The Vault of the Drow, the Tomb of Horrors, the Forge of Fury, and the Keep on the Shadowfell—all those names describe two things: adventures published over the last 30 years of D&D history, and the settings in which those adventures take place. One element that all the best adventures share is a compelling and evocative setting. When you’re building an adventure, think about what makes an awe-inspiring and memorable setting. One good way to think about setting is to work backward: imagine a great climactic battle against the ultimate villain of the adventure. You don’t need to have any idea who that villain is just yet, but thinking about the setting might give you ideas. Of course, if you have a villain in mind, that might inspire setting ideas as well. If you want your players fighting a red dragon in that last encounter, something volcanic or otherwise fiery is a good starting point. Alternatively, if some fantastic terrain inspires you, run with that. Perhaps you want to set that great climactic battle in an enormous Underdark cavern where two mighty armies of drow clashed centuries ago, staining the rock with their accursed blood. From that starting point, you could build an expansive Underdark adventure that eventually leads the characters into that cavern and its blood rock.

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TYPES OF SETTINGS

Adventure settings in the D&D world tend to fall into four categories. The first consideration in thinking about a setting is what type of setting you want: an underground “dungeon,” a wilderness environment, a city or other settlement, or a fantastic different world (or plane of existence).

Many D&D adventures revolve around a dungeon setting. That’s why the game is called DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. The word “dungeon” might conjure images of dry, bare stone corridors with manacles on the walls, but dungeons in the D&D game also include great halls built into the walls of a volcanic crater, natural caverns extending for miles beneath the surface of the earth, and ruined castles that provide gateways to other planes. Underground settings are such a staple of D&D adventures because dungeon environments are cleanly defined, separated from the outside world and set apart as a special, magical environment. More important, dungeons physically embody good adventure design: they offer choices (branching passages and doorways) but not too many choices. They’re limited environments that clearly define the options available. The rooms and corridors constrain the characters’ movement, but the characters can explore them in any order they choose, so they have a feeling of control and meaningful choices. Many dungeons are ancient ruins, long abandoned by their original creators and now inhabited only by monsters looking for underground lairs or humanoids setting up temporary camps. Some undying remnants of the original inhabitants might also linger in the ruins—undead, constructs, or immortal guardians set in place to keep watch over treasures or other important locations. The dungeon’s rooms might contain hints of their previous purpose—rotting remnants of furnishings piled together into kruthik nests, or faded tapestries hanging behind a crumbling throne. Rumors of ancient treasures or artifacts, historical information, or magical locations might lure adventurers into these ruins. Other dungeons are currently occupied, presenting a very different sort of environment for the characters to explore. Whether they originally created the dungeon or not, intelligent creatures now inhabit it, calling its chambers and passages home. It might be a fortress, a temple, an active mine, a prison, or a headquarters. The inhabitants organize guards to defend it, and they respond intelligently to the characters’ attacks, especially if the characters withdraw and return later. Characters might fight or sneak their way into an occupied dungeon to discover the secrets of an underground cult, stop the orcs from pillaging nearby towns, or prevent a mad necromancer from animating undead legions to conquer the barony. Or they might seek to reclaim the ancient dwarven fortress from the goblins that have taken it over, making it safe for habitation once again. Sometimes dungeons are built to hold something— whether a mighty artifact or the body of a revered ruler—and keep it safe. A dungeon might also serve as a prison for a powerful demon or primordial that couldn’t be destroyed at the time. These dungeons are usually sealed, often trap-laden, and sometimes inhabited only by monsters that can survive the passage of ages—undead, constructs, immortal guardians, devils, or angels. Some dungeons aren’t built at all. They’re sprawling networks of natural caverns stretching deep below the earth. Taken as a whole, this expanse of naturally occurring dungeon is called the Underdark. It is an almost lightless region of subterranean wilderness. Within those caverns, adventurers might find cities of the drow, ruins of long-forgotten dwarf strongholds, or the hidden tomb of a mind flayer lich. Many kinds of monsters call the Underdark home, making it among the most dangerous areas of the world. Finally, many dungeons combine two or more of these elements. For example, imagine that the dwarves of an ancient civilization built a sprawling subterranean complex where they thrived in splendor for many years. Then they dug too deep. Their tunnels opened into the natural caverns of the Underdark. Some horrible evil emerged from the lightless depths and destroyed the dwarven civilization. Centuries later, most of the original complex lies in ruins. Here and there among its sprawling passages, though, ragged bands of degenerate dwarves, enclaves of scheming drow, and a tribe of savage orcs have made their homes, and they live in a perpetual state of war against each other. Somewhere in the ruins is the tomb of the last dwarf queen, said to hold the mighty Axe of the Dwarvish Lords. Lastly, the ruins still connect to the Underdark. All four dungeon types come together in this single dungeon.

