From 10 to 100 Pages, How I Wrote a DnD Adventure!

Total chaos, can’t breathe, crushing water everywhere, bubbles streaming past, darkness below, red glow of fire above. Sound is muffled, the panic is real. You struggle to breathe, to swim, heavy, sodden clothes trying to drag you down. Force yourself up, lungs burning, you need air. You refuse to drown here, push! You break the surface, gasping for breath, green and brown horizon tilting crazily, massive ship sinking all around you, salt stinging your eyes, trying to drown you. With grim determination you drive yourself through the wreckage, there, the soft beckoning pale beach … land! Grabbing fistfuls of wet sand, you claw yourself out of the water, coughing, blinking salt from your eyes as the final wedge of hull slips beneath the waves …

Not only did I write that piece of mucho cliche flavor text for the opening of any generic dnd or tabletop rpg session, but I formatted it for publishing and I’m gonna sell it.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we confront our fears of inferiority with a blind case of “I’m just gonna do this thing I wanna do – even if it’s been done a hundred times before.”

And yes the lighting is changing minute by minute today, it’s cloudy outside.

Anyway, it’s taken me quite a few years to get to this level of “just take a chance”.

All right, let’s into it. I wrote an adventure for DnD 5e – really, it’s usable for any tabletop rpg – and this is how the project came to fruition. Fruition. I kinda hate that word “fruition.” It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue does it? And it sounds like fruit, and it’s not, and … yeah. Fruition. I can’t even say it! That’s why I wrote it, apparently.

Anyway, this whole project started because I wanted to just make a quick little document to help me run a little adventure for a small group of first-time players. And at this point, I hadn’t run DnD in over 20 years. So I wanted to jot down a few notes, make a little contained area for these players to start out in and just have a simple little introductory adventure. “Containment” was a keyword for me. I didn’t want any railroading going on, I wanted the players to really feel like they could go anywhere, do anything they wanted without me having to spin up too many on-the-fly scenarios. And that meant I wanted a geographical area that wasn’t necessarily leave-able. That’s not a word, but you know what I mean. And of course a location that lends itself to this containment idea really well is an island.

The other keyword I had in mind from the very start was “in medias res”. In medias res means literally “into the midst of things”. This is not only one of my favorite ways of encountering stories, whether it’s books or movies or whatever, it’s also the best way to start a new campaign or new party of adventurers – basically the best way to start a first session. 

There are countless videos about this on YouTube, all of us talking about how we’ve basically outgrown the classic “you all meet at a tavern” sort of beginning, right? Starting a group of players, whether they’re dnd veterans or brand new … noobs, starting a group of players literally in the middle of an action sequence means the game is running from minute one. The players are starting right away with decision-making. Now, maybe working with an in medias res opening might make setting up how player characters have actually met or what brought them into that particular action scene a little tricky, but I do have a cool suggestion for this, we’ll get to that. To me, the important thing was to get the players engaged in gameplay as soon as possible. 

So of course I went with one of the most cliche openings ever – and to be honest, this whole adventure is … well, it’s kinda powered by giant cliches – the first being pirates. But hey, don’t gimme that look, you know as well as I do that you love pirates. We all do. But despite incorporating a bunch of cliches, I think the adventure developed and became more of it’s own thing by the end of production. 

The opening is that the party is literally in the middle of a ship exploding and sinking in the ocean. This group of disparate characters were all on a ship traveling somewhere and now they are all dragging themselves up onto a tropical beach. They see a pirate ship sailing off around the edge of this little bay and that’s it. What do you do?

So here’s my “what I think is a cool” suggestion: I made a note to myself to ask each player to write on the back of their character sheet one or two sentences explaining – briefly – WHY their character was traveling on a ship. They could literally make up anything they wanted to. And that actually works out really well. That little activity at the start of the game becomes a little bit of a kickstarter for character backgrounds, especially for new players who may or may not even know about creating character backgrounds. It also gives them something to either share with other characters in-game, or, just as good, something to keep from the other characters as their own character’s secret. Obviously as the DM I wanted to see everyone’s answer to the question so I could A) know a little bit about each character and B) start thinking about some details and plot lines that could come into play later in a campaign for each character.

