Writing Travellers Guild Adventures

While you are absolutely welcome to run the many fantastic pre-written adventures available to you, if you’re feeling especially creative you can also write an adventure of your own, provided you follow the template and guidelines in this section.

The Process

  1. Read these rules.
  2. Come up with an idea for an adventure
  3. Share a link to it with @admin on Discord to request their review
  4. Flesh out the rest of your adventure for your own use, balance your encounters, and note down everything else you need to run it so that it all happens close to the same way every time.
  5. Run the adventure (once approved)
  6. Refine it as needed, informing the admins if anything major changes
  7. Run it again

Coming Up With a Concept

Your adventure should have an easily communicated concept of no more than a few sentences that describes the basic outline of the adventure and makes it sound interesting. Work from a simple idea and expand from there. For example from two of the official adventures:

Cargo ships are being dashed against the rocks west of Hulburg, lured off course by a mysterious light. Is this the work of ordinary thieves, or are more nefarious forces at work? A group of dwarves in the Hulburg region are in need of help. Strange lights have been seen at night and a deadly terror has struck their mining camp. Venture into the ancient ruins and discover the source of this terror before it's too late.

Settings

Your adventure must be set in a setting published in existing Wizards sources. At the present time, no homebrew settings are allowed. By setting your adventure somewhere in an existing world, you allow characters to tie themselves into it, for example a character from Faerun would know of Waterdeep, or a character from Theros would be at home in Meletis.

Valid Settings

The following are supported settings for Travellers Guild adventures:

  • The Forgotten Realms (Faerun, the Great Wheel cosmology)
  • Eberron
  • Ravnica
  • Theros
  • Ravenloft (incl. Barovia)
  • Strixhaven
  • Spelljammer (the Astral Sea)
  • Wildemount
  • The Radiant Citadel

Any settings featuring in officially released books are fine, so if you think a setting should be allowed but isn't listed, it may just be this hasn't been updated in a while. Contact an admin to be sure. Your adventure must tie to an established setting in some way. Adventures that tie to the Travellers Guild itself with a less determined setting are also fine - for example setting an adventure inside the guild hall in an indeterminate extraplanar location, or travelling from the guild hall to a strange plane or demiplane. The key is giving the players something they can connect with.

Interplanar Travel

You should ideally avoid interplanar/cross-setting travel during an adventure unless it is critical to the plot, as hitting two different planes within one adventure in a single evening feels rushed and confusing (unless the introductory segment is simply about transporting them to an unusual plane). Discuss this with admins when submitting your adventure.

Pick an Appropriate Setting and Tone

Try to make your adventure’s setting appropriate to the level range you have chosen. For example, an adventure set in the Feywild or the Nine Hells is probably not suitable for Tier 1 characters. Adventures should become more epic the higher level characters get. It makes no sense for level 4s to save the world, much as it makes no sense for level 20s to solve a small village’s bandit problem.

Even if some settings are dark and grim, make sure your adventure does not violate any of our community guidelines, or just good taste. Your adventure will be rejected or banned if it slips the net and players complain, and your right to submit and run custom adventures in the future will be revoked.

Combat

Combat takes time, which is what we’re shortest on in our Tuesday sessions. You should ideally limit the combat in your adventure to one major encounter (the final battle, or ‘boss’ encounter), plus one lesser encounter.

If an encounter is trivial or unlikely to result in full-length combat (for example, a zombie trapped down a pit, or a group of thugs that run away or surrender when some are killed), don't count then towards this guideline, just make sure the encounter runs quickly.

Creatures

Creatures should ideally be based on existing monsters from official sources, but you may modify them extensively, for example changing the weapons they wield, applying the mythic encounter rules from Theros to make a villain more intimidating, and switching out the abilities of a creature.

You may fully homebrew creatures in your adventure, but pay close attention to their balance when you run the adventure and modify them on the fly to ensure they are not too lethal or too easy for your party, to ensure they still have a good time. Modifying existing creatures is almost always the better route.

