At the beginning of Legacy of the Crystal Shard, there is an encounter with a crag cat. At some length, here is how that encounter is presented:

These hills are hunting grounds for crag cats, a cold-weather breed of tiger that is notorious for hunting humans as prey (a job to which it is uniquely suited thanks to its natural immunity to all forms of detection magic). Normally these predators stalk lone travelers, but the crag cats have recently taken to ambushing even large, well-armed companies due to the growing influence of the Ice Witch. One such creature lies in wait near an outcropping of boulders near the trail that the caravan is passing. It waits until most of the wagons have passed, attacking the last band in the train.

Ask the players what part of the train their characters are guarding. In addition, if any of the players have indicated that their characters are watching for danger, allow them to make a DC 20 Wisdom check to notice the crag cat.

If the heroes spot the crag cat, read:

As the caravan steers around the base of one hill, you notice movement in a nearby outcropping of boulders. Through the flurries of snow, you can make out the form of a great sabertooth cat creeping forward, ready to pounce.

The encounter begins with a surprise round. Only the crag cat and any characters who succeeded at spotting the cat roll initiative. If a character attacks the crag cat before it acts, the crag cat attempts to target that character when it takes its turn. If the character is out of reach, or if no one attacks the crag cat, it attacks one of the caravan guards instead, hitting automatically and knocking the guard unconscious. In either event, the crag cat’s appearance scares a team of nearby draft animals, causing one of the wagons to crash on its side as the beasts attempt to flee.

After the surprise round, have the rest of the characters roll for initiative and continue with the encounter.

If the heroes do not spot the crag cat, read:

As the caravan steers around the base of one hill, you suddenly hear the cream of horses and the shouting of riders coming from the back of the train. Through the snow, you can make out the figure of giant saber-toothed cat looming over a caravan guard, who is weaponless and pinned to the ground. The teamster of a nearby wagon fights to regain control of his panicked horses, but the beasts pull wildly at their harnesses as they attempt to flee, and with a lurch the wagon tips and crashes to the ground.

Starting Locations: Have the players roll for initiative and describe their characters’ response to the attack. No tactical map is provided for this encounter, so you will need to use your judgment in deciding whether the players’ desired actions are feasible. As a guideline, any characters near the back of the train can close to melee with the crag cat during the first round of combat, while characters in the front of the train must either use ranged attacks or spend a round moving in order to join the melee during the second round of combat. The snowfall is light enough that it does not hamper visibility or ranged attacks.

Meanwhile, Beorne Steelstrike, Helda Silverstream, and the other three caravan guards try to calm the animals while keeping an eye out for more cats.

Crag Cat Tactics: If ever on the crag cat’s turn it has no one engaging it in melee, it performs a coup de grace and kills the fallen guard. The creature then attempts to drag the body back to the outcropping of boulders. Otherwise, the crag cat stands its ground, attacking anyone who engages it in melee. It shows no interest in attacking the draft animals or any non-humanoid prey, and prefers to target small or lightly armored foes. Once reduced to a quarter of its hit points, the crag cat attempts to flee.

So that’s one way of prepping this encounter.

Here’s a different way of prepping the same encounter:

A crag cat attacks the caravan.

… that’s it.

ON THE SPECTRUM

To be clear, what I’m saying is that BOTH of these encounters – despite the radically different approaches to prep – can ultimately play out in exactly the same way at the gaming table. In fact, these are not  different encounters at all. They are the SAME encounter, prepped in different ways.

Which one would you rather prep?

Which one would you rather run at the table?

In thinking about these questions, however, we should recognize that this is not a dichotomy. These two versions of the crag cat encounter exist on extreme opposite ends of a spectrum of prep, ranging from lots of details being laid down on the page to virtually no details being prepped. And the latter, let us say “minimalist,” version of the encounter is one which can only come fully and smoothly to life in the hands of an experienced GM.

To be clear, while my own predilections are usually closer to the minimalist approach, it’s not actually how I would typically prep this encounter. For example, a tool I’d like in my prep notes would be the crag cat’s stat block, so that I’d have that information at my fingertips while running the encounter.

