16 Things Every Good D&D Adventure Must Have

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A Brief Word From Johnn

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Here’s a great list of essential adventure ingredients based on this video from Luke at The DM Lair on YouTube. Luke helped me out with a Kickstarter before — thanks Luke! — and I recommend his channel to D&D DMs.

You can check it here: List #1 & List #2

16 Essential Adventure Ingredients

Compelling Story
Good Plot Hook
Intriguing Villain
Subservient Lieutenant
Twist
Enemies That Do More Than Just Attack
Piece of Lore
Balance Among the Three Pillars
Interesting Encounters and Combats
Variety of Encounter Difficulties
Escalation and Rising Action
Climax and Boss Fight
Resolution
Rewards
Stakes for the World
Stakes for the Characters

This is a strong list.

And if you don’t mind, I’d like to provide my take with d3 tips on each step. I won’t run this series 16 days in a row, but I’ll drop a few here and there over the next while until complete.

Let’s dig in!

#1 Make Stories More Compelling

1. Create a Character Connection

I’ve recently added “Connection” to my Encounter Stat Block. One option for that slot is tying a player character to the situation.

For example, in my Basilica campaign, the party finds a farmhouse recently burned out by Dogmen. If anyone sifts through the debris, they could find the land deed signed by the Baron himself — and it’s in the character’s family name.

With this connection, the entangled player is sure to take interest and investigate further.

2. Launch Them Out of a Cannon

Because we’re playing a game, our “stories” unfold as we play them. In a glorious, messy, unpredictable fashion.

We cannot control the PCs, but we can give them a strong push in the direction we want by shooting them out of a cannon (not canon — although both work here) aimed in that direction. I’ve not been used as ammunition in real life, but I imagine changing course mid-air is tough.

The first adventure, first encounter of that adventure, and first encounter each session are key GM moments where we tend to have more control.

The classic advice is to start with a Bang! Agreed. Start your campaign with a bang. Your adventures. And your sessions. Put the party on a trajectory towards your ideal grand finale or next milestone to ensure a compelling story develops through play.

The party can still deviate and become wandering monsters themselves, but they need to go against the cannon shot’s momentum during each of those key starting moments.

3. Add an Institution

More NPCs never hurts. 🙂 Connect adventure to setting via faction. This stirs the plot, adds layers to the onion, and gives you more mook and stage boss options.

For example, the PCs are hired to track down the killers of a farm family. Tracks indicate Dogmen.

Upon visiting the scene of the crime, a PC notices symbols blazoned into a couple of trees, fence posts, or buildings. These could be hobo code, and fresh marks could mean witnesses. The signs could be thieves’ cant advising already looted, a paladin’s oath of revenge on behalf of his order, or ranger’s warning to travellers.

Now the party not only has a lead, but they have something else to worry about.

Let’s say the farm encounter is from a published adventure you’re running. You can still add in the faction and fresh blazoned sign. If pursued, they could easily be left as dead end Red Herrings, with no witnesses or useful information, to facilitate faction insertion and not derail the adventure.

And now you can add the faction into gameplay wherever you like. You’ve forewarned the party. The faction could be appear as a second wave in a combat — whose side will they choose? The faction could be a clue provider if the party gets stuck. Or the faction could offer rivals and hooks as Back Pocket material if needed.

#2 Great Plot Hooks

We’ve chatted extensively about plot hooks in the past. They are the connective tissue between characters now and their future.

Sometimes we feel inclined to wield them like Whelm and beat the compliance into our players. But let’s swap the hammer for curiosity. Great hooks invite players forward — they don’t shove.

1. Make Hooks Personal

The best hooks dangle something the characters want. They operate on the emotional level, through the physical.

Gold and gear are fine, but fleeting. Vengeance, honour, lost family, forbidden knowledge? Those motivations burn until the heat death of the universe.

Tie your plot hook to a PC’s background, flaw, or goal, and watch the player lean in. Bonus XP if your hook is personal to multiple PCs.

The most worn out papers after your GM Cheat Sheets should be the character sheets from studying and mining them so much.

2. Make Hooks Relevant

Make hooks feel urgent and not optional. Connect them to what just happened or what’s about to happen. Use NPC reactions, the unfolding situation change, and environmental changes to keep momentum flowing.

