Making an Adventure Site Part 1: So, You Need an Adventure Site…

  In the lead-up to the second annual Adventure Site Contest, I’ll make a few posts working though the creation of my own adventure site entry, currently titled Fog Valley Retreat. My players are going to be needing an adventure site next month and I have the idea, so why not go ahead and write it up all nice? I am in fact making two adventure sites for where they’re currently exploring, but the bigger one isn’t going to ever be written up for publication (because it’s using some non-commercial Dyson maps), so I knocked that out for 2-3 sessions’ worth of exploration in half an hour of prep. If it’s going to look nicer like this example site, though, I’m going to be spending a little more time.
  As an aside, drilling down a little bit on my process might make these things seem like a little more work than they actually are; I’m being careful and so I expect for this 3-pages-plus-map submission I’m going to spend about four hours of work. Some perfectionists will lavish dozens of hours on their lovingly crafted submissions but there are going to be great sites also slapped together in a couple hours. Please don’t hesitate to create and submit, a contest like this is a fantastic opportunity to get a project done, and also receive multiple sets of feedback. If you have extra time, the very best use of it is in playtesting your site, I cannot undersell how much better that makes an RPG product.
  So as a prelude, let me tell you (a bit) about my campaign; as my players have pushed deeper into the stormy central isles of my ongoing West Marches campaign (Into the Skyshadow Isles), they’ve been stumbling upon adventure sites from Adventure Sites I, notably the spider-themed linked sites of the Barrow Shrine of Corruption, Legacy of the Black Mark, and Etta Capp’s Cottage, which I’ve seeded as all being linked to an ancient elven spider-demon’s cult, the later two giving two halves of a map leading to an ancient elven hideaway in the hills….the genius module Webs of Past and Present. My elves, as all elves should be, are a decadent fallen people prone to depraved cults, and while they’re not heavily present in most of the Skyshadow Isles, a few of their moldering ruins remain on these particular isles. Looking around I spot an area where I think another site would go, if I have something nice and elven-ruiny. I could make a map at this point, but Dyson Logos has a perfect commercial map just right for something of this scale:
 
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  There’s nothing wrong with grabbing a free map for something like this, and that’s a real beauty right there. Two levels with a little bit of up/down on the ground floor, multiple means of ingress/egress, good meaningful loops, and clear clean rooms with a ton of visual interest. At twenty-one “rooms” it’s right at the max for a one-and-done adventure site, but with the more relaxed three-page limit that’s no issue. I also think it’s pretty…but it’s also something that is pretty easy to convey to a mapper at the table. I’ll probably draw the entry and the octagonal first balcony room for them first, because that’s complex, but after that they can do their mapping easily.
  Once I either pick out or draw out my map, I begin to think about the context for the site and what challenges will be presented...for an adventure site in this contest, I also want to see how it can be made more generic and thus usable for anyone’s game. So, while in my campaign this is on a constantly stormy island’s hills, I’m noting this takes place in any viny fog-shrouded valley. Should be a ubiquitous environment. I’m also preparing this to be where the elf general flees to if he does run from Webs’ site, but for the purposes of the site as a one-shot I have a generic “flight-risk bad guy”. I’m also going to note this site works as a generally-known sanctuary for moral reprobates in whatever campaign world, giving users a lot of flexibility for how to use the adventure site in any number of campaigns.
  I’m going to write up a story for the site here, but I think it’s going to be something that adapts easily to whatever generic Greyhawklike is being used. The upper left zone suggests a shrine and a private priestly complex, I’m going to tag that as devoted to a deceptive elven deity known as Saint Lilit, while the lower main complex is devoted to a god of travelers and refugees. Ostensibly neutral, this god can trend evil by being a protector of deposed tyrants and dictators. Who couldn’t use something like that? This religious hermitage thus gets known as the Fog Valley Retreat, descriptive and evocative both.
  The details of the map suggest some cool individual challenges. The hex this goes in has foggy valleys full of assassin vines, the front of the site being ivy-covered with some of that ivy as assassin vines is a classic and grants a little protection to the secret entrances. Fog is a theme that works for the elevation, I’m going to have waist-deep persistent fog present on the ground floor when doors or curtains are open, up to head-height in those lower-down rooms to the bottom right. That’s going to be an environmental effect to play with in terms of traps and hazards. Absent a map flow that encourages a “boss fight” or two, I think in fact I like the biggest combat danger to be present in the very first main room there, that big mark representing a huge statue. When someone under the protection of this religious retreat is killed, that center statue is going to wake up as an extremely dangerous threat, to be battled or avoided with difficulty. Add a clerical caretaker, random encounters, and a ghost or two, we have a nice challenging site aimed at levels 5-8.
  Which of course means I’m free to be very mean and have one of these running around in the fog:

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