What I'm Writing This Week

Well I'm back to writing this week, but not exactly what I expected. I ran out of time this past weekend and barely even got started on my Standard Pauper review of Hour of Devastation. My friend and I also still haven't resumed our writing exercises. I do seem to be getting back into the discipline of getting blog posts out on a consistent basis again at least, so I'm seeing some progress there.

But this week in my wife's birthday, and to celebrate, I decided to host a special party with some of our friends and run a one-shot D&D session for them. Which means I'm busy creating a four hour adventure for this group, which looks like it may be as many as eight players.

For this adventure, I'm using two tools I've discussed recently on my blog. I started by browsing the free-use maps from Dyson's Dodecahedron, and then used his adventure hook to brainstorm a specific Five Room Dungeon for the session. I've got the whole thing outlined; now it's just a matter of fleshing it out with text and monsters and descriptions. Assuming the whole thing goes well, I may even throw it up on the Dungeon's Masters Guild.

So while it may not be the writing I was expecting - at least I'm writing!

Finally, as I announced earlier today on Twitter, congratulations to Klimon, who won the free booster pack of Hour of Devastation as the Door Prize for the MPDC League.  All of the booster packs from the league are already waiting for the winning players in their collection, having been added by Wizards of the Coast earlier today. I'm definitely looking forward to the next season of this great event!

Five Room Dungeon

One of the best tools I've ever found for designing a side-quest or short adventure is the Five Room Dungeon Model, which I believe originated with John Four's Roleplaying Tips website. In case you're unfamiliar with it, here's the short version:

Room 1: Entrance And Guardian
Room 2: Puzzle Or Roleplaying Challenge
Room 3: Red Herring
Room 4: Climax, Big Battle Or Conflict
Room 5: Plot Twist

The idea is that a good adventure includes an opening conflict, an obstacle that you can't just kill or destroy, a distraction or diversion, a face-off against significant odds, and some sort of twist or link to the next adventure. Its brevity, variety, and focus is actually what makes it so good. Your players don't waste time wandering around fighting off random monsters; instead, each encounter is significant, interesting, and engages different types of players. If you're interested, you can actually download an e-book with 88 unique dungeons built using this model.

While this specifically was written for a short dungeon, it actually easily can be used as an outline for a larger dungeon complex, a major adventure arc, or even a campaign. I certainly have made use of it both for individual adventure locations in my current D&D campaign and the overall flow for the adventure. So if this is something you haven't used before, definitely read the whole article and start using it for your own adventures.