When you make the world respond to player choices, every detail becomes potential plot fuel. A scrap of paper, a worried glance, a bloodstained sigil — they all become clues worth chasing.

3. Hook Every Player Every Session

Hooking characters once isn’t enough. Adventures can play out over several sessions, and players can forget, lose motivation, or drift. We want to remind them every session why their character’s actions matter and what’s at stake for them in the adventure.

Get into the habit of expressing the same hook multiple times, in different ways. This is the basis of my Knowledge Table tool. I extract the facts from my adventure and list them out. Then I make partial truth versions of each.

The partial truths aren’t lies. Lies create red herrings and dead ends that get frustrating when used too often. Instead, think of partial truths as half-clues.

Half the important details aren’t wrong, they’re missing. This instantly gets you multiple hooks from one as you drip out a new detail that completes part of the puzzle each time.

Make it feel like the world always beckons, offering players interesting choices and reminding them about their characters’ mission.

#3 3 Secret Ingredients of an Intriguing Villain

How can we get our players to get a good hate on and go after our villains?

Three tips today for you on how to do that, as part of the 16 point adventure tips series.

1. Start With the 3 Villain Basics

When I create a villain, before doing anything with their stat block, backstory, or evil plots, I create three quick details:

Goal: What do they ultimately want? If intelligent, what’s their goal? If not, what’s their instinct or drive?
Motivation: With goal in mind, we now ask Why? so we know the reasons behind their objective.
M.O.: Modus Operandi. How do they get the job done? Resources, abilities, and most importantly, unique “signature” or personal style.

With these three pieces of information nailed down, I can design the rest of my adventure with confidence. For example, tone and themes based on Modus Operandi; history and current situation based on Motivation; region map and encounters based on Goal.

2. Give Villains Early Wins

Once we’ve built the villain’s core, it’s time to activate them within the adventure. To spark player animosity, show off three villainous aspects early on:

Villain Capability: FUD. Scare the players, or at least get them worried, about whether the party is up to the challenge.
Villain Mystery: Hook players deeper by getting players curious and puzzling over what the BBEG’s up to right now. Get the party guessing the villain’s next move.
Villain Urgency: Fire all the slow-moving NPCs in the villain’s operation and give your antagonist a burning clock to race. This creates authentic urgency from the players’ side of the screen.

Use Goal, Motivation, and M.O. here to inform each aspect.

3. Make the Villain’s Defeat a Journey Not an Encounter

I see a lot of adventures make the final encounter the BBEG showdown. That’s great. But not when it’s the first time they meet the villain!

We want several touchpoints with our villain during the adventure. These interactions can be direct or indirect. Indirect examples include confrontations with minions, first and second order effects from villain actions, and uncovering the villain’s influence through clues, propaganda, or changes in the world’s factions, economies, or cultures.

The main tip here is to see things from the villain’s perspective.

They’ve got a lot of work to do.

Our antagonist isn’t just waiting in Room IV for the PCs to achieve their goal. He’s out and about, commanding minions, dominating council meetings, raising an army, building factories, or stealthing around and waiting for the opportunity to “remove opposing game pieces off the board”.

I hope you are finding this series on adventure tips helpful. It’s based on a Youtube video from the DM Lair called 16 Things Every Good D&D Adventure Must Have. It’s a great list, and over the next few weeks I’m going through each item and offering 1d3 tips.

We tend to treat villain lieutenants like walking stat blocks. But, What if… they were your campaign’s secret plot foil?

Next up in my ongoing adventure building tips series following this 16 point checklist from the DM Lair on Youtube is the Subservient Lieutenant.

Here are 1d3 tips:

1. Give Villain Lieutenants Status

I used to run mooks as randos who got in the PCs’ way. But doing so made me miss out on numerous world building chances over the years.

I also ran a villain’s organization as a flat mob. I just picked combatants from monster books that I felt could challenge the PCs for any particular encounter.

However, we get GM boons when we create a faction pyramid for the villain and assign one or more NPCs to lieutenant boxes. This creates structure and hierarchy we can use in several ways.

