How to Run Published Adventure Modules for Dungeons and Dragons 5e

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greetings my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we discuss everything Dungeons & Dragons including advice for players and guides for Dungeon Master's we upload new videos every Thursday so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode this week we are taking a look at our tips and tricks for running a published adventure module in Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition and we picked out a couple of our books from the campaigns that we've run over the years of D&D 5 e now pre written modules are packed with great stories and inspiration for any DM to take upon and use at their table however in both of our experiences there is still a lot of work that has to go in to running a pre written module far less work than creating your own campaign setting but still there are some things to keep in mind and today we're going to discuss our top tips and tricks for running pre written modules the pre written modules that have been published by Wizards of the coast for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and all the great third-party modules all are very inconsistent in how they are presented to Dungeon Master's some of these books are wonderfully organized and the adventure basically Springs itself right off the page some of them though are a real mess and while they have awesome ideas encounters and storylines in them the books themselves are really confusing for a dungeon master to disentangle we've built a couple strategies that we use at our tables for making it easier for us as Dungeon Master's to economize the amount of time it takes to turn these books into a game that you can actually run at your table so let's get rolling all of our tips and tricks start from one core principle you've got to read the module this is the script for your campaign if you're gonna write a movie if you're gonna do a movie if you're gonna do a television show or play you gotta read the script and this is basically your script that you're gonna be working from that said a thorough cover to cover reading is not always the best idea or the most efficient use of your time I say that the best you of your time is to skim through the module make sure that you understand each chapter and have an understanding of the overall plot of the campaign before running out of the abyss I skimmed it front to back probably ten times just to make sure that I knew where all the pieces fell that way I felt confident going into running each of the missions and chapters in the game and I read them more thoroughly as we approached each chapter this was a great way to get the big picture of the entire adventure all at once so that you have an idea for what's going to happen in the whole campaign oftentimes these books are organized so that really key details are buried in the back of the book in the appendix or certain characters locations or key plot points are not described in detail and tell the players encounter them but knowing that that is coming is going to help you foreshadow certain events and is going to give you as dungeon master the context that you need to make the current things the players are going through makes sense so skim read the entire module you don't need to read it thoroughly cover to cover and then as you are running it for your players you're gonna want to reread the sections as they become relevant to your game itself there's one main tip that I have for everybody to do as they're skimming front-to-back through their module that they plan to run and that is create a roster of all the prominent NPCs villains monsters maybe even put in where they're located who they are what their aspirations and goals are just creating a little cheat sheet of all of the most important players in the campaign will allow you to be able to reference it easily and drop them in as needed or at least allude to them or hint at them and their location and whereabouts this can be very important for knowing the campaign and running it smoothly a little bit of real talk for a moment if you are an inspiring RPG adventure author or if you are one of the members of the Wizards of coast RPG team I love your work but please start including a roster in these modules a couple of these have done it but many of them have not the very first that you open up when you look at a script for a play is the cast of characters and this is so important for the directors the casting director of the stage manager and everyone because they need to know how many people they need to cast in the play I don't understand why published modules don't put a list at the very beginning of the module explaining who all the NPC's are and instead leave most Dungeon Master's to scour through the book to figure out who the key players are not only that but something that I find very important about making this roster is that when you look at the campaign modules often time prominent villains or important NPCs are not mentioned until you're entering the room that they exist in because of this fact I have found that some very important characters that should have been known to the party to build up that sort of threat or presence ended up not being known to them until it was too late and they were killing them making a roster I found in both the modules I've ran has allowed me to then pepper in hints or allude to the presence of or even have a villain taught the party ahead of time building them up so that the party knows who their enemies are unless there's a big secret about who the villain is it is actually worth it to have the party understand who they're up against and grow that passion towards finding them and defeating them another way that building a roster is really useful in adapting the adventure is that you get a really clear picture of what the resources and the organizational structure of the NPC's and villains actually are and it allows you to detach the monsters from the room that they're encountered in and possibly have the wander across the dungeon or perhaps make the villain change their plans gather their forces together and form some sort of other attack or encounter at a different location entirely so by building this roster you get a really clear sense as a dungeon master what your villains and NPCs resources actually are and you can really change the module in dramatic ways even though you're still using the same monsters the same NPCs and the same locations you're just remix ingles elements in creating something original from that as you're creating this roster of NPCs and monsters you may also want to add to it the treasure magic items or any key artifacts that are really important the campaign in some cases magic items that are a part of the storyline can be just as important as the NPCs and the villains themselves so if there are these kind of major plot points you might want to treat them as if they were an NPC in this regard another main point when you're getting ready to run an adventure module is to summarize the adventure write down what the main plotline of the adventure is without all the fiddly bits in the middle just what is the goal what's the goal of the party what's the goal of the villains what is every major player after in this campaign setting and by doing so you have a quick reference to make sure that you are on track with running the story and pushing it forward in the right direction like the roster this summary should fit onto a single page even half a page if at all possible it's a rough flowchart that tells you what the big idea what the main conflict of the entire story is now some of the adventure modules do do this