That’s really what this is about: What information do you need/want to have when you’re running your prep?

As such, this is a practical example of one of the central principles of Smart Prep: Don’t duplicate in your prep what you can improvise at the table.

The reason the minimalist presentation of the crag cat encounter can work is because so much of the lengthier presentation can be trivially intuited by a GM who is actively playing the crag cat at the table.

• “The crag cat will attempt to ambush the caravan.” This seems like essential framing, but answering the questions, “How would this encounter start?” or, more specifically, “How would a crag cat choose to attack?” is clearly something a GM can do during play. (And the nature of the crag cat likely to suggest an ambush approach.)
• “The encounter begins with a surprise round.” This is simply a reminder of how the mechanics of the game work. Nothing wrong with this. If you’re still learning the rules of a game and need mechanical reminders, it’s a great idea to put them in your prep notes. But obviously an experienced GM who has learned these rules wouldn’t need to repeat them in their prep notes.
• “If ever on the crag cat’s turn it has no one engaging it in melee, it performs a coup de grace and kills the fallen guard.” This is a tactical option. These can, once again, be useful, but are obviously not needed in order to run an encounter. (For the same reason that, for example, the players don’t need a list of tactical options before going into combat: The GM can actively play their NPCs the same way that the players actively play their PCs.)
• “The crag cat’s appearance scares a team of nearby draft animals, causing one of the wagons to crash on its side as the beasts attempt to flee.” This is a cool idea for something that could happen during the encounter. Such cool ideas can obviously be improvised, but jotting down particularly cool ideas that occur to you during prep can make a lot of sense.

And so forth.

Something else I talk about in Smart Prep is the hierarchy of reference: The rules you know and what you can effectively improvise will change over time, depending on both circumstance and your level of skill. Which means that what you need to prep and put into your notes will also change over time.

For example, if you’re running D&D for the first time, maybe you need to remind yourself how surprise works:

Surprise. Wisdom (Perception) vs. Dexterity (Stealth). Surprised characters can’t move, take action, or take reaction until end of 1^st turn. (Determine individually, not by group.)

Later you’ve mastered the rules for stealth and some other aspects of surprise, but you’re always forgetting exactly what a surprised character can and cannot do. So the next crag cat-like encounter you run includes a much shorter note:

Surprised = No move, action, reaction.

And then, eventually, you realize that you’ve learned this rule, too, and you no longer need to include that reminder in your crag cat encounters.

The same principle applies more abstractly to other facets of prep, too. Maybe you struggle to describe battlefields that aren’t just featureless plains, so it makes sense to fully prep what the encounter area looks like. Later you may find you only need to jot down one or two ideas.

(Of course, there are also other factors to identifying high-value prep. For example, if you’re using a virtual tabletop with battlemaps, you’ll obviously want to prep the encounter area for that. You’re generally not going to be able to improvise that in the middle of a session.)

ADD WHAT YOU NEED

Even as we consciously choose to avoid over-prepping and move towards the minimalist end of the spectrum of prep, I think there’s still a temptation to start with EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW. That in order to prep an encounter, for example, you must start by fully actualizing the encounter and then identify which elements of that completely realized encounter need to be written down as some kind of mnemonic for remembering the rest of it.

This can seem super-logical, in particular, if you’re already over-prepping: You look at what you typically do and think, “What can I get rid of?

What I’d suggest is that you may be better off starting with nothing more than, “A crag cat attacks the caravan,” and then really trying to focus exclusively on the high-value information that it’s useful to add.

Often even the element you’re adding doesn’t have to be fully fleshed out. You only need to take the idea to the point where your improvisation can bring it to life. I’ve found that using bullet points can be a great way of keeping your thoughts brief. (Plus it often makes it easier to find and use the information during play.)

For example:

Crag Cat Ambush:

• Frightens draft animals.

• Attacks unarmored caravan members first.

• Drags first dead foe away to eat.

