Hidden Kingdom Devblog: Writing Process

Though I’ve written a lot of sessions for plenty of D&D games over the years, many of those being D&D 4e games, I’d never actually written a module before trying my hand at it now. It was kind of daunting at first, but a lot of the same skills for writing your D&D 4e game sessions translate over well (in my opinion) to writing an adventure module for the system. The process though had to be different. I’m not a very structured sort of guy mostly. I like writing from the chaos of the mind, without a plan, without an outline. But I knew to get this done and done professionally it couldn’t just come out of a storm. I needed a process.

As I mentioned before, when I heard that I was going to write a module for Nevermet Press, I started consuming modules from D&D 4e, but also modules from D&D 3.5. I went back to one of my old favorites, Red Hand of Doom. Though a lot of lessons of what makes Red Hand of Doom good do not apply to my module (the situations are just too different), it did get me writing. I read Village of Hommlet because I wanted to utilize 4e Minor Quests in my module as an incentive to explore and to roleplay.

When writing my outline, I started from the end and sort of worked my way back. I thought about what I wanted the climactic final battle to be like, and then what I wanted the dramatic final roleplaying scene to be like (and this module’s final scene, despite by default not having anything to roll dice for, is still extremely important and filled with roleplay opportunities). Then I worked on leading up to it. I populated an outline first with the major locales the PCs would visit, and then with the combat encounters (very important to 4e, you gotta have these) in each locale. After creating the skeleton I set about fleshing it out, mostly with roleplay scenes, and the lead-ups and consequences of combats.

The most important thing I had to learn was to leave open blanks – I always tried to think of many different ways that things may or may not go. Sure, some things are going to be straightforward, but for others I did not want to just say “this is exactly the way it has to go.” Instead I wanted there to be many different outcomes which lead in to different situations, so different parties and people would take different approaches. Though I wasn’t really thinking with a mind to “replayability” per se (though I think there is a good bit to be found), I did want different groups to be able to talk about how they did something, why and how it turned out and be able to feel like they played in ways the other would not have conceived of.

I wanted the module to be pretty flexible, so I when I wrote a situation, I thought of a few ways to add twists to it. In combat, this meant adding powers and bonuses to things in the map that may or may not have gone inert. Some groups will ignore everything and just use their class powers to win, while others will ask the GM if they can break windows and knock down barrels and throw chairs. I wanted to make sure the latter not only had stuff to use, but that some of that stuff was encouraged and written down so they can make use of it without the GM having to improvise. Outside of combat, this meant writing situations with the thought in mind that PCs might win or they might fail critical checks (and how the adventure changes if they do; and how the adventure does not grind to a halt if they don’t). For example, there’s two whole encounters that stealthy, cunning PCs can escape entirely with good rolls. If they do, they trigger one encounter later on. If they get caught and fight both of those, the one that comes later won’t happen. Either way they have to do some fighting, but there’s rewards both for brute force and for cunning.

It might also be a bit controversial (I honestly don’t know what is or isn’t bad, wrong, or horrible DMing, module writing or RPG playing anymore) but there are some places where I leave certain decisions squarely on how the GM wants to do things for more difficulty or less difficulty. For example, there’s a two areas where the GM (such as the aforementioned trigger) could string together two encounters into one, without allowing healing, or allow a pause between for resting. I know different GMs with different ways of handling this slightly nebulous area. So I left that up to them.