Over the past few months I've jumped into adventure design which ended up with me creating an "adventure frame" (like a campaign frame but with adventure scaffolding rather than campaign scaffolding). I wanted to take some time to share what that was like in a design diary and what I learned.

So first of all, when I started I didn't have the concept of an adventure frame in mind or what that was, but with the Daggerheart space having no official adventure framework yet it seemed ripe to dive in and see what writing an adventure in Daggerheart was going to be like.

There really wasn't any preconceived notions of what an adventure for Daggerheart would look like so I wanted to stick with the game's principles. This had me ask what would an adventure look like, and to me the obvious transition was from a campaign frame to an adventure frame. What was an adventure frame, though? Well to me that meant a few things: a skeleton or scaffolding with GM and PC resources to run YOUR version of a guided story, complete with connections, GM moves, story beats (which later became the Almanac of the adventure), and of course, stat blocks for environments and adversaries.

It wasn't going to be a prewritten story centered you coming in as an outsider (like most 5e adventures), but tools with a direction and general shape, with set pieces premade for the GM, but how you approach it and used it was up to your personal style and how the group integrated with the story, but still with the group at the center of the story. In my playtesting of Blood & Midnight, we ended up with the group’s masquerade being invaded by BBEG vampire (which was in the adventure frame) but the group created a story where the vampire was seeking to overtake the property and fill it in with private equity apartments!

The reasoning was a GM should be able to pick up the adventure frame and use it as a resource that would provide them as much of the prep as possible. With as much flexibility for the group to make themselves the centre for the story.

I started by framing the adventure into scenarios of set pieces encounters. The next question would be, well what constitutes a scenario for Daggerheart? And that was the main question that really informed the most important thing I learned: a good scenario (and as a result, a good adventure frame) is one with different objectives. You want diverse objectives with different narratives beats and different stakes, and the result is the PCs need to pick and choose what they spend their time and resources on and decide what is important to them to take the adventure in their own direction.

The worst case scenario, in my opinion, is an encounter with 2 + 3 x PC battle points (i.e., the recommended battle points) and the only objective is "defeat all adversaries" and the only thing at stake is "a PC or PCs die". An adventure should never use that one dimensional encounter and instead should have broad and wide encounters with different stakes or paths depending on the story so far.

In my adventure frame, I had 3 scenarios and I wanted each scenario to have a different structure in its objectives and how they fit into each other.

In the first scenario, Masquerade Macabre, the objectives were to find out who infiltrated their party, then to track down the vampire thralls at the party and either defeat them or revert their thrallism with a potion. Afterwards, depending on if you defeated more thralls or cured more thralls, you either learned of a powerful artifact to defeat the BBEG or that the BBEG was preparing a ritual from the thralls that you unturned. This was 2 objectives, and one branched depending on your choices that led into the next scenario.

In the second scenario, Midnight Manor, you are either following up on the rare artifact or the ritual, which was more about seeing how efficiently you do it (but not tough enough to fail on it's own). Then after that, it branches open into 3 different objectives: can you escape the manor in time (a progress countdown), the manor keeper shows up and the more you defeat him (he respawns), the weaker the BBEG gets, and you can either go get the artifact or learn about the ritual (whichever you didn’t do first).

And lastly this leads us into the finale, which I think has a great two phase big boss battle. In the first phase, you’re trying to defeat the BBEG and also rescue your ally who she kidnapped (a progress countdown). Most groups will rescue the ally, spending precious resources in a fairly deadly encounter.

In phase two, you continue to fight the BBEG for a true defeat, but the objective of closing the ritual portal also becomes a priority now, and finally the objective of surviving comes into play (and they must chose how hard they decide to go at it). With my group, they chose to save their ally, defeat the BBEG, and close the portal but at the great cost of 3 PCs going out in a blaze of glory to do so. And so, having all these competing objectives made for a very dynamic adventure that had a lot of different pieces moving and to chose form.

