Creating Adventures

Creating adventures is one of the greatest rewards of being a Dungeon Master. It’s a way to express yourself, designing fantastic locations and encounters with monsters, traps, puzzles, and conflicts. When you design an adventure, you call the shots. You do things exactly the way you want to.

Fundamentally, adventures are stories. An adventure shares many of the features of a novel, a movie, an issue of a comic, or an episode of a TV show. Comic series and serialized TV dramas are particularly good comparisons, because of the way individual adventures are limited in scope but blend together to create a larger narrative. If an adventure is a single issue or episode, a campaign is the series as a whole.

Whether you’re creating your own adventures or using published adventures, you’ll find advice in this chapter to help you create a fun and memorable experience for your players.

Creating an adventure involves blending scenes of exploration, social interaction, and combat into a unified whole that meets the needs of your players and your campaign. But it’s more than that. The basic elements of good storytelling should guide you throughout this process, so your players experience the adventure as a story and not a disjointed series of encounters.

Elements of a Great Adventure

The best adventures have several things in common.

A Credible Threat

An adventure needs a threat worthy of the heroes' attention. The threat might be a single villain or monster, a villain with lackeys, an assortment of monsters, or an evil organization. Whatever their nature, the antagonists should have goals that the heroes can uncover and thwart.

Familiar Tropes with Clever Twists

It might seem stereotypical to build an adventure around dragons, orcs, and insane wizards in towers, but these are staples of fantasy storytelling. It might also seem trite to begin an adventure in a tavern, but that’s an idea that remains true to D&D. Familiar story elements are fine, as long as you and the players occasionally put a spin on them. For example, the mysterious figure who presents adventurers with a quest on behalf of the king might be the king in disguise. The crazy wizard in the tower might be a projected illusion created by a band of greedy gnome thieves to guard their loot.

A Clear Focus on the Present

An adventure is about the here and now. A little bit of history might be needed to set the story in motion, and the adventurers might discover interesting lore of the past in the course of the adventure. In general, let the world’s history be evident in the present situation. Instead of dealing with what happened in the past, an adventure should focus on describing the present situation, what the bad guys are up to, and how the adventurers become involved in the story.

Heroes Who Matter

An adventure should allow the adventurers' actions and decisions to matter. Though it might resemble a novel or a TV episode, an adventure needs to allow for more than one outcome. Otherwise, players can feel as if they’ve been railroaded-set onto a course that has only one destination, no matter how hard they try to change it. For example, if a major villain shows up before the end of the adventure, the adventure should allow for the possibility that the heroes might defeat that villain.

Something for All Player Types

As outlined in the book’s introduction, players come to the gaming table with different expectations. An adventure needs to account for the different players and characters in your group, drawing them into the story as effectively as possible.

As a starting point, think about your adventure in terms of the three basic types of activity in the game: exploration, social interaction, and combat. If your adventure includes a balance of all three, it’s likely to appeal to all types of players.

An adventure you create for your home campaign doesn’t have to appeal to every abstract player type—only to the players sitting down at your own table. If you don’t have any players who like fighting above all else, then don’t feel you have to provide a maximum amount of combat to keep the adventure moving.

Surprises

Look for opportunities to surprise and delight your players. For example, the exploration of a ruined castle on a hill might lead to the discovery of a dragon’s tomb hidden underneath. A trek through the wilderness might lead to the discovery of a tower that appears only on nights of the full moon. Players remember such locations.

Too many surprises can be off-putting to players, but adding the occasional twist gets players to adjust their tactics and think creatively. For example, you could spruce up a goblin lair by including goblin sappers with kegs of oil strapped to their backs. An attack on a villain’s estate might be complicated by the unexpected arrival of a special guest.

When preparing for possible combat encounters, think about odd pairings of monsters, such as a hobgoblin warlord and his pet manticore, or will-o'-wisps in league with a young black dragon. Have surprise reinforcements show up, or give the monsters unusual tactics. Throw in the occasional red herring, deception, and plot twist to keep players on their toes, but try not to go overboard. Sometimes a simple, straightforward encounter with an orc guard is just as fun for your players.

Useful Maps

A good adventure needs thoughtfully constructed maps. Wilderness areas sprinkled with interesting landmarks and other features are better than vast expanses of unchanging terrain. Dungeons that have branching corridors and similar decision points give players the opportunity to choose which direction their characters should go. Presenting the characters with options allows the players to make choices that keep the adventure unpredictable.

If drawing maps isn’t your strong suit, the Internet is a great place to look for adventure maps that have been made freely available for use, as well as floor plans of real-world buildings and images that can inspire your mapmaking. You can also use software to help put your maps together.

Published Adventures

Published adventures are available for purchase if you have neither the time nor the inclination to write an adventure of your own, or if you want a change of pace.

A published adventure includes a pregenerated scenario with the maps, NPCs, monsters, and treasures you need to run it. An example of a published adventure appears in the D&D Starter Set.

You can make adjustments to a published adventure so that it better suits your campaign and appeals to your players. For example, you can replace the villain of an adventure with one the players have already encountered in your campaign, or add something to the background of the adventure so that it involves your players' characters in ways that the adventure’s designer never could have imagined.

A published adventure can’t account for every action the characters might take. The nice thing about published adventures is that they allow you to focus your game preparation time on highlighting plot developments in your campaign that the adventure can’t address.

