Go to Part 1

PREPPING PUBLISHED DUNGEONS

The Art of the Key discusses best practices for writing dungeon keys that are efficient, clear, and easy-to-use at the table.

Many published adventures fall short of that ideal, but I usually won’t waste a lot of time bringing them up to code, so to speak. I find it more effective to occasionally make note of particularly crucial details that are essential to the adventure but buried in the middle of a paragraph, to make sure they don’t get missed during play.

Only in circumstances where an area is particularly baffling will I endeavor to reorganize or redesign the description in my prep notes. (And this often crosses over into remixing the adventure, which remains a topic for another time.)

One thing I will do, though, is pay attention to my personal hierarchy of reference: If the adventure is referencing a particular mechanic or bit of lore that I’m not familiar with, I will find that information and put it into my prep notes so that I can easily reference it during play. (That might be anything from a specific spell to the rules for grappling to the history of Neverwinter.)

But the absolutely most essential thing you can do when running a published dungeon is prepping an adversary roster. Check out the full article link for a detailed description of adversary rosters and their use, but if there’s literally only thing you do before running a dungeon adventure, it will almost always be this. Adversary rosters make it easy to turn static dungeons into dynamic, exciting environments, and prepping them can be as easy as flipping through the module and listing which monsters are in which rooms. The bang for your buck is huge.

PREPPING PUBLISHED MYSTERIES

When prepping a published mystery, the first thing I’ll do is compile a revelation list:

• What are the essential conclusions that the PCs have to make in order to solve the mystery?
• What locations, people, organizations, and/or events can the PCs investigate to discover clues?
• What clues point to each one of these revelations and where can they be found?

Once you have the revelation list, use the Three Clue Rule to check it for shortcomings: Which revelations don’t have enough clues?

You’ll find that virtually all published mystery scenarios will be filled with these shortcomings, making the scenario unnecessarily fragile in play. This gets into remixing a little bit, but you obviously need to patch up the revelation list: If a revelation doesn’t have at least three clues pointing to it, add more clues until it does.

BACKGROUND/REFERENCE SHEETS

Some published adventures will be polite enough to orient would-be GMs, providing them with clear references for the essential information they need to understand and run the adventure. Many, unfortunately, do not, preferring to present themselves as tantalizing narrative experiences in which the GM must first solve the mystery for themselves!

This can be frustrating, but doesn’t necessarily mean that the adventure isn’t any good.

However, because I don’t want to be put in the position of trying to, for example, solve a mystery at the same as my players to make sure that information I’m presenting is consistent with the solution, I will generally take the time to sort out these sorts of continuity conundrums during my prep and write down an authoritative reference. This can include stuff like a timeline of the Dispatch Murders, the history of the Red Scarab, or the family tree of the Maidenhair family.

There may be other research I do or background lore I create for the adventure. Often this is incorporated into the structure of the adventure itself (that’s where the players will usually be able to learn it, interact with it, and use it), but a central repository collecting all the information for my edification and easy reference is often useful.

For example, when the PCs visit a new city in a campaign set in the 1930’s, I might research what the local newspapers were and include those in my running notes for easy reference and verisimilitude. There are also many fictional settings which have become dense enough that you can actually use very similar research techniques to pull together the deep lore of a location, organization, or person to great effect.

ADVENTURE TEAR-OUTS

In addition to reference sheets, there’s other material in published adventures that can often be reformatted for easier use at the table.

MAPS: If there are any maps in the adventure (particularly for location crawls), I will almost certainly print them on separate sheets of paper. This allows me to separate the map from the rest of the adventure notes and either place it flat on the table in front of me or clip it to my GM screen.

This makes it a lot easier to reference both the map and the adventure key simultaneously. (The quality of life improvement here is astonishing if you’ve never done it before.) I’ve also used counters in combination with maps laid flat on the table to dynamically manage adversary rosters (allowing me to see at a glance where foes are currently located in a complex, and even do things like running security patrols in real time).