Not every adventure has to take place in a dungeon. A trek across the wilderness to the heart of the Blackmire or the Desert of Desolation could be an exciting adventure in itself. When designing a wilderness adventure, it helps to think of the great outdoors as a big dungeon. The characters should have a destination in mind, so that helps make the route they will take predictable. Roads, paths, and terrain features can channel the PCs along predefined paths, rather than allowing them to wander freely around a vast and open map. The PCs still have plenty of choices—from simple choices such as whether to walk along the bottom or the top of a gorge, to larger choices such as whether to skirt the edge of the swamp or cut through the middle, taking days off the journey but exposing the characters to greater danger. In cases where the terrain doesn’t channel the characters to specific locations, think about the adventure in more of an event-based structure, with encounters connected by a flowchart of events and choices rather than defined by geographical location. See “EventBased Adventures” on page 115 for more ideas. Most wilderness areas should seem familiar but have fantastic elements. The creatures flitting among the branches of the Wyrmclaw Forest might be tiny dragonets rather than birds. They’re not any more dangerous than birds (until the characters encounter a needlefang drake swarm), but they add a fantastic and flavorful element to the wilderness environment. Once in a while, though, break up the familiar wilderness with truly wondrous locations: trees that hover above the ground and send roots snaking through the air, auroras of many-colored light dancing in the depths of a lake, coldfire flames cascading across the surface of a glacier, or a swamp filled with pools of acid.

From the smallest village to the largest metropolis, urban environments offer limitless opportunities for adventure. Humanoids make the most cunning and devious foes, and NPCs found within the boundaries of the adventurers’ hometown are often the most memorable villains. Urban settings need not be mundane—not any more than wilderness or dungeon areas. Wealthy citizens might ride hippogriffs between the towers of the upper-class families. A mysterious local wizard might live in a tower floating above the city. The storm sewers might crawl with wererats or hide a secret enclave of aboleths. The baron might be a rakshasa or a doppelganger. Magic and danger don’t always come from normal humanoid threats. Adventures based in settled areas don’t usually focus on exploring a location and killing its inhabitants. However, cities can hold mini-dungeons (such as the aboleths’ sewers or the floating tower of the rakshasas) that combine elements of underground and urban settings. City adventures also work well as event-based adventures in which the setting is a backdrop for the unfolding drama.

The world is not the only dangerous place full of dungeons. The Shadowfell and the Feywild hold countless opportunities for even low-level adventurers to seek treasure and glory, and the Elemental Chaos and the dominions of the Astral Sea are proving grounds for the most powerful characters. These different worlds offer the most magical, fantastic settings for D&D adventures. The Elemental Chaos is full of mountains floating through the air, stone slabs drifting on rivers of liquid fire, and clouds of pure lightning. The dominions of the gods in the Astral Sea are as different as the deities themselves, from Zehir’s Endless Night to Pelor’s shining palace at the pinnacle of Celestia. Planar adventures sometimes resemble wilderness adventures with more fantastic terrain. However, such adventures have plenty of opportunities for dungeon exploration—the fey Labyrinth of Eldren Faere or the Endless Crypts of Morth Dire in the Shadowfell—and even urban encounters in the City of Brass or the Bright City.

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SETTING PERSONALITY

A great way to think about the setting for your adventure is to imagine its personality. A dungeon built as a hobgoblin stronghold has a very different flavor from an ancient temple-city inhabited by yuan-ti, and both are different from a place where the alien energy of the Far Realm has warped and twisted all life into aberrant forms. A setting’s personality lends its flavor to the adventure as a whole. Deciding on a setting’s overall personality helps you create all the little details that make it come to life. That said, here and there you can throw in elements that don’t fit the overall theme. While fighting their way through the hobgoblin stronghold, if the characters find a secret door leading to an ancient shrine to Bahamut built by the dungeon’s original creators, they get a sense of a bigger world beyond their adventures, a taste of history, and a larger view of the dungeon’s place in the world.

