In the last part of this series we created the initial concept of the adventure. We were going to add in a village, NPCs and convert it into a high quality adventure.
Rather than do this in isolation, we going to do this together.
We’re going to lay the adventure out using HomeBrewery, a simple and very useful tool.
Using this tool it’s pretty simple to produce something that looks good without any experience. Oh, and most importantly it’s free!
Getting started
Second we’re going to make some changes to what we’ve already done.
For this first version we’re cutting back on everything, no NPCs yet, no village, no stats, no treasure calculated. We’re going to do all these things together.
All we are trying to do here is apply some broad strokes so we can see the outline of the adventure. We are not trying to fill any details as yet and all this information is fluid.
Personally I like to stick in creatures and encounters I like to start and then adjust for character levels later.
This does mean that our initial version is not suitable for 4 level 1 players, especially new players, it is deadly, don’t run it!
Next we’re going to put in an introduction, just explaining what we’re going to do.
Then a list of resources of all the things they might need to run the adventure.
All these styles are built into homebrewery and are pretty easy to use.
Adding the map
I hand drew our map and scanned it in, but if you’re producing your own adventure, there are online tools for map drawing such as dungeon painter, gimp and inkarnate.
Then we add our map, you’ll need some place to store the map for the website to access it online. There are free hosting sites out there like https://imgbb.com/ so don’t worry about spending any money.
When creating a dungeon it’s useful to think of it in realistic terms, what would this character want from a hideout, how would they layout their base?
Now we add a map key, this helps use create the titles for the different sections, usually at this point you should some idea of what you’re planning to do in every room.
Write in some outline notes
Now use those titles to create section headings and add in some notes.
These shouldn’t be complicated, just simple notes that can be updated and added to later.
Now, if you’ve been reading this series of articles, you might notice some changes from part 2. I’ve removed some of the undead encounters and added some variety of monsters, no one wants to just face wave after wave of the same monster.
From this initial work we can now build out a true adventure, currently this is a deadly adventure for new level 1 players.
In the next part we’ll adjust this and fill out some of the details to make this a more rounded adventure.
