Adventure Design Blog

Hello, again.  As I had already established, I've been running role-playing games for about 35 years, now. And I've used all sorts of media (television, movies, books, etc.) as inspiration for my adventures. Today, we'll be covering the second paragraph of the adventure plot "Lost Highway" in the book "Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters" by the authors of GnomeStew.com.  It's a part of the "Recovery of a Lost One" dramatic situation located in the science fiction genre.  In this article, I'm going to be reskinning this sci-fi adventure plot to fit the D&D 5e fantasy gaming system. If you recall last week, we focused on transforming the first paragraph, which involved a mysterious AI discovered on an old website. The fantasy reskin replaces the AI with a mysterious magical scroll, the website with a retired, starving elven wizard named Almon Wildoak, and the AI's security interface with a terrifying demon-like be...

Hello, again.  As I had already established in my previous article, I've been running role-playing games for a very long time now, almost 35 years. And I've used all sorts of media (television, movies, books, etc.) as inspiration for my adventures. Today, we'll be covering the first paragraph of "Lost Highway" in the book "Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters" by the authors of GnomeStew.com.  It's a part of the "Recovery of a Lost One" dramatic situation located in the science fiction genre.  In this article, I'm going to be reskinning this sci-fi adventure plot to fit the D&D 5e fantasy gaming system.  The plot has a total of six paragraphs, so, let's dive in and see what we can do. As the first paragraph states:  "Examining an old website, the PCs discover an odd process running. Upon closer inspection, it appears to be an incredibly complex AI. Inspecting it causes it to open an interface and start asking...

Hello.  I've been running role-playing games for a very long time now, almost 35 years. And I've used all sorts of media (television, movies, books, etc.) as inspiration for my adventures, as one should. At one point (and the only time) early in my GMing career, I used a published adventure module.  However, I discovered one of my players easily had access to that module. My discovery: in one part of the module, that player corrected me on how the adventure should be run, which told me he knew what was coming.  I felt that player was cheating just to get a jump on the rest of the players. That was a mistake I have never made again. I scoured sourcebooks, created my own dungeons, made hybrids of know creatures, and tried my best to run a few stories, without much success.  And then I discovered "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons World Builder's Guidebook" by Richard Baker. One thing you should know about me is I love randomized tables.  The more random something is...