In my work as a GM for hire, I spend a lot of time with published adventures. It wasn’t always this way—my first attempt at running something written by someone else was 2014: about 15 years after I started running D&D. These days, I mostly run pre-written stuff in my paid games because I’m trying not to water down my hourly rate to less than a dollar. Diversifying the type of products I add to my repertoire keeps burnout at bay, so I don’t end up grinding through duplicate sessions of the same one-shot over and over.
The cool part about this workflow is that I’ve learned a huge amount about adventure structure, design, and utility over the last 5 years. I’ve run the majority of the D&D hardcover campaigns, a pretty big swath of Adventurers League content, and plenty of old-school modules like Village of Hommlet and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Because I make an effort to fit whatever material I’m running into my own particular style, I’ve developed an approach to “popping the hood” and messing with the inner workings of these adventures.
A Disclaimer
“It’s not our role as the GM to take action—it’s the players’ role. They’re the protagonists. It’s in their job description. ”
My style incorporates some improv and centering of player agency, but I also try to give an adventure the best showing I can when I run it. I want players to get the Rime of the Frostmaiden experience, even if it has some embellishments or concepts of mine worked in. So this advice assumes we’re trying to find that balance.
Here are my steps for popping the hood on published scenarios:
Find the Climax
Identify Situations and Goals
Prep Locations
Prep GM Events
Reinforce Transition Paths
1. FIND THE CLIMAX
Prepping hundreds of pages of adventure motivates you to cut straight to the heart of the story—to find the core premise as soon as possible. Find the nexus chamber and collect Daoud’s Wonderous Lanthorn. Protect Ten-Towns from the chardalyn dragon. Destroy or redeem Zariel to save the city of Elturel.
I skip past intro material at first and flip straight to the synopsis (this usually exists in some form). From there, I look at the last couple pages for a final location, encounter, or resolution. Particularly I’m scanning for NPCs, monsters, magic items or effects to understand the main dramatic question of the scenario—that is, what central choice will the players make to determine how this scenario ends?
Not every adventure ends with a choice. Sometimes the default becomes how will they confront the Big Bad? because it’s a linear adventure with guard rails. But ideally, the players can express their characters’ personalities and skills by how they approach the scenario—fight or negotiate? take the cursed item or let it go? ally with faction A or faction B? There are tons of options, and you can always adjust it to fit this framing if the scenario doesn’t provide anything workable. The important thing is that the players aren’t just following orders from the NPCs (or the GM).
2. IDENTIFY SITUATIONS AND GOALS
Don’t prep plots. The players do X, then the players do Y, then it ends when they do Z. That’s the least helpful stuff to plan unless you really know your players and can guess their behavior accurately. Even then, it’s not great.
Frustratingly, a lot of scenarios are designed with this sort of GMing in mind. They do usually present player choices, but those choices are nested in a series of “scenes” that the scenario intends you to play out in order. A lot of times they’ll give advice for handling players who want to go off the rails, but it’s usually framed around limiting or roadblocking possible choices. I get why this is the case: you’ve got 3-4 hours to play, so narrow the focus.
Really, though, a GM shouldn’t be narrowing the focus on players’ tactics or what their plan is. We should narrow the focus on the goal. What do the PCs want? Tie everything in the adventure to that goal. Instead of deciding which possible choice to nip in the bud, clarify why they care about the situation and what stands in their way. This creates a narrative magnet that will bring all their decisions back to the locations and encounters you’ve prepared—because to accomplish their goal, they need to resolve those obstacles.
My favorite formula for situations and goals is:
Situation: NPC or faction is doing Plan X that will affect Y (someone or something the PCs care about). They’ve lined up Obstacles A, B, and C to help them achieve this.
Party Goal: PCs need to overcome Obstacles A, B, and C, and take action to influence how the situation affects Y.
If you can boil the scenario down to this, you’ve already got a really workable outline before you even begin prepping in earnest.
Granted, I’m coming at this as a GM who doesn’t always know which characters will be at the table. You can do even more in a session zero, and by tying character backstory into the scenario. That’s an S-tier skill.
Why not prep scenes? Well, a lot of GMs do, and a lot of published scenarios structure themselves this way. Even adventures that aren’t at all linear get represented as such. Just look at the published “flowchart” of Rime of the Frostmaiden above on the left—that’s actually just a table of contents. It’s possibly the least helpful way to walk someone through that adventure. Contrast it with my flowchart on the right and you’ll get a better sense of which quests from which chapters flow into each other.
It’s easy to imagine a game session like a movie and think cinematically about how the action might play out. But movies are usually linear, and even if they’re not there are still writers, directors, and cinematographers who know the end from the beginning and take you from scene to scene in a linear track.
Roleplaying games don’t operate this way. It’s not our role as the GM to take action—it’s the players’ role. They’re the protagonists, which by definition means their choices have the strongest bearing on the story. It’s in their job description. At best we should be using NPCs to incite them to take action themselves. Invite them to grapple with the scenario and make choices.
3. PREP LOCATIONS
Once I have a sense of the goals, situations, and climactic choices of the scenario, I zoom in on the locations most likely to be involved. This is usually where Obstacles A, B, and C that I mentioned above come into play.
Dungeons make this part easy, because your dungeon is usually (hopefully) keyed with specific descriptions of each area. No matter where the players choose to engage, you know roughly what they’ll find there.
You have to approach railroad scenarios a little differently. Generally in these products the established locations will be connected by “cut scene” style transitions that grab the wheel, assume how players will or should respond, and force those choices regardless of logic or motivation. Time to move to chapter 2, everyone get in the car!
The first thing I do is strip out any material where the adventure directly tells the players where to go or what to do. Instead we want to clarify their goal. Sure an NPC might say “in order to accomplish that goal, you’d have go to A, B, or C”—but that’s not the same as telling them what to do. You’re providing information, presenting players with choices and questions that they answer.
In other words, it’s less about “playing through” an adventure in order like a golf course. The scenario becomes about players forging a unique path through the situation. If they feel strongly about going and doing something outside the scope of the railroad, I can handle it with a little light improv because I’ve converted “scenes” into tools.
4. PREP GM EVENTS
Once you have the situation and its locations down, you can start being more dynamic with the scenario. The NPCs can shift where they are and how they’re pursuing their goals without much difficulty, because you know what’s in each location and what resources enemies can avail themselves of.
Incidentally, this is one reason prepping a location that’s “empty” or isn’t slotted for important encounters can be worthwhile. An NPC might move to the armory to gather weapons when they hear intruders in the hall, or rally a small mob of cultists from the partially-cleared dungeon and raid the empty monastery. When you have goals and locations in place, you can actually play the NPCs as your characters, inserting “GM events” wherever they’re useful: to incite action, to redirect the game toward important locations, or simply to create drama.
5. REINFORCE TRANSITION PATHS
Last of all, I look at the overall structural integrity of the adventure I’ve laid out. What often started as an A > B > C railroad now looks like an actual flowchart because players might go in several directions from any given location or obstacle. Most important to me here is ensuring there’s a likelihood that players care enough to plan and consider each option.
If I have a manor house that used to feature a cut scene where no choice was offered, I want to make sure there’s a clue or hook pointing there that’s sufficiently compelling. I’m not deciding the exact order of events or how players engage. Instead, I’m keeping the emergent story alive by making all the options I prepped viable from the players’ point of view.
Thanks for reading!
In the future, I’ll illustrate these points using parts of the adventure Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus (2019), for which I went through this process. It’s a doozy. Thanks for reading!