Published adventures also provide inspiration. You might not use an adventure as written, but it might spur ideas, or you can pull out one part of it and repurpose that part for your needs. For example, you might use a map of a temple but repopulate it with monsters of your choice, or you might use a chase sequence as a model for a pursuit scene in your campaign.

Adventure Structure

Like every story, a typical adventure has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Beginning

An adventure starts with a hook to get the players interested. A good adventure hook piques the interest of the players and provides a compelling reason for their characters to become involved in the adventure. Maybe the adventurers stumble onto something they’re not meant to see, monsters attack them on the road, an assassin makes an attempt on their lives, or a dragon shows up at the city gates. Adventure hooks such as these can instantly draw players into your story.

The beginning of a good adventure should be exciting and focused. You want the players to go home looking forward to the next session, so give them a clear sense of where the story is headed, as well as something to look forward to.

Middle

The middle of an adventure is where the bulk of the story unfolds. With each new challenge, the adventurers make important choices that have a clear effect on the conclusion of the adventure.

Over the course of the adventure, the characters might discover secrets that reveal new goals or change their original goal. Their understanding of what’s going on around them might change. Maybe rumors of treasure were a trick to lure them into a death trap. Perhaps the so-called spy in the queen’s court is actually a scheme concocted by the monarch herself to seize even more power.

At the same time the adventurers are working to thwart their adversaries, those adversaries are trying to carry out their nefarious plans. Such enemies might also work to hide their deeds, mislead potential adversaries, or confront problems directly, perhaps by trying to kill meddlers.

Remember that the characters are the heroes of the story. Never let them become mere spectators, watching as events unfold around them that they can’t influence.

Ending

The ending encompasses the climax-the scene or encounter in which the tension building throughout the adventure reaches its peak. A strong climax should have the players on edge, with the fate of the characters and much more hanging in the balance. The outcome, which hinges on the characters' actions and decisions, should never be a forgone conclusion.

An ending needn’t tie everything up in a neat bow. Story threads can be left hanging, waiting to be resolved in a later adventure. A little bit of unfinished business is an easy way to transition from one adventure to the next.

Adventure Types

An adventure can be location-based or event-based, as discussed in the sections that follow.

Location Based Adventures

Adventures set in crumbling dungeons and remote wilderness locations are the cornerstone of countless campaigns. Many of the greatest D&D adventures of all time are location-based.

Creating a location-based adventure can be broken down into a number of steps. Each step provides tables from which you can select the basic elements of your adventure. Alternatively, roll on the tables and see how the random results inspire you. You can mix up the order of the steps.

1. Identify the Party’s Goals

The Dungeon Goals table provides common goals that drive or lure adventurers into dungeons. The Wilderness Goals table provides similar inspiration for an adventure focused on outdoor exploration. The Other Goals table suggests location-based adventures that don’t fit neatly into the first two categories.

Dungeon Goals

Wilderness Goals

Other Goals

2. Identify Important NPCs

Use the Adventure Villains, Adventure Allies, and Adventure Patrons tables to help you identify these NPCs. Chapter 4 can help you bring these NPCs to life.

Adventure Villains

Adventure Allies

Adventure Patrons

3. Flesh Out the Location Details

Chapter 5 offers suggestions for creating and fleshing out an adventure location, including tables that can help you establish the important elements of a dungeon, wilderness area, or urban setting.

4. Find the Ideal Introduction

An adventure can begin with a social interaction encounter in which the adventurers find out what they must do and why. It can start with a surprise attack, or with the adventurers coming across information by accident. The best introductions arise naturally from the goals and setting of the adventure. Let the entries in the Adventure Introduction table inspire you.

Adventure Introduction

5. Consider the Ideal Climax

The climactic ending of an adventure fulfills the promise of all that came before. Although the climax must hinge on the successes and failures of the characters up to that moment, the Adventure Climax table can provide suggestions to help you shape the end of your adventure.

Adventure Climax

6. Plan Encounters

After you’ve created the location and the overall story of the adventure, it’s time to plan out the encounters that make up that adventure. In a location-based adventure, most encounters are keyed to specific locations on a map. For each room or wilderness area on the adventure map, your key describes what’s in that area: its physical features, as well as any encounter that plays out there. The adventure key turns a simple sketch of numbered areas on graph paper into encounters designed to entertain and intrigue your players.

See “Creating Encounters” later in this chapter for guidance on crafting individual encounters.

Event Based Adventures

In an event-based adventure, the focus is on what the characters and villains do and what happens as a result. The question of where those things happen is of secondary importance.

Building an event-based adventure is more work than building a location-based one, but the process can be simplified by following a number of straightforward steps. Several steps include tables from which you can choose adventure elements or roll randomly for inspiration. As with location-based adventures, you don’t necessarily have to follow these steps in order.

1. Start with a Villain

Putting care into creating your villain will pay off later, since the villain plays such a pivotal role in advancing the story. Use the Adventure Villains table in the previous section to get started, and use the information in chapter 4 to help flesh out the villain.

For example, your villain might be an undead creature seeking to avenge a past imprisonment or injury. An interesting aspect of an undead villain is that this past injury might have occurred centuries ago, inspiring revenge against the descendants of those that harmed it. Imagine a vampire imprisoned by the members of a religious order of knights, and who now seeks revenge against the current members of that order.

2. Determine the Villain’s Actions

Once you have a villain, it’s time to determine what steps the villain takes to achieve its goals. Create a timeline showing what the villain does and when, assuming no interference from the adventurers.