So “in medias res” and “containment”, my two starting concepts. Shipwreck – island. Again, at this point, I was just trying to get something down in a notebook that I could run an adventure with. I knew my group was all brand new to role playing games, so something familiar like pirates is an easy way for them to kinda get ahold of the game conceptually and understand what’s going on, and the setting means we’re gonna need a map of the island. 

Now, of course I knew this island was gonna have some stuff on it other than the pirates, so another cliche – fishmen! That’s right, there’s gonna be fishmen to contend with as well as pirates. Cool, couple of things for the players to deal with. And of course the island is mysterious. Right? Mysterious islands are captivating even if they’re cliche – cause it’s the Mystery that’s captivating. Whatever’s gonna be discovered on that island doesn’t have to be cliche at all. But with the fishmen thing, I had a name for the island – and now, for the adventure: Mystfin Isle. 

I say that with such confidence like it such a fantastic title. Anyway, I like it. Mystfin Isle. 

So I was gonna draw a quick map of Mystfin Isle in Photoshop but I came across the Inkarnate site from my various YouTube watching and web surfing and they had a free trial. It looked like it’d be really fun to work with and I’d be able to create something way better looking than relying on my own stick-figure drawing skills. So I tried it out, found it to be pretty cool, dropped $25 bucks or whatever for an annual subscription and spent a few days – all right maybe a few weeks – building my Mystfin Isle map. 

It was while working on the map that a lot of the ideas for the larger adventure started to form. As soon as you draw, like a circle, and you say, players are gonna land here, well then you start thinking about what’s actually in the circle. What are they going to see, what are they going to encounter. So you draw a little pyramid and you say, “There’s a mountain.” But then because it’s on the map and players are gonna see it or go there, you gotta start thinking about what are they gonna encounter on the mountain. The whole process just sorta starts to steamroll.

And Inkarnate – which is not sponsored, I swear – has all these pre-fab textures and foliage and terrain you can paint onto your map. And at first I was just tripping out on the different trees I could paint all over, and the different kinds of mountains and hills. And then I found the pre-fab structures. And I was like, oh, there’d be a ruined temple on this map for sure. Right? Of course. Another perfect DnD cliche. But then you know I’m thinking about: what is this ruined temple? Who built it? Why’d they build it? What’s inside of it? So more ideas just started to bubble up and I was writing them down and pretty soon I had some cool little set pieces established.

Now, quick break here: I gotta put a spoiler warning in here for my current players – turn this video off, you guys haven’t escaped the island yet and you don’t want any spoilers. Which doesn’t matter anyway, the players I play with get outta everything with rope. It’s bizarre how much rope a DnD party can roam around with. They always, always have rope.

Anyway, another thing I’m a huge fan of are Tom Sawyer style underground caverns. I mean, who isn’t, right? So I was like, yes, let’s put an underground cavern system in there for the players to explore. This fit in with the whole fishmen thing, I figured they might live underground and maybe come up to the surface in patrols or scavenging parties. And of course, what’s more Goonies than underground rapids and waterfalls and great big underground lakes with glowing water plants and glow shrooms and glistermoss? Glistermoss is a word. I smithed it. It means moss that glistens. In the dark. It’s my glowing moss that provides light for my river cavern playground. 

Anyway, so then I was kinda building out this idea of the underground cave system and I thought it’d be cool if there was like a dungeon down there somewhere. I mean, it’s a Dungeons and Dragons adventure right? Gotta have a dungeon. So I figured there’d be some place down here to explore and here’s where some real world inspiration hit me. 

I’ve always been fascinated with the “Egyptian” pyramids. Those are the most sarcastic air quotes you’ve ever seen. I have no idea if Egyptians built those pyramids or not. But you know, what’s more Indiana Jones in our real world than the ancient pyramids? And no I don’t buy the ancient aliens thing. I do honestly question the commonly taught stuff about how and when they were built, but that’s a whole YouTube genre, right? so we’ll just sidestep that rabbit hole today. 

BUT – you knew there was a “but” coming – there’s a particular phenomenon that really plugged right into my dnd adventure: the granite boxes. If you haven’t heard of or seen these things, you gotta check ‘em out. Near the pyramids are these sites that contain these crazy big rectilinear boxes that basically seem like they’re machined outta granite. The tolerances of the angles and the smoothness of the finishes just flat out contradict any notion that they were carved with chisels or sanded down with … sand. Seriously, these boxes are nuts. In one particular example, it’s physically clear that the pyramid it’s under was built AROUND the box rather than the box being brought in, because all of the tunnels aren’t wide enough to fit the box. Check out the links below, they’re pretty fun. 

