The 5x5 Adventure

Three sentence advertisement for your adventure to get your players excited.

What is the adversary’s goal?

What is the party’s goal?

What happens if the party succeeds?

What happens if the party fails?

Guy Sclanders, The Great GM, recommends putting these ideas together into sentences.

Events: These are things that happen in the course of the adventure that move the adventure along by helping to tell the story.  This might be a conversation with a local lord, a kidnapping, or interaction with a conflicted or traitorous ally.

Adversaries: Every adventure has a key adversary with a real goal.  Working to support that goal might be several groups or individuals and other minor adversaries. Along the way, the party might encounter thugs, minions, and other challenges. Finally, an interesting story might have a good-hearted NPC who is reluctantly fighting against the party or even a traitorous NPC who presents as an ally but is working for the adversaries all along.

Locations: Having quick links in your adventure to the locations is important for organization.  One of these places might be a dungeon, a village, or a castle with multiple sub-regions, but giving the players a variety of locations to explore makes a story interesting and engaging.

Encounters: Here you can outline battles, traps, deadly obstacles, and skill challenges for the party.  Each one should present the real possibility of the death of a player character.

Items: Loot is the items and treasure found by the party during the adventure that really does not serve to move the story along but rewards the party.  Artifacts are vital items or notes that move the story along. A powerful dragon-killing sword. A complex cipher to stop the world ending death ray. The one ring of power. You might choose to have 5 artifacts in this planner.