aeons ago for possible 
  conquest when they crashed. The strong suggestion is that the mind 
  flayers who escaped the crash are the ancestors of all the mind 
  flayers on Toril. Ok, this does not quite square with established lore, 
  especially the Spelljammer stuff. But I thought it was a fun idea.  
   
  The computer also has a nasty surprise for the characters. It has 
  remained functioning for all these years because it was obliged to 
  render whatever assistance it could to its masters. Having 
  determined that mind flayers are well established on the planet, the 
  computer has completed its functions and initiates a self-destruct 
  sequence. The characters barely escape in time. It is a fun climax, 
  though I wish I had gamified it a bit more.  
   
  This adventure gets a lot of things right—it has a strong premise, 
  is tightly written, has a good mix of combat, social, and exploration, 
  and also has a dramatic conclusion. It is short, but it goes close to 
  fulfilling the vision I had when I was thirteen years old, staring 
  longingly at the cover of Barrier Peaks.  
   
  The feedback for Expedition to the Lost Peaks has been very 
  favourable. The adventure is currently rated 90% and has sold over 
  
  85 
  4,000 copies. I think it is a good example of how you can take 
  something you love (or want to love) and make it your own. The 
  success of this adventure, and the delight it has brought so many 
  people, is one of the reasons I will never apologize for riffing on past 
  classics. Having said that, soon after I wrote this adventure, I began 
  earnestly using another idea-generating tool, one that proved to be 
  immensely powerful. We will discuss it in the next chapter.  
  
  86 
  10. Let the Dice Talk 
  Chapter 10 
  Let the Dice Talk 
  Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns 
  in order to look at things in a different way.  
  Edward de Bono 
  There is an old joke about a novelist and a neurosurgeon who meet 
  at a party. The neurosurgeon says, “When I retire, I plan to write a 
  book.” The novelist says, “What a coincidence! When I retire, I plan 
  to operate on brains.” The novelist, of course, is making an ironic (or 
  bitter) comment about the devaluation of their craft. In a culture with 
  high literacy rates, many people fancy they can write a book. Having 
  spent a lifetime reading, such folk do not imagine they might need to 
  serve a writing apprenticeship first—in their assessment, they are 
  experts already.  
   
  We see the same thing in the roleplaying game community. There 
  are many, many people who have invested a remarkable number of 
  
  87 
  hours in this highly addictive hobby. And it is only natural for such 
  folk, once they decide to publish, to consider themselves experts 
  already. But one of the downsides to such “expertise” is that you are 
  tempted to skip over the basics. And in doing so, you might miss 
  ideas, techniques, and tools that can greatly enhance your work. I 
  know because I did exactly that.  
   
  As a Dungeon Master with many years’ experience under my belt, 
  I felt like I did not really need the Dungeon Master’s Guide very 
  much. That was a book aimed at beginners, in my view, and I was 
  beyond the lessons it contained. Folly! The latest edition of this book 
  is a distillation of forty years of experience, and it simply oozes useful 
  advice and ideas. I realized this myself a few years ago when I had 
  another look at appendix A, which helps you generate a dungeon 
  using random tables. 
   
  Now, I know some are skeptical about creating with random rolls, 
  but this technique is well established in the hobby. Indeed, using 
  randomness has a respectable history in the arts. For example, in the 
  early 20th century, the French-Romain poet Tristan Tzara invented 
  a composition technique called découpé, where he took an existing 
  composition, cut up the words, and re-arranged them into a poem.  
   
  Many creators have since used similar techniques, including Kurt 
  Cobain and David Bowie. Writer Ray Bradbury used to write down 
  lists of evocative nouns, then pick them out at random and create 
  stories from them. Using random words as creative prompts is a 
  
  88 
  pretty standard technique in many writing workshops and has even 
  been turned into a dice-based game called Story Cubes (which I 
  mentioned a couple of chapters ago). Lateral thinking expert Edward 
  de Bono calls this the “random input technique” and has taught it to 
  business leaders for decades.  
   
  When I started creating D&D adventures, I did not give much 
  thought to randomness. I was aware of the technique, but I think I 
  had put it into the “beginner” basket. But not long after completing 
  Expedition to the Lost Peaks, I happened to pick up The Dungeon 
  Alphabet by Michael Curtis, an adventure writer whose work I 
  admire. This particular book contained a couple of dozen random 
  lists for DMs to use when generating dungeons. I found the lists very 
  imaginative and creatively provocative. I went searching for similar 
  works and landed upon the extraordinary Tome of Adventure Design 
  (or TOAD) by Matthew Finch. This weighty book contains hundreds 
  of tables, most with dozens of detailed entries covering just about 
  every aspect of fantasy RPG adventure design. I have found it an 
  indispensable tool ever since.  
   
