"Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not.” — Bilbo Baggins
It’s high time I begin another!
I’ve published adventures before, and I’d like to do it again. As DMs, we design adventures for our own tables all the time, but that’s quite a different story than designing them for other Dungeon Masters.
I don’t know about you, but I can run an awful lot off memory and a post-it note from my prep. That won’t fly in a published adventure, of course!
So publishing adventures is an added challenge, a ton of fun, and a way to give back to you for supporting me.
Here we go!
As a side note, this is the start of an ongoing series I’m doing as a thank you to paid subscribers and as accountability for my own lazy self. I’ll make the first half of each post, with the general stuff, available to everyone, but the specific adventure details will be tucked away … behind the screen, so to speak.
There are a zillion different ways to begin designing an adventure. My first, Zassan the Slaver, started with an interesting story hook. The second, Silent Screechers, was inspired by a location in one of the old Conan the Barbarian stories.
For this one, I’m going to try something I’ve had a lot of fun doing with characters: Rolling randomly and making sense of it.
Those first two published adventures were suitable for a coastal/island setting, so I think I’ll have this one do that too, to make a sort of trilogy of sorts for folks. I’ll aim for tier 1 play, 3rd or 4th level, and I think I’ll have it be a temple or shrine of some sort. Ten rooms sounds about good. This, by the way, is a pure S.W.A.G.1
But it’s enough to get me started.
I headed over to to Appendix A of the Dungeon Master’s Guide with a fistful of dice and rolled on the tables there.
For each room, I rolled:
Chamber purpose
Chamber state
Chamber contents
General feature or furnishings (looking particularly at the Religious Articles and Furnishings table because temple)
Hazards, obstacles, traps, tricks, and monster motivation as needed
Here’s what I got:
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