STAT BLOCK SHEETS: I will similarly collate stat blocks from the adventure onto reference sheets. (This can include pulling stat blocks from other sources, like the Monster Manual in D&D, which are only referred to by the adventure text.)

In some systems, the stat blocks are short enough that I can often fit every single NPC in the adventure on a single page. In other cases, I’m dividing them according to faction or location or action group (whatever feels most useful for the scenario).

As with the maps, this again reduces page-flipping: When a fight starts, I can quickly grab the appropriate stat sheets, and lay them out. Even if all the stat blocks for a particular fight don’t fit on a single sheet, having them on separate sheets lets me lay them all out at once, so that I can reference stats by just flicking my eyes back and forth. (This may seem like a minor advantage, but once you’ve done it a few times you’ll never want to go back. But I digress.)

As you’re prepping these stat sheets, once again keep in mind the hierarchy of reference: Identify any mechanical elements or abilities in the stat blocks that you’re not familiar with and add them to the stat block. Putting this information at your fingertips during play (instead of, for example, needing to flip through the Spells chapter to figure out how a particular enchantment works) will allow you to simulate system mastery while simultaneously familiarizing yourself with the material through play; in other words, fake it until you make it.

OTHER TEAR-OUT REFERENCES: Maps and stat blocks are the most common examples, in my experience, but there may be other resources in the published adventure that would benefit from being “torn out” of the main text for easy, independent, and/or pervasive reference. I’ve previously mentioned stuff like scenario timelines, NPC templates, and background reference. It might also be stuff like the standard features (door types, ceiling height, etc.) for a dungeon or a random encounter table.

See also Random GM Tip: Swap Notes for Your GM Screen.

PROPS

In Smart Prep, I talk about how props – items that can be physically handed to the players – are almost always a value add when you prep them. This applies to published adventures, too.

The forms these props can take are almost limitless (depending on what the adventure is about), but here are some common forms I look out for.

IMAGES: Published adventures usually include graphical elements. Many of them would be cool for the players to see. Take the effort to pull them, edit them (if necessary), and put them in a format where they can be easily shared (by printing them out, loading them into a virtual tabletop, etc.).

NPC PORTRAITS: These are obviously also images, but as a class receive some special treatment in my experience. First, where possible I’ll also attach copies of these images to NPC roleplaying templates. I find these visual references useful in both quickly finding the appropriate sheet when I’m looking for it and as a touchstone when portraying the character.

Second, if a campaign features lots of paper props, I’ve found it can be useful if NPC portraits are printed out in a distinct format (say, 4” x 6” photos instead of an A4 page). This seems to help players keep their handouts organized so that vital information doesn’t get lost in a Polaroid cascade.

I also think that NPC tent cards (that can either be placed on the table in front of you when an NPC joins a scene or draped over the top of your GM screen) can be incredibly cool. But, truth be told, I never seem to actually find time to do this.

Finally, are there NPCs who don’t have portraits in the adventure? In the era of Google image search, it’s often absurdly easy to find options. (It can actually be so easy that this is also an area where you can fall into the trap of pouring too much energy adding exuberant detail to NPCs with walk-on roles.)

LETTERS & LOREBOOKS: It’s not unusual for scenarios to be designed so that PCs find letters or books which contain clues or other information. These are usually just summarized, but taking that summary and turning it into an actual handout is always going to improve the experience.

For letters, this is fairly straightforward. For books, check out Random GM Tips: Using Lore Books for a technique you can use to achieve the desired effect without writing 40,000 words.

DIORAMAS: We’re straying pretty far into “nice if you have time for it” techniques here, but I do love creating setting dioramas.

The centerpiece of my diorama is frequently a map. When running an urban campaign – whether in modern day Hong Kong, 1930’s New York, or a fictional city like Waterdeep – I love, love, love to have a poster-size city map hung on the wall of my gaming room. World maps are also frequently a great resource, whether for establishing fictional worlds or while running real-world globe-hopping campaigns.