Building on the previous example, you might decide that your vampire villain murders several knights. By slipping past locked doors in gaseous form, the vampire is able to make the deaths appear natural at first, but it soon becomes clear that a depraved killer is behind the murders.

If you need additional inspiration, consider a few different options for how the villain’s actions unfold over the course of the adventure.

Event-Based Villain Actions

Big Event

The villain’s plans come to fruition during a festival, an astrological event, a holy (or unholy) rite, a royal wedding, the birth of a child, or some similar fixed time. The villain’s activities up to that point are geared toward preparation for this event.

Crime Spree

The villain commits acts that become bolder and more heinous over time. A killer might start out by targeting the destitute in the city slums before moving up to a massacre in the marketplace, increasing the horror and the body count each time.

Growing Corruption

As time passes, the villain’s power and influence grow, affecting more victims across a larger area. This might take the form of armies conquering new territory, an evil cult recruiting new members, or a spreading plague. A pretender to the throne might attempt to secure the support of the kingdom’s nobility in the days or weeks leading up to a coup, or a guild leader could corrupt the members of a town council or bribe officers of the watch.

One and Done

The villain commits a single crime and then tries to avoid the consequences. Instead of an ongoing plan to commit more crimes, the villain’s goal is to lie low or flee the scene.

Serial Crimes

The villain commits crimes one after the other, but these acts are repetitive in nature, rather than escalating to greater heights of depravity. The trick to catching such a villain lies in determining the pattern underlying the crimes. Though serial killers are a common example of this type of villain, your villain could be a serial arsonist favoring a certain type of building, a magical sickness that affects spellcasters who cast a specific spell, a thief that targets a certain kind of merchant, or a doppelganger kidnapping and impersonating one noble after another.

Step by Step

In pursuit of its goal, the villain carries out a specific set of actions in a particular sequence. A wizard might steal the items needed to create a phylactery and become a lich, or a cultist might kidnap the priests of seven good-aligned gods as a sacrifice. Alternatively, the villain could be following a trail to find the object of its revenge, killing one victim after another while moving ever closer to the real target.

3. Determine the Party’s Goals

You can use the Event-Based Goals table to set the party’s goal. A goal can also suggest ways in which the adventurers become caught up in the villain’s plans, and what exactly they must do to foil those plans.

Event-Based Goals

For example, you roll a 10 on the table, indicating that the party’s goal is to secure aid from a ruler or council. You decide to connect that to the leadership of the order targeted by your vampire villain. Maybe the order’s leaders have a chest of jewels stolen from the vampire centuries ago, and the characters can use the chest as bait to trap the villain.

4. Identify Important NPCs

Many event-based adventures require a well-detailed cast of NPCs. Some of these NPCs fall neatly into the categories of allies and patrons, but most are likely to be characters or creatures whose attitudes toward the adventurers remain undecided until the adventurers interact with them. (See chapter 4 for more information on creating NPCs.)

The elements of the adventure you’ve determined so far should provide a clear idea of what supporting characters you need to create, as well as how much detail you need to generate for each one. NPCs unlikely to become involved in combat don’t need full combat statistics, for example, just as characters heavily involved in negotiation could have ideals, bonds, and flaws. If it’s helpful, roll on the Adventure Allies or Adventure Patrons tables (in the “Location-Based Adventures” section, earlier in this chapter).

5. Anticipate the Villain’s Reactions

As the adventurers pursue their goals and foil the villain’s plans, how does the villain respond? Does it lash out in violence or send dire warnings? Does it look for simple solutions to its problems or create more complicated schemes to route around interference?

Look over the villain’s actions that you outlined instep 2. For each event arising from those actions, think about how the adventurers are likely to react. If they can prevent an action or hamper its success, what effect does that have on the villain’s overall plan? What can the villain do to compensate?

One way to track a villain’s reactions is by using a flowchart. This might grow out of the timeline that describes the villain’s plans, outlining how the villain gets back on track after the adventurers thwart its plans. Or the flowchart could be separate from the timeline, showing the various actions the adventurers might take and the villain’s response to those actions.

6. Detail Key Locations

Since locations aren’t the focus of the adventure, they can be simpler and smaller than a dungeon complex or an expanse of wilderness. They might be specific locations in a city, or even individual rooms in locations where combat is likely to break out or significant exploration is needed, such as a throne room, a guild headquarters, a vampire’s crumbling manor, or a knights' chapter house.

7. Choose an Introduction and a Climax

The Adventure Introduction table in the “Location-Based Adventures” section offers fun possibilities for hooking the characters into the events of your adventure, including dreams, hauntings, and a simple plea for help. The Adventure Climax table in that same section includes adventure endings that work just as well for event-based adventures.

For example, the Adventure Introduction table helps you decide that an ally the adventurers care about needs their help. Perhaps the NPC is a knight who believes that a vampire is trying to kill him, or a friend or relative hoping to find the knight’s murderer. This NPC brings the vampire’s crimes to the characters' attention.

Looking over the Adventure Climax table, you might decide to have the adventurers bait the vampire with a chest of jewels stolen from its lair. As an added twist, you decide that the vampire’s true goal is to retrieve a necklace among the jewels. The necklace is set with nine gems, and with these gems the vampire can open a gate to the Nine Hells. Should the vampire succeed, the adventurers will have a more pressing threat to deal with, as a powerful devil steps through the gate and honors some ancient pact it made with the vampire.

