The primary goal of a published adventure should be to get the DM excited about running it.

There are many, many adventures that don’t do that.

Now, I hear you say, “What about being a good adventure?” Well, that should also happen, but more than anything, the DM and players will never find that out if the DM doesn’t want to run it.

It starts with the blurb/advertising text on websites and the cover. It continues with the first bit of text in the adventure, summarizing the adventure. And then you want the rest of the text to pop, to say “I’m worth it! Play me!”

At least, that’s what the goal should be. It’s not made easier by people having different opinions on what’s exciting and worth running.

And let’s face it: the more adventures you’ve read and run, the harder it is to excite you. You’ve probably seen it before. Luckily for designers, this doesn’t actually describe that many potential customers. Mostly long-time DMs and reviewers.

There have been adventures where the concept is absolutely killer, but the implementation has fallen down. I think the poster child for that is The Temple of Elemental Evil. The pure idea of it is joy – the title itself is brilliant. But given to the average DM, it turns into a somewhat repetitive dungeon crawl. There’s the potential there to make it far better, but the bare text doesn’t do that much for it. But because it has that initial spark, it makes me excited to go back to it and see if I can make it better this way. It’s descendent, Princes of the Apocalypse, makes me feel the same way. A flawed adventure, but so many good parts that I want to run it again and do it better next time.

As for a recent adventure that doesn’t inspire me at all? Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. The one from the new D&D starter kit. Lost Mine of Phandelver is one of the great introductory adventures, perhaps the best D&D has ever had. But Stormwreck? Every time I try to read it, I get bored and move on. Now, I want to point out that I haven’t run it yet. It may play a lot better than it reads, and there are definitely adventures that look great but play terribly. And the basic themes of the adventure don’t resonate with me. I hope that I’m an outlier; I don’t want the introductory adventure to D&D to be boring.

Once you get past the fact that the adventure has to sell itself to the DM, you can start talking about other things it needs to do. Like present its information in a way that makes the adventure easy to run.

And this is also tricky.

One of the realisations about adventures is that they need to serve two readers: the DM who is reading the adventure before running it, and the DM who is running the adventure. Yes, both of these are the same person, but at different times. And the requirements of each DM are different.

The DM who reads the adventure beforehand needs to discover the shape of the adventure, its structure, and gain an overview of what will happen. Information like, the players start by escorting a caravan, it’s attacked, and they chase the goblins, they go through the goblin caves and rescue a prisoner. And DMs will also note a few things to pay attention to during the session. (Like, making sure where the prisoner is and how the players can rescue them).

The DM who is running the adventure needs all the encounter information Right Now Please and in an easy-to-find place.

As we found out during the Dungeon Delve format experiments of 4E (and early 3E), these two goals actually fight with each other. There are reasons that the 5E adventures abandoned the format and went back to a more traditional layout.

And, of course, the story and encounters should engage and entertain the players!

Adventure writing is hard. There are a lot of competing goals, and limited space. Limited space in the book, and limited space in the DM’s memory. Yes, you can go into ten pages of detail for each encounter, but who will remember that? And how do you find anything? Compromise is the name of the game.

But when you pull it off, it’s magic.