Scaling

Your adventure should be written in such a way that it supports scaling combat encounters to match the power level of the party, as follows:

Party Composition Party Strength
3-4 characters, average level less than intended Very Weak
3-4 characters, average level equal to intended Weak
3-4 characters, average level greater than intended Average
5 characters, average level less than intended Weak
5 characters, average level equal to intended Average
5 characters, average level greater than intended Strong
6-7 characters, average level less than intended Average
6-7 characters, average level equal to intended Strong
6-7 characters, average level greater than intended Very Strong

Essentially, every encounter should include adjustments for some of the following party strengths:

  • Very Weak
  • Weak
  • Average
  • Strong
  • Very Strong

Your adventure should be balanced for 5 characters of a specific level in your tier (We recommend levels 1, 3, 7, 10, 11, 15, 17, and 20 as good benchmarks). The D&D Beyond Encounter Builder is useful for this. You can then add or remove creatures, abilities, hit points or anything else you think will make a reasonable difference according to the party strength. You need not adjust for every single party strength, but always at least account for a Weak party. A strong party will find it too easy, which is sad but fine, but a weak party risks a TPK.

You may create adventures that are intended for multiple tiers to provide flexibility. This scaling is limited to a single tier in either direction, for example an adventure written for tier 1 can be scaled up to tier 2, and a tier 2 adventure may be scaled down to tier 1 or up to tier 3.

Structuring Your Adventure

Your adventure should follow something similar to the following structure:

  1. Introduction (~15 minutes) - The party are in some way introduced to the story at hand. If your adventure is set in an exotic plane or setting, write a short blurb introducing them to that setting so that they know the general vibe of the setting, as well as getting the opportunity to get to know each other and the general party vibe.
  2. Call To Arms (~30 minutes) - The party discover their primary goal, they are given their mission, they meet an NPC in need of aid. This should primarily be a structured roleplaying encounter involving interaction with the adventure’s main quest-giver.
  3. Investigation/Exploration (1-2 hours) - The party explores an area, follows a trail, investigates a situation, crawls a dungeon, or in some other way lays the groundwork for the finale. This can be a mix of minor combat, roleplaying encounters and/or puzzles. The meat of your adventure.
  4. Conclusion (30 minutes - 1 hour) - The investigation/exploration concludes, and a final showdown with some greater threat occurs as a result. This may involve a major combat or similar.

You may stray or blur the lines between these sections, as they are simply guidelines.

Your adventure needs to include the three pillars of D&D:

Exploration Role Playing Combat
The party describes doing things and exploring an environment, the DM describes the consequences of their actions. This can be anything from dungeon crawling to puzzles and investigations. The party talks to NPCs, played by the DM, and to each other in character. You need to ensure that the adventure is able to proceed even if people aren’t good at this bit, but it should be encouraged. The party gets to kill something! Combat should be challenging yet not unreasonably deadly (see the section on balancing your adventure). While allowing for peaceful solutions is encouraged, your adventure should have some guaranteed combat.

It’s a good idea to explicitly ensure you include something for each of these pillars when writing out your adventure.

Connecting Adventures

You may write multiple adventures to form a wider arcing story, but it should be trivial for people to drop in and out and still know what’s going on. You should account for the party in later adventures not being those who completed the original steps, and have a “canon” outcome to each adventure that you recap for those who weren’t there for it, making it possible for people to play the later adventures without feeling they’re missing out. You should also ensure that each adventure has a conclusive, satisfying ending so that it works entirely in isolation.

Example: You wrote a series of two adventures where the party save a caravan from bandit attacks in the first adventure, then hunt down the bandit king in the second. For your second adventure, you should write in an explanation that some members of the Travellers Guild were contracted to guard a caravan and briefly explain what was meant to happen as if it had happened. If some of the party from your previous adventure are present, you can adapt it to what actually happened, but you should make it as easy as possible to jump in later on in the series.

Yes this is hard, that’s why you should try not to write a series where possible. If you do need to write a series, the maximum number of instalments is currently 4. No more than 4 parts will ever be considered.

Handouts

Handouts are a great way to augment your adventure. Notes, maps, drawings, and other such things are encouraged and recommended. If your adventure contains a letter, write (or type) out the letter and hand it to them instead of reading. The experience is dramatically improved by doing this.

Rewards

Gold

Gold available in the adventure should be limited by tier, and distributed explicitly throughout the adventure. This means that when submitting your adventure, you should detail exactly where the gold is found in the adventure. Ensure that the amounts of gold listed are given as per-player values (for example if 90g is found in a chest with a 3-player party, if 6 players are present, that chest contains 180g).