A setting’s creator and current inhabitants can have a profound impact on the personality of that setting. A forest haunted by ettercaps and spiders is a very different place from one where the Feywild draws near the world and the fey lead their hounds on monthly wild hunts. An ancient dwarven stronghold takes on a different flavor when a minotaur cult moves into its ruins. When large creatures create dungeons or cities, they build things to scale. A fortress crafted by titans can be hard for humans to negotiate, even if only goblins and dark creepers inhabit it now. On the flip side, adventurers (except halflings) find a kobold warren to be close quarters. The difference between grand battles in the stately halls of the titan ruins and running skirmishes in the cramped tunnels of the kobolds leads to a marked difference in the personality of those two settings. Some other fundamental elements of a setting’s structure can be shaped by the nature of its creator. A lost temple of the yuan-ti, choked by overgrown jungle plants, might use ramps instead of stairs. A place carved by beholders would use empty shafts to connect different levels. Flying creatures in general approach the construction and use of their lairs very differently from land-bound creatures, potentially creating challenging dungeons for adventurers to explore. A setting’s environment might also be closely related to who built it or lives in it. A fortress built into the side of an active volcano might have been built by fire giants or be inhabited by salamanders. A towering palace of ice in the frigid northern wastes could be the work of ice archons, or it might be a temple to the Raven Queen. These are cases in which distinguishing between the setting’s original creator and its current inhabitants can be very interesting. Perhaps dwarves built the volcano fortress, but they were wiped out when the volcano erupted a hundred years ago. Now the volcano is home to salamanders. Or its current inhabitants could be relatively normal creatures that rely on magic rituals to keep them protected from the volcano’s heat and ongoing activity. Cultural details, at both a large scale and a small one, bring a setting’s personality to life in your players’ minds. Great bearded faces carved on the doors of a dwarven stronghold (perhaps defaced by the orcs who live there now), spiderweb decorations in a citadel of the drow, grisly battle trophies impaled on spears around a gnoll camp, and a statue of Pelor in the ruined temple are all details that tell the PCs something about who built the setting or who currently inhabits it. Cultural details such as these can also tie different settings together, perhaps suggesting an interesting storyline. Imagine that in three different dungeons, all the gold coins the characters find were minted by the ancient tiefling empire of Bael Turath. Does this cultural detail hint at some historical element linking these three dungeons? A more dramatic sort of cultural detail has to do with the types of rooms or buildings you might find in the setting. A drow stronghold might have pens for slaves, a number of torture chambers, and elaborate temples to Lolth. A kobold warren or dragonborn ruin might have egg incubation chambers. An expansive complex with a dusty library and museum has a different feel from one full of armories, barracks, and prisons.

Many of the elements just discussed speak to the setting’s history. The race or culture that originally created a dungeon gives it a great deal of its personality, and the history of the site between its creation and the present is no less significant. The D&D world has a glorious history of expansive empires and prosperity. In the present day, the empires of the past lie in ruin, replaced by petty baronies and vast expanses of lawless wilderness. This world has endless opportunities for adventure: ancient ruins to explore, lost treasures to be recovered, savage hordes to drive away from settled lands, and terrible monsters haunting the dark places of the world. The exact history of your own campaign world, of course, is yours to design if you so choose, but these basic assumptions make for a world of opportunity from the adventurer’s point of view. Does this dungeon hold the last ancient monster of its kind, a powerful being that fiercely defends its last stronghold? Were its long-dead rulers the last known possessors of the Regalia of the Seven Kingdoms? Was it built as a prison for a primordial or demon prince whose influence still lingers in the place? Do the residents of the city in the remote jungle not know that the empire of Nerath has fallen? These are all ways you can tie the history of a setting into adventures you place there, shaping its flavor and feel. A word of warning: Let background be background. Unless the background is essential to your adventure, don’t spend a lot of time detailing the history of a dungeon in exhaustive detail. Use history to spice up the setting and provide the interesting details that help bring it to life in the players’ minds, then move on to focus on the adventure.

Sometimes a setting’s surroundings give it all the personality it needs. A ruined castle in the Shadowfell, a monastery drifting through the Elemental Chaos, or the classic dungeon built into an active volcano are all settings that have a distinct personality regardless of their history or inhabitants. You might find inspiration in the jungle-choked ruins of Angkor Wat or decide to create a coral labyrinth in a tropical sea. The environment in these cases is the primary element of the setting’s personality, which you can then enhance by choosing the right inhabitants and creating an appropriate history.