quite well many of them like storm Kings Thunder and water deep dragon heist actually have a flow chart that breaks down the overall structure and the different scenes of the adventure I would just add to that by saying what is the major conflict of each of these points what is the party's major objective going to be at this point it might be open-ended and there might be things that change or shift around as the party gets their hands on the module no plan that the dungeon master has will ever survive contact with the player characters but giving yourself this rough idea of what the main objective is going to be and particularly stating what the main objective of the antagonists and villains is will help keep you in the mindset of how the moving pieces are unfolding another reason why making this summary of the entire campaign is so important is because it is accept only difficult to derail a campaign with a prepared and flexible Dungeon Master just because the chapter isn't going the way that you imagined because the players have come up with some zany scheme that goes an opposite direction doesn't mean that it has to throw the entire campaign off if you're flexible and understand the key points of each chapter you can still steer the party towards that well letting them have their zany wild schemes as long as you're flexible and prepared your players can go wherever they want but you'll still be able to guide them back to where they need to be one of my favorite ways to address this is to ask myself really seriously what would happen if the player characters failed what would happen if they were never involved what would happen if the villains got their way what steps to the villains still need to take to execute their master plan and this way even if the player characters are going off in a completely unrelated tangent the plot still advances because the villains and NPCs are still taking the actions that they would take if the players were never involved one of the most frustrating parts of running a pre written module is that you have these wonderful beautiful maps that really help guide the players through dungeons and you as a dungeon master to know where everything is and then they proceed to explain each room in several pages beyond that and I find what I'm playing at the table I'm flipping back and forth in my book constantly going from the explanation of the room to where it is in the map and trying to make sense of how all the pieces connect together it is so annoying no one has figured out the best way to organize these things but I love how an adventure will sometimes be written and room 19 and room 20 are completely on opposite sides of the map and it makes no sense why the rooms were numbered in this way or they just ran out of numbers and started somewhere else or the rooms are numbered in the most illogical pathway that the players would actually take through the dungeon so my solution to this is to print the map out I print it out in black and white on cheap laser printer if you are a subscriber on D&D beyond you can actually download high-resolution versions of all the maps in the official adventure modules and online there are tons of other maps that have been released some of the map makers like Mike Schley have even released map packs that you can buy and download so getting a printable version of the adventure maps for the fifth edition modules is really easy with a couple quick google searches also keep in mind that our sponsors for the week dungeon fog are a great map making application that help you rebuild the maps for yourself or address environments that maybe aren't mapped out in the adventure books once you've printed out the map now you can make adjustments and little notes next to each room in the map which you don't really want to do in your book maybe you do but I like to keep my books as clean as possible I mean I've seen a lot of people that do mark up their books with bookmarks they get stationary tags they get post-it notes and stickies that they can put through the book this is my personal preferred method because what I end up with this is a one-page summary of a location in the adventure currently I'm running the notorious chapter 4 from out of the abyss which is well known to be an overly complex and convoluted chapter in that module I'm currently doing a dungeon crawl within that chapter and have realized that several of the plots that I left out of this chapter because they weren't necessary and didn't really push the story forward for me there's a lot of rooms in that dungeon that actually correspond to those plot lines so being able to print out a map cross out the rooms that have to do with things that have no relevance in the story I'm telling and giving a more linear path not fully linear there's still a lot of player choice in there but they don't end up going down paths and spending hours exploring rooms that have no use so for me even though I put a big red X on many of the LEAs rooms that doesn't mean I'm removing them from the adventure it means that I think it's really unlikely that there's gonna be a combat encounter that I'm gonna want to build out on a map with a grid with miniatures and everything in that way I'm economizing where I'm spending my time in that regard because those rooms if the players go in them I'm just gonna use theater of the mind for that especially with all these twisty connecting passages I'm not necessarily gonna build out the entire dungeon with my dwarven Forge stuff I'm only gonna build up the key rooms and rely on theater of the mind to transition between those locations lastly as your players arrive to run through this marked up map that you've created you could actually keep track of what rooms they've been in what they've uncovered where they ended up so that you can continue from session to session and where they plan to go next if they have that information this is all useful stuff that you can just write onto the map keeping track of everything so that between sessions you can show up the next game prepared to run the next part of that dungeon so we've already touched on this next point a little bit but I think we need to talk more about it and that is skipping the boring bits and I cannot stress enough how important this skill has been for me for running a module so many times I read a chapter and there are a lot of great ideas in there the main plotline is wonderful and they include their own little side missions or subplots or things that may illuminate some ideas in your head and you go oh I really want to run that but also I found in every module there are loads of information that I just find not really necessary or things that don't interest me or wouldn't interest the players at my table this is where the ability to cut out all the boring bits all the parts that aren't relevant to the story you're going to tell or aren't relevant to the overall plot of the campaign cut those out get rid of them and you can actually run a campaign a little bit faster without bogging it down with hours spent with the players going off in random directions remember an adventure module is not a contract you are not obligated to run it exactly the way it is printed on the page wizard of the coast lawyers are not going to send a squadron of bugbears to break down your door and beat you up if you don't run it to the absolute letter and if one of your players calls you out on changing things in the module you can ask them how they know that I I have a player who loves reading adventure modules and he is made sure that he reads chapters after I've ran them but what's what's actually fun about that is he comes back to me and goes so we finished that chapter and I just read through