The diorama also includes other pictorial elements that help set the visual motifs of the setting. Stuff like:

• Fashion. What are people wearing? What hairstyles do they have?
• Architecture. What do buildings look like? And not just the big impressive, stuff. What do different neighborhoods look like?
• Activities. What is life like for people in the setting? What are their leisure activities? Where do they shop? If you’re just walking down a street, what do you see?
• Vehicles & Transportation. When the PCs need to get from Point A to Point B, how is that likely to happen?

For more contemporary campaigns, advertisements can be great source for accomplishing or all of these.

A good diorama doesn’t just set mood and help the players visualize exotic settings, it also serves as creative fodder. When the adventure twists in an unexpected direction and you need to start improvising, you’ll have a wall full of buildings, objects, and people that you can point to and say, “That’s what you see.” (I’ll occasionally sneak a few prepped elements of the campaign into a diorama, too, when it’s appropriate.)

You can see several hyper-developed dioramas in the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies.

MINIATURES & BATTLEMAPS

If you’re running a game with miniatures, now is the time to prep the resources you need for that.

Start by running through the stat sheets you prepped for the adventure. Use those (and you adversary rosters) to pull all the miniatures you need. You can also use some of the graphical resources you’ve prepped (NPC portraits, for example) to create custom tokens when appropriate.

Of course, not every creature needs a custom mini. Spot check your likely encounters, though, to make sure you have a sufficient variety of generic tokens to handle the different creature types.

For a battlemap, I tend to use a Chessex mat and just sketch things out during play. But for those occasions where you want something more elaborate, you’ll obviously need to take the time to do that, too – whether they’s pre-drawing maps on modular map components, creating DungeonDraft maps for your virtual tabletop, or prepping your Dwarven Forge collection.

ORGANIZING YOUR NOTES

Roleplaying templates, reference sheets, and adversary rosters – oh my!

How do you avoid getting overwhelmed by all these new tools?

Well, it really boils down to keeping your prep notes organized so that you know exactly where to look for the information that you need. Many of the things we’re prepping are, in fact, aimed to make that easier.

I also find it helps if I generally use the same sequencing of information in my prep notes. My own method has evolved organically over many years, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly magical about it. Most of its utility, for me, is just the fact that I’m familiar with it:

• Reference Sheets
• Revelation List / Adversary Rosters
• Adventure Material (scenes, nodes, dungeon rooms, etc.)
• NPC Roleplaying Templates
• Stat Sheets
• Maps
• Paper Props (I keep a copy in my prep notes for easy reference)

Seek out a system that makes sense to you. Pay particular attention to the first and last things in your notes, as those will generally be the easiest to find quickly during play.

The biggest thing is to make sure that this sequencing is working for you and doesn’t become a straitjacket. If it seems like a particular scenario would benefit from organizing the material in a different way, just do it!

In many ways, this advice applies to every facet of your prep: You’re doing it for you. Prioritize the stuff that makes the adventure easiest for you to run and seems to add the biggest value at the game table. If there’s something that you feel comfortable improvising or which doesn’t seem to significantly enhance the enjoyment of this particular group of players? Skip it!

Focus on the prep that brings the most joy.

FURTHER READING
How to Remix an Adventure

How to Prep: The Haunting of Ypsilon-14

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

The 5^th Edition of D&D identified Three Pillars of Adventure:

• Exploration
• Social Interaction
• Combat

Of these, nobody seems to have been particularly confused by social interaction (those are the talky-talky bits) or combat (there’s a whole combat system hardwired to an action economy, tactical movement, and hit point depletion).

Exploration, though?

