Evaluating an adventure

As you might know, I like and use Sly Flourish’s 8 steps to organise and handle my prep. But I have another secret, I also use it as a kind of analysis tool to see strengths and weaknesses in an adventure. I rip the adventure apart and reassemble it into the 8 steps.

Here’s an example. Below is a screenshot of the level one adventure notes as shown in the DMG. I picked it because it’s very very short. This adventure is written in a scene-to-scene style, while I prefer the looser, deconstructed style that allows me to improvise better, giving information out where it seems reasonable and allowing for player shenanigans. In an adventure like this, the 8 steps are kind of hidden here so I’ve coded them by colour in the screenshot below — I then rip apart by colour and reconstruct.  

I’ve described this process in detail before in Preparing a published adventure for play, but I think this little adventure shows it visually in a very nice way.

My Reconstruction

1 – characters – level one – might live in the village or have a contact in the free city of greyhawk

3 – Strong start

• Folk of High Ery notice a fungal growth on the river?

2 – Scenes and dramatic questions

• The first fork. Will they be able to track the source of corruption?
• Journey upstream. Will they ally with Borogrove?
• Twig-blight encounter. Will they live? How injured will they be?
• Corrupted Cave. Will they discover the brain fungus’s plan or its source?
• Journey Home. What effects will their heroics have?

4 – The party finds out (secrets and clues)

• an alien fungus is polluting the stream
• the fungus spawns vile creatures
• there are fungal growth on the riverbanks and a layer of scum on the water
• a stream a mile upstream from the village flows into the river and carries the pollution
• A treant, Borogrove, keeps watch over the wood
• The source of the corruption is inside a cave
• Drinking the water can make animals ill
• The fungus can control sentients like Bullywugs
• There’s a brain-like fungus in the cave water that is the ultimate source of the pollution

5 – Locations

• Village of High Ery, near Free City of Greyhawk
• Polluted Stream
• Corrupted Cave

6 – NPCs

• Borogrove, a treant. “kindly”

7 – Monsters

• treant
• stream pollution
• twig blights
• shrieker fungus 
• bullywug warriors
• psychic grey ooze
• brown bear
• stirges

8 – Treasure

• magic acorn
• staff of flowers

Analysis

Some things I notice right away from doing this:

• What happens if they don’t take the bait? this is a really linear adventure, and we see this because the dramatic questions are a little bit weak and we need to add good answers for what happens if they don’t act in the way the adventure thinks. What if they take a long time to find the source? What if they kill Borogrove? What if they ally with the fungus?
• Even though this is a very short adventure, the secrets and clues are repetitive, indicating there is not much flesh on the bones. This scenario needs lore. What does the brain fungus want? Why is it there? What’s Borogrove’s agenda? What are the townspeople of High Ery up to? To some extent this makes the scenario flexible but I’d definitely want to know more going in.
• There is only one NPC detailed — I’m probably going to need to add some, and also probably be ready to build out the treant a bit. I’d prefer to have someone in the final dungeon that they can talk to, so maybe I’ll make some chief fungus-controlled Bullywug who has something they want
• There’s no strong start — maybe a fungus-covered something comes into the village chasing someone
• The hook is weak. I want to intrigue them, threaten them, and arouse their greed. Maybe the thing that comes in the strong start is covered with fungus that’s full of gold or something. 

I do a similar process for most of the published dungeons I’m looking to run as I work through my session prep. Maybe it will be helpful to you.