Beleaguered GMs everywhere suffer burn out, and even well established, well prepared GMs might have habits that make running a game difficult. Maybe it’s in choosing which adventure to run. Maybe you overprepare, juggling more information than the players will ever see, and you feel like you’re wasting valuable time. Maybe you just get caught up in the excitement of it all and dream of long campaigns, while in reality you’re lucky if enough players show up to the first session.

I’ve got a process that will help you out! Using cutting edge learning techniques, we’re going to tackle these problems. This process will give you the ability to design and develop a one-shot or mini-adventure quickly, and by using this method, you’ll have an easier time recalling all the information during the game session when you run it.

Introduction

I recently took the course Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski through Coursera. It teaches the cutting edge of how we learn: how our brains work in terms of focus, memory, building connections between diverse subject matter, the habits of procrastination and techniques to overcome it, and much more.

One of my earliest a-ha! moments in the course was how I could apply nearly every concept to running good roleplaying game sessions. The skills I picked up…

  • help combat procrastination that sets in during adventure design and preparation
  • focus attention in easy-to-manage blocks to commit plot elements to memory
  • gave me an understanding of how important it is to break up prep rather than burn out during marathon sessions

Much of this reinforces why so many of the best GM aids work so well. Sly Flourish’s The Lazy Dungeon Master (and its sequel), hours of GM tips from YouTubers (Ginny Di, MCDM, Deficient Master), and game design blogs by Skerples, The Alexandrian, and all of that works because of an underlying foundation of how the brain works. Something I didn’t see until Learning How to Learn laid it bare.

Using these concepts and techniques, I developed a process for making and running short, focused adventures in a way that commits most of the information to memory. This makes every step easier, faster, and more exciting. If you love it like I do, check out the course and get even more skills, not just applicable to roleplaying games, but for learning anything!

Overview

In this method, you’ll pick an existing adventure you likely already have in your game collection, and you’ll prepare to run it in a very different way than you’re probably used to. Rather than attempting to learn it inside out and run it as-is—potentially in a format that’s too long for a session or two of gaming—you’re going to take the most interesting parts and create your own adventure. This method will engage parts of your memory and learning that will make it easier to run on game day.

The benefits of this method are:

  • You get to use an adventure module of nearly any length. Whether it’s an old 32-page adventure, an epic 120+ page campaign, a clunker with a few scenes worth salvaging, something you’ve already run, or an adventure you never think you’ll get around to, it will find new life with this method.
  • You’ll take only the elements you need—the bits you find most inspiring and exciting—to build an adventure that’s perfect for a one-shot or short string of 2-3 game sessions. This makes it much easier to schedule than a weekly campaign that might go on for months. You’ll get to play start to finish!
  • The methodology used to uncover the bits you like and piece them together will double as a means to lock the adventure into your memory. You won’t need to commit hours to re-reading an adventure to understand its structure, or have to stop the action mid-game in order to look up information the players require to move the action forward.

Perhaps best of all, you’ll have an easy to follow methodology that provides you with built-in tools to help you combat procrastination and over-preparing, two of the biggest issues that plague us GMs!

Terminology

Although this is more or less written for a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure, you can easily use this for any tabletop roleplaying game adventure scenario. Just replace “encounter” with “scene” and “Game Moderator/GM” with “Dungeon Master/DM” or vice versa. “Monsters” might simply refer to “antagonists” in many games. You can use those sorts of terms interchangeably.

Step By Step

  1. Read the adventure and highlight the elements that stand out to you.
  2. Develop adventure cards of those elements so you can reference them individually and separately from one another.
  3. Design the adventure flow: what elements are connected to what, and what might be missing?
  4. Finalize the adventure with a map, flowchart, strong opening, player handouts, or whatever else it needs most.
  5. Run the game!

You’ll stop working and get some sleep between several of these steps, allowing your brain to work on aspects of the adventure when you don’t even realize it! Additionally, several of these steps will feature built-in time management tools to help you fight procrastination, and keep you from working on things that won’t add to the players’ experience.

1. Shape of the Adventure

The first step is simple: pick an adventure, read it, and highlight the stuff that inspires you and makes you say, “Oh! That’s cool!”

While it’s enticing to dig and do a deep read and take lots of notes—something you would do if you run the adventure as-is—for our purposes that is wasted effort. You are only trying to get an overview of the adventure and pick out the moments (locations, characters, encounters, plot hooks) that really stand out to you and make you want to run them. Everything else is unimportant until later steps, or will be entirely ignored.