8. Plan Encounters

After you’ve created the overall story of the adventure, it’s time to plan out the encounters on which the events of that adventure will hang. In an event-based adventure, encounters occur when the villain’s agenda intersects the path of the characters. You can’t always anticipate exactly when or where that will happen, but you can create a list of possible encounters that the adventurers might experience. This can take the form of general descriptions of the villain’s forces, details of its lieutenants and minions, as well as encounters tied to the key locations of the adventure.

See “Creating Encounters” later in this chapter for guidance on crafting individual encounters.

Mysteries

A mystery is a form of event-based adventure that usually focuses on the adventurers' efforts to solve a crime, usually a robbery or murder. Unlike the writer of a mystery novel, a Dungeon Master can’t always predict what the characters will do in a mystery adventure.

A villain whose actions are “crime spree,” “one and done,” or “serial crimes” might inspire you to craft a mystery adventure around that villain’s crimes. Similarly, if the adventurers' goals include determining the villain’s identity, that might be part of a mystery.

To build a mystery adventure, follow the steps for creating any event-based adventure. Then consider three additional elements for the adventure: the victim, the suspects, and the clues.

Victim

Think about the victim’s relationship to the villain. Though you can create a strong scenario with no such relationship, part of what makes a mystery exciting is the discovery of the twisted connections between NPCs and how those connections led to the crime. A random killing might be just as mysterious, but it lacks that emotional connection.

Also look for a connection between the victim and one or more of the adventurers. One surefire way to draw adventurers into a mystery-including making them suspects-is to make the victim someone with whom the characters are acquainted.

Suspects

Your cast of characters should include an assortment of other NPCs who didn’t commit the crime, but who had the motive, the means, or the opportunity to do so. Suspects might be obvious or could come to light during the investigation. One technique often used in detective fiction is to create a closed circle of suspects-a finite number of individuals whose circumstances make them the only possible suspects.

One tip for keeping the players and the adventurers guessing as to the identity of the villain is to ensure that more than one suspect has a secret. When questioned by the adventurers, a suspect might appear nervous or attempt to lie, despite being innocent of the crime. A secret business deal, an illicit affair, a dark past, or an uncontrolled vice are flaws that make suspects more interesting than NPCs with nothing to hide.

Clues

Clues point to the identity of the villain. Some clues are verbal, including the statements of the suspects and witnesses that help the adventurers develop a picture of what happened. Other clues are physical, such as an unfinished message written in the victim’s blood, a piece of jewelry left behind by the villain, or a weapon found hidden in a suspect’s room.

A clue should connect a suspect to the crime, typically by shedding light on the suspect’s motive, means, or opportunity. Some clues connect the wrong suspect to the crime, leading the adventurers in the wrong direction. Eventually, they must find other clues pointing in a different direction, or come across evidence that absolves the suspect.

It’s better to populate your adventure with too many clues than too few. If the adventurers solve the mystery too quickly, you might feel some disappointment but the players will feel a sense of accomplishment. If the mystery is too hard, though, the players will become frustrated. Since you have to account for the possibility that the adventurers will overlook some clues, use redundant clues to ensure that the players have the knowledge needed to catch the villain.

Intrigue

Intrigue adventures are event-based adventures that revolve around power struggles. Intrigues are common in the courts of the nobility, but power struggles can play out just as easily in merchants' guilds, crime syndicates, and temple hierarchies.

Rather than dark events and villainous plots, an intrigue adventure typically revolves around the exchange of favors, the rise and fall of individuals in power and influence, and the honeyed words of diplomacy. A prince’s efforts to be named heir to the throne, a courtier’s ambition to sit at the queen’s right hand, and a merchant’s desire to open a trade route through enemy lands are the stuff of intrigue.

Like all adventures, an intrigue adventure works only if the players and their characters are invested in the outcome. If no one cares who the king’s chamberlain is or who has logging rights in the elven woods, throwing the characters into an adventure centered on those issues will fall flat. However, if having the ear of the king’s chamberlain means the characters can use royal soldiers to help them defend their own stronghold on the borderlands, players will be invested in the scenario.

Adventurers usually become embroiled in intrigue when they need a favor from a powerful creature and have to perform a favor in exchange, or when the plots of powerful NPCs get in the way of the characters achieving their goals. Some of the event-based goals discussed earlier in this section lend themselves to intrigue adventures. For example, if the adventurers must uncover a conspiracy, negotiate a peace treaty, or secure aid from a ruler or council, you might be looking at an intrigue adventure.

The process of creating an intrigue adventure is similar to creating any other event-based adventure, with two main differences: how villains are handled and how the characters can gain influence.

Villains

Some intrigue adventures are driven by the actions of a single villain, such as a noble plotting the assassination of a monarch. However, an intrigue adventure can have multiple villains or no villain at all.

No Villain

Some intrigue adventures revolve around the exchange of favors in the absence of a villain. For this type of adventure, skip steps 1 and 2 of the event-based adventure creation process (the villain and the villain’s actions) and move straight to the adventurers' goals in step 3. Figure out why the adventurers become involved in the intrigue, then spend the bulk of your time creating the NPCs they interact with.