Anyway, I really like this idea of something ancient feeling bizarrely advanced in strange ways, so I modeled the “dungeon” – which is not really a dungeon – with this in mind and started describing everything as being built out of precisely etched panels of obsidian. So this entire dungeon space developed as I worked on it – meaning I’m just writing about it – it became what is now called The Atheneaum. Which, it turns out, was built a thousand years ago – cause you know, everything in DnD is a thousand years old, even though we all still wear the same fashion and fight with swords and daggers and no one invented anything new in the intervening millennia. But this is just our fantasy game, it’s not here to make sense, right? 

So then I started to think about what this Atheneaum structure was, who built it, what was it’s purpose. And basically what I came up with is really just sort of a DnD dwarven mage version of a We-Work building. 

But I had fun developing the Athenaeum and the Conclave of mages who built it and lived there. But then I was like, hmm, there’s all this cool stuff underground on the island, but the whole underground area could easily be missed, and I kinda want the PCs to at least become aware that this underground system exists, so how could I pseudo railroad them in a fun way. Quicksand. That’s right. Another perfect cliche for a mysterious tropical jungle island. I looked up some quicksand rules and they’re out there, typically pretty simple, like combined Strength checks or whatever, but that just seemed boring. And also, easily beatable. I actually want a PC to drown in the quicksand on Mystfin Isle. Because, they won’t drown for real, they’ll become submerged and then fall through the bottom of the pit and then fall another hundred or so feet into the middle of a great big underground lake. Now that’s fun, right? Say yes. Say it’s fun.

Now, I did a traditional sorta dungeon floor map for the Atheneaum in Procreate on the iPad. And then stumbling around in the Procreate menus, I discovered a super cool feature: the ability to pull up a guide overlay. And you can set the guide overlay to almost anything you want, including an isometric view. I love all different kinds of maps and isometric ones are pretty rad, so I was like, oh! I wanna draw an isometric map for something. What on the island needs a map? I looked around, and there, the temple! The temple needs a map. Duh! The temple, by the way, is called the Ruined Basilica in the adventure. Cause, you know, temple is so cliche.

I was having so much fun in Procreate with the map drawing that I moved on to doing a full multi-level map of the central pirate ship. I really had a good time doing these maps. They aren’t the best by any means and because I’m just noob “artist” I was doing a lot of tracing and sort of mechanical drawing, but I was having fun. And again, working on the maps of the ship decks had me coming up with all the crew members and the captain and his collection of higher level NPCs just by drawing sections that I was labelling as crew member quarters. Overall this is just to point out how working on a map alone can help inspire tons of ideas for an adventure. 

At this end of the process looking back, I can say that it feels like a sort of disparate puzzle at first, just a collection of random things, random ideas that got jotted down here and there, and then as time went on and I continued to work on the thing, I started to feel like things that were disparate suddenly started to become related and things started to click and all of a sudden I felt like I was working on a clockwork puzzle box where the pieces started clicking into place of their own accord. And then, of course, Pinhead showed up.

We have such sights to show you.

I don’t wanna see those sights, man, I’m not a Kushiel’s Dart audience member. 

Over time the adventure just became bigger and more cohesive and more detailed, and at some point, earlier on in the process, I think maybe when I started working on the Ruined Basilica, it occurred to me that I was doing a ton of work I didn’t really need to and I thought hmm maybe I should just go all the way and try to make a publishable product since I’m already putting all this work into it. Maybe other DM’s could run this adventure themselves if I kinda fleshed it out enough, maybe even more specifically, NEW Dungeon Masters would find it a good adventure to start out with. So I started working with that new perspective. And the first thing I thought about from that angle was the graphic design aspect of the document. 

Now, a couple years ago, I did a tabletop hobby podcast and I did quite a few interviews with different artists and creatives. It’s kinda weird cause the title of that was CryinMo’s Tabletop Alchemy, and that’s because I did it on my Minecraft YouTube channel. Yeah, I know, I’m an idiot. Now I’m just an older idiot, but at least I came up with a cool name, right? Say yes. Make me feel better. 