  But the 300-page TOAD can be hard to navigate, and for some 
  time I have thought we needed something less complicated but still 
  relatively comprehensive. I then revisited appendix A of the Dungeon 
  Master’s Guide and realized what a superb job the authors had done. 
  It turns out that these were the tables I had been looking for all along. 
  
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  You can use them to generate engaging and playable dungeons, and 
  I have increasingly relied on them when creating D&D content.  
   
  But aren’t such tables only intended for use at home? Can you use 
  them in publishable material? To test this point, I used the appendix 
  A tables to outline two of my most recent D&D adventures, The 
  Cannith Schematica and The Eye of Klothys. I also used randomly 
  generated maps for them. At time of writing, both adventures are 
  highly rated.  
   
  Why do random tables work? Edward de Bono described it this 
  way, “The general principle of the random input is the willingness to 
  look for unconnected inputs and to use these to open up new lines of 
  thinking.” Our minds are good at finding connections between 
  seemingly unrelated words, and these connections are a fertile 
  source of fresh ideas. 
   
  Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury gave a more detailed and 
  personal explanation of why randomness helps creativity: 
  Three things are in your head: First, everything you have 
  experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every 
  single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how 
  you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, 
  whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things 
  you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from 
  the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the 
  
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  things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film 
  directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a 
  fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do 
  that?  
  For Bradbury, the random noun list helped him “dredge” (his word) 
  his subconscious and bring the best ideas to the surface.  
   
  Ok, what does this look like in practice? For the two adventures I 
  mentioned above, I used the appendix A tables to generate the 
  following information about each chamber: 
   Chamber purpose 
   General feature or furnishing 
   Chamber state 
   Chamber contents 
   Hazards, obstacles, traps, and tricks (if applicable) 
   Monster motivation (if applicable) 
  Doing this for every room gave me an outline of the dungeon, which 
  I then fleshed out in an iterative manner, adding details, moving 
  things around, and looking for interconnections to develop.  
   
  Let us work through a single chamber as an example. Assume we 
  are creating an adventure called Temple of the Jade Bishop (a title I 
  devised using tables from TOAD). Following is how we can roll up a 
  chamber for that dungeon using the appendix A tables. These are all 
  genuine rolls, by the way—I am going to let the dice talk.  
  
  91 
  Chamber purpose 
  Pages 292 to 295 of the DMG contain lists of chamber purposes, 
  such as bedrooms, kitchens, libraries, and so on. Defining this 
  information helps you add details to your chamber that may interact 
  with other chamber contents in intriguing ways. The chamber 
  purpose tables are divided up by the dungeon type, so there are 
  different tables for strongholds, tombs, mines, etc. I will use the 
  “Temple or Shrine” table on p. 294. I rolled 01, meaning our 
  chamber is an “Armory filled with weapons and armor, battle 
  banners, and pennants.” 
  General feature or furnishing 
  Pages 299–301 contain a bunch of features and furniture to add to 
  your chamber. I usually roll up a single item from one of these tables 
  and later look for a way to turn it into some kind of toy, as I described 
  in chapter 5. In this instance, I decided to use the Religious Articles 
  and Furnishings table on p. 300. I rolled 48, meaning there is an 
  “incense burner” in the room. 
  Chamber state 
  Page 293 has a table that tells us the current state of our chamber. 
  This information potentially changes the battlefield terrain and may 
  
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  also suggest ways in which to make the chamber interactive. I rolled 
  2, which is “Rubble, partially collapsed.”  
  Chamber contents 
  Page 294 has a table that determines the encounter type of a 
  chamber, that is, whether it contains a monster, a treasure, etc. I 
  rolled 78, meaning this chamber contains a “Trick.” As you will have 
  gathered from chapter 5, I love tricks! Modern dungeons need more 
  tricks. 
  Hazards, obstacles, traps, and tricks 
  Pages 296 through 298 contain random tables for hazards, 
  obstacles, traps, and tricks. Since we rolled up a trick for the 
  chamber contents, I am going to use the trick tables on page 298. I 
  rolled 12 and 33, meaning my trick object is a “pool of water,” and 
  my trick effect is “Magic mouth speaks a riddle.” A talking pool of 
  water—how cool! I love random tables. 
  Monster 
  We did not roll up a monster in the chamber contents roll above, but 
  I will describe my process for monster encounters anyway. The 
  Dungeon Master’s Guide does not have monster tables, so I either 
  
  93 
  choose the monster by hand, use the encounter tables in Xanathar’s 
  Guide to Everything, or use a random web tool such as Kobold Fight 
  Club. I often choose a monster type as the general theme for a 
  dungeon or level, such as fiends or elementals. Even if randomly 
  rolling for monsters, I tend to roll a few times until something feels 
  right. 
   
