I think published adventures are great.

It’s not just that they’re a crazy useful resource for time-strapped game masters. I believe that using high quality adventures will make your campaign better for the same reason that theater companies choose to put on productions of Much Ado About Nothing or The Glass Menagerie or Hamilton instead of just improvising an original script. Injecting an outside creative influence (whether a playwright in the case of a theater or an adventure writer in the case of your gaming table) provides a rewarding experience of creative interpretation that is both distinct from freeform creativity and spurs unique moments of creative closure that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Sharing the experience of that adventure with other gaming tables also creates a communal dialogue and shared experience that can enhance both the short-term and long-term rewards of the scenario.

(Which is not to say, of course, that there’s no place for original scripts in theater or homebrewed adventures in your RPG campaign. These, too, have their distinct advantages.)

Unsurprisingly, therefore, I consider the art of plugging a published adventure into your campaign an essential one for new GMs to develop. (This is why RPG adventures were originally called modules: They were designed to be modular, so that they could be plugged into your campaign world and/or ongoing campaign.) And a big part of this is actually what happens before you start running the session.

So let’s take a closer look at how I prep a published adventure for play.

READING THE ADVENTURE

Let’s get the basic stuff out of the way: If you want to run a published adventure, you need to read it. Cover to cover. In its entirety. There are no shortcuts here. You just have to do it.

While I’m reading an adventure, I’ll usually have a small notebook nearby that I can jot notes in. (Failing that, I’ll use my phone. Whatever works for you.) These generally pertain to everything we’re going to discuss below, but are mostly just a way for me to keep any cool ideas that pop into my head while reading.

One thing I try to do while reading an adventure is to actively imagine the experience of running it. This can be a little misleading, though: I’m not imagining specific outcomes or planning contingencies; those are things to be discovered at the table, in my opinion. What I’m thinking about, for lack of a better word, is presentation: How will I describe this trap? What accent or mannerism do I want to give this NPC? Would this puzzle work better if I used a matryoshka technique? What soundtrack do I want to use for the hacking sequence? Is there a metagame special effect that I could use to enhance the villain’s body-swapping schtick?

And so forth.

Once I’ve read the adventure, there’s a key question to be answered:

Is this adventure worth running?

The answer can quite easily be a resounding, “No!” Sturgeon’s Law that ninety percent of everything is crap holds just as true for adventure modules as it does for everything else.

If an adventure IS worth running, I then ask myself:

Does this adventure need to be remixed?

By which I generally either mean (a) that there’s a lot of cool stuff I want to add to the adventure, (b) there are broken parts to the adventure that need to be fixed before I run it, or (c) both. Remixing an adventure is almost certainly an article in its own right, so if an adventure needs a remix we’ll lay it aside for the moment. (Although for any adventure you’re remixing, you’ll usually also be doing the prep tasks I describe below.)

The final thing I’ll say here is that this is not the One True Way of prepping published adventures for play. It’s just what works for me, and hopefully you’ll find some tricks and tips that will be equally (or even more) useful for you.

ADVENTURE NOTES

Now we’re ready to start making our prep notes.

There are lots of tools you can use for this: Wikis, OneNote, Scrivener, custom GM software, a good ol’ fashioned notebook and pencil.

Personally, I just open up a Word document. I usually use a numeric or alphanumeric code to identify the adventure, which makes it easier to keep my notes organized (e.g., “1.3 Los Angeles” or “NOD4 Temple of Deep Chaos).

A few things I do that aren’t directly related to prepping published adventures, but which may be useful:

• I have a dedicated directory on my computer for each campaign. There are usually sub-directories for associated resources, either organized by specific adventure (e.g., there’s a directory specifically for 1.3 Los Angeles) or by type of resource (e.g., Props, Maps, etc., with the associated resources identified by the alphanumeric code, like “NOD4 Temple Map – Level 1”.)
• I make sure that each set of adventure notes is identified in the footer (with page numbers!), so that when I print the notes out they stay organized.
• For campaigns involving lots and lots of props, I will often identify handouts with the alphanumeric code where they’re found. (For example, any props found in the Temple of Deep Chaos would have “NOD4” written on them.) When the players start asking me questions about a particular prop fifteen sessions later, this code allows me to figure out where the heck my notes are for it.

One key thing in working with published adventures is that I generally treat my prep notes as a diff doc. This is particularly true for location keys: If I add an object or change the god being worshiped in a temple, I just note that one change. During play, I’m referring to both the published text and then modifying it on-the-fly with the differences noted in my prep notes.

Only when my alterations to a particular location or sequence reach a threshold where I feel it will be unnecessarily difficult to make the necessary changes on-the-fly will I essentially rip out the original description and replace the whole thing in my prep notes.

For example, in the adventure “Trouble With Goblins” (which appears in Monte Cook’s Ptolus), Area 4 appears like this in the published adventure:

5. STORAGE (EL 1)

This dank room off the main cellar holds a number of empty wine racks and a large iron safe, which hangs open (the latch is broken).

Three more goblins relax in this room until they hear sounds of trouble, in which case they run into the cellar (Area 4) to join the goblins there.

Goblins (3): hp 5, 5, 7; see MM.

Secret Door: The secret door in the west wall shown on the map isn’t actually a secret door at all, but an opening hidden behind a stack of crates (Search check, DC 15, to find). The crates are empty and easily moved.

When I prepped this adventure for my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, my prep notes for this area looked like this:

AREA 5 – STORAGE

Jassin’s corpse, along with the corpses of several small cats and dogs, can be found here. If the PCs reach it the same day that Eral and Ortesia come to them, Jassin could still be saved with 2,000 points of healing.