Anyway I had interviewed Kelsey Dionne of The Arcane Library. I really liked how she designed and wrote her adventure modules, they’re concise and designed well and short and during the interview I asked her what software she used to lay them out, figuring it was InDesign or something and she said … Apple Pages. 

Apple Pages? I was like, seriously? I mean, I have Apple Pages, it’s free. I thought it was just a word processor. But yeah, turns out you can do some pretty slick stuff with Apple Pages as far as graphic design and layout goes. Now, it’s nowhere near what you can do with Adobe InDesign or Photoshop, et cetera, but for a free app, it’s kinda ridiculously powerful. I’m sure there’s a free Windows app that can do similar work. So I used Photoshop to create like the page background texture and to finish out the maps with legends and some other things, but then all the layout and text and text formatting and links and stuff, all that is just done in Apple Pages. And you can export from Apple Pages in the Epub format and then open that document up in Apple Books. 

Boy the light is all over the place today, I have no idea what my exposure’s doing. This might be terrible. 

So another thing I wanna bring up has to do with play testing and getting outside opinions on your work. I think that’s always necessary but it can be hard to do. As the creator of something, you’re always going to miss mistakes or not have certain ideas occur to you without some kind of outside opinion or alternate set of eyes or at least a lot of time between when you wrote something or created something and then going back and looking at it. 

One day, while I was shooting some interviews at a writer’s conference, one of the people my director was interviewing turned out to be Clark Rowenson, you can find his YouTube channel, The Magic Engineer, linked below. He specializes in helping people create magic systems. He’s also a tabletop rpg player and a writer and all kinds of stuff and I just hit him up after the conference cause I thought he was cool and into some of the same stuff as me. He did me a huge favor and looked at a couple pages of my adventure, which at that point was what I thought was 95% ready to go. I was just waiting on some interior art my friend was contributing, but I definitely wanted Clark’s outside opinion on what this thing looked like to him from a third-party perspective. 

He did initially bolster my confidence quite a bit by telling me the overall look and quality of the piece seemed solid. But then he asked me something that ended up resulting in my kinda going back to the drawing board – not totally by any means, but I did end up doing a bit more writing, some re-jiggering of things and some finessing. 

And I’m so, so so glad he asked what he did. He asked me: how many ways are there to escape the island?

I said, one – via the pirate ship. Because that’s what I figured was the main goal of the player characters and it’s set up for them pretty clearly at the beginning. I mean there very specific dialogue bits that come from an NPC that let them know that the pirate ship is pretty much a guaranteed way to escape the island. 

And Clark said, “You should have three ways off the island.”

I was like, oh. Really? I mean, I could immediately feel that he was right. We all have that intuition sometimes, where we just know something is right but we ignore it for a while cause it entails work or something. It just took me a day to get over the idea of going back to the writing work. But man, I am SO glad I did. Working on these alternate ways off the island actually ended up making Pinhead’s puzzle box come together way tighter and more logically than before. There are literally two or three NPC back story changes that I love and that I would never have fixed or come up with without Clark’s suggestion. And there were completely serendipitous connections and plot hole fixes that came about just from working with the different NPC backgrounds and location details to make these new alternate escapes viable. 

Here’s an example. Actually here’s two examples. One of what Clark’s suggestion helped spur and one that’s a direct example of realizing something is not right and not wanting to re-do it. I already recorded this example bit and the day after I woke up knowing it was the wrong example to share. So this right here is footage recorded on a different day. Sigh. But this is a better example for sure.

I had these two completely unrelated areas on the map – this spot right here which is Area 2: The Totem Garden, and this small cavern at the end of the underground river system, Area 9D: The Dryad Oasis. Both of these were just dropped in at different points in the writing process as random ideas. The Totem Garden originally was just an idea for a large space full of carved wooden totems the PCs might run into. Later, as the Athenaeum and temple developed idea-wise, I thought maybe this was another spot to drop like precursor bit of that weird obsidian architecture for players to discover. So I just randomly wrote down there’s like a 10’ diameter disc of obsidian in the ground in the center of the totem garden, it’s etched with runes, and there’s a giant totem pole on top of it. That was it. It was purely intended as a curiosity for the players. 