The reasons we do it this way are many. First, you want to get through reading quickly since you’ll be doing the “hard work” later. Second, you’re getting an overview of the adventure’s structure and how the inspiring bits all work together. Third, you’re taking a normally big task and significantly reducing the amount of time your brain is “working” on it. You will be focused during your reading, but since you’re not looking for all of the little details and connections between characters, backstory, and scenes yet, your brain is allowed to ignore complexities and focus on fun.

If you can, break up the reading into small chunks of 20-30 minutes. Spend time away from the book in between. If the adventure is written in acts or chapters, read only one in a single sitting and jot down the inspiring elements after you’re finished, preferably in very brief bullet points. This gives your brain time to process what you’ve read, review which elements actually stood out to you, and rewards both body and mind with time to walk away and grab a drink or a snack.

Once you’re done reading it and have a list of a dozen or two dozen cool elements—or the book has packed with post-it notes, or several pages are dog-eared to sections you loved; however you prefer to do it!—put it down and go live your life for the rest of the day. Go to sleep. We’ll start the next step tomorrow, and trust me, you’ll see why soon enough!

Learning How to Learn: The concepts from Learning How to Learn at play in this step include starting by getting an overview of the subject (the adventure), engaging both the focused and diffuse modes of how we take in new information, chunking information, highlighting only a minimal amount of information, and the effects sleep has on our learning process. The important one here is getting an overview of the adventure, simply reading it for its inspiring content and divorcing the cool stuff from the rest of its details and complexities. We’ll discuss the rest of these concepts in a bit more detail in subsequent steps.

2. Adventure Cards

After you’ve slept on it, set aside 20-25 minute chunks of time to create “adventure cards,” index cards or half-page blocks that turn your previous bullet points, post-it notes, or dog-eared pages into short, discrete scenes. Think of this like building a flash card for each encounter that tells you who, what, and where, because those are the elements the players are going to interact with. Anything else is background information that we’ll get to later.

At this stage, you’re not looking to build any sort of structure into the list of scenes. You simply develop the scenes themselves, irrespective of their place in any narrative. For example, if you loved a particular dungeon room with a pit trap and some monsters with pikes that will try to push the adventurers into the pit, and you also loved a particular character such as a dragon that is a major NPC in the adventure, those are two discreet adventure cards. One is “room with pike-wielding monsters surrounding a pit trap” and the other is “the greedy dragon that wants to add the magical ruby to its treasure hoard.” You don’t care where the kobolds are in relation to the dragon, whether or not the dragon knows where the ruby is, or if either of these scenes has any relation to one another.

What you’re putting on these adventure cards is the Who, What, and Where of each encounter that inspires you.

  • Who are the NPCs, monsters, or perhaps hidden players behind the scenes of this particular dramatic moment in the game?
  • What is the situation happening when the players first arrive?
  • Where does this scene take place; how is the place where it occurs interesting, and how does it reinforce the drama of this particular moment?

If you finish a card early, then try to fit two or even three into that 20-25 minute session, but don’t press beyond that! You aren’t looking to get the whole adventure done and organized in a single sitting, or even a single day. The list of scenes serves as your checklist, and you can schedule your time for each card as you have it. Do one on your lunch break. Do another right when you first wake up, or a few minutes before bedtime. Do them over the course of a day or two, or maybe even a week or more as you do only one per day. Once you’ve finished each particular 20-25 minute session, close your notebook and go do something else. Have lunch, grab a coffee, call your mom, wash your dishes, take a walk, whatever. You will almost certainly be compelled to just keep creating adventure cards, but don’t! Here’s why.

You may have already noticed during the first few adventure card creation sessions that revisiting your ideas after a night’s rest, something changed. New ideas may already be present, trying to connect scenes or characters. A scene you liked yesterday no longer fits, or maybe one you liked begs for a new scene to be added so you can set up the appearance of a major NPC. This is your brain working in the background during restful states away from the focused attention you’re giving the adventure now, and it’s a critical component of this process! Regardless, walking away from a session of adventure card writing will—perhaps counterintuitively—keep your creativity flowing.

If a particular encounter just doesn’t feel like it’s worth a full index card, or seems wildly disconnected from the other cards on your list without all the “framework” of the larger adventure…consider dropping it. Or at the very least, don’t bother with a card yet; you can always come back to do it later, but many times you’ll find that the other encounters are just more interesting and inspiring, and this one’s worth ignoring for now…or possibly for good.

