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!

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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 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!

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

I have a short video for you today!

I’ve just hired a professional editing company to help me speed up my video production process. I’ve got raw footage for three more videos after this one that’s been sitting on my hard drives for weeks, so if this works out I’m hoping to get back to regular video releases.

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