Plan better campaigns: the adventure site model

A few weeks ago, I tried Dragonbane for the first time. It’s a great game—full review here—but it’s the map that got me thinking about today’s article.

Take a look at it. Gorgeous, isn’t it? Francesca Baerald’s work is outstanding, and without knowing anything about the system, it lures me in and makes me want to go and adventure.

I’m not the first person to wax lyrical about the importance of a good map. A good map is almost an adventure in itself. It sparks your imagination, immerses you in a world, gives your eye something to gaze on. But perhaps more than anything else, it gives you choices.

I think now about some of the 5e adventures from WotC. Curse of Strahd has the map of Barovia, an area roughly the size of Andorra. Tomb of Annihilation has Chult. Dragon Heist has Waterdeep. Ghosts of Saltmarsh has, well, Saltmarsh. So why is the Misty Vale map from Dragonbane different, and dare I say, better?

It’s not the art style. Mike Schley’s work is fantastic, and he’s widely regarded as one of the best in the business.

I think it comes down to two things.

Firstly, with the exception of Strahd, these maps aren’t really made to be displayed easily to the players. I’m talking big, foldout poster maps here that you can slap down on the table for your players to gaze at. I guess you could buy or print them at a different scale, but it isn’t made easy for you.

Secondly, while these maps are very clear, and particularly for tracking long-distance travel, the Misty Vale map offers something they don’t: adventure sites.

Note that I don’t mean a key. I know, for example, that the map of Barovia has locations the party can go to like Yester Hill, Castle Ravenloft, the Amber Temple, and so on, and these are all marked by letters on the map. We expect that. But these locations are not depicted. Whereas in Dragonbane, there is a visual representation of each adventure site to draw the eye and spark our imaginations. You aren’t spoiling anything by putting these adventure sites on the map. They’re hooks, not spoilers.

But this article isn’t just about maps. More fundamentally, it’s about how we approach the business of writing adventures—or even campaigns.

Think for a moment about bad adventure writing. What are the cardinal sins? I would proffer the following:

1. Railroading, limited player agency
2. Monotony, repetition, lack of variety
3. Confusing layout or organisation

The adventure site model, with choice, variety, and a clear map, happily avoids all three. Each adventure site is essentially its own ‘situation,’ ready to drop in whenever needed and perhaps just a few pages long. To paraphrase Chris Perkins, the world is one big toy box, and the players can decide how to smash it all up.

(Incidentally, of the three cardinal sins, railroading is perhaps the worst because it runs completely counter to what an RPG is all about: entering a world of imagination where anything is possible. If we were to depict such adventures diagrammatically, they would be linear flowcharts: x happens, so y happens, so z happens. You might get the occasional fork where players can choose Path B instead of Path A, but if the ending is essentially prewritten, it’s merely the illusion of agency. Several WotC adventures do exactly this, Vecna: Eve of Ruin being the most recent—and perhaps most egregious.)

Now, do you have to have an illustrated map like the Misty Vale for the adventure site model to work? No—but it certainly helps. A black-and-white icon can also do the trick. I love the ones Dungeon Baker did for Adventures in Hawk’s Rest. Ultimately, you want a gorgeous visual aid that the players can pore over and lose themselves in. It’s a big part of the fun.

The adventure site model can even work at higher levels. You just need to change the scale. If Tier 1 adventures take place over a small region or province, Tier 2 could be a country and Tier 3 a continent. Tier 4 might even take place across the Multiverse with adventure sites on different worlds, and the map is actually an orrery or nexus of portals. The fundamental skeleton remains the same.

How many sites? Enough to provide meaningful choice, but not so many as to overwhelm you or them. I would suggest perhaps one or two big adventure sites with enough material to gain a level, at least a handful of small adventure sites that last a session or two, and at least two or three sites that are somewhere in between. But this is just a general guide, not an exact science. I love megadungeons, but I would avoid them in this model because they lend themselves to such a different style of play, one that the players should probably have signed up for first.

How challenging should each site be? (In 5e terms, what level are they scaled for?) I would try to include a range for each tier but also lean towards lots of easier enemies—low challenge ratings—and make big bosses the exception rather than the rule. This gives you more flexibility to dial the challenge up or down if you think the players are finding things too easy (or too hard). Thus, at each tier of play, I would maybe lean towards monsters with the following challenge ratings:

• CR ⅛ for 1st to 3rd level
• CR ¼ for 3rd and 4th level
• CR ½ from 5th level
• CR 1 from 7th level or so
• CR 2 from 11th level (Tier 3)
• CR 3 from around 16th level
• . . . and maybe CR 4 enemies or higher in Tier 4.

If this seems too low to you—well, that’s a whole other discussion.

It’s also good to have an underlying conceit for why the characters need to explore different sites. In Dragonbane, they are hunting for pieces of an important artifact, and this is probably default (although something of a cliché, maybe). Here are some alternatives:

• Uncover lost knowledge
• Stop a spreading curse or corruption
• Gather allies
• Defeat legendary monsters
• Control magical power nodes, or restore destabilized ones
• Pursue enemies or a villain
• Awaken an ancoent dormant power
• Prevent escalating natural disasters
• Investigate mysterious disappearances
• Unlock ancient portals or seal dangerous rifts
• Disrupt a cult (or other faction)
• Reclaim lost strongholds
• Sabotage enemy operations
• Rescue important figures
• Defend key locations from invaders
• Reach hidden sanctuaries  
• Investigate strange phenomena
• Gather intelligence
• Reverse a magical castrophe
• Recover stolen treasures

Bonus: add the phrase ‘before their rivals do’ to almost any of the above. And by the way, you don’t need every site to have what the characters are looking for. We’re going for exploration, not completionism.

An accidental bonus of this model is the realism it can provide. Maybe this is the wrong word; after all, we’re talking about magic and giants and fire-breathing dragons. I mean realism in the sense of believable escalation in threat. I wrote about this earlier in the year when I asked the question, ‘How many liches are there in your world?’ The adventure site model encourages DMs to lean towards lower-level monsters instead of constantly scaling up with the characters, and it encourages players to choose their adventures more strategically, knowing that some lairs may ultimately be beyond them.

Perhaps none of this article is especially radical to you, and the adventure site model is already the default. Maybe you have enjoyed this style of play but never really deconstructed what it was that made it work. Maybe you are looking to start a new homebrew campaign but have always found the prospect too daunting and overwhelming. Regardless, I hope it’s food for thought, and it’s definitely a framework I would like to try out in my next campaign.

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