  If the monster I select is intelligent, I roll on the monster 
  motivation table on page 296 of the DMG. The motivation 
  information adds depth to the monsters, can help you understand the 
  dungeon’s history, and sometimes suggests what the monster might 
  be doing when the characters show up. 
  Pull it all together 
  So, here are the random elements I rolled up for my temple chamber: 
   Armory filled with weapons and armor, battle banners, and 
  pennants 
   Incense burner 
   Rubble, partially collapsed 
   Trick: Pool of water, magic mouth speaks a riddle 
  The dice have spoken and provided us with some idea seeds. Now 
  we turn the results over to our brain and let it figure out ways to tie 
  these elements together. Why can the pool talk? We are in a temple, 
  so perhaps a drop of the god’s blood got mixed in there, which made 
  
  94 
  it magic. Ok, we have tied the pool to the temple theme. And perhaps 
  you have to burn incense to get the pool to talk. Good, we have also 
  linked in the incense burner! Having the pool in the armory is a bit 
  strange, but maybe this temple is dedicated to the god of war, so this 
  is a kind of ceremonial armory. Nice! See how we can link these 
  random ideas together? 
   
  Ok, let us tidy it up and summarise. Sometime in the past, a drop 
  of blood from the god of war got mixed in with a natural pool in the 
  wilderness, and the god’s followers (led by a senior priest known as 
  the Jade Bishop) built a temple around it. The chamber that houses 
  the pool is at the center of the temple and has been decorated like an 
  armory in honor of the god. Now, when you burn incense in the 
  incense burner here, the pool gives you a riddle-like hint about an 
  upcoming conflict.  
   
  That sounds rather good to me—and all inspired by random rolls! 
  The whole temple 
  Let us put together an outline for a 10-room temple using this 
  technique. For convenience, room 1 is the chamber we rolled above, 
  though we would likely renumber the rooms once we get a map. As 
  far as monsters go, I have decided this temple will have a fiendish 
  flavor, with perhaps one other sort of monster for contrast. Since this 
  
  95 
  is a fairly small dungeon, I will re-roll repeat values. For larger 
  dungeons, I have more tolerance for repeats. Here goes: 
  Temple of the Jade Bishop 
  1. Armory; incense burner; rubble; trick => pool of water speaks 
  a riddle 
  2. Robing room; altar; ashes; empty room (no encounter) 
  3. Guardroom; offertory container; wrecked furniture; monster 
  (random) => ettercap 
  4. Crypt for the high priest; paintings; rubble; monster (dominant 
  inhabitant) => shadow demon is hiding from enemies 
  5. Drinking well; holy symbol; holes in the floor; hazard => green 
  slime 
  6. Weapon workshop; idol; ashes; treasure => adamantine armor 
  7. Chapel; font; rubble; trick => tapestry casts polymorph 
  8. Central temple; stand; campsite; monster (ally) => quasits want 
  to conquer the dungeon 
  9. Monk cells; kneeling bench; a pool of water; monster (pet) 
  guarding treasure => hell hound guarding chest full of gems 
  10. Dining room; lamp; converted to a divination room; trap with 
  treasure => open door and stone block smashes you 
  That looks like a fun little dungeon to me! You see some unusual 
  results when you use random rolls, and these really provoke the 
  creative process. For example, in chamber 4 we have the boss 
  
  96 
  monster, a shadow demon, hiding in this (presumably abandoned) 
  temple from its enemies. Perhaps it is being chased by some 
  archdevil enemy who cannot enter the prime material plane. The 
  archdevil sends an emissary to hire the party to go to the temple and 
  destroy or capture the shadow demon. So, there we have a little 
  backstory and hook, prompted by the random roll!  
   