This is a pretty typical additive element, where I’m taking the existing description in the module and simply adding more stuff to it. But alterations are also possible. For example, in the Banewarrens the PCs visit a religious chapel dedicated to Lothian:

1. ENTRY

The chapel’s main doors lead into a long vestibule. On the walls here hang many tapestries – primarily of blue, gold, and white – depicting a long-haired man with a gentle expression performing various miracles.

The long-haired man in the tapestries is Lothian.

Lothian isn’t a god in my campaign setting, so my notes for this room are:

AREA 1 – ENTRY

Tapestries: Depict St. Thessina performing the Miracle of Many Grains.

• Thessina of Tohlen performed the Miracle of Many Grains, in which the grain fields around Ptolus (which had been blighted by the scorching fire of six red dragons which attacked the city) were rejuvenated in a single day and night.

Fairly straightforward. Note that I don’t bother writing something like, “Replace text X with the following text.” I’m trusting my future stuff to look at the diff file, read the information about tapestries, and then simply be smart enough to sub that information in for any description of the tapestries in the original adventure.

I do try to help my future self out a bit by separating elaborative detail into a bullet point: The essential detail is that the tapestries need to be described as St. Thessina performing the Miracle of Many Grains. Once I know that, I’ll be able to identify the moment in the original text where I’ll need to reference the additional details provided. (The utility of this may become clearer if you consider a situation in which there are perhaps four or five or six different things changed or added to a particular scene.)

REINCORPORATE LORE

If you truly want to incorporate a published adventure into your campaign, then you need to reincorporate the existing lore of the campaign by adapting and customizing portions of the published adventure.

This is a topic I delve into in more detail in The Campaign Stitch and Random GM Tip: Adaptation & Reincorporation, but a really simple example is recasting characters in the published adventure using established NPCs from your campaign. This is an example of Neel Krishnaswami’s Law of the Conservation of NPCs, which not only keeps the size of the cast of characters in your campaign under control, it also allows NPCs to develop over time.

Very common examples include both the patron who hires the PCs for a job (if it’s someone they have a previous relationship with or care about, it will often make the hook of the adventure more meaningful) and the villain responsible for whatever nefarious goings-on are going on (allowing them to build a long-term relationship with an antagonist).

This is not, of course, limited to NPCs. You can swap out locations for places the PCs already know; organizations for groups the PCs belong to; gods for members of familiar pantheons; and even background events for things that the PCs experienced (or already know about).

UNIVERSAL NPC TEMPLATES

While I’m recasting NPCs, I’ll also be looking for major characters in the adventure that would benefit from being written up using the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template.

It’s a trap to think that you need a full-fledged template for every incidental NPC. (There are many, many NPCs who don’t need more than a couple of sentences to sum them up.) But published adventures are kind of notorious for writing up NPCs in a way that makes them incredibly difficult to run; for example, by burying essential information in the middle of dense paragraphs of exposition.

The Universal NPC Roleplaying Template is specifically designed to solve that problem and make significant NPCs easy to run during play.

I will almost always format my notes to print one Universal NPC Roleplaying Template per sheet (even if I need to tweak font size, etc. to make that happen). It’s simply too useful to be able to freely grab whichever NPC sheets I need to for the present scene, pull them out of the binder, and put them on the table in front of me for easy reference.

CUSTOMIZE THE HOOK

One of the most important things you can do when prepping a published adventure is to revamp the scenario hook to (a) make it personal to the PCs; (b) integrate it into the existing events of the campaign; and/or (c) tie it to things that the players care about.

I touched on this lightly above with the issue of recasting patrons and villains. For example, the published version of “Trouble With Goblins” features two hooks:

• The PCs may hear rumors about a haunted house in North Market and choose to investigate.
• Neighbors may approach the PCs and offer to pay them 75 gp to clear out the ghosts.

These are actually fantastic adventure hooks, notably featuring a surprising scenario hook by misleading the PCs about the nature of the threat within the house. But they are, by necessity, generic.

So in my prep notes for the adventure, I wrote:

The PCs are approached by Eral Yinick and his wife Ortesia. Their young son, Jassin, has been kidnapped by the “ghost” of Greyson House.

Eral and Ortesia were told about the PCs by Phon Quartermail [an NPC they had rescued earlier in the campaign].

This is a deliberately simple example: It largely leverages the form of the existing scenario hook, simply swapping in stakes that I know the PCs in my campaign will particularly care about (a missing kid) and a specific connection to the previous actions of the PCs (through Phon’s recommendation) so that this adventure is the result of what the PCs have experienced, rather than merely being random people randomly approaching them.

Obviously you can do this in far more detail and with far deeper ties to the PCs the campaign. (What if Ortesia was their sister?) And there’s an almost limitless variety of ways to do this, depending on the particular details of the scenario and your campaign. But the point is that you often don’t need to do this to accomplish your goal.

Similarly, revised scenario hooks will frequently mean making additional adjustments to the adventure. (For example, now you know why I had to add Jassin’s body to the dungeon key.) But you may be surprised by how often these changes are minor or even nonexistent: Changing the context of the scenario through the scenario hook can radically transform the entire scenario in play (due to what’s at stake, the PCs’ emotional connections, and so forth), but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the scenario needs to be radically altered in prep.

You can customize the hook like this even if it’s the very first adventure of the campaign. Look at the backgrounds your players have created for their PCs and use those events to frame and contextualize the scenario hook.

Go to Part 2