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FINDING THE RIGHT STRUCTURE

You can get a lot of mileage out of node-based scenario design, but it’s not a cure-all. The goal here is not “make everything node-based.” The goal is identifying (or, in some cases, creating) the structure best-suited to running the scenario.

This also means that the more scenario structures you have in your toolkit, the more often you’ll see ways to crack needless railroads into meaningful gameplay or give purpose to meandering scenarios that are desperately trying to empower the players, but don’t know how.

In addition to mysteries and node-based scenario design, structures we’ve discussed here on the Alexandrian include:

• Raids
• Heists
• Hexcrawls
• McGuffin Keep-Away
• Party-Planning
• Sector Crawls
• Festivals
• Urbancrawls
• Tactical Hacking
• Between the Stars (Interstellar Trade)

That might seem like a big reading list. But here’s the thing: Any one of these game structures is the key to unlocking an infinite number of new adventures for you and your players. That’s exciting!

XANDERING DUNGEONS: Another place where I’ll look for opportunities to break up linear design are dungeon maps.

As with other forms of linear design, there are situations in which linear dungeons make sense. But, when it comes to published scenarios, most linear dungeons are just the result of lazy design (or designers who don’t know any better) and I will seize the opportunity to fix them.

I’m not going to belabor the techniques for doing this here, because I wrote a whole article diving deep into this specific topic called Xandering the Dungeon. The short version is that linear dungeons strip strategic play and meaningful decision-making out of dungeon scenarios, resulting in flat, simplistic play that frequently deprotagonizes the PCs.

Here’s one specific tip, though, when doing a dungeon remix: Add windows!

Obviously this doesn’t apply to subterranean labyrinths (usually), but there are plenty of “dungeons” which are just warehouses, slavers’ enclaves, or the mansions of nefarious nobles. A surprising number of these lack windows in published adventures, forcing the PCs to enter them through the one-and-only-door.

In addition to being terrible fire hazards, these buildings don’t really make a lot of sense when we think about how buildings actually work. You can usually fix them pretty quickly by jotting in a few lines indicating the locations of windows, instantly adding a ton of dynamic interest to the scenario by allowing the PCs to choose how they’re going to infiltrate or assault the building. (Or run away when things go poorly at the Fortress of Black Night.)

In addition to the examples given in Xandering the Dungeon, there’s also a practical example of this in the Dungeon of the Dead Three in Remixing Avernus.

PLAY- AND PLAYER-FOCUSED MATERIAL

The other thing I’ll look for in published adventures is material that has no mechanism for bringing it to the table.

This is surprisingly common in published adventures. You’ll read all kinds of nifty stuff, only to realize that there’s no way for the players to ever learn about it. This usually takes the form of cool background material, but sometimes you’ll find vast, Machiavellian struggles being carried out between NPCs without the PCs ever knowing any of it is happening.

It’s top secret, right? So, logically, the PCs shouldn’t know about it!

But if an amazing secret falls in the forest and there’s no one around to see it, does it make a sound anyone care?

Once you identify an element like this you can figure out how to bring that lore into the game:

• Make it a revelation and seed clues that allow the PCs to learn about it.
• Work it into conversations with NPCs. (If it’s an NPC’s dark secret, this conversation may or may not be with them.)
• Have the “secret” actions reverberate throughout the campaign world, creating ripples in the form of rumors, jobs, and other opportunities for the PCs.

There are exceptions to this, and it’s not unusual for an adventure to have a “hidden” elements that exist only to provide context for your rulings.

But if it’s awesome, let the players see it.

On a similar note, make sure that the PCs are the protagonists of the scenario.

Any place where the adventure says, “And then an NPC does something awesome!” think long and hard about how you could redesign that moment so that the PCs are doing the awesome thing.

Any place where the adventure has an NPC tell the PCs what they need to do next, figure out if there’s a way to let the PCs figure that out for themselves.

Failing that, try to make sure that quest-givers are observing the Czege Principle:

When one person is the author of both the character’s adversity and its resolution, play isn’t fun.

Specifically, in this case, structure things so that the quest-giver tells the PCs what the adversity is, but then the players need to figure out how to solve that. This is the difference between, “We need you to get Lord Cleverpants’ technobabble widget!” and “You will sneak into Lord Cleverpants’ castle through the sewers and steal his technobabble widget.” By posing a problem and then letting the players figure out how to solve it, you are giving them agency and the space to actively engage with the scenario.

(The quest-giver who gives them a list of everything they need, instead of parceling them out as sequential quests, is another example of how to do this.)

CONCLUSION

To briefly sum up the heart of a successful remix: Identify cool stuff. Add more cool stuff. Figure out how to reveal that cool stuff to your players and give them the space and structure to play with it.

And have fun!