Rivers of digital ink have been metaphorically spilt over it. So let’s take a moment to summarize two key points from all that discussion:

Yes, exploration is the least mechanically supported pillar. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it is the least structurally supported pillar. Combat has that whole combat system we mentioned and an entire core rulebook dedicated to monsters you can fight. Social interaction is naturally supported by the fundamental structure of an RPG as a conversation of meaningful choices. Exploration simply lacks those clear, core structures.

Second: No, the “exploration” pillar is not just about wilderness exploration. Exploration is much more than that and – like the other pillars – should ideally permeate every facet of your D&D experience. Exploration is about discovering your environment, analyzing what you’ve learned about it, and then enjoying the pay-off of using that knowledge.

I was initially baffled by why so many people make the false assumption that “exploration = wilderness exploration,” because the pervasive nature of the pillar seems very clearly explained in the core rulebook (PHB, p. 8). But I think the problem goes back to the lack of structure: Exploration doesn’t have a clear-cut structure in the core rulebooks. D&D used to have a very clear-cut structure for wilderness exploration (the hexcrawl). If D&D still had that clear-cut structure, it would solve the problem! Therefore, wilderness exploration would solve the problem of the missing exploration pillar, which means that the exploration pillar is wilderness exploration.

But here’s the thing. Even when groups reach out, grab that structure, and plug it back into 5^th Edition, they often find that there’s something missing. They’re running the hexcrawl, but it doesn’t feel as if they’re exploring the world.

So there’s something more fundamentally amiss here. What does it really mean to be an explorer? And how can we capture that experience at the game table?

EXPLORING EXPLORATION

Exploration takes place in an environment. That environment might be a vast wilderness, a dungeon, or a specific room within that dungeon — it’s a fractal concept that can (and should!) apply to the game world at all scales – but regardless of the environment being explored, there are, broadly speaking, a few different kinds of exploration.

• Curiosity: You’re just randomly looking around to see what you can find in an area.
• Searching: You’re trying to find something specific that you know or suspect is in a particular area.
• Trailblazing: You’re figuring out how to get between two known locations. (Think Northwest Passage, but this can also apply metaphorically to non-geographic exploration.)

There are probably other broad categories I’m overlooking here, but this is a good start.

One key thing to take away from this list, though, is that travel is NOT exploration. I wrote an article called Thinking About Wilderness Travel which looks at the issue of wilderness travel specifically, but what it boils down to is this: In travel, you know the route. In exploration, you’re trying to figure out the route.

Using the word “travel” sort of narrows our scope to moving from one location to another, but the same principle applies more broadly. For example, visiting and exploration aren’t the same thing, either. When the PCs visit a tavern, for example, you usually won’t run that the same way you’d run a dungeon. Even if they’ve never been to a particular inn before, when they go up to their rooms for the night, you don’t break out the battlemaps or have them start navigating hallway by hallway.

When you’re going along a known route to a known place – either literally or metaphorically – that’s travel; not exploration.

(Vague treasure maps totally count, though. “Okay, the map says head south from the mountain.” But which mountain? That’s not really a known route. You still need to find the route, and that’s either searching or trailblazing or both. The same basic principle applies to a mystery scenario, for example.)

DISCOVERING EXPLORATION

Okay, but how do you make it FEEL like exploration? Well, if we describe it in terms of a hexcrawl, there are three core requirements:

First, you have to give the players a structure in which they can make meaningful navigational choices.

Second, it has to be possible for the players to FAIL to find something they’re looking for.

Third, the players have to either have information or be able to get information about an area so that the choices they make aren’t just random.

The first of these is generally not a problem in true wilderness exploration (although navigational systems can sometimes be a little anemic), but what will kill it dead as a doornail is any kind of linear plot.

I’m not just talking about railroading. (That’s always bad.) In this case, it’s any linear plotting that kills exploration dead. If you imagine the beginning of an adventure as Point A and the end of the adventure as a known Point B with a linear sequence of planned events connecting those two points, then what you’re imagining, from a structural point of view, is a road. It’s a known route that the PCs are traveling along, and that’s why the linear plot is antithetical to exploration.