By interspersing your time between each card and a break, and limiting yourself to an index card (or equivalent) of information, you are doing several things that will help this adventure come together. You are focusing only on the most important information, in useful, organized chunks, that the players will be interacting with. You aren’t wasting time on purple prose, long backstories and setup, or anything that the players can’t immediately see, interact with, fight, flee from, or negotiate with.

When you have about 7-10 cards, you’ve got a one-shot. If you go with 12-20, you’ve probably got 2-3 sessions of play.

Learning How to Learn: In this step, we are mostly in focused mode as we conceptualize and deep-dive into whatever we need for each adventure card. Our brain is working hard at making each scene come alive, but luckily already has the benefits of the overview and an effective checklist from our first step. Importantly, we are using the Pomodoro Technique in order to manage our time and maintain that focus without slipping into a marathon session that overcrams our brain. This step has two specific outcomes related to Learning How to Learn:

  • Chunking information by creating independent adventure cards; this makes information “bite-sized” and formats it in a way that is easy to reference over and over again.
  • Beating procrastination by focusing on process (creating one card at a time, independent of the adventure’s structure as a whole) rather than being overwhelmed by the entire product (the entire adventure, start to finish).

3. Adventure Flow

By now you’ve got a bunch of encounters and you know how they work individually, so you just need to form the connections between them. This is the adventure structure, and the first thing you need to know about it is it doesn’t have to match the original adventure. Unless the original adventure was short, it probably shouldn’t match at all.

Functionally, what you do here is grab a pen and an index card or a piece of paper—or by writing numbers on the adventure cards themselves—and create a timeline or order to the encounters. That’s it. Some may be able to float around in the order, or simply be entirely optional; mark them as such and move on. As in previous steps, set aside 20-25 minutes for this and then go eat an apple when the buzzer sounds. There’s no need to have a perfect order here, because the players can and will take things in their own direction. The important considerations are to have a strong opening that sets the stage for the bigger dramatic conflict of the scenario, and a boss monster at or near the end (or perhaps the big treasure as a pay day), but even those can remain a bit fluid in the order of things.

You want to use the inspiring stuff—all your adventure cards—and make that the adventure. Everything else in the original adventure is just filler. If your players don’t experience it, it serves little or no purpose. You may uncover a detail or two from an element you didn’t create a card for that turns out to be important as some added context, but even then, consider any means of simplifying it or working it into a scene. Players don’t play the context, they play the encounters.

(If you’re an advanced GM, you might create a “cutaway” scene or find a way to work in a journal or letter between NPCs that the player characters might find. These are interesting ways to fill in details the players otherwise won’t or can’t see. But such things can be time-consuming, and if there’s any way to add value to the existing scenes instead, that’s where you should focus your attention.)

Chances are, this is the easiest step. Give yourself permission to ignore the original adventure, and not get hung up on its ideas of the plot or structure. You don’t need any of that. You just need the scenes that you’re going to enjoy running, which are incidentally the challenges that the players will enjoy facing.

Learning How to Learn: By this point in the process you’ll have noticed the secret sauce of this method: your brain’s already doing a bunch of the work even when you’re not focused on these specific steps! You’ll arrive at this step having already formed ideas about the connections between the scenes, perhaps by considering what questions you had about the adventure’s context and couldn’t recall, or because you realized some element of the existing adventure was boring, nonsensical, or might be tedious to convey to the players in an interesting way.

This step also reinforces chunking information and utilizing the Pomodoro Technique. Additionally, it makes use of the concept of interleaving. As you briefly glance back at the individual adventure cards as you jot down the larger context for them, you’re engaging both recall as well as creatively forging connections between the information on them. It’s a decidedly focused mode of doing things, but comes after a night of sleep or time away from the previous step, allowing your diffuse mode of thinking to work in the background where it has already envisioned connections and relationships between these scenes.

4. Adventure Map

Now you finalize the adventure. This may be as simple as one more night’s sleep and saying “that’s it!” or it could be doing fun creative work like building an adventure map, creating a visual outline or flowchart, or writing an opening preamble like the famous Star Wars opening crawl. Different adventures require different things, and some might not need anything extra at all, but we’ll tackle a couple common elements below. Whatever you choose, consider breaking it up into short 20-25 minute sessions using the Pomodoro Technique, and preferably keep it to only one or two of these sessions, unless you have several days before your game session and lots of free time on your calendar.

