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FINDING THE RIGHT STRUCTURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLAY- AND PLAYER-FOCUSED MATERIAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

And have fun!

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.

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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