(If you’d like to explore how to prep adventures that aren’t based on linear plots, check out Don’t Prep Plots.)

What about our second requirement? How can that one go awry? Returning to a hexcrawl, for example, it’s not unusual to see systems in which players choose which hex to enter and then automatically find whatever is in the hex. That can be OK (they can still fail to go to the right hex, so there’s a little bit of exploration there), but it’s pretty weak. It’s kind of like a dungeon with no secret doors in which the boxed text for every room completely describes everything in the room, with further investigation or examination never revealing anything more. The players simply move through the dungeon and the DM reads each room description to them. And that’s it. It should hopefully be pretty obvious why that would make for a lackluster dungeon experience.

When it comes to failure in exploration, explorers can also:

• Fail to look in the right place.
• Get lost (and possibly only think they’re looking in the right place).
• Be prevented by danger from reaching their goal (being captured or killed or forced to flee).
• Be forced to withdraw due to limited logistics. (The logistics of a wilderness expedition, for example, creates a time limit: Can you find it / what can you find / how much can you find before you need to return home?)

Another way of looking at this is that if you want to feel as if you’ve truly accomplished something, then you must be challenged in accomplishing it. And if the challenge is to be meaningful, then failure has to be possible (even if it’s only a temporary failure or a cost you didn’t want to pay).

(We’re kind of dancing around a broader principle here: It’s not just combat where the players should feel challenged by the game. All three Pillars of Adventure are made meaningful by overcoming challenges! That includes both exploration and social interactions.)

It’s really our third requirement, though, where I think things can often go wrong even when it seems like we’re doing everything right.

It’s all right to wander aimlessly and just kind of randomly look for something interesting. That’s curiosity. It counts as exploration. But it’s a shallow experience; it’s not going to engage the players, so they won’t FEEL like they’re exploring.

Once the players start getting information, though, they can start making meaningful choices.

So where does that meaningful information come from? Well, once again limiting ourselves specifically to hexcrawls, we can consider specific techniques like:

• Information in one keyed location can indicate other keyed locations, giving the PCs the opportunity to seek those locations out. (This changes curiosity into searching. See Hexcrawl Addendum: Connecting Your Hexes.)
• Treasure maps can be discovered. (A specific variant of the same technique.)
• Rumors can be gleaned from tavern talks, befriended NPCs, interrogated enemies, and the like. (See Hexcrawl Tool: Rumors.)
• Tracks or similar “monster sign” can be followed, as described in Hexcrawl Tool: Tracks. (This changes curiosity into a form of trailblazing.)

And so forth.

The more general principles here, of course, aren’t just limited to wilderness exploration. In other forms of adventure, for example, clues can often be pursued (see the Three Clue Rule), similarly changing curiosity into trailblazing.

SUMMING UP

Exploration requires freedom. It also requires an environment or a structure of play in which players can make meaningful choices in order to navigate, inspect, and take action in their surroundings.

At the most basic level, players should be able to satisfy their curiosity. This becomes a kind of default action. In a dungeon it’s examining and interacting with a room. In a mystery, it’s investigating a crime scene. In the wilderness it’s venturing forth into the unknown.

But because exploration at random is a shallow experience, that default action of random exploration should ideally provide information which allows the players to set goals and then make meaningful choices to pursue those goals though exploration – either by seeking something specific (searching) or figuring out how to get from where they are to where they want to be (trailblazing).

These can be quite literal (searching a room or a dungeon or a forest; seeking a physical path from one point to another), but can also be thought of as principles for guiding exploration in other contexts: Figuring out how the Mad Alchemist hid the key to his cypher in the statuary; how to prove that Old Man Roberts murdered his wife; or how to bypass a particularly nefarious trap.

