Drawing dungeons for a new adventure
While I was working on my latest adventure, I decided to document my process on drawing the dungeon. I'm relatively new to drawing dungeons but I thought a breakdown of my process would be helpful to other GMs who release maps or at least somewhat interesting!
Read My Process for Drawing Dungeons
New Adventure!
I've just released a new free adventure called Rumble at the Hog & Hound, which includes the dungeon I broke down in the above post! My goal with this one was to try to stick to a 5 room dungeon structure and make it a simple and straightforward level 1 adventure for new players.
I playtested this adventure with some friends and included a full character creation as part of the session. It was longer than I normally run a one-shot, just over 4 hours, but the fact that it included character creation was awesome.
Grab it free on DriveThruRPG or on sidequesters.club
Session lessons
This week I ran the a session of my West Marches Shadowdark game. It was the first one in a few months. It's an ad-hoc game and sometimes calendars don't line up or life happens. The thing I take away from this is while it's really great to have a regular game with a regular date, you can structure a game in a way where you can walk away for a few months and come back strong!
The way West Marches style games tend to do this is by having a large flexible pool of players, encouraging good notes, and having a clear goal ahead of the session. I run my West Marches games with a "captain" who specifies a goal for each session so it makes prep really obvious and lets me focus on exactly what I need. We were able to very quickly jump right into the session even after months.
The other thing that helps is that I don't do up front world building, I basically prep for the session plus a little extra that the players might run into. Practically this means I think about the hex they're probably going to and the surrounding hexes, plus a related teaser for a place they haven't been to. This results in a the world growing naturally and manageably. The result is that I basically had a rough session planned from the last time I did prep and I used those notes and the player goal as a jumping off point.
Hope the scheduling gods are in your favor this week too and you get to run a fun game with your friends!
Kenny
