Three more weeks on your Adventure Site...and a note on maps

  You still have three more weeks to submit your adventure site, you still have time...it's only two pages, you can definitely do it. There are entrants making wilderness sites, there are entrants making city sites, there's even a clever entry that can be used as either an independent tomb location or as a smaller section in a bigger pyramid, great stuff. Even if you don't have a brilliant idea, why not take a premade map and just key the thing? You might be surprised about what emerges, this is the whole body of work of Vance Atkins. 
  There's a style of play that suggests the best version of TTRPG play is just take a map and roll on tables for the inhabitants...this is the Heroes of Adventure model, basically. Well, there's something about that for stocking a dungeon, too, just grab your favorite tables and see what story emerges in the dungeon as you roll. The trouble is that these results need to be filtered to make sense, and also that rolling the encounters and pulling them together takes too long to do it at the table. So the value of the adventure sites is that we have something prebuilt for play. So if nothing has occurred to you so far, why not start with some inspiration? Look for a map.
  I'll explain using a great site-map that Dyson Logos just dropped, Gath-Am's Beacon. 
  It's worth looking at the map with an eye toward adventure design and most importantly gameplay. Remember, pretty as it is, what we're looking for is interesting things to do when 3-7 violent treasure-hungry homeless people stumble upon it. First of all, it's got verticality; five levels up-and-down, with both outdoor ways up and indoor stairs. The assumed gameplay with an outdoor tower is usually "how do we get to the crunchy nougaty center where the treasure is?" Well, here there's the stairs, a rope ladder, and a secret back door. Every level there's also the option to free-climb of course, and if you're writing for higher levels you can assume flight options. I'd dismiss this spot as a good high-level site because flying does obviate a lot of the neat exploratory bits. So, good gameplay just in the "how do we get up", and varying the challenges based on the approach gives those all-too-essential choices to the PCs. 
  Now unfortunately the size and the visually exposed nature of this map means that there's not a lot of finding the path. That's not fatal, but what it does mean is that if I were stocking this thing for an adventure (and I might if none of you do), I'd want to make it clear early on what the multiple paths' guardians or challenges are, at least telegraphing things with hints. An immobile but sentient door guardian is a good initial block, something formidable but that can be bypassed via talking/trickery or sneaking/walking around. After that, I'd almost use the classic 5-room-dungeon formula, just consciously trying to mix puzzles/fights/traps. The difference between a classic 5-roomer and this map's scenario is that the map geometry does allow the party to say "nah, let's try the ladder instead". 
  Take something like this (or heck, this one, I'm not your dad) and roll up three encounters on the outdoor random encounter chart. Figure out why these three adversaries would be here working together...or even better, all here at cross-purposes. You might be surprised at the emerging story that is born even as you just noodle on why the orcs have a bear and are sharing the space with a gryphon. Don't feel like you have come up with something out of nothing...find a map, find a picture, heck, go outdoors to the nearest woodland and find a place with interesting rocks. It's fun to fill in things with your imagination from there.

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