Each of these is a distinct idea, but you can also think of each as a seed that will grow to fruition when you plant it into the game during actual play.

Something to note here (and which can almost be used as a check to see whether or not you’re prepping too much) is that, because each idea is waiting to discover its final form during actual play, you have much greater flexibility in how each idea can be used (and, as a result, what its final form will be).

For example, consider the idea that the crag cat “frightens draft animals.” This might play out with the crag cat causing a specific animal to panic and tip over a wagon (as described in the heavily prepped version of this encounter). But it might also cause an animal to panic and throw a PC. Or panic and race off across the icy tundra. You could even reach in and grab this idea when the PCs make their Wisdom (Perception) checks: On a success, you might describe that as noticing that their axebeak has gotten suddenly skittish, causing them to look up in time to spot the crag cat getting ready to pounce. Or on a near miss, you might describe a partial failure by simply mentioning that the axebeak has gotten skittish (leaving it to the players to try to figure out what might be wrong).

Not only does this result in varied outcomes, but, as we’ve seen here, it often means that a single idea can be used multiple times to different effect.

In other words, as you begin experimenting with minimalist prep, you’ll probably find that you’re also naturally moving away from specific, pre-scripted ideas and towards fun toys that can be used in lots of different ways to respond to the evolving situation that develops at your table during actual play.

There are lots of short adventures available for RPGs like D&D, Feng Shui, Shadowrun, and Magical Kitties Save the Day. But if you want to do something more than the purely episodic, how can you take those adventures and weave them all together into a cohesive campaign?

This video is the first in what I’m hoping will be a new video production pipeline, featuring a dedicated editor other than myself. If all goes well, this should significantly speed up the production of new videos and let me get back to making regular video releases again. (To put things in perspective, I’ve had the raw footage for this video and three others just moldering away on my hard drive since the end of June without being able to dedicate the time necessary to get them ready for prime time.)

Good gaming! I’ll see you at the table!

Go to Table of Contents

As previously discussed in the Remix, there are at least two things the PCs might gain by raiding Zariel’s flying fortress:

• Zariel’s half of Bellandi’s contract (which can be destroyed if brought together with the other half)
• Access to the control room for the Dock of Fallen Cities (which they can use to detach the chains holding Elturel if the pact has been broken)

It’s also quite possible that the PCs might come up with any number of other plans, like sneaking in with a Bel-sponsored strike team to assassinate Zariel. Or they might be captured by Zariel’s forces, thrown into the fortress’ brig, and then need to escape.

There are two flying fortresses presented in Descent Into Avernus – Zariel’s flying fortress (p. 130) and a wrecked flying fortress (p. 118). The presentations of both are severely restricted by the limitations of their design. The wrecked flying fortress, for example, crams everything into the command deck so that it can be presented as a single, small dungeon map. Zariel’s fortress, on the other hand, would be impossible to tackle as a clear-the-dungeon style adventure with its vast legions of hell troops, so an implausible railroad sees the ship abandoned by all but a skeleton crew of twenty-two devils.

To avoid these problems, we’ll use an alternative structure. A Death Star Raid is designed for exactly this type of scenario. It’s discussed in more detail here, but we’ll look at the essential elements below. The adventure features:

• A toolkit of situational obstacles, including both active and passive defensive measures that can be found in the flying fortress.
• Entrances to the flying fortress, including the obstacles which will try to prevent the PCs from using them (if any).
• A flowchart map of significant locations within the fortress, including obstacles and objectives placed within some of these locations.

RUNNING THE RAID

This should give the PCs enough structure to make meaningful choices (without getting bogged down in navigating every corridor) and give you the tools to flexibly run the scenario (without micromanaging every imp).

As noted in the article on Raiding the Death Star:

Don’t feel trapped by your prep. Remember that what you’re designing are tools: If they’re in the brig and they blow their Bluff check, send in some stormtrooper squads. If they feel trapped, don’t think they can fight their way out, and they say, “There must be another way out of here! Can we get out through the vents?” think for a moment and then say, “Sure. That works. You can blast a hole in the wall over there and drop down onto the garbage disposal level.” You didn’t prep a garbage disposal level, but it makes sense that a space station would have one, right?

