Last Christmas I ran the Bone Dragon Pyramid from The Creative GM’s Guide To Extraordinary Locations as a one-shot for some of my old school friends and their kids. I placed the pyramid in Chult (Forgotten Realms) and inserted a Heart of Darkness-style boat ride up the river Tyriki to reach the pyramid, after which […]
Category: Adventure Design (Page 1 of 2)
I finished running my first ever D&D “intrigue” adventure recently. Since a) it went pretty well and b) it was quite a different adventuring experience to our usual sessions, I thought it would make a good topic for a blog post. A while back I tried to categorise all the possible Dungeons & Dragons quest […]
The other day I saw that Sly Flourish answered a question on his RPG talk show about running gladiatorial arenas in D&D. Given that I dedicated 1.5 years of my life writing an epic 300-page arena adventure, I figured this is probably a topic I should also address on my own media! Especially since writing […]
If you’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for any reasonable length of time, you may well have heard the enigmatic phrase ‘West Marches Campaign’ dropped into your D&D discourse. What is a West Marches Campaign? West Marches was the solution of Dungeon Master (and game designer) Ben Robbins to the age-old issue of RPG scheduling […]
“Heists don’t work in D&D!” retorted my friend and fellow Dungeon Master, when I announced I was excited to get my hands on Keys from the Golden Vault. It’s a common refrain, usually followed by: “You should try Blades in the Dark!” According to its many detractors Dungeons & Dragons is, in fact, a terrible […]
Last time I was in the UK, I picked up a 1958 edition yellow-leafed pocket-sized paperback of Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming, which I later read on various beaches of the Costa Brava over summer. I was impressed with Fleming’s punchy, authoritative prose and I enjoyed the gritty, down-to-earth plot of Bond exposing a […]
Last year I researched and wrote Candlekeep Murders: The Deadwinter Prophecy, a murder mystery adventure for 5th edition Dungeon & Dragons that I’m immensely proud of… hey, if Ed Greenwood gives you the thumbs up, you can afford to pat yourself on the back a little, right? My research not only included taking in the […]
In general teleportation works pretty well in Dungeons & Dragons. At low levels, when the characters don’t have access to spells like teleportation circle, journeys are arduous and fraught with danger. Then, at mid-to-high levels, when the party have exhausted that style of play, and their characters can’t be challenged by bandits, broken bridges and […]
I’ve seen people argue that there are only three fundamental adventure types in Dungeons & Dragons: Fetch, Kill and Discover. However, you won’t have to wrack your brains too long to think of a story that falls outside those rather narrow restraints. The blog Master The Dungeon proposes seven core quest types: Fetch, Kill, Escort, […]
A while ago, I proposed six alternatives to the overused trope of starting your D&D adventure in a tavern. When M.T. Black recently asked his Twitter followers what fun variations they had seen to the “you all meet in a tavern” adventure beginning, I shared my article and then condensed my six alternatives (plus the […]