Many Villains

Some intrigue adventures feature a whole cast of villains, each with its own goals, motivations, and methods. The adventurers might be drawn into the struggle of a court full of nobles vying for the throne in the wake of the king’s sudden death, or could find themselves negotiating the end to a deadly turf war among thieves' guilds. In this scenario, you’ll spend a lot of time on steps 1 and 2, developing each of the major NPCs as a distinct villain with an agenda. In step 5, you’ll need to develop each villain’s reactions to the potential setbacks they face during the adventure.

However, you don’t need to put equal effort into detailing the reactions of every villain, since many will likely echo each other or cancel each other out. Whenever the adventurers foil one villain’s plans, it might let another villain’s schemes move forward, advancing the adventure whether the foiled villain reacts or not.

Influence

Depending on the scenario, you might want to track the party’s influence with different NPCs or factions, or even track influence separately for each character.

One way to handle influence is to treat it like inspiration. A character gains influence in a certain situation only if you grant it, and bringing influence into play requires spending it. Characters can gain influence by doing favors for NPCs, advancing the cause of an organization, or demonstrating their power and heroism, at your discretion. As with inspiration, a character can choose to spend influence to gain advantage on a roll relevant to that influence.

Another way to handle influence is to treat it like renown (see chapter 1), allowing characters to gain renown at court and within various key factions.

Framing Events

You can base an entire adventure on a framing event or use such an event to grab the players' interest. The Framing Events table presents several ideas, or you can use it to inspire your own framing event.

Framing Events

Complications

Sometimes an adventure isn’t as straightforward as it might seem.

Moral Quandaries

If you want to give the characters a crisis that no amount of spellcasting or swordplay can resolve, add a moral quandary to the adventure. A moral quandary is a problem of conscience for which the adventurers must make a single choice-but never a simple one.

Moral Quandaries

Ally Quandary

The adventurers have a better chance of achieving their goal with the help of two individuals whose expertise is all but essential. However, these two NPCs hate each other and refuse to work together even if the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The adventurers must choose the NPC that is most likely to help them accomplish their goal.

Friend Quandary

An NPC that one or more of the characters cares about makes an impossible demand on the characters. A love interest might demand that a character turn away from a dangerous quest. A dear friend might plead with the characters to spare the villain’s life, to prove that they are better than the villain. A weak NPC might beg for a chance to win favor from the characters by undertaking a dangerous but essential mission.

Honor Quandary

A character is forced to choose between victory and a personal oath or code of honor. A paladin who has sworn the Oath of Virtue might realize that the clearest path to success lies in deceit and subterfuge. A loyal cleric might be tempted to disobey the orders of his or her faith. If you present this quandary, be sure to provide an opportunity for a character to atone for violating his or her oath.

Rescue Quandary

The adventurers must choose between catching or hurting the villain and saving innocent lives. For example, the adventurers might learn that the villain is camped nearby, but they also learn that another part of the villain’s forces is about to march into a village and burn it to the ground. The characters must choose between taking out the villain or protecting innocent villagers, some of whom might be friends or family members.

Respect Quandary

Two important allies give conflicting directions or advice to the adventurers. Perhaps the high priest counsels the characters to negotiate peace with militaristic elves in the nearby forest, while a veteran warrior urges them to prove their strength with a decisive first strike. The adventurers can’t follow both courses, and whichever ally they choose, the other loses respect for them and might no longer aid them.

Twists

A twist can complicate a story and make it harder for the characters to complete their goals.

Twists

Side Quests

You can also add one or more side quests to your adventure, taking the characters off the main story path defined by location or events. Side quests are peripheral to the characters' primary goal, but successfully completing a side quest might provide a benefit toward completing the primary goal.

Side Quests

Creating Encounters

Encounters are the individual scenes in the larger story of your adventure.

First and foremost, an encounter should be fun for the players. Second, it shouldn’t be burden for you to run. Beyond that, a well-crafted encounter usually has a straightforward objective as well as some connection to the overarching story of your campaign, building on the encounters that precede it while foreshadowing encounters yet to come.

An encounter has one of three possible outcomes: the characters succeed, the characters partly succeed, or the characters fail. The encounter needs to account for all three possibilities, and the outcome needs to have consequences so that the players feel like their successes and failures matter.

Character Objectives

When players don’t know what they’re supposed to do in a given encounter, anticipation and excitement can quickly turn to boredom and frustration. A transparent objective alleviates the risk of players losing interest.

For example, if the overall story of your adventure involves a quest to deliver a priceless relic to a remote monastery, each encounter along the way is an opportunity to introduce a smaller objective that moves the quest forward. Encounters during the trip might see the adventurers accosted by enemies determined to steal the relic, or by monsters that are constantly threatening the monastery.

Some players create their own objectives, which is to be expected and encouraged. It is, after all, as much the players' campaign as yours. For example, a character might try to bribe enemies rather than fight them, or chase after a fleeing enemy to see where it goes.

Players who ignore objectives will have to deal with the consequences, which is another important facet of encounter design.

Sample Objectives

The following objectives can be used as foundations for encounters. Although these objectives focus on a single encounter during an adventure, using the same objective in multiple encounters allows you to combine those encounters into a larger obstacle or problem the adventurers must overcome.

Make Peace

The characters must convince two opposing groups (or their leaders) to end the conflict that embroils them. As a complication, the characters might have enemies on one or both of the opposing sides, or some other group or individual might be instigating the conflict to further its own ends.

