Creating my first D&D adventure

Over the last year I have been playing D&D adventures with a group of close colleagues/friends. I ended up in the role of DM partly because I was the most experienced at D&D of the group (that's not saying much since no one in the group played before and I had played a few games in university). Still, I really enjoy being the DM so I'm certainly not complaining. For the most part, though, we had been playing from pre-made adventures which worked well for us considering there's (relatively) less preparation needed for the DM and it's supposed to be material that's well play-tested and should be fun for the group.

By late last year we were running out of pre-made content and that meant we were in danger of having no adventures for the group. I'd have to either go find new content or put in the work of creating an adventure from scratch. I chose the latter. But I didn't stop there, I also chose that for my first adventure I'd go ahead and create a themed adventure; Halloween was coming around and I thought it would be fun to do an adventure with a distinctly darker story and introduce some elements of horror. I also had some fun ideas that would only make sense in an isolated themed adventure and would surprise (or infuriate) the players (more on that later!).

I have to admit that I was a bit intimidated about creating my own adventure from scratch. I had some general idea about what I wanted to do story-wise, but it wasn't obvious how to layout the dungeon, how to prepare for all the myriad of options the characters could choose from, what monsters/characters to include, and especially how to keep it fun and exciting all the way through. I guess my biggest concern was that I might end up creating an adventure that was boring for the group.

Brainstorming the adventure

The Map

Thankfully, the Dungeon Master's guide has a pretty good guide on generating random dungeons. I figured that if I was going to create something from scratch, I'd have my first dungeon be largely guided by randomized rooms, connections, and so forth. At the very least, I thought that if a randomized dungeon was in fact feasible then it would be worth trying out.

The photos below are from parts of the DM guide on creating randomized rooms, including recommendations for randomizing room size, choosing doors, connections, hallways, and so forth. It's surprisingly quite comprehensive.

       

I followed through to create the dungeon (as seen below) on graph paper, rolling dice to determine whether a passage should go left/right/straight-ahead, what the room size should be, etc. The dungeon sheet looks fairly messy, and that's because I included several notes on things to happen in each room, what monsters to include, how doors can be destroyed (or if they could not). I also went back and changed my mind several times.

Annotated dungeon

Once I finally came up with something I was happy with, I redrew the whole map and used this as the main reference for laying out the group's progress during the game. (I still kept the annotated map for reference during the game session.)

Redrawn (clean) version

A Themed Story

The story I had in mind involved evil cultists, zombies, and a variety of more horror-themed monsters from the universe of D&D. The heroes set out on an adventure to rescue some kidnapped towns folk, but, unknown to the group, I never planned for them to succeed. The very end of the adventure had the heroes face off against an archlich that was powerful enough to dispatch the heroes extremely easily. The "surprise" I had in store for the group was that I didn't intend them to kill the final boss and make their way back. Realizing that all their efforts were in vain seemed to be quite appropriate for the Halloween/horror-theme. 

This was quite intentional: D&D can be quite forgiving in some respects about allowing the group to survive and the adventures I've run so far haven't really put the group in mortal danger yet. Since this was an isolated themed adventure I thought it would be a pretty safe opportunity to experiment with hero death. Plus, I could add as many monsters to the story as I wanted to but I figured that the most horrific thing I could do was tell the players that their heroes are dead and cannot be resurrected.

In an attempt to keep the atmosphere moody I played some select music tracks in the background that I thought were appropriate for a tense, horror-themed adventure. A selection of tracks chosen:

• John Carpenter's Halloween as covered by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
• Darkness Our Bride by Cradle of Filth
• Start/Whispers by Trent Reznor (Quake soundtrack)

The End Result 

So how did it all turn out? I'd like to think it was a success. At least the players seemed to enjoy it. The players didn't seem as bummed out by their heroes being killed as I had hoped for expected. It turned out not to matter, since after all of them were killed off I told the group that they woke up in their beds and realized everything seemed to have been a vivid frightful dream. I left a few hints to suggest that it might not have entirely been a dream and those breadcrumbs could be followed in possible subsequent adventures or a larger campaign if I choose to continue those ideas.

In the end, I really enjoyed the experience of creating my own story/adventure. It was quite time consuming: for this small adventure I spent two weekends and several nights after work fine tuning what I wanted to include. I spent a lot of time questioning what goes in each room, choosing the right moody music for different phases of the story, and trying to cut down material so that this could all be played in one sitting. To my disappointment the game took longer than one sitting to play through and we were forced to meet up on a second night to finish up the adventure. I will say that I have a lot more confidence in my ability to create a new adventure. It's true that there's more work involved than using a pre-made adventure, but it's also a lot more rewarding. Another benefit is that I ended up being pretty confident about leading the adventure at game time since it was something I was very familiar with.

I'm looking forward to getting a new adventure under way to play with the group. It's been a while. :)

Whiteboard showing progress of heroes across the map

Inserting Unicode characters

The other day I had to enter Unicode characters in an existing text file. I had to introduce word joiner characters in between existing characters to ensure they wouldn't get split as a result of line wrapping. This is not the sort of thing I have to do on a daily basis so I had to do a bit of digging online to find out how to achieve this (credit goes to this site I came across after some Google searching).

Inserting Unicode characters in Vim is quite straightforward: in insert mode, press ctrl+v, u, and then follow this with the necessary Unicode characters. For example, to enter a non-breaking space, you'd enter insert mode, press ctrl+v, type u, followed by 00A0.

Below is an example of doing just this. I've entered the name of one of my favorite novels in runic.

Runic letters entered using Unicode characters

Of course, this is sort of a contrived example because I can't imagine someone writing out a long string of characters this way; for that it would behoove one to use an IME instead. I'd imagine using this sort of Unicode input method more sparingly, such as the occasional non-breaking space, word joiner, or oh-so-cool math symbol (yes I'm talking about you, proper subset symbol, ⊊).

More generally, entering Unicode characters in Ubuntu requires the following sequence of keys: ctrl+shift+u, Unicode characters, and then Enter. Certain text editors may have specific requirements for Unicode entry: Vim was already mentioned above, but I believe that Emacs has yet a different way of Unicode entry. Also, different operating systems also have their own mechanism for Unicode entry: entering characters in Windows and Mac will likely be different to the sequence mentioned above.