An “adventure”, in roleplaying game lingo, is a situation or scenario intended for play with a particular roleplaying game within an implied or specific setting.

An adventure, as a product class, has a few characteristics that make it different from most forms of written entertainment.

What is an adventure for?

An adventure scenario is a blueprint for producing a particular gaming experience. An adventure can fulfill some secondary purposes but it’s primary purpose is to help the game master create a situation that players will find engaging and enjoyable.

Secondary purposes can be collecting, provide game masters with a sample adventure for a system, supplemental adversaries or objects that can be borrowed for other adventures, or introduce more lore about a location or characters in the setting.

Who is an adventure module for?

An adventure is for game masters. There is some sub-text worth thinking about.

An adventure is for game masters who don’t know how to create their own adventures. A new GM doesn’t know all the ins and outs of creating an adventure for themselves. It takes practice and if they just want to get started running a game, an adventure is a good way. A GM may be new to a particular game system or genre and wants to see how the designer or another more experience GM approaches that particular game.

An adventure is for game masters who don’t want to create their own. Adventures take some work to create. A string of connected adventures or adventure locations with a consistent through line can be especially difficult.

An adventure is for game masters who want to borrow someone else’s creative ideas. Some people are more creative than other people. Everyone has a different mix of experiences and influences. A designer might come up with something I would never think up myself. This is the main reason I buy adventure modules.

The intended audience is the odd bit

The most forms of entertainment in a written form are for entertaining a reader. The reader is who the book is for. A reader doesn’t buy a novel so they can tell someone else the story. They buy it so they can have the emotional experience produced by imagining the story as they read it. Unless it’s an audio book, the reader is getting it directly from the page.

An adventure is sold to the game master so they can present it’s contents to someone else. There aren’t many other kinds of writing that are for someone who is going to tell someone else what is in the book.

Screenwriters are one of the few whose work isn’t sold directly to the audience who get the best experience of the work. It sells to a producer. If the producer thinks it will be too expensive to turn into a film or won’t get enough viewers then the producer won’t buy it.

The screenwriter and the adventure writer have the same challenge. They have to write something for the person who will produce the experience the writer is imagining. It has to serve the intermediary who is going to do the work of presenting it to the audience.

The adventure writer has to make their work for the game master. The game master has to decide if the adventure is going to be a fit for the kind of game they want to run and if they have the skills to run that adventure. If the adventure doesn’t aid the game master in creating an enjoyable game session, then it is not accomplishing the purpose of the work.

This adds a layer of complexity to writing an adventure. It makes it extra difficult and makes the form and content of an adventure a little different from the sort of writing you would do if the work was for a reader to consume alone.

What do I want from an adventure?

When I read an adventure, here is what I’m looking for:

Inspire me to run the adventure.

I want to be excited about the possibilities of the adventure or at least think of ways I can make it exciting with a few modifications.

Make preparation for running the adventure efficient.

If I’m going to spend more time preparing to run the adventure than it would take to make my own, why buy the adventure? Reference sheets, good descriptions, encounter keys, and stat blocks that save me prep time increase the utility of the adventure.

Help me produce the intended experience.

For a variety of reasons, some adventures do not produce the experience the designer was hoping for. There are ways of figuring that out before you publish the book. Those methods require effort, time, and money that the designer or publisher doesn’t have or isn’t willing to spend.

If I am excited about the premise, can prepare the adventure in less time than it would take to write my own, and helps me produce the game experience I want, then an adventure is a winner.

How do I shop for adventures?

Frankly, I don’t buy many adventures. I’ve bought so many that didn’t deliver what I was looking for that I’m just not willing to spend the money. I buy adventures, but not many.

I’m always watching out on message boards, Facebook groups, and Reddit for recommendations. I skim the threads to see if someone has a review. If I’m looking for something specific I’ll drop a question to see if anyone knows an adventure that has what I’m looking for.

I follow some of the bloggers like Welcome to the Deathtrap, tenfootpole.org and Prince of Nothing who review a lot of adventures. There are others but I find those three match my tastes in adventures most closely.

I also like to watch the adventure contests. The winning entries are often things that a good game master wrote and played through at least once. Often, the winning adventures are bundled into a free or cheap PDF that makes it a great bargain.

I look for recommendations from game masters who have played through the adventure.

Maps might be hard to use during play. A clever player may come up with an idea that makes the adventure easy to overcome. Sometimes the particular mix of character classes in a group can lead to total party annihilation. Reviews based on actual play are more likely to identify those problems than a single read through. Some problems with adventures can be hidden until you play them.

Conclusion

Adventures are a tool for creating an enjoyable gaming experience.

A good one gets me excited to run it, provides all the necessary information a clear and useful format, and lives up to it’s promise in actual play. There aren’t as many of those as I’d like. Reading reviews based on actual play helps to avoid clunkers.

If you can find a published adventure that saves you time or offers something you wouldn’t have thought of then they can be worth the expense.