A subtle but important way to communicate your setting’s personality to the players is through the background sensory details you use in your descriptions—the ambience the characters experience in the place. Remember to consider all five senses, as well as harder-to-define gut feelings and emotional responses characters might have to the setting. As the characters enter a natural cavern complex, they might see a dim blue glow radiating from the walls, hear the distant dripping of water, smell the slightly acrid scent of wet earth, and feel the cool air even as the weight of the earth and stone above them seems to press down on their spirits. When they creep down the stairs of an ancient crypt, describe the dust-covered cobwebs, skittering beetles, dry air, and perhaps the haunting sense of a presence deep within the tomb that watches their every move, anticipating their arrival. You don’t need to pile atmospheric details into your very first description of an adventure setting. Make a note of the ambience of the place, perhaps listing a variety of details that might appear to every sense, and break them out to add some flair to your narratives as the adventure progresses.

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SETTING DETAILS

You can design the details of settings in your adventures in three ways: the natural method, the staged method, and the best method. The strengths of the first two methods fuse to create the best method while countering their weaknesses.

With this method, you picture a location in your mind and draw it out on your map. If the goblins live in a ruined castle, you take care to design a castle first, add in crumbled walls and ruined areas to reflect its age, and then determine how the goblins live in the place. Logic, story, and realism guide your design. The areas you map have a history, they were built for a purpose, and those two factors guide your design. The natural method is the best method because it creates realistic, believable environments that reflect the story and your campaign world. The natural method is the worst method because it can cause you to worry too much about realism, especially realism that is lost on the players. Taken too far, worrying about “real” encounter areas can force you to build boring ones. Remember, you are the creator and final arbiter of the game, not a rule, someone else’s sense of realism, or any other outside factor.

This method embraces the encounter area as a setting for a game. It sets aside worries about realism or a sense that a location existed as something other than the place for a fight. With the staged method, you treat encounter areas as stages for the action, just like a director or novelist. The only thing that matters is how much excitement and fun the encounter yields. The staged method is the best way to go because it promotes action, adventure, and excitement. It forces you to design toward a clear goal of making things fun. The staged method is the worst approach because it places artifice above everything. Like a paper-thin façade, it works as long as no one pushes against it. If the players stop to think about the area, or if you try to make sense of it in terms of story and narrative, it falls flat.

The aptly named best method is a fusion of the natural and staged approaches. Build encounter areas within the context of the campaign’s story and history, but keep an eye out for creating fun, interesting encounters. In truth, the two methods are completely compatible, particularly when you add monsters to the mix. For instance, a ruined castle might have an entrance gate with battlements above it. The goblin lord of the place assigns archers to watch the gate from this position. When the PCs attack, the archers rain arrows down upon them while the characters must rush through the gate and up the crumbling stairs to reach the goblins. A dungeon filled with puzzles and weird monsters was built that way because Emperor Darvan the Mad constructed it to defend his most valuable treasures. The alleyways around the syndicate’s headquarters are rife with traps and ambush points because the Lord of Shadows is always ready for an attack by his rivals. Encounter areas never spring from a vacuum. They are built, designed, or chosen by monsters and intelligent creatures for a reason. Even wholly natural terrain lends itself to this approach. While the characters travel along the road, bandits attack when they reach an area of rough ground that offers plenty of cover for the bandit archers. A bulette hunts in a box canyon, trapping animals in a dead end.

The rooms in a dungeon setting show what the place was built for, and they show how the inhabitants live their lives. When you add rooms to a site, consider the story they tell about the place and its dwellers. Rooms, as well as the arrangement of them, should make sense within the context of their intended purpose and current use. Don’t forget that fantastic elements can be a part of the scene—illusions instead of art, or unusual passages and rooms for creatures that have a distinctly nonhuman body or mindset.

In natural settings, whether outdoors or underground, large-scale terrain features tend to define the environment. In outdoor environments, look for fantasy art or even real-world photography that depicts dramatic natural settings. A forest does not need to be just a battle grid dotted with trees and undergrowth when even a casual Internet search can bring up dozens of beautiful pictures of dramatic forest landscapes. Not only do your players have a more vivid scene to imagine, but an encounter can also become a lot more interesting when it takes place on a forested hill with a stream tumbling down its rocky side.