There are many ways you can leverage simple curiosity into deeper exploration experiences in your scenario design (placing treasure maps, clues, node-based scenario design, etc.), but you can also use matryoshka techniques (like matryoshka searches and matryoshka hexes) to easily do this at the table during actual play, too: Instead of framing the resolution of curiosity-driven actions to an answer, simply frame those actions to the method (or methods) the PCs might choose to find their answers.

Hopefully this article has whetted your curiosity when it comes to exploration-based play. Good luck in searching out your own answers for how to incorporate exploration into your adventures, and I wish you the greatest success in blazing a trail into exciting new styles of play!

(You see what I did there?)

In the Matryoshka Search Technique, I described a method for resolving search checks that keeps players actively engaged with the actions of their characters so that they feel ownership of what their characters discover. You may want to read that post before reading this one, but the short version is:

• On a successful search check, instead of immediately discovering the point of interest, the character discovers an indicator pointing them in the direction of the target of the search.
• This requires the player to draw a conclusion and then act on that conclusion.

For example, instead of saying, “You find a hidden switch on the frame of the painting that opens a secret door,” you would instead say, “You notice that the frame of the painting is quite dusty, except for one spot in the lower right corner.”

Because it is the player’s declared action (“I examine that corner of the painting” and then “I push on the raised portion of the heron engraving”) that result in the switch being discovered and the secret door being opened – rather than the dice roll – the player is empowered and it feels as if THEY were the one who found it. (Because it was.)

I refer to this as a matryoshka technique because it’s like a Russian nesting doll: Instead of showing the players the innermost doll, you instead hand them the full stack and let them open each one.

But it’s not the only matryoshka technique.

If you’re running a hexcrawl, for example, you can use a matryoshka technique even within a single hex.

For example, even if you’re using an extremely simplistic hexcrawl structure in which the PCs automatically encounter the keyed content of each hex when they enter the hex, you can – instead of having them just run directly into it – give them an indicator.

So instead of saying, “You see a goblin village,” you describe the goblin tracks they stumble across. Or describe a plume of smoke on the horizon.

Do they follow the tracks? And, if they do, are they successful?

Do they head towards the plume of smoke? Or avoid it?

Instead of stumbling directly onto an ancient pyramid, the PCs spot a patch of ancient road almost completely swallowed up by the jungle.

Are they able to figure out which direction the road originally ran? Do they divert to see where it went?

And, like any matryoshka technique, this doesn’t have to be just one level deep. It can be nested to several levels.

It can also be interesting if they get two different indicators at the same time. For example, they see a plume of smoke to the west, but the goblin tracks are heading north.

(With a robust structure for running wilderness exploration, multiple indicators like this can be spontaneously generated. For example, you might have both the keyed location in a hex they just entered and the random encounter you just rolled.)

The goal of the technique is to draw players more deeply into the game world and empower them to actually explore the game world (instead of letting the dice do it for them). Not just because it will make them feel cool (although it will), but because it positions them to make meaningful choices. And that’s exciting for everyone at the table, because the consequences of those choices will transform the campaign.

FURTHER READING
Matryoshka Hexes

This is an unusual post.

After writing Part 5: Encounters of the 5e Hexcrawls series, I received feedback from readers that the post wasn’t clear enough and needed several points of clarification. I concluded it would also benefit significantly from some substantive examples of the system in practice.

Which is, of course, what you’ll find below.

This material has been added to the original article (linked above, but I also didn’t want people who had already read the original article missing this update). So this post is being posted… and is also immediately completely redundant.

So if you haven’t read the original article, you should just do that now and skip the rest of this. Otherwise, read on!

EXAMPLE: SAMPLE ENCOUNTER TABLES

Location Check: 1 in 1d6

Encounter Check: 1 in 1d10

Border Encounter: 1 in 1d20

Note: I indicate hexes which are already keyed as potential lairs for this creature type. This can inform the nature of wandering encounters and/or suggest a potential origin/terminus for tracks.

This table uses several advanced rules. When rolling an encounter, I would simultaneously roll a 1d6, 1d10, and 1d20 for each watch.