Protect an NPC or Object

The characters must act as bodyguards or protect some object in their custody. As a complication, the NPC under the party’s protection might be cursed, diseased, prone to panic attacks, too young or too old to fight, or apt to risk the lives of the adventurers through dubious decisions. The object the adventurers have sworn to protect might be sentient, cursed, or difficult to transport.

Retrieve an Object

The adventurers must gain possession of a specific object in the area of the encounter, preferably before combat finishes. As a complication, enemies might desire the object as much as the adventurers do, forcing both parties to fight for it.

Run a Gauntlet

The adventurers must pass through a dangerous area. This objective is similar to retrieving an object insofar as reaching the exit is a higher priority than killing opponents in the area. A time limit adds a complication, as does a decision point that might lead characters astray. Other complications include traps, hazards, and monsters.

Sneak In

The adventurers need to move through the encounter area without making their enemies aware of their presence. Complications might ensue if they are detected.

Stop a Ritual

The plots of evil cult leaders, malevolent warlocks, and powerful fiends often involve rituals that must be foiled. Characters engaged in stopping a ritual must typically fight their way through evil minions before attempting to disrupt the ritual’s powerful magic. As a complication, the ritual might be close to completion when the characters arrive, imposing a time limit. Depending on the ritual, its completion might have immediate consequences as well.

Take Out a Single Target

The villain is surrounded by minions powerful enough to kill the adventurers. The characters can flee and hope to confront the villain another day, or they can try to fight their way through the minions to take out their target. As a complication, the minions might be innocent creatures under the villain’s control. Killing the villain means breaking that control, but the adventurers must endure the minions' attacks until they do.

Creating a Combat Encounter

When creating a combat encounter, let your imagination run wild and build something your players will enjoy. Once you have the details figured out, use this section to adjust the difficulty of the encounter.

Combat Encounter Difficulty

There are four categories of encounter difficulty.

Easy

An easy encounter doesn’t tax the characters' resources or put them in serious peril. They might lose a few hit points, but victory is pretty much guaranteed.

Medium

A medium encounter usually has one or two scary moments for the players, but the characters should emerge victorious with no casualties. One or more of them might need to use healing resources.

Hard

A hard encounter could go badly for the adventurers. Weaker characters might get taken out of the fight, and there’s a slim chance that one or more characters might die.

Deadly

A deadly encounter could be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat.

XP Thresholds by Character Level

Challenge Rating

When putting together an encounter or adventure, especially at lower levels, exercise caution when using monsters whose challenge rating is higher than the party’s average level. Such a creature might deal enough damage with a single action to take out adventurers of a lower level. For example, an ogre has a challenge rating of 2, but it can kill a 1st-level wizard with a single blow.

In addition, some monsters have features that might be difficult or impossible for lower-level characters to overcome. For example, a rakshasa has a challenge rating of 13 and is immune to spells of 6th level and lower. Spellcasters of 12th level or lower have no spells higher than 6th level, meaning that they won’t be able to affect the rakshasa with their magic, putting the adventurers at a serious disadvantage. Such an encounter would be significantly tougher for the party than the monster’s challenge rating might suggest.

Evaluating Encounter Difficulty

Use the following method to gauge the difficulty of any combat encounter.

1 Determine XP Thresholds

First, determine the experience point (XP) thresholds for each character in the party. The XP Thresholds by Character Level table below has four XP thresholds for each character level, one for each category of encounter difficulty. Use a character’s level to determine his or her XP thresholds.

Repeat this process for every character in the party.

2 Determine the Party’s XP Threshold

For each category of encounter difficulty, add up the characters' XP thresholds. This determines the party’s XP threshold. You’ll end up with four totals, one for each category of encounter difficulty.

For example, if your party includes three 3rd-level characters and one 2nd-level character, the party’s totaled XP thresholds would be as follows:

• Easy: 275 XP (75 + 75 + 75 + 50)
• Medium: 550 XP (150 + 150 + 150 + 100)
• Hard: 825 XP (225 + 225 + 225 + 150)
• Deadly: 1,400 XP (400 + 400 + 400 + 200)

Record the totals, because you can use them for every encounter in your adventure.

3 Total the Monsters' XP

Add up the XP for all of the monsters in the encounter. Every monster has an XP value in its stat block.

4 Modify Total XP for Multiple Monsters

If the encounter includes more than one monster, apply a multiplier to the monsters' total XP. The more monsters there are, the more attack rolls you’re making against the characters in a given round, and the more dangerous the encounter becomes. To correctly gauge an encounter’s difficulty, multiply the total XP of all the monsters in the encounter by the value given in the Encounter Multipliers table.

For example, if an encounter includes four monsters worth a total of 500 XP, you would multiply the total XP of the monsters by 2, for an adjusted value of 1,000 XP.

This adjusted value is not what the monsters are worth in terms of XP; the adjusted value’s only purpose is to help you accurately assess the encounter’s difficulty.

When making this calculation, don’t count any monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average challenge rating of the other monsters in the group unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter.

Encounter Multipliers

5 Compare XP

Compare the monsters' adjusted XP value to the party’s XP thresholds. The threshold that equals the adjusted XP value determines the encounter’s difficulty. If there’s no match, use the closest threshold that is lower than the adjusted XP value.

For example, an encounter with one bugbear and three hobgoblins has an adjusted XP value of 1,000, making it a hard encounter for a party of three 3rd-level characters and one 2nd-level character (which has a hard encounter threshold of 825 XP and a deadly encounter threshold of 1,400 XP).