GM Boons

Stakes: Each lieutenant can show a different face of the villain’s influence. For example, regional governors, cult leaders, pirate captains. This spreads villainy into the world and your adventure organically.
Plotting: Lieutenants give us proxy contact with the villain without confronting the BBEG too early. We also build up anticipation and drama about eventual PC contact with a particular lieutenant.
Sandbox: Each lieutenant should pursue their own agendas (sub-plots in your campaign). This creates side quests, rivalries, and opportunities to portray a dynamic world.
Adventure Design: Defeating or allying with lieutenants gives the campaign natural milestones and branching paths. Take down Lieutenant A? Lieutenant B might retaliate or seize power.
Roleplay: Don’t build your lieutenants as mere combat constructs. Give them personality and dimension so we get chances for parley, betrayal, negotiation, and grudging respect.

Chief takeaway here is, instead of sword fodder, make your mini BBEGs recurring NPCs players love to hate, therefore building up good hate for the villain through association as well.

2. Give Villain Lieutenants a Specific Job

The word Lieutenant comes from Old French:

Lieu = place
Tenant = holding (from Latin tenere, “to hold”)

Put together, lieutenant in literal terms means “place-holder” as in someone who holds a place on behalf of someone else, usually a superior.

Thus, a lieutenant was someone entrusted to run things in another’s name. Things like land, troops, a castle, or even a whole region.

Give each lieutenant in the villain’s organization a clear portfolio, responsibility, role, or job. Something that’s theirs to wield that lets them project force.

GM Boons

Stakes: Players understand exactly what the lieutenant controls, and therefore what the PCs can capture, sabotage, or steal.
Hooks: Each lieutenant job has duties and actions. Flip these around to become party missions, such as blocking a caravan, disrupting the harvest, infiltrating a garrison, stealing a powerful magic item.
World Building: Lieutenant “jobs” reflect the villain’s footprint in your setting making your world feel alive. For example, corrupted priests, a rise in piracy, increased taxes, or new wars.
Tiers of Difficulty: Stratifying a villain’s network into Spikes of Danger lets players attack it layer by layer, instead of charging the castle door.

3. Give Villain Lieutenants a Personal Mission

Bring our stage bosses to life by giving them their own purposes that can, at times, cross the villain’s aims.

While lieutenants serve the villain publicly (or at least in front of the troops), many harbour private motives, such as ambition, revenge, fear, faith, or even escape. These motives should reflect the villain’s core themes, offer cracks in the façade for PCs to wedge into, and give players dilemmas and other engaging choices.

GM Boons

Conflict: When lieutenants pursue goals that clash with other stage bosses or sabotage the villain, we add intrigue and chaos to our villain’s machine.
Plot: Personal missions from powerful NPCs create surprise plots, betrayals, and uneasy alliances as players navigate the villain’s corrupted and potentially crumbling network.
Achilles Heel: We now have at least one way the PCs can win the adventure by exploiting a lieutenants’ personal motives. Offer a deal, exploit a rivalry, or turn enemies of enemies into reluctant allies.
Stakes: Each personal mission (like reclaiming a lost heirloom, toppling a rival, or protecting forbidden romance) stitches personal stakes into the wider setting.
World Building: Each new lieutenant mission creates a side plot that you can build out with new NPCs, locations, treasure, and events.

Turn your villainous lieutenants into plot foils that deepen your world, spawn adventure and encounter hooks, and pose tricky challenges for your players.

Twist Your Twists

This approach works for any adventure type. 5 Room Dungeons, point crawls, megadungeons, urban crawls, even sandboxes. Especially sandboxes.

And it works because you, clever GM, knew the twist’s twist from the start. You can layer it in encounters the whole time, setting up a potential incredible campaign moment when players figure it out.

Reframe the Adventure

A great twist gets you rethinking everything you thought you knew.

Wait, I’m the dead one?

I am your father.

One’s growing in you now.

Effective twists retroactively change how you see everything that came before. Not just at the twist moment, but also later, while at the refrigerator, when you realize there was a hidden truth all along.

Here’s an example:

The Barrier

In my CampaignCraft: From 5 Room Dungeon to Universe program I built a graveyard dungeon. The dungeon is a crypt of a wealthy noble.

If the party can survive the crypt’s many perils (I’m connecting four 5 Room Dungeons together to form a full-length adventure), they can pillage some sweet magic items.

The goal after looting will be getting out alive.

That’s because the graveyard is cursed. The graveyard creators were punished by the gods for hubris. They can never leave. And worse, no magic can pass through the graveyard gates or walls.