Even in a fantastic city, a lot of buildings are mundane places—the ropemakers, tanneries, and provisioners’ shops that support the day-to-day life of the city’s people. Those don’t usually make great adventure sites, though. Use them for color as characters move through the city. The types of businesses found in a city can say a lot about the city’s personality. (Does the city have a slave auction yard or abundant hostels where the poor can find food and shelter? Does it host three temples to Bahamut, or a great fortress-temple to Bane?) Look to more exotic and interesting sites for the important scenes in an urban adventure. Sites that can take a role as part of an encounter are always a good choice—a mill with wheels and gears turning a giant millstone is terrain that smart players (or monsters) can use to their advantage. Moving parts, built-in hazards, and verticality—the risk of falling with a wrong step—make city sites more interesting than a stereotypical tavern brawl.

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FURNISHINGS AND FEATURES

Spice up dungeon or city rooms with furnishings or other minor features whose primary purpose is flavor. Any detail you add to a room not only brings the setting to more vivid life in your players’ minds, it can also spur unusual and creative ideas in encounters, such as tipping over a brazier of burning coals or pulling a tapestry down over opponents. (Refer to “Actions the Rules Don’t Cover” in Chapter 3 on page 42 when these situations come up.) Some of these features might count as difficult terrain or grant cover (see “Encounter Settings” on page 60 in Chapter 4).

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MAPPING THE SITE

Once you’ve come up with a concept for your adventure’s setting, you probably need a map. An adventure map can take many forms—from an exquisitely detailed dungeon map that shows every feature in every 5-foot square to a sketchy outline of how one encounter might lead to one or two or three others, depending on the route the characters choose. Whatever your map looks like, it serves the fundamental purpose of mapping out your adventure, not just its setting. The map is a visual representation of how all the encounters that make up the adventure fit together. The map is also like a flowchart, in which each decision point (a branch in a corridor, a room with multiple exits) leads along a different course to new decision points. By looking at your map, you can tell where the characters’ decisions lead them. If they leave the room by the north door, you look at your map and see that it leads them into the great hall, lined with pillars, where the fire giant king holds court. If they leave by the secret door to the southeast, you look at the map and follow the secret tunnel as it winds to the hidden vaults below the great hall. Chapter 11 includes a short adventure with a dungeon map you can use as example and inspiration for your own maps. Each encounter also includes a map of the encounter area in greater detail. Although in the case of that adventure, the encounter areas are all close to each other in a relatively limited space, that doesn’t have to be true. Your adventure map could be circled numbers representing encounter areas with lines between them, and each line possibly representing hours or even days of travel. Your adventure might have decision points along those lines that aren’t encounter areas: “After about two hours, you reach a point where the passage splits. The left branch starts with a short flight of stairs and seems to lead gently upward beyond them, while the right branch slopes sharply downward. Which way do you go?” It is fine if your map glosses over long stretches of travel to keep the adventure moving. Sometimes an encounter map is literally a flowchart, when the setting is less important than the plot, and encounters are more like events. Decision points on such a map aren’t literal rooms with multiple exits, but they work just the same way: If the characters convince the baron to send soldiers to the pass, they lead a squad to the pass the next day, and their next encounter is with a group of hobgoblins in the pass. If they fail to convince the baron, their next encounter is a team of assassins sent by the vizier that attacks them that night.

When you’re setting out to draw a dungeon map, start with a blank sheet of graph paper. With one square on the graph paper representing 5 feet of distance, you can easily translate the encounter areas on your map to the battle grid when combat breaks out. Your map should include all the important features of a room, although flavor details can rest in descriptive text or notes rather than appearing on the map. Consider all the elements that apply from the following list.

MAP ELEMENTS

✦ Boundaries and walls

✦ Doors and passages

✦ Furnishings

✦ Hazards

✦ Numbers or letters for key locations

✦ Obstacles

✦ Secret areas

✦ Terrain

✦ Territory for factions

✦ Traps

Unless cartography is fun for you, don’t worry about the drawing quality in your mapping. Your map is a tool to help you keep track of the adventure and convey the setting to the players. It just needs to be clear and easy for you to use. Make notes on it that will help you describe the area and run the encounters. Map Symbols: You can use symbols to indicate map features. The map symbol illustration here shows one way to depict common features of adventure settings, but use whatever symbols work best for you.