Party Size

The preceding guidelines assume that you have a party consisting of three to five adventurers.

If the party contains fewer than three characters, apply the next highest multiplier on the Encounter Multipliers table. For example, apply a multiplier of 1.5 when the characters fight a single monster, and a multiplier of 5 for groups of fifteen or more monsters.

If the party contains six or more characters, use the next lowest multiplier on the table. Use a multiplier of 0.5 for a single monster.

Multipart Encounters

Sometimes an encounter features multiple enemies that the party doesn’t face all at once. For example, monsters might come at the party in waves.

For such encounters, treat each discrete part or wave as a separate encounter for the purpose of determining its difficulty.

A party can’t benefit from a short rest between parts of a multipart encounter, so they won’t be able to spend Hit Dice to regain hit points or recover any abilities that require a short rest to regain. As a rule, if the adjusted XP value for the monsters in a multipart encounter is higher than one-third of the party’s expected XP total for the adventuring day (see “The Adventuring Day,” below), the encounter is going to be tougher than the sum of its parts.

Building Encounters on a Budget

You can build an encounter if you know its desired difficulty. The party’s XP thresholds give you an XP budget that you can spend on monsters to build easy, medium, hard, and deadly encounters. Just remember that groups of monsters eat up more of that budget than their base XP values would indicate (see step 4).

For example, using the party from step 2, you can build a medium encounter by making sure that the adjusted XP value of the monsters is at least 550 XP (the party’s threshold for a medium encounter) and no more than 825 XP (the party’s threshold for a hard encounter). A single monster of challenge rating 3 (such as a manticore or owlbear) is worth 700 XP, so that’s one possibility. If you want a pair of monsters, each one will count for 1.5 times its base XP value. A pair of dire wolves (worth 200 XP each) have an adjusted XP value of 600, making them a medium encounter for the party as well.

To assist with this approach, appendix B presents a list of all monsters in the Monster Manual organized by challenge rating.

The Adventuring Day

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

In the same way you figure out the difficulty of an encounter, you can use the XP values of monsters and other opponents in an adventure as a guideline for how far the party is likely to progress.

For each character in the party, use the Adventuring Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party’s adventuring day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.

Adventuring Day XP

Short Rests

In general, over the course of a full adventuring day, the party will likely need to take two short rests, about one-third and two-thirds of the way through the day.

Modifying Encounter Difficulty

An encounter can be made easier or harder based on the choice of location and the situation. Increase the difficulty of the encounter by one step (from easy to medium, for example) if the characters have a drawback that their enemies don’t. Reduce the difficulty by one step if the characters have a benefit that their enemies don’t. Any additional benefit or drawback pushes the encounter one step in the appropriate direction. If the characters have both a benefit and a drawback, the two cancel each other out. Situational drawbacks include the following:

• The whole party is surprised, and the enemy isn’t.
• The enemy has cover, and the party doesn’t.
• The characters are unable to see the enemy.
• The characters are taking damage every round from some environmental effect or magical source, and the enemy isn’t.
• The characters are hanging from a rope, in the midst of scaling a sheer wall or cliff, stuck to the floor, or otherwise in a situation that greatly hinders their mobility or makes them sitting ducks.

Situational benefits are similar to drawbacks except that they benefit the characters instead of the enemy.

Fun Combat Encounters

The following features can add more fun and suspense to a combat encounter:

• Terrain features that pose inherent risks to both the characters and their enemies, such as a frayed rope bridge and pools of green slime
• Terrain features that provide a change of elevation, such as pits, stacks of empty crates, ledges, and balconies
• Features that either inspire or force characters and their enemies to move around, such as chandeliers, kegs of gunpowder or oil, and whirling blade traps
• Enemies in hard-to-reach locations or defensive positions, so that characters who normally attack at range are forced to move around the battlefield
• Different types of monsters working together

Random Encounters

As characters explore a wilderness area or dungeon complex, they are bound to encounter the unexpected. Random encounters are a way to deliver the unexpected. They are usually presented in the form of a table. When a random encounter occurs, you roll a die and consult the table to determine what the party encounters.

Some players and DMs view random encounters in an adventure as time-wasters, yet well-designed random encounters can serve a variety of useful purposes:

• Create urgency Adventurers don’t tend to dawdle if the threat of random encounters is hanging over their heads. Wanting to avoid wandering monsters creates a strong incentive to look for a safe place to rest. (Rolling dice behind the DM screen can often accomplish this even without an actual encounter.)
• Establish atmosphere The appearance of thematically linked creatures as random encounters helps to create a consistent tone and atmosphere for an adventure. For example, an encounter table filled with bats, wraiths, giant spiders, and zombies creates a sense of horror, and tells the adventurers to prepare for battle with even more powerful creatures of the night.
• Drain character resources Random encounters can drain the party’s hit points and spell slots, leaving the adventurers feeling underpowered and vulnerable. This creates tension, as players are forced to make decisions based on the fact that their characters aren’t at full strength.
• Provide assistance Some random encounters can benefit the characters instead of hindering or harming them. Helpful creatures or NPCs might provide the adventurers with useful information or assistance when they need it most.
• Add interest Random encounters can reveal details about your world. They can foreshadow danger or provide hints that will help the adventurers prepare for the encounters to come.
• Reinforce campaign themes Random encounters can remind the players of the major themes of the campaign. For example, if your campaign features an ongoing war between two nations, you might design random encounter tables to reinforce the ever-present nature of the conflict. In friendly territory, your tables might include bedraggled troops returning from battle, refugees fleeing invading forces, heavily guarded caravans full of weapons, and lone messengers on horseback riding for the front lines. While characters are in hostile territory, the tables might include battlefields littered with the recently slain, armies of evil humanoids on the march, and improvised gibbets holding the bodies of deserters who tried to flee the conflict.