These objectives also free you from the constraints of battle points. You can add 20-30 battle points to a scenario because it simply means the PCs will need to pick which objectives they actually care to pursue and I think you should always have more than they can accomplish to keep the game interesting, the stakes high, and so that they need to make choices about what they actually care about. A huge thing to remember is: the GM can't kill PCs, the GM can't TPK the group. Only the PCs can kill their PCs! So if it's mid adventure and they go down to 0 HP, they can just choose to survive and that's great! It's part of what makes Daggerheart work on this level.

Another thing I learned is that you need to incorporate diverse mechanics while writing an adventure. There are many parts of Daggerheart you can lean into, and I think you should have a list of them when writing. Here’s a list of all the things I have that I try to think of to include in the adventure frame for things like GM moves, adversaries, or environments:

Core PC pressures

Hit Points and damage
Stress
Hope
Fear
Armor Score and Armor Thresholds
Death moves / death consequences
Class, subclass, and domain features
Consumables, gear, and supplies

Roll outcomes

Success with Hope
Success with Fear
Failure with Hope or Fear
Partial success through success-with-cost framing
Advantage/disadvantage from conditions, features, or fiction
Help an Ally
Reaction rolls
Spellcast rolls
Group or teamwork rolls when the fiction supports it

Conditions to use

Hidden
Vulnerable
Restrained
Temporary conditions that clear through action or GM ruling
Special conditions with their own removal rules

Scene pressure

Countdowns for imminent consequences
Looping countdowns for recurring threats
Increasing or decreasing countdowns for escalating or fading danger
Scene based timers for rituals, pursuits, collapses, reinforcements, or escapes

Combat variety

Standard attacks
Area attacks on all PCs
Reinforcements.
Phased enemies or changing battlefield phases
Protect, escort, defend, or disable objectives
Terrain that changes how combat works
Objective based victories

Downtime and recovery

Rest moves

Speaking of mechanics, things that were self balancing made a big difference for keeping the party on track (and not too far ahead or too far behind). For example, in the final scenario, there’s a group Presence roll to see if they succumb to the horrors before facing the BBEG. If they fail, one party member loses all of their hope. If they’re already ahead and have lots of hope, this hits them hard. Someone could lose 4+ Hope. If they’re behind, then it won’t hit nearly as hard. Maybe even 0 Hope if someone is empty.

Another thing that I really liked doing was I created these entries of boxed text but it wasn’t for rooms or locations, but thing that happened (and they changed based off of what happened in the story). I called this the almanac, and it would often be referenced if a countdown was completed so the GM has something to work with when it activated. This also made it easy to include custom GM moves and align them with things like golden opportunities or story beats. Here's a sample of one:

Sample from the Almanac

On the publishing side of things, I wanted to release it as PWYW because I felt that aligned most with what would get this into the hands of people who wanted it, kept it accessible, but offered a way for people to provide me with a tip of appreciation. I think this has gone well, and I’ve made about $200 USD from the adventure and I think it’s really connecting with people.

Now I know that some people are going to look at this adventure frame and come in expecting it to act like a D&D adventure module. Unfortunately this is not meant for them and I suspect it’ll be a bit of a shock to some GMs who want the “everything on the rails, no real challenge” type of story you get from those types of D&D adventures. This adventure module was meant to lean into Daggerheart’s principles and be narrative and dynamic, with things like stat blocks handled for you.

As well, I did experience a few... spirited readers who really expected this PWYW product to be some kind of official fully fledged adventure with art, professional company sized play testing and more... That felt really entitled and I didn't appreciate that behaviour because I'm just one person making something folks can get for free. I hope those people learn to show a little appreciation in the future because that was kind've insane behaviour! lol

I do think that for publishing in Daggerheart, the streamlining portion of things is crucial. Before it was playtested, I had a note on the product page saying it wasn’t done yet due to playtesting. And I think the difference playtesting made here was huge. It really took that final level of polish and I think people will have a great time with it.

Anyways, these are a lot of the things I learned. I hope this was helpful and insightful :) Thanks for reading this far if you made it. If done your own writing, I’d love to hear how it’s gone for you. If you’re interested, you can check out my adventure frame on https://heartofdaggers.com/products/blood-and-midnight-a-tier-1-and-2-adventure-module/.