Since the garbage disposal feels like a significant location, you might want to add an obstacle to it. You could add stormtroopers here, too, but since the whole point was to get away from the stormtroopers (and who would bother guarding garbage anyway?) it might make more sense to add a passive defensive measure. Perhaps a magnetically sealed door?

Use this same combination of logic and rulings when running Zariel’s fortress and you should be in good shape.

RAID PREP

If the PCs want to get information about the layout, defenses, and other features of Zariel’s fortress before initiating their raid, there are several options:

• Explore the wrecked flying fortress in Hex H6. The layout may not be precisely identical, but will be broadly so.
• Detailed blueprints of the flying fortress can be found in the archives of Bel’s Forge in Hex H2.
• Questioning captured devils of the 5^th Legion (or making soul bargains for the information) can also reveal many details.

THE 5th LEGION

Zariel’s flying fortress is the mobile base of operations for the 5^th Legion, which is composed of the:

• 3^rd Aerial Cohort, composed of spined devils
• 7^th Infantry Cohort, composed of bearded devils
• 9^th Cavalry Auxiliary, consisting of several dozen war machines.

See The Ranks of Hell for more details on the organization of Avernian legions. The command structure of the 3/5 and 7/5 is a little unusual, with the flying fortress having two rotating officer corps:

• The Horned Devil corps, under the command of Signifier Uxtarthas, is currently out of favor and are stuck leading the 7^th
• The Erinyes corps, under the command of Principia Hathastus, currently have dominion and are leading the prestigious 3^rd

Each officer corps consists of an independent cadre of prima, triarii, and their Princeps. They are kept in competition with each other, creating a fierce rivalry for supremacy in Zariel’s esteem. This drives them to fiendish heights, but also creates the opportunity for clever PCs to sow discord and distrust between the ranks.

The 9^th Cavalry maintains its own, independent command structure under the command of Principia Vastarxes. They are not responsible for internal security on the fortress and, therefore, will be not be significantly featured here.

Legate Siccatrax Augustus, a pit fiend, is the commanding officer of the 5^th Legion. She is also unlikely to directly appear in this adventure unless the PCs seek her out.

Homework: The 9^th might be field-testing an experimental war machine. (Mobile Suit Avernus?) Or perhaps their war machines are simply significantly superior to the outdated crap the warlords are driving around in. Either way, pulling a heist to steal one or more of the 9^th’s war machines might be the price demanded by a warlord for their assistance.

OBSTACLES: DEVILS

The 3^rd and 7^th Cohorts are not intermixed in most regions of the ship and are never on patrol together. However, consider staging scenes or encounters featuring members of each squabbling with each other (their rivalry echoing those of their commanding officers).

Security Patrols: Your basic security patrol. Also the ones standing around guarding the random location the PCs need to pass through. Or the poor devils who respond to a minor alarm to “check things out.”

• 2-4 spined devils
• 2-4 bearded devils

Optio Squads: A full squad led by an optio. Use the alternate stat blocks from Enhanced Devils to make the officer distinct from the other devils in the squad.

• 4-6 spined devils (including optio)
• 4-6 bearded devils (including optio)

Primus Squad: A squad led by a primus.

• 4-6 spined devils + 1 erinyes
• 4-6 bearded devils + 1 horned devil

Design Note: Assuming the players are higher than 10^th level by the time they’re mounting a raid on Zariel’s fortress, Security Patrols should be an Easy encounter for them. (They will likely be able to take them out before they have a chance to raise an alarm with minimal difficulty.) Optio Squads are slightly more difficult, varying from Easy to Medium challenges. The PCs should still have no problems dispatching them in combat, but the risk of the alarm being raised and additional reinforcements arriving is higher. A Primus Squad is a very serious threat, posing a Hard to Deadly challenge.