When you map encounter areas, keep in mind that you’re going to have to transfer your map to the battle grid when the characters enter the area. Don’t make areas that are too big to fit on your table (or your gridded surface). If you use D&D Dungeon Tiles for your battle grid, consider building each area with the tiles first, then transferring it to the map. That way, you are sure you can build the location again when the encounter starts.

The key for your map is the substance of your adventure. For each room on the adventure map, your key describes what’s in the room—its physical features, as well as the encounter that waits there. The key turns a room sketched on graph paper with the numeral 1 in the middle of it into an encounter on the battle grid designed to entertain and intrigue your players.

ELEMENTS OF A KEY/ENCOUNTER DESCRIPTION

✦ Room description

✦ Monsters

✦ Traps

✦ Hazards

✦ Monster tactics

✦ Encounter XP value

✦ Treasure, if any

✦ Rules for terrain and features in the room

The encounter areas presented in Chapter 11 are reasonably well detailed, but you don’t necessarily need the same level of detail in your own adventures. Particularly if you don’t have a lot of time to prepare, it can be enough to jot quick notes about each encounter. Even so, try to include at least enough detail to spur you to give an expanded description when you’re running the encounter. Whatever format works best for your reference during the game is the format you should use. Some DMs like having a page neatly organized for each encounter, while others use index cards. Still others write the contents of each room directly on the map and don’t bother with a key at all, trusting their ability to improvise any further details. Your own preference is what matters, along with the preparation time you have available.

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OUTDOOR SETTINGS

A dungeon makes a great adventure setting because it offers choices without presenting too many options. The characters can turn right or left, and that choice can make a significant difference in the adventure, but they can’t go in a completely different direction than you planned for. Because the players’ options are limited, planning for all possibilities is easy. Just determine what’s in every dungeon room, and you’ve covered all your bases. By contrast, an outdoor setting seems to present limitless options. The players can move in any direction they want to over the trackless desert, and you might think you’d have to detail every square mile of the desert in order to be prepared for every possibility. Either that, or you design an encounter in an oasis, the characters miss the oasis because they wandered off course, and the result is a boring adventure with uninterrupted slogging across bare rock and dry sand. The solution is to think of an outdoor setting very much like you think about a dungeon. First, most terrain—even trackless desert—does present some clear pathways. The reason that roads seldom run straight is that they follow the contours of the land, finding the most level or otherwise easiest pathways across uneven ground. Valleys and ridges channel travel in a certain direction. Mountain ranges present a forbidding barrier except for natural or constructed passes. Even an apparently trackless desert has easier routes and harder ones—regions of wind-blasted rock that are easier to walk on than shifting sand. Second, you don’t have to be precise about where you place encounters on your outdoor maps. A part of your brain might cling to the realism of saying, “But the oasis is right there,” but the oasis is not there. The oasis isn’t real. It exists precisely where you need it to exist, which is in the path of the player characters as they make their way across the desert. It might be 80 miles into their journey, or however far they travel in three days. You might want to draw a sketch of an outdoor map for an adventure. However, keep it on the freeform side. Just as you do in a dungeon, think about decision points and encounter areas and how to connect them, rather than focusing on the exact terrain between. A decision point might be a fork in the road, or the choice to ford a river, continue down its closer bank, or build a raft and paddle downstream. The ford might lead to one encounter, while either walking or rowing downstream might lead to another. The adventure continues, no matter which route the characters choose. Thinking about outdoor adventures in this way presents some risk of overpreparing. If the characters’ goal is to get from one place to another, and the adventure is the encounters they have along the way, they’re significantly more likely to miss encounters you have planned than they are in a dungeon where they’re inclined to explore every room. You can approach this problem in two ways: You can grin and bear it, taking care not to put too much effort into each encounter and knowing that the characters will skip over some of them. Or, you can throw every encounter in the characters’ way, regardless of the choices they make. That might seem like railroading, but it’s not—at least, not any moreso than a normal dungeon is. As long as the players feel as though they’re making meaningful choices along the way, the end result can be that they go through the same encounters they would have if they would have made completely different choices. Their choices should influence the order in which the encounters occur, just as they do in a dungeon. For example, opponents from one encounter might flee and appear again as reinforcements in a later encounter. Another way to think about outdoor travel is as an extended skill challenge. The “Lost in the Wilderness” skill challenge example in Chapter 5 (page 79) shows how to make a journey through the wilds into an important part of an adventure. You can interrupt the skill challenge with combat encounters at several points along the way—the higher the complexity of the challenge, the longer it will take to complete, and thus the more often it is liable to be interrupted. Using the skill challenge system in this way makes the players feel as though the episode of outdoor travel is full of meaningful choices and a chance for their characters’ skills to matter in the game.