it and wow the way we played it at the table was a lot different and I always say yeah that was the fun of it yeah you should embrace that and I will say credit where credit is due to the authors of the adventure modules there's a lot of filler in these things there's a lot of words that are dedicated to things that will never be relevant or never be of interest to the player characters sometimes there are pages and pages and pages spent on lore and history but the module doesn't discuss how to present that lore and history to the players in an interesting and interactive way that's not something that you have to solve you can just throw that out sometimes adventures have these happy little accidents that the specific chemistry of you your player characters and the adventure itself are going to yield some unexpected magic that just on your own when you're skimming through the module you're like this is dumb so use your judgment with this it is important to economize the module and eject the parts of the module that aren't interesting to you but be careful that you're not throwing out that something your players might actually love the counterpoint to this is don't be afraid to make the module your own by adding new things to the module itself that we're just not there in the first place my players have talked to me many times about how I like to as they call it fluff up each chapter and it is something that I enjoy doing because it's me flexing my creative muscles to actually try to add an element that maybe I think will add to the story like we said if you're cutting out the boring bits it might be because you read the module and there are sections in there that add to the story but that don't interest you and instead if there's something that comes in your head that does interest you then add it in in rise of Tiamat there's the enemy wrath mode are who has a very small role but I introduced them much earlier on in the plot and the characters became very attached to this villain I ended up adding an entire section and where they had to go hunting for his phylactery because he was a budding lich and so that whole plotline was something that i added in to add context to this villain and make him more interesting because my players were so responsive to him as a villain and that chapter ended up being one of the most fun chapters in the entire campaign and my players still talked about it to this day one of the other great elements of this is that many of the official 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons modules have been expanded on by the Dungeons & Dragons adventurers League on the dungeon master skilled there have been one shot style adventures and longer that have added prologues and epilogues to many of these adventures added new side quests NPCs or greatly expanded locations so if you are running one of the official fifth edition modules it is worth checking out the adventurers League adventures that have been written for that module because they can really add a lot to the adventure if you are sending out to run one of these pre-made modules keep in mind as our final point that there are so many great online resources to help you out with understanding or adding to the adventure that you plan to run before I ran out of the abyss I read through several other documents that people had created about their playthroughs what worked what didn't work what were the struggles what were the best parts and what happened in their campaigns I kind of gathered all of this information and when I started running it I use little bits from each one of those now it still created my own story and I find that my characters have gone an extremely different direction than anybody else whose story I had read online but the fun of it is I have all of these tools in my back pocket that I can pull out from all of these online resources that I read a few places that you can go to to get yourself started there are great communities on Facebook and reddit that are dedicated towards the specific fifth edition adventure modules you can join and participate in the discussions on these groups and they often have collected a lot of resources together in one place for Dungeon Master's who are writing these campaigns it also gives you a really easy place to post and say hey I'm having trouble with this specific part of this module and you'll usually get a lot of great feedback from those places another thing is that you can scour through here on YouTube and on Twitch and other streaming and video sites to find actual play campaigns that have been run and broadcast by other Dungeons & Dragons players on the dungeons of the Dragons YouTube channel many of the official modules have been run by the D&D team and their other groups so I would start there and see if you can find their campaigns but there are many more than just this and don't forget to check out the dungeon masters guild which we've already mentioned has a slew of resources available for most of the campaign settings as well as just one shot adventures and other such things that you can use to add into your own campaigns on top of that there's tons of blogs and campaign Diaries that people have written for you to check out and get an idea on what worked and what didn't work for them I find these extremely helpful when I'm setting out to run a new campaign at the end of the day the key concept here is that the it pre written adventure modules are not a Bible or a contract that you need to stick to the letter on they're not going to be the final word you as the DM get to have the final word on what goes in and what stays out use this to your advantage and the players at the table are going to tell their own story and you're going to be the dictator of how that story goes look at the pre written module for inspiration ideas and a concept of a story that will be great to run at your own table but make it your own and have fun with it the more fun you're having the more fun everybody at the table is going to have so hopefully some of these strategies will help you economize your time so that you can run these modules more efficiently and if saving time isn't as important as getting ideas and inspiration from these modules hopefully some of these strategies give you a few ideas and ways that you can adapt these modules and really make them your own and make them more special than what they could ever be just on the page it is really important to give them a good read through and skim over them unfortunately very few of these modules can actually be run off the page with only a few minutes of prep time before the game session itself so the less you have to have your nose in the book during the game session the more you will have internalized it and the more you can really create a memorable experience at your table so this has been a look at our top tips for running a published adventure module in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition if you have any other tips or resources you'd like to share with us tell us about them in the comments below if you're enjoying our show please consider supporting our work on patreon you can find out how by following the links in the description below or at patreon.com slash dungeon underscore dudes don't forget to check out our live place shadows of dragon hime which airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. Eastern on Twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we have plenty more tips and tricks for Dungeon Master's right over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 168,291

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: fcjK8oXEx5I

Length: 24min 40sec (1480 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020