Now down here in the caves, I was in the process of just populating the caverns with possible encounters. And I did have this vague idea that maybe the dwarven mages disliked the Fey, like maybe the Fey or Fairies kept coming through some kinda portal onto the island and messing with the mages. So the Conclave of mages did some crazy magic and sealed off the island from the Feywild. And I thought, oh, a really lush underground cave would be cool to run into, like it’s really overgrown and dense with this underground foliage and stuff, and then the two ideas sorta clicked into there being a dryad down here that can’t escape the island because her ability to make portals or to travel to the Feywild has been cut off. 

It’s DnD, we just make stuff up, it’s fine.

And that was all I had. Just a random dryad encounter and a random point of visual interest with totem poles. Which I know is kinda dumb, but that’s how this whole thing started, just a bunch of random ideas of things to encounter. So then after Clark suggested the three ways off the island, these two separate, random areas clicked into place together. The mages created some sort of magic Seal against the Feywild – that’s seal with a capital S – and the dryad wants the PCs to break that seal. And where’s the Seal? It’s the obsidian disc in the Totem Garden. Of course, right? It’s perfect!

I added a few more details around here and there and wrote up some post-seal-breaking action the dryad could do for the PCs that would help them get off the island and voila, synergy! Or … that’s not the right word for it, I don’t know what the word is. But it works! As silly as it might sound.

So now there are three distinct methods of escape from the island, each one having nothing to do with the other, they are all independent and independently discoverable in different parts of the island. And on top of that, they each require some additional exploration of the island as part of little mini-quests to achieve that goal.

All right, so that’s a huge bunch of yada yada about the writing process, but I also wanted to make this adventure specifically tailored for both experienced DMs and new DMs. Cause I’m a new DM and I think this would be cool to have, a completely specked out location where no railroading is necessary and it also includes … that’s right, a whole section of Tips for New DMs! And here I just share a bunch of stuff I’ve learned from other YouTubers (along with links to their channels and other resources). I just wanted to be helpful for new DMs, and of course experienced DMs can just ignore this section.

And of course I made some random encounter tables, a random weather table, some custom creatures, magic items, et cetera, and I made some Player Handouts, cause Player Handouts are awesome at the table. Couple of maps the PCs can find in the pockets of slain or captured pirates, some journal pages they can find in a little cave campsite behind a waterfall, you know, pretty typical cliche stuff. But it’s always fun to hand something physical to a player that helps with immersion. 

As I mentioned I asked my friend to contribute some original art and he did 10 custom drawings that came out pretty spectacular. I ended up having to do the cover myself and that was a huge issue for me. I mean, it’s the cover, right? And yes, I would be the first person to advocate hiring an artist. But, you know, ducats aren’t always in the pockets, so I used the midjourney AI to create specific pieces that I spent a couple weeks doing my best with photoshop trying to make something that didn’t look absolutely wretched. Side note: mid journey just dropped an update and I think now I’ve gotta redo the cover with this newer algorithm’s better art. 

Nothing is ever finished, everything is just abandoned, that’s the saying right? 

All right, well, this video is proving to be way too long, kinda like this adventure itself, which started in my head as a 10 or 15 page one or two session adventure and now clocks in at 108 pages and if played a certain way is basically a mini-campaign. To be honest, I could have just said the TLDR – which, you know, in pure Tabletop Alchemy fashion, is appropriately at the end of the video – the way I created my DnD adventure was I just started writing it for myself and it got out of hand, so I decided to lean into it and polish it up. But I thought you might get some inspiration from some of my techniques and whatever, especially the idea that working on a map is an excellent catalyst for drumming up more and more ideas. 

And I’ll let you in on a little secret – years ago, I made a map of a small village in my DnD world. And I’m feeling like that might be my next publishing attempt.  

And speaking of publishing, I’m just now figuring out how to actually publish Mystfin Isle on DriveThruRPG. But when I get it up there, I’ll be dropping a short promo trailer for it, cause I like making trailers and I’ll also be posting a much more concise sort of “how to use” or “here’s what you’ll find” sorta video that should be embedded on the actual DriveThruRPG sales page. And I’m thinking of charging $2.99 or $3.99 for it. Let me know if you think that’s too much. I won’t be offended. Cause the only thing I’m absolutely sure about is that there are going to be mistakes in the published version. I just know there’s gonna be something I’ve missed. Or a few somethings. 

That’s it for now. Go write something! 

See ya!