Barlguran Slaves: These deckswabs are captured demons who perform menial tasks. Their actions are controlled through experimental cyber-technomantic helms (with lots of strange metal protuberances and glass tubes imbedded into their skulls). Some of the older models are attached to a kind of “mobile slave platform” that they wheel around with them (6d6 psychic damage if you sever the connection), but newer models pack all the gear into the demon’s skull.

Thavius Kreeg: If the PCs killed Kreeg on the Material Plane, his soul was damned to Hell… and immediately rewarded for his exemplary service to Zariel. Wreathed in a perpetual cloak of fire and given the rank of Triarius, the devil Thavius serves in a position of honor onboard Zariel’s fortress. He is constantly accompanied by his “honor guard.”

• Thavius Kreeg: magugon (The Book of Fiends, p. 170)
• 2 gladiatrix (The Book of Fiends, p. 160)
• 2 pain mistresses (The Book of Fiends, p. 175)

Design Note: What about Zariel? The Archduchess is unlikely to go swooping around her ship dealing with internal problems. She literally has an entire legion to do that for her. (To use the Death Star analogy: Vader comes looking for the PCs. Tarkin deos not.) If the PCs want to confront Zariel, they will probably need to seek her out. In other words, she’s an objective, not an obstacle. (Your mileage may vary.)

OBSTACLES: PASSIVE DEFENSES

Security Gates: Doors on the fortress iris open and close. They have razor-sharp edges and can be quite dangerous when shutting unexpectedly (DC 15 Dexterity save or suffer 4d6 damage).

Security gates use infernal technology and can be opened only with a password or physical contact by authorized personnel (or a DC 18 Thieves’ Tools check).

Scourge Ooze Doors: Some vital compartments and passages on the fortress are protected with “doors” formed from a thin layer of gray-black ooze. Known as a scourge ooze, devils can simply walk through these oozes (with a slight popping sound). Mortal flesh, however, is scourged away, dealing 10d6 damage.

Scourge oozes can be easily destroyed with holy water (simply melting away if splashed with such).

Demon-Detectors: These are unlikely to bother most PCs, but there are demon-detectors located throughout Zariel’s fortress. These take the form of brass eyeballs protruding (sometimes obtrusively, sometimes less so) from the walls. The eyeballs spin back and forth. Using magic, they can detect demons in line of sight within 100 feet with a Passive Perception score of 25. If a demon is detected, an alarm-type spell triggers alerts on the bridge.

Ioun Turrets: These technomantic constructions have 1d4+2 specialized ioun stones whirring around their top. They are operated by a soul trapped within a soul coin which is placed in a slot at the top of the turret. The souls can also speak through the turret and have a Passive Perception score of 18. (Souls who serve well within a turret are given an opportunity to advance in the ranks of Hell.)

The ioun stones cannot operate independently of the turret. Each ioun stone contains one stored spell. These are usually offensive in nature (fireball, lightning bolt, finger of death, and power word pain are quite common), although some may also be loaded with divinations useful for security (zone of truth, detect evil and good, or true seeing, for example).

Go to Part 7D-B: Fortress Raid Map

Go to Part 1

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 “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!

I’ve shared several remixes of published adventures here on the Alexandrian. These have included individual scenarios like Eclipse Phase: Ego Hunter, Keep on the Shadowfell, and The Tomb of Horrors, as well as full campaigns like Dragon Heist, Descent Into Avernus, and Eternal Lies. I’m often asked what the secret is to doing adventure remixes like this.

First: There has to be a reason to remix the adventure in the first place. For an adventure to be worth remixing, there needs to be something really awesome about it. So awesome that it’s worth putting in the effort to bring that experience to the table.

People sometimes tell me, “Such-and-such an adventure is awful. It’s the worst adventure I’ve ever read. Can you do a remix of it?” And the answer is no. There’s no reason to do that. There are hundreds of published adventures that are worth running, and even if there weren’t, your time would be better spent creating an original adventure instead of trying to overhaul a pile of crap.

You need to be willing to do is walk away from adventures that are just bad. That’s okay. There are lots of bad adventures, just like there are bad books, bad movies, and bad TV shows. It’s not just okay to read something and then use your critical judgment to walk away from it, it’s recommended.