This anti-magic barrier keeps the locals safe. They treat the place like a haunted zoo, watching the undead trapped within from a safe distance.

And nobody’s looted the place over the millennia because nobody’s come back out with magic treasure intact.

The First Twist

So the initial twist, which you probably figured out already, is when the party tries to leave, clutching their shiny new magical loot, they’ll be blocked by the barrier.

(Note this is a first level adventure and the first of the campaign, so characters won’t have any magic items on them when they enter to spoil my twist at the outset.)

And the undead they just robbed are now hot on their heels. Excellent tension. Do the PCs drop their treasure and run? Or stand and die clutching it?

They’ll likely flee. And once safe outside, I bet they’ll turn back to taunt the furious undead. Your mother was a zombie and your father smelt of embalming fluid!

The Second Twist

The undead run the local Thieves’ Guild. The graveyard’s the perfect den for ancient undead gone rogue (pun intended!).

The twist on the twist is that some of these villains can cross the barrier, magic items and all.

So the undead can smuggle gold, illicit goods, and enchanted loot in and out all the time.

When the party learns this, they’ll remember their taunts, rude gestures, and the undead’s enraged glares…and then realize the barrier is a lie. That’s when their blood turns cold.

But that chill also thrums with the thrill of discovery. The party’s just unlocked a new plot thread. The undead Thieves’ Guild, the truth behind the barrier, and the chance to return – if they dare.

Twisting the twist surprises your players twice, rewires your entire adventure, and opens doors to new adventure.

Have you twisted twists before? Hit reply, I’d love to hear your story!

Enemies That Do More Than Just Attack

Here’s how to make your combats more exciting from just one simple tweak to your descriptions.

Combats grind when they devolve into just trading blows.

But they become thrilling when combatants perform stunts, take tactical actions, and make use of the battlefield features you’ve designed.

One way we can do this is through Battlefield Actions, described here in this YouTube D&D 5E video from Pointy Hat that Wizard of Adventure Andy recently shared with me. Pointy Hat also shares the rules in this Google Doc.

Turns out, I’ve been doing combat this way for a while as part of my Wizard of Combat Combat Stories method.

And you can do this too, reaping the same powerful benefits, as a tweak to your GMing style instead of adding a new rule.

Here’s how it works:

Have your foes stop the grind by doing stunts, being tactical, and leveraging the battlefield (or CombatScape as I call it in Wizard of Combat).
At the end of a foe’s turn, decide what they want to do on their next turn.
Signpost this intention to players.

That’s it.

Pretty simple, eh?

But it dramatically changes the game.

Here’s an example:

The party’s fighting four goblins in a torture chamber with iron maiden, chains, tongs, fire pit, and similar features.

Johnn: Roghan, the door of the iron maiden suddenly crashes open. A fifth goblin leaps out and slices at you with a razor-sharp bone saw!

[Roll] Hit! [Roll] Terrible pain lances across your arm as the saw cuts deep. 12 damage.

Roghan: #$%& I’m gonna give you a dirt nap, filthy gobbo!

Johnn: The creature laughs in your face. Then gets a cunning gleam in its eyes as it spots a glowing red tong sitting in the fire pit.

So what’s happening here and how does this make our battles better?

By telegraphing a foe’s next move at the end of their turn we prod players to react. In this case, a literal poke, haha.

Now we’ve got an interesting situation.

Does Roghan still just stand there and swing? Race to get the hot tong first? Block the way and then whack? Yell at the bard to grab it?

New options open up by hinting at what a foe might do next.

And note the “might” part. As GM I’ve committed to nothing. ‘Twas just a glance. A hint.

With this detail, I alert players about a new threat or foe tactic. And by adding this detail at the end of a foe’s turn, it gives players time and opportunity to do something about it.

Try this out yourself and see how it gets your party doing more than grinding until the last health point.

This technique works for every game system, every genre. And, as I mentioned, it need not be codified into a rule if you prefer. Have foes give away their next potential action and then let players do the rest.

For more combat techniques like this, check out my Wizard of Combat self-paced online program before the price goes up.

Make fights epic with little tricks and tactics like Battlefield Actions.

Cheers,
Johnn
roleplayingtips.com
https://discord.gg/6MxTRAqQ76
Have more fun at every game!

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