If the 1d6 result is a 1 (indicating a location encounter), it would indicate that the PCs have found the keyed location in the hex. If I’m not using simultaneous encounters, I would then ignore the other dice rolls (the location check “overrides” them; you could also just roll the 1d6, then the 1d10, then the 1d20, but that’s not necessary and is more time-consuming).

If the 1d10 check indicates an encounter, then you’d check the 1d20 roll to see which encounter table you should be rolling on. (You could also theoretically roll 2d20 of different colors, allowing you to immediately identify what type of encounter.)

With an encounter identified, you would then check % Lair, % Tracks, and # Appearing (although you don’t need to check for tracks if a lair encounter is indicated). Lairs and tracks are also exploration encounters, so if those are indicated when the party is resting, you can treat the encounter check as having no result and the watch passes quietly.

This is, of course, a fairly complicated example featuring a lot of the advanced rules all being used simultaneously. For a much simpler resolution you could just roll 1d12 (1 = wandering encounter, 12 = location encounter), roll 1d20 on the wandering encounter table (if a wandering encounter is indicated), and then the number of creatures appearing.

DESIGN NOTE: PROCEDURAL vs. DESIGNED ENCOUNTERS

A procedural encounter will usually generate one or more general elements. (For example, 1d6 friendly orcs.) As described in Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster, the expectation is that the DM will contextualize this encounter. In other words, the procedural encounter is an improv prompt for the DM to create the encounter (often combined with a simulationist element of modeling, for example, what kinds of monsters lurk in the Darkovian Woods).

A designed encounter, on the other hand, is far more specific: You’re essentially prepping the material that you would improvise with a procedural encounter.

The Principles of Smart Prep maintain that you generally shouldn’t prep material that can be just as easily improvised at the table, so generally speaking I would describe most designed encounters as being training wheels for DMs who aren’t confident improvising encounters from procedural prompts yet. (There can be a number of exceptions to this, but they’re pretty rare in actual practice, in my experience.)

In other words, designed encounter tables typically result in a lot of wasted prep. They also get used up (a procedural encounter can be used over and over and over again to varying results; a designed encounter is specific and generally can’t be repeated). This creates gaps in your encounter table and a need to frequently restock them.

(Procedural-based encounter tables will also need to be tweaked or restocked from time to time – if the PCs wipe out the goblin village, it may result in no further encounters with goblins – but this is very rare in comparison.)

DESIGN NOTE: SETTING LAIR/TRACK PERCENTAGES

In designing your encounter tables, the % Lair and % Tracks values can be set arbitrarily. For a quick rule of thumb, use Lair 20% (or Nil for animals that don’t really have lairs) and Tracks 40%.

Older editions actually included values for one or both of these stats in their monster entries, so for some creatures you may be able to reference those older resources.

A gamist tip here is to increase the % Tracks value based on difficulty: If there’s a monster that’s a lot more powerful than everything else in the region, crank up the % Tracks so that the PCs are far more likely to become aware that it’s there than they are to run into it blindly.

A simulationist tip is to vary both numbers by a sense of the creature’s behavior. Here’s an easy example: How likely is a flying creature to leave tracks compared to a woolly mammoth? (See Hexcrawl Tool: Tracks for  thoughts on what types of tracks a flying creature would leave.)

A dramatist tip is to think about how interesting each type of encounter is for each creature type. Is a ghoul lair more interesting than running into a pack of ghouls in the wild? If so, crank up the ghoul’s % Lair.

The last thing to consider is that, as noted above, a Lair encounter will generally add a new location to the current hex. The higher you set the % Lair values on your encounter tables, the more often this will happen and the quicker areas of your campaign world will fill up with procedurally generated points of interest.

Conversely, how comfortable are you improvising this type of content? It’s good to stretch your creative muscles, but it may make more sense to keep the % Lair value low until you’ve gotten more comfortable with pulling lairs out of your hat.

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