Second: At a fundamental level, remixing is more art than science. There’s no recipe or simple set of instructions you can follow and automatically end up with a good adventure. It’s a creative process, that has to be guided by your creative instincts.

Hopefully, though, the advice which follows will prove useful to you.

TYPES OF REMIXES

I tend to think of my remixes as belonging to one of two general types:

Expansive remixes are primarily focused on creating lots of cool new content for a scenario. My work with Eternal Lies is a hypertrophic example of this approach. The published campaign is absolutely fantastic; I just wanted to enhance it in every way possible. The Alexandrian Remix added 300+ props, 150+ diorama elements, two brand new adventures, and a wide variety of bonus material. Another good example is the Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion, an 800-page fan publication that similarly sought to add tons of new material for GMs running the original Masks of Nyarlathotep.

Design remixes, on the other hand, are focused on “fixing” the adventure. This is usually what people mean when they ask me about remixing adventures, and the primary focus here is in correcting structural defects in how the adventure is designed. (In other words, the adventure has lots of cool stuff in it – which is why we want to remix it in the first place – but it’s not very good at delivering that stuff to the players. So we’re going to fix that structure and bring more of that cool stuff to the players in cool ways.)

In practice, my remix work for any adventure usually includes elements of both. Even the best published adventures tend to be anemic in their scenario structures and can usually benefit from some bulking up in that department; and once I’m neck deep in mucking out a railroad and replacing it with an active scenario structure, I’m probably going to start pouring cool ideas I have into the adventure, too.

ADDING COOL STUFF

The part where you add more cool stuff to an adventure is the bit that’s almost entirely art and very little science. It’s an almost entirely opportunistic process: Think of something cool through that strange alchemy by which our brains create stuff, then add it to the adventure.

This process starts, however, when you’re reading the adventure for the first time. Keep a notebook nearby and when the adventure prompts an interesting thought, make sure to write it down. (Otherwise, in my experience, that thought is going to escape out the window and you’ll never see it again.)

One thing you can do which is almost always cool is adding props and handouts to the adventure. I discuss how to recognize opportunities to do this with published adventures in detail in How to Prep a Module. The short version? Any place where an adventure says something like, “The PCs find a letter telling them that Lord Sonofabitch is the secret mastermind behind the plot to kidnap the gnome babies,” is usually an opportunity to actually write that letter or book or whatever.

As you’re adding new stuff to an adventure, you’ll want to make sure that it isn’t creating new problems.

• Is the new material affecting the pacing of the scenario?
• How is it affecting the scenario’s sequencing? Is it preempting information that the players shouldn’t have until later?
• Does the new material affect the balance of the scenario? For example, does the magic item you’ve added in Act I trivialize the challenges in Act II?
• Is it integrated into the scenario structure? For example, if it’s a new location for the PCs to find during their investigation, have you included three clues to make sure they find it?

And so forth. In my experience, this is rarely a problem. But it’s worth keeping one eye on it just to make sure.

FIXING STRUCTURE

When it comes to fixing an adventure, what this largely boils down to is looking for places where you think the adventure is structurally weak or broken and then figuring out what to do about it.

This will probably make more sense if you’re familiar with the concept of scenario structures. The short version is that the vast majority of GMs and designers are limited to just three structures when designing and running their scenarios:

• Railroads
• Dungeoncrawls
• Mysteries

This is a problem because when you try to prep a scenario using the wrong scenario structure, the result is usually a disaster. Wrong-headed examples can include stuff like running a dungeon as a linear timeline of events; running conversations using combat initiative; or trying to have players navigate a city as if it were a dungeon (making intersection-by-intersection navigation decisions everywhere they go).

And in practice, it can actually be a lot worse: A lot of “mysteries” are actually just railroads because their designers don’t understand how to structure mysteries. And D&D has actually stopped teaching new DMs how to prep and run dungeons, so there’s a whole generation of designers who also don’t know how to do that.

