#dm starterpack

To me, one of the best marks of good DM advice (or for any creator) is not just sharing tips about what you COULD do, but WHY you should do it in the way the person is recommending; helping you build a methodology of better play.

Recently stumbled across this channel in some of my youtube deep dives and I have been solidly impressed since.

DM Tip: Coloring outside the lines. 

A piece of advice that’s vitally important for DMs, especially newer DMs to recognize is that presenting our party with a fleshed out, vibrant world is a magic trick mostly reliant on us having enough easily adaptable world-pieces laying around. It’s a matter of building the track as they go, and though modules provide a box full of pre-selected track pieces that can be useful building that backlog, the process is still reliant on YOU to fill in the blank space and account for the odd directions your party might end up in. 

As such, it’s important for us to look at modules not as a recipe that must be followed to have a good time, but as a concentrated dollop of inspiration/jumping off point upon which we can create our own adventures. There’s a similar philosophy behind my own adventure prompts, as I seldom expect people to be able to use them 1:1. Even I have to adjust things and change details when turning a series of individual prompts into the material of a campaign. 

The first step when you’re thinking of adapting an existing work  (whether it be a module or a narrative you want to turn into an adventure)  is to ask yourself and your players if this is the right fit for what they want to play.  There’s no point in adapting an adventure focused around a heist if your party wants to be out exploring the wilderness, and there’s no point in adapting a wilderness exploration adventure if your party wants to do a political thriller/urban mystery.  Just like with creating a homebrew campaign, you want to match the story to the expectations of your players. Trying to build a machine without knowing what it’s for is an exercise in frustration, as is trying to build a story without knowing the general direction you want it to be going.  

Next is to read the work back to front, making notes as you go, specifically looking for: 

Interesting ways the narrative could spin off from this, and what adventures might occur if your party make different decisions than what the story allows. 

What emotional work you need to build into the party’s backstory/previous adventures/to have them make the decisions you NEED them to. 

What happens if the party fail at each major step of the journey. 

Ways you think you could do X thing better. 

After you’re done with that, read another work with similar themes/subject matter with an eye of salvaging it for ideas to improve the first. Most modules have a direct path in mind with a few major branching points. What you want is raw material for when your party zigs when the original writers expected them to zag, as well as extraneous details that can make otherwise thin plot beats into sturdy pillars of your story. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve averted disaster or disinterest in my games by importing an npc or worldbuilding detail from something I’d recently read/watched into a narrative I’d thought was fully planned out but was just failing to fire

Finally, sit down with a notebook and try writing out the adventure step by step. Any time you get fuzzy on the details, it means you haven’t internalized the story you want to tell, and would end up running things by the book. This isn’t bad necessarily, but it’s the difference between a musician who has to go slow and follow along with the sheet music vs one who’s practiced enough to be confident in their performance. Recreating it like this might also let you see narrative potential that wasn’t necessarily evident in your first attempts.

Fantastic advice from a fantastic DM, especially when combined with all those amazing community produced maps