Present a variety of settings within both a single adventure and over the course of several adventures. It’s almost a cliché of the game, but one outdoor encounter on the way to the dungeon—or an outdoor encounter that leads the characters to the dungeon— can be an exciting way to lay the foundation of an adventure, cluing the players in to the nature of the threat they face. A mix of dungeon, outdoor, urban, and even planar adventuring also keeps a campaign interesting. You might even structure your campaign so that characters routinely travel the world, with one adventure in steamy tropical rainforest and the next set in the frozen tundra.

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EVENT-BASED ADVENTURES

If a good outdoor adventure map is a sort of abstraction of a dungeon map, then the “map” for a purely event-based adventure is even more so. But the idea of a dungeon map as flowchart is a great metaphor for how to structure an adventure around events and decisions instead of around physical space. An event-based adventure focuses on the things the characters do rather than the places they go. Each decision—as well as the outcome of each encounter—leads to direct consequences. Typically, event-based adventures rely heavily on skill challenges, particularly those that involve interactions with nonplayer characters. They might involve solving a mystery (which you might also think of as a logic puzzle), plunging into a tangled web of diplomacy and intrigue, or tracking down a hidden cult operating in the bell tower of the abandoned temple. An event based encounter is a great way to involve the actors, storytellers, and thinkers in your group, but you can keep slayers happy with frequent combat encounters thrown into the mix. The setting of an event-based adventure is often a city (though it can be anything). An event-based structure works well for urban adventures because you don’t have to map every building in the city. What’s important is whom the characters interact with. However, you can also use this structure for outdoor or dungeon encounters, particularly in cases where the opponents are organized and intelligent, rather than dumb brutes who lurk in their dungeon lairs until characters come along to fight. Consider an ancient ruin now inhabited by three different factions: yuan-ti in one quarter, minotaurs in another, and drow in the cellars, sewers, and caverns below. Such an adventure has an element of exploration, but more interesting is how the characters might play the three factions against each other, making the events of the adventure far more important than the setting—particularly since the inhabitants of the ruin move around regularly, rather than appearing in fixed encounter locations. Certain points on the event flowchart for your adventure might be sites—small dungeons or just city building. At those points, you set the flowchart “adventure map” aside and turn to a smaller map, let the characters explore that site and complete the encounters there, then return to the flowchart, following one branch or another depending on the outcome of those encounters. These mini-dungeons are a good way to vary the pace and feel of the adventure and so to appeal to different player motivations. Similarly, have encounter areas mapped for the combat encounters you do plan for an event-based adventure. Assassins might attack the characters anywhere in the city, when the time is right, but if you have a few interesting encounter maps available to choose from (a marketplace, a tavern, a warren of back alleys) you can pick the right one for the event when it occurs. Even more than in most adventures, the overall structure of an event-based adventure is essential. You want events to hook the characters in immediately, build excitement slowly, and reach a climactic moment, a crucial encounter. That crucial encounter might be an all-out fight against the mind flayer impersonating the baron or a final showdown with the castellan to determine the duke’s final decision, but it should be the most exciting and tension-filled encounter in the whole adventure. Pay close attention to the advice about good and bad structure (see page 101). It’s easy to bottleneck or railroad the players in an event-based adventure. Another useful tool for organizing an event-based adventure is with a timeline. Certain events might occur at specific times in the adventure regardless of the characters’ actions (a solar eclipse, a new nonplayer character arriving on the scene, a festival day, or some other event beyond the player characters’ control), or events on the timeline could trigger unless the characters manage to prevent them. A timeline is a great way to make sure an event-based adventure stays on track by adding new elements to the mix at regular intervals. It can also put time pressure on the characters to accomplish their goals before certain inevitable events occur. If the villains are scheming to assassinate the earl during the festival, the characters have a limited time to unravel the plot and stop it. Finally, have a few more-or-less random combat encounters prepared to kick-start the action if things start to bog down. Rather than drop a clue in the characters’ lap, have someone kick down their door and start a fight, dropping the clue in the process. That way, the players feel like they earned the clue, and the encounter also gets their adrenaline flowing and ratchets up the excitement a notch.