This means that a lot of designers are more or less forced to use a railroad for everything they design, and railroads are always bad.

So what you’re looking for are the places where the scenario is trying to do something but lacks the structure to make it actually happen at the table in a satisfying way.

MYSTERY SCENARIOS: For an easy example, take any mystery scenario. Any time an adventure wants the PCs to solve a mystery, the first thing I’m going to do is make a revelation list and check to see if it follows the Three Clue Rule:

For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues.

If a scenario is missing clues for one or more of its revelations, then it’s fragile and liable to break during play. Once you’ve spotted the missing clue, of course, you can fix the problem by simply adding new clues.

REBUILDING RAILROADS: This is going to sound ridiculously easy, but nine times out of ten what I’m doing when remixing an adventure is casting a detect railroad spell and any place where the designers have prepped a plot – A happens then B happens then C happens – I just remove the plot.

The result may still be a linear adventure (there’s nothing inherently wrong with linear design; it’s just that a properly designed linear adventure is different than predetermining a sequence of events), but you’ll often discover that the linear structure is actually just an artifact of the railroading and, in fact, completely unnecessary.

An easy variant of this is to look for any linear quest chain (an NPC says “get X,” the PCs get X; then the NPC says “get Y,” the PCs get Y; then the NPC says “get Z”… etc.). See if you can break that up by having the NPC simply tell the PCs that they need X, Y, and Z right from the beginning. You’ll be surprised how often this is possible, and the net benefit is that the players now have to strategize and prioritize their targets. Even if that choice seems arbitrary in an abstract sense, it will nevertheless empower the players, and, in my experience, these choices usually become profoundly meaningful in actual practice.

In a general sense, what I’m doing here is looking at how the linear structure can be broken up with node-based scenario design.

Using our example of the serial quest-giver, for example, the original adventure’s structure looks like this:

Which, when we have the quest-giver tell them everything up front, turns the structure into this:

Neither of these structures is inherently superior to the other, but the nonlinear structure gives us a lot more flexibility. For example, we could seed each of the X, Y, and Z nodes with information about the other two nodes that might make raiding or investigating them easier.

The flexibility isn’t just limited to prep. It will also emerge organically during play. If the players decide to attack the Fortress of Black Night (Node X) and discover that the bad guys there are too tough for them, then, in the linear structure, they’re basically stuck: Their only options are to give up or to ram their face into the Fortress again and again in the hope that somehow it’ll go differently.

But in the nonlinear structure, if they hit unexpected difficulties at Node X, they can bounce over to Node Y or Node Z. Which might give them an opportunity to level up, gain resources that will help with cracking Node X, and/or find an alternative route to accomplishing their goals, depending on the nature of the scenario.

(Remember! These aren’t contingencies you need to prep. They emerge naturally during play as the PCs interact with a nonlinear scenario.)

You can, of course, do the same thing with mystery scenarios. Instead of a linear structure like this:

Where the initial node has three clues pointing to Node X, which has three clues pointing to Node Y, and so forth, you can instead create a nonlinear node-based structure with clues pointing in multiple directions:

Here the initial node has clues pointing to Node X, Y, and Z, and then each of those nodes have clues pointing to each other. Since, as we’ve noted, you frequently need to add clues to published mystery scenarios to make them more robust, it’s often trivial to simply add those clues in a nonlinear fashion.

This particular example conveniently forms most of a 5-Node Mystery, but there’s nothing particularly special about this specific pattern of clues. One of the great advantages of node-based design is that you can freely associate the nodes in any way that makes sense in the context of the scenario and the game world.

In fact, one of the most notable things about remixing adventures is how often you can take a plotted adventure, simply remove the plotted elements (“the players must do A so that B will happen”), and watch a plethora of perfectly serviceable nodes drop into your lap. Often all you have to do is

• Look at them logically from the perspective of the game world and
• Think about how information can/should flow to the PCs (in the form of clues)

to quickly rebuild the connective tissue between them according node-based design principles.

The Dragon Heist Remix, is a good example of what this looks like in practice.

Go to Part 2