  Chamber 8 also has a slightly unusual encounter. Some quasits, 
  allies of the shadow demon, want to conquer the dungeon. What does 
  it mean for such weak creatures to desire conquest? I think I would 
  play them as a bit of comic relief. When the party encounters them, 
  they boldly declare they are masters of the temple and will destroy 
  anyone who dares to pass.  
  The next, hard step 
  The next step, and it’s a hard one, is to go through each room and 
  convert it into a full encounter, tying together the different threads, 
  fleshing out the descriptions, and making sure it is fun and playable. 
  This step often involves shuffling things around a bit, which is fine—
  the random elements are there to serve you, not to shackle you. 
  Based on experience, the 120-word outline above would evolve into 
  a 3,000-5,000-word dungeon by the time I am finished with it.  
   
  Random tables will not do the work for you, but they will help you 
  get out of creative ruts and stimulate new ideas. It is a creative 
  
  97 
  process that I have found invaluable, especially as I have sought to 
  increase my output. I know some folk fear that any sort of framework 
  is inherently limiting, but the opposite is true. A good creative process 
  (like randomization) helps broaden your thinking, forcing your mind 
  into new and unexpected places. Speaking about his random list 
  technique, Ray Bradbury said: 
  These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better 
  stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, 
  hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull… similar lists, 
  dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well help you 
  discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me. 
  To help you discover you—that is really my hope, not just for the 
  techniques in this chapter, but for all the material presented in this 
  book. Bradbury talks about flopping around in search of his creative 
  voice. I prefer the image of shuffling forward: we might be moving 
  slowly, but to move at all is the thing.  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
  98 
  Afterword: I have Not Yet Begun to Write 
  Afterword 
  I have Not Yet Begun to Write 
  A writer is a person for whom writing is  
  more difficult than it is for other people. 
  Thomas Mann 
  As I write this, my thirty-fifth adventure has just been published on 
  the Dungeon Masters Guild. Called Thimblerigging, it is part of the 
  Adventurer’s League Dreams of the Red Wizards series, which is 
  aimed at experienced players. One scene from the adventure 
  requires the players to enter the fortress/library of Candlekeep, 
  seeking a piece of secret information. The story outline said I needed 
  to give it a Ninth Gate feel, with the NPCs being very unhelpful and 
  the characters struggling to make progress.  
   
  When I first read that part of the outline, I had no idea how to turn 
  it into a playable D&D scenario! So, I did what I often do in such 
  cases—I put out a call for help on social media. I had to be pretty 
  
  99 
  oblique as the plot line was still confidential, but I asked for 
  suggestions around “gamifying” social interactions. Some good 
  discussion followed, and folk pointed me to a few examples of it being 
  done well. After sweating a bit of blood, I came up with the following 
  approach. Spoiler alert, of course! 
   
  The characters arrive at Candlekeep wanting to find out some 
  information. The head librarian knows what they need but does not 
  trust them. He instead sends them off to visit various book chambers 
  within Candlekeep, each with a librarian in attendance. The 
  characters learn some useful lore from this research, but do not find 
  the information they are looking for, and nor can the librarians help 
  them. The experience should start to get frustrating, as they go from 
  chamber to chamber without finding what they need. 
   
  However, each librarian has a small personal problem that 
  becomes apparent as the scenario progresses. If and when the 
  characters help a librarian, they gain a “reputation point.” Once they 
  get 3 reputation points, the head librarian is convinced they are 
  trustworthy people, and volunteers the information they have been 
  looking for. It is a nice little piece of misdirection: the players go into 
  the scenario thinking their research skills are to be tested, whereas 
  it is really their worthiness being scrutinized. 
   
  Some of you are thinking “That’s cool, I might try that in my next 
  adventure,” while others are thinking, “I don’t much care for that 
  approach.” Both valid responses! But my point is that, after 
  
  100 
  publishing thirty-five adventures, I am still learning all the time. This 
  book was not intended as the master crafter giving you definitive 
  instructions. Rather, I am a fellow apprentice who is showing you a 
  few tricks I have picked up along the way.  
   
  I have learned lots of other tricks as well, but it is time to bring this 
  little book to a close. If it proves sufficiently popular, I may publish a 
  sequel or two. Otherwise, perhaps we will bump into each other on 
  social media, where we can swap some tips and excitedly discuss our 
  latest projects. Because I am still excited by this craft, and I am 
  certain my best work lays ahead of me rather than behind. To 
  misquote John Paul Jones, “I have not yet begun to write!”  
   
   
  
  101 
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SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Dungeons & Dragons [multi]/5th Edition (5e)/3rd Party/M.T. Black/M.T. Black - The Anatomy of Adventure.pdf