Anyone who's been following along with Machines of Bone & Blood will know that it's got me doing something I haven't traditionally done before - writing adventures. Honestly, it's a little daunting. Years ago, in another life, I ran a lot of published adventures (I was regularly running for a vibrant Adventurer's League group), but I hardly ever use them in my home games, and I virtually never use them anymore. Partly I just prefer to write my own stories; partly, after you run that many adventures, you get keenly aware of how poor the average quality tends to be.

Sometimes the issues are extremely obvious: I could point you to an AL module that has no plot (literally), with encounters that don't connect and characters that don't make sense. Sometimes they're more subtle, with adventures that break if you go off the planned railroad or encounters that seem fun but are poorly balanced of thematically off-base. All that's to say that I don't love prewrites, and I put a lot of thought into it before writing my own.

But! Obviously I'm doing that now. Mostly it's a play to expand my audience: obviously a lot of people do like prewrites and will get a lot of mileage out of them, including people who are not in my current community of mechanics-focused gearheads. So I figure it's worth going into the how of it a little bit, and doing a few design notes about how the MB&B adventures are getting written and the sorts of concerns that go into them.

The Tragickal Murder

Most of these are getting reviewed just by MB&B backers, but the Tragickal Murder was my proof-of-concept and got workshopped with all Patreon supporters, so it's kosher to share here (and some folks have already read through it). The premise is very simple: there's a merchant, he's an asshole, someone wants you to kill him. (The character of Cartwright Umber is based heavily on the historical figure William Horsfall, who was exactly the same kind of asshole. The story goes that after he got shot, numerous people passed him bleeding out on the road, and every single one kept on walking).

In general I cribbed a lot of formatting things from the way Loot Tavern writes adventures, since those are some of the most popular and successful around. I'm always aiming for something decently open-ended, where if the party chooses not to go along, the GM can still take the component parts (along with the monsters and mini-settings in the book) and get somewhere good.

Being the first and simplest adventure, the Tragickal Murder is straightforward. You meet the questgiver, Thorm Copperhand, and he asks you to kill Cartwright Umber. He gives you a contact you can meet for some useful information, and suggests you hold up Umber's carriage, but it's up to you. The party can get a little info about Umber's guards, defenses, and potential ambush sites, and then get to work.

The adventure all-but-assumes that you'll be holding up his carriage. You don't have to, and the GM can improvise some other sort of map with the same encounters if you don't, but it gives you a dynamic scenario, with built-in terrain and the need to prep some kind of tool to disable the carriage.

The Encounters

The Tragickal Murder's climax is a pair of linked combats: one where you defeat Umber's guards, and a second where he cracks open a jar of specters and tries to escape while you fight murderous undead. Umber himself is an easy kill, but the specters can cause some damage.

In general, my approach for writing combat encounters here is multi-stage.

Step 1: Outline it. I write the outline of the encounter, with a rough guess at what the enemies will be in each APL (average party level) variant. If I can use stat blocks I've already written, I will, but I'm not constraining myself to them at all.

Step 2: Write the Monsters. It's virtually certain that every adventure will feature a new monster somewhere, in addition to reusing the ones written for the book. So in step 2, I go and write the actual monsters. I have guesses for their CRs, based on step 1, but they might change here based on how the stat blocks wind up shaking out.

Step 3: Rebalance the Encounter. With finished monsters in hand, I go back and recheck the encounter balance. Every time so far, the CRs have fluctuated at least a little bit, so I have had to rearrange things to keep appropriately difficult.

The Writing Process

I'd be lying if I said my method was complicated here. I started with the sections (again, cribbed from LT's format). I wrote things basically sequentially until I had the whole adventure skeleton in place. I knew this one was going to be very simple, so I added in the three ambush locations in order to squeeze some choice in. Basically anything in a sidebar was not included in the first pass; instead I put in things like [describe Thorm here]. For the second pass, I went in and finished filling out those skipped-over details. That's the point where I put it to supporters for review, where a few people had useful feedback on various details. So I added in solves for those - Umber's unicorn-skin vest makes him immune to poison, and his ring of spell storing makes it harder to instakill him before he can open the jar of specters. (Not impossible, though, and getting your own jar is a nice prize if you manage it). In other cases, there was feedback I wasn't prepared to incorporate. Making the Tragickal Murder more full-featured and more open-ended would easily triple the word count; it'd be wonderful, but it's just not within scope to fit into the book. (Not just out of scope for me to write, but if every adventure had 3x the word count, I'd only be able to fit in 1/3 as many adventures).

With all the feedback incorporated, I put it out for more backer feedback and handed it to playtesters to try and break. And we'll see how they do!