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Adventure Writing Techniques

Abstract

Writing adventures is a craft with learnable techniques. The difficulty is that most of the hard parts — ideation, getting unstuck, maintaining momentum across a multi-part document — aren't solved by more rules or tools. They're solved by process habits. These techniques are not prescriptive: use what works for your brain, discard the rest.

Ideation

Cultivate boredom. Ideas emerge in unstructured time. If you're always consuming input (feeds, podcasts, games), you have no idle processing time. Trains, walks, showers — these are when writing problems resolve themselves.

Write it down immediately. When an idea arrives, capture a snippet or phrase even if you can't use it now. A log of these fragments is a goldmine when you're stuck mid-project.

Cultivate sources: history, geography, poetry, visual film aesthetics — these tend to generate more generative fragments than consuming more TTRPG material.

When Stuck: Switchup

If you're stuck while typing, stop and write it physically. Changing the medium (keyboard → pen and paper) helps enormously. Some of this is reduced distraction (paper has no notification feed). Also: turn off Wi-Fi. The open internet is an obstacle to writing.

Structural Techniques

Outline To Fuck

Write your structure first: headings, section names, key landmarks. These are your skeleton. Then fill the meat. In Markdown, headings are fast — hit # and write a name, then jump elsewhere in the document and write another. Come back to fill them in any order.

The headline structure tells you at a glance what's missing and what's complete. This is especially useful for scatterbrained writing sessions.

Map First

If the adventure has a physical space, draw the map before writing the content. The map acts as a framework — spatial relationships suggest contents. Room adjacency creates fiction: what's in the guard room implies what they're guarding, which implies what's worth guarding, which implies who owns it.

The !! Placeholder Method

When you don't know a specific detail (a name, a relationship, a piece of geography), write !! and move on. When the draft is complete, search !! and fill in the blanks. Most blanks will have suggested themselves through the context you wrote around them.

Mental Dig / Mental Exploration

For spaces with a clear vibe and tone: close your eyes and place yourself there. Walk from room to room in your imagination. Contents will suggest themselves from the space's internal logic. Good for fine-tuning tone, finding what else should be present, discovering unexpected corners.

Pearl

Take your single core concept, element, or vibe. Note everything you know about it freely. Then add a complication or destabilization. Note everything that changes next to the destabilized element. Repeat. Good for developing premises that feel rich rather than thin.

Resonance & Conflict

List all your concepts, factions, elements, and vibes. Identify conflicts and resonances between them. Conflicts are where the adventure is. Resonances build the setting and NPC alignment.

Timeline

Write a rough timeline of what happens if the players never show up. This clarifies: the situation, what the factions want, what's at stake, and what would change without PC involvement. The timeline often reveals gaps in your prep (you don't know what the villain does after day 3) and suggests encounter points.

Index Card Organizational Method

From the Critical Hits approach — useful for adventures with multiple moving parts or for brainstorming:

  1. Write one idea per card — encounter, NPC, location, or hook
  2. Sort physically into clusters: what belongs together spatially or temporally
  3. Lay out as a map — the physical arrangement of cards mirrors the adventure's structure
  4. Mark connections — draw arrows or use string between cards that need to interact
  5. Replace or remove freely — unlike a linear document, cards can be shuffled, discarded, or promoted without rewriting

Index cards work well as a brainstorming and architecture tool before committing to a document. They're especially useful for non-linear adventure structures (sandboxes, hexcrawl stocking) where the sequence is undefined.

Practical Workflow Notes

  • Write headings first; fill content later
  • Don't write adjacently in a document — jump around, let the headings track structure
  • Physical notes for stuck moments, digital for bulk drafting
  • !! for unknown specifics; search and fill at end
  • Timeline as a factional-consistency check, not a player-facing document

See Also

Sources

  • https://lukegearing.blot.im/techniques-to-write-adventures
  • https://critical-hits.com/blog/2014/07/28/adventure-creation-hacks-two-methods/