I love published adventures. Investigating them has proved some of the most rewarding times I have spent with Dungeons & Dragons. However, I recognised that running published D&D adventures is not to everyone’s taste, or possibly even ability. There are distinct differences between running an adventure written by someone else and one you design, and you should choose the path you enjoy more!

However, even if you’re running a published adventure yourself, there is not one correct way to use it, just as there isn’t one correct way to design them!

Any published design is going to leave things out. It has to. Exhaustively detailing every possibility would be exhausting to read. Do you really want to read a 10,000 page tome to run four hours of D&D?

As a result, designers have to trust that the DMs that use their adventures can understand their words, and fill in bits left unstated. (Occasionally they badly misjudge what is needed).

There are actual flaws in adventure writing, of course. There are basics that should be included. But exactly what they are varies depending on the style of adventure. Some adventures expect more improvisation from the DM; they provide inspiration but don’t go into all the details.

And yes, running published adventures IS a skill that you can get better at. Just as you can get better at designing your home adventures. And, I trust, designing adventures to be published!

A large part of my interest in adventures comes from trying to understand the underlying structure. How does that enable the stories you create. Is it a fixed story, or does it have more flexibility?

I have a feeling that of all the skills you could have when running a published adventure, that one may be most key. Understanding how the structure works! How event A opens up events B, C, and D. Whether it’s a linear path through the story, or a network that adapts.

I have been running Curse of Strahd again recently, and that is a fascinating adventure to analyse. It is not a linear adventure. But there are aspects of it that work in a linear manner. I often describe the main structure of it as this:

• PCs enter Barovia
• PCs learn of the thread of Strahd
• PCs learn how to defeat Strahd (Fortunes of Ravenloft)
• PCs seek and find items
• PCs defeat Strahd

So, that’s the main framework. But how does it play at the table? It’s more like this:

• Players travel to location and learn of opportunities for adventure
• Players choose an opportunity and pursue it
• Completing the opportunity opens up FURTHER opportunities

That’s an oversimplification. All of that is informed by the overall quest, but you get subquesting where players choose what to engage with. And Curse of Strahd has a lot of things with which to engage. The DM then chooses things to emphasise and link together.

In my current game, in an early encounter, the PCs rescued some children. They took them to an inn, where they asked the innkeeper to look after them. The innkeeper agreed, provided the PCs quested for wine! That sent them to the winery, and a quest for magical gems… but one of the gems is at a place already important due to the Fortunes of Ravenloft. So, the place becomes really important to the plot, and the PCs become more invested in the linked quests.

This is not explicitly laid out in the adventure text. The adventure provides opportunities which the players and DM then take advantage of, instead of a set linear progression where every encounter is known.

I have seen DMs, quite recently, say how they don’t understand how to run Curse of Strahd. And, to a large extent, it isn’t something you’re going to learn from reading instruction. We may give you pointers, but it’s something you learn mainly from experience.

I can describe how things played in my game, but if you take that and expect it to work exactly that way in yours, you’re probably going to be disappointed. (Other adventures, which are more linear, are going to be more comparable in experiences). And, though I’m very comfortable with this level of emergent play, it isn’t something that all DMs and groups are comfortable with. For some, it’s too unstructured. For others, it’s too structured!

And though that’s the way Curse of Strahd runs, it is not the way Tyranny of Dragons works. Nor the way that Princes of the Apocalypse nor Rime of the Frostmaiden work. Each has their own structure!

Often, the adventure’s introduction will give you an idea as to how an adventure flows, but even then it won’t (can’t) be complete. And so, learning how to analyse how the text translates into an adventure is a wonderful skill to have. And, yes, you’ll probably learn by reading the text, coming up with theories, then running the adventure, and discovering how your theories diverge from reality. (This is also true of reading someone else’s explanation of how the adventure works!)

The art of running published adventures is a massive subject; and it’s just a subset of running Dungeons & Dragons. It is why I love the hobby so much – limited only by our imaginations, and so much to discover when we have people imagining together!