Random encounters should never be tiresome to you or your players. You don’t want the players to feel as if they aren’t making progress because another random encounter brings their progress to a halt whenever they try to move forward. Likewise, you don’t want to spend time distracted by random encounters that add nothing to the adventure narrative or that interfere with the overall pace you’re trying to set.

Not every DM likes to use random encounters. You might find that they distract from your game or are otherwise causing more trouble than you want. If random encounters don’t work for you, don’t use them.

Triggering Random Encounters

Because you want random encounters to build on the intended narrative of a game session, not compete with it, you should choose the placement of those encounters carefully. Think about a random encounter under any of the following circumstances:

• The players are getting off track and slowing down the game.
• The characters stop for a short or long rest.
• The characters are undertaking a long, uneventful journey.
• The characters draw attention to themselves when they should be keeping a low profile.

Checking for Random Encounters

You decide when a random encounter happens, or you roll. Consider checking for a random encounter once every hour, once every 4 to 8 hours, or once during the day and once during a long rest-whatever makes the most sense based on how active the area is.

If you roll, do so with a d20. If the result is 18 or higher, a random encounter occurs. You then roll on an appropriate random encounter table to determine what the adventurers meet, re-rolling if the die result doesn’t make sense given the circumstances.

Random encounter tables might be provided as part of the adventure you’re running, or you can use the information in this chapter to build your own. Creating your own tables is the best way to reinforce the themes and flavor of your home campaign.

Not every run-in with another creature counts as a random encounter. Encounter tables don’t usually include rabbits hopping through the undergrowth, harmless rats scurrying through dungeon halls, or average citizens walking through the streets of a city. Random encounter tables present obstacles and events that advance the plot, foreshadow important elements or themes of the adventure, and provide fun distractions.

Creating Random Encounter Tables

Creating your own random encounter tables is straightforward. Determine what sort of encounters might occur in a given dungeon area, figure out the likelihood of a particular encounter occurring, then arrange the results. An “encounter” in this case could be a single monster or NPC, a group of monsters or NPCs, a random event (such as an earth tremor or a parade), or a random discovery (such as a charred corpse or a message scrawled on a wall).

Assemble Your Encounters

Once you’ve established a location through which the adventurers are likely to pass, be it a wilderness area or dungeon complex, make a list of creatures that might be found wandering there. If you’re not sure which creatures to include, appendix B has lists of monsters organized by terrain type.

For a sylvan woodland, you might create a table that includes centaurs, faerie dragons, pixies, sprites, dryads, satyrs, blink dogs, elks, owlbears, treants, giant owls, and a unicorn. If elves inhabit the forest, the table might also include elf druids and elf scouts. Perhaps gnolls are threatening the woods, so adding gnolls and hyenas to the table would be a fun surprise for players. Another fun surprise would be a wandering predator, such as a displacer beast that likes to hunt blink dogs.

The table could also use a few random encounters of a less monstrous nature, such as a grove of burned trees (the handiwork of the gnolls), an ivy-covered elven statue, and a plant with glowing berries that turn creatures invisible when ingested.

When choosing monsters for a random encounter table, try to imagine why the monsters would be encountered outside their lairs. What is each monster up to? Is it on patrol? Hunting for food? Searching for something? Also consider whether a creature is moving stealthily as it travels through the area.

As with planned encounters, random encounters are more interesting when they happen in memorable locations. Outdoors the adventurers might be crossing a forest clearing when they encounter a unicorn or be pushing through a dense section of forest when they come across a nest of spiders. Crossing a desert, characters might discover an oasis haunted by wights or a rocky outcropping on which a blue dragon perches.

Probabilities

A random encounter table can be created in a number of ways, ranging from simple (roll 1d6 for one of six possible encounters) to complicated (roll percentile dice, modify for time of day, and cross-index the modified number with the dungeon level). The sample encounter table presented here uses a range of 2 to 20 (nineteen entries total), generated using 1d12 + 1d8. The probability curve ensures that encounters appearing in the middle of the table are more likely to occur than encounters placed at the beginning or end of the table. A roll of 2 or 20 is rare (about a 1 percent chance of either), while each of the rolls from 9 to 13 occurs a little over 8 percent of the time.

The Sylvan Forest Encounters table is an example of a random encounter table that implements the ideas mentioned above. Creature names in bold refer to stat blocks that appear in the Monster Manual.

Sylvan Forest Encounters

Random Encounter Challenge

Random encounters need not be level-appropriate challenges for the adventurers, but it’s considered bad form to slaughter a party using a random encounter, since most players consider this ending to be an unsatisfying one.

Not all random encounters with monsters need to be resolved through combat. A 1st-level party of adventurers could have a random encounter with a young dragon circling above a forest canopy in search of a quick meal, but the characters should have the option to hide or bargain for their lives if the dragon spots them. Similarly, the party might encounter a stone giant roaming the hills, but it might have no intention of harming anyone. In fact, it might shy away from the party because of its reclusive nature. The giant might attack only characters who annoy it.