As a general rule, put around 80% of the gold available in places it cannot be missed, or as a reward for completing the adventure, and the rest where it can potentially be missed if the party fails an objective or misses looting the room. For example (this doesn’t have to be exact, you are free to distribute it as makes sense):

Tier Guaranteed Gold Per Player Missable Gold Per Player
1 64 16
2 192 48
3 640 160
4 2400 600

Magic Items

Magic Item Sources

Magic items in your adventures should be those found in any official content source, such as the Dungeon Master’s Guide, Xanathar’s Guide, or another setting or campaign book. Homebrew items require explicit approval and 1-1 balancing with an admin, but you may re-flavour an official item, for example making a helm into a belt, or turning a ring into a cloak.

Awarding Magic Items

A maximum of 1 permanent magic item of an appropriate rarity of uncommon or above may be included in an adventure, and, most importantly, the item chosen must be a core element or at least present in the adventure’s story. For example, just throwing in a suit of +3 Plate Armour is irrelevant to an adventure about overthrowing an evil lich king with no further context, but if that suit of +3 Plate Armour is his head guard, an augmented suit of animated armour that the party has to kill to gain access to the lich’s phylactery, then it is relevant to the adventure.

To put it another way, every magic item in the adventure must be used by an NPC in some way in your adventure to make it memorable to the players. It’s not just a sword, it’s the sword they took from that corrupt guard captain. As custom magic items are allowed (consult with an admin on doing this currently, as the system is still being written), drawing magic items from a table or deciding from a pool is no longer permitted, unless the presence of each magic item can be placed firmly within the adventure.

You should, where possible, also provide your players with a description of the magic item that makes it unique and special. For example, it’s not just a Ring of Protection, it’s a chipped golden ring, inscribed with the word “Eternity” inscribed in elvish around the inside. When you put it on, you faintly hear the sound of bells. This again anchors the item in the world and makes characters remember it.

As a reminder, here are the appropriate tiers:

Tier Rarity
1 Uncommon
2 Rare
3 Very Rare
4 Legendary

If you wish to include an item from a lower rarity tier, you can instead include two items of a lower tier, for example two rare items in a tier 3 or 4 adventure instead of a single very rare item. As with the single item, these must be tied into the story of your adventure.

Custom Items

Custom Magic Items can be included in custom adventures. Custom magic items are all subject to approval using an elaborate spreadsheet, and will need to be cleared with Matt, who has spent far too many hours going full mad scientist on deconstructing official items to establish a baseline. DM him on Discord, he loves it.

Common Magic Items

You may also include 1 common magic item in your adventure in addition to the above, provided it is featured in your adventure in some way. You should not add common magic items just because you can, and you should not include them in every adventure, or they become less fun and special, but they make a good way of rewarding characters for optional or hidden objectives, such as impressing a particular NPC.

Consumables (potions, scrolls, etc.)

You may include a reasonable number of consumable items of an appropriate tier throughout your adventure. Use common sense for how many, bearing in mind the impact on other DMs. We recommend a maximum of 4 or 5 as a guideline. If you are able, tie these consumables into the adventure in some way that would be useful - for example, if there is an important strength check involved in the adventure, you may want to include a Potion of Hill Giant Strength.

Spell scrolls and spell books of enemy spellcasters should be awarded less frequently than potions, and justified by the story. Spell books may only be included if they are owned by a wizard the party encounters, not just randomly found on a shelf, and should only include level-appropriate spells.

Story Rewards

Story rewards can be written into your adventure as you wish, following the standard guidelines for Story Rewards.

Running your adventure

When you run your own adventure, inform your party that it is a homebrew creation, and ask for their feedback afterwards. Ensure you iterate and adapt on the fly to ensure that the experience is fun. If you find yourself improvising a section, write it into your adventure as a potential route for future parties to take.

Sharing your adventure

Ideally, you want to write your adventure in such a way that anyone can run it after you. Look at some existing adventures, and structure yours in a similar way. It doesn’t have to be massively polished, but if someone else can run your adventure without issues, you know it’s well-written!

Selling your adventure

If you flesh out your adventure to the point where anyone could run it based on reading your full written documentation, you are welcome to sell it on sites like the DMs guild. The Travellers Guild does not keep any ownership of what you create, and you are welcome to use your creation however you want. If you want to include the Travellers Guild logo in solidarity with the group, then you are absolutely welcome to do so, but it is not required or expected.

If you have any questions - ask on Discord!