A Map

If the adventure takes place in a single site, there’s no better way to represent it than using a map! Whether it’s the layout of the dungeon rooms the adventurers will explore or an overland map displaying how long of a journey it is between the starting village and the sinister fortress, having a visual representation tells you when to utilize each adventure card and gives the players choices about where to go and in what order. You might use an existing map, such as the one in the adventure, and designate unused rooms as empty or as possibly containing random encounters. Or you might draw your own map, using guidance from artists that love to teach people how to draw simple but elegant maps like JP Coovert. Another option is the following “dice drop method” (inspired by wilderness and dungeon mapping in Shadowdark):

  1. Number your cards 1 through 6, repeating until all your cards are numbered.
  2. Roll that many six-sided dice (d6) on a piece of paper.
  3. Draw a circle around each die; this represents a room/location.
  4. The number on the die corresponds to an adventure card, or maybe even a few; choose one and write down it’s name inside of or next to that circle.*
  5. Draw a few connections between each of the circles; some might only have one connection, but most should have 2 or 3. (Five or more might be a little too much, in most cases.)
  6. Make 2-3 of these connections special: a secret door, secret tunnel, teleporter, or some other interesting way of getting from one site to another. The rest are just doors, stairs, hallways, etc.

*You’ll likely have a few dice that are duplicates that don’t quite make sense, or adventure cards whose number didn’t come up. That’s fine; this is your chance to move a few things around and determine how it all makes sense to you. (Advanced GMs may see an opportunity here for a shifting dungeon, or a purposely random layout as surprising to them as it is to the players during the game session!)

Tips & tricks for mapping:

Not an artist? Just draw circles for rooms, lines for corridors, stairs, or other connectors, and number them. On either the adventure cards or a separate sheet of paper, create a key by listing the numbers and then writing a simple 2-5 word description of each item: The Entrance Chamber, Goblin King’s Throne Room, Trapped Sliding Stairs to the Mud Pits, etc.

If you do enjoy drawing, keep it simple and consistent. Find and print out, or create your own, key of map icons (locked and secret doors, pit traps, portcullises and gates, pillars, statues, etc.) that you can always work from. Watch a video or two on cross hatching or stippling to help corridors and rooms stand out from empty portions of the map. Having such tools and skills on hand will make future work easier to dive into.

A Flowchart

You could just order the cards in a way that suggests a timetable or flowchart. Some scenes naturally lead to others, and certain ones (like boss monsters or big rewards) are often best at the end or in the “center” of the adventure or dungeon.

If this setup makes more sense than a dungeon or wilderness map, consider another element that ties things together: a timeline or clear goals from an antagonist, which might be best represented by time pressure on the players! In these scenarios, how the locations fit together might be secondary to, or more influenced by, the fact that there’s a limited time to complete the quest. Or perhaps by the fact that an enemy is moving along these same locations performing actions that could lead to a terrible fate, or that change the environment. (The Waking of Willowby Hall by Ben Milton is an excellent example of the latter.)

Tips & tricks for flow charts:

  • It’s okay if some encounters have linear connections to others.
  • It’s best if some encounters are purposefully not linearly connected to other encounters: creating forking paths, or making some areas entirely optional allows you to match the encounters to the pacing of the game.
  • You want to get to a satisfying conclusion in the time you have scheduled to play. Know which things you can drop.
  • It’s okay—even preferable—to have a boss monster show up early so the players develop an emotional connection to them. This could be in the opening introduction of the adventure, or an earlier encounter. But make sure they can come back near the end for a final confrontation!
  • Adding time pressure is great for pacing, but keep it somewhat loose or vague whenever possible, so you don’t force the players past interesting encounters or have the adventure wrap up too early if everyone’s having fun.
  • If your adventure feels sparse, just add a simple 1d6 table of encounters, and/or look for a quick puzzle or trap from some other resource to drop in. (Wally DM’s Journal of Puzzle Encounters is great for full-room puzzles, while the forthcoming Grimtooth’s Old School Traps is great for traps you can use either as the focus of a room or alongside random encounters.)

A Strong Opening

A great use of this final step that helps bring things together is figuring out how you frame the whole thing at the start for the players! When you start with an explosive scene, or even a simple opening narration like so many fantasy and sci-fi movies, you convey what this adventure is all about.

This when you have the most power, according to the Law of Narrative Influence. Use it to set up an interesting conflict and give the players a taste of what’s to come, as well as a reason to be invested in its outcome. From there, the players take the lead and tell you where they go and what they do. That’s the power that tabletop roleplaying games have that no other medium can compete with. By spending time on a summary, opening crawl narration, or simply an initial scene that sets the stage for why the players hate the Big Bad, you are bringing everything together in a way that supports the adventure from the players’ perspective, rather than creating additional material you’ll have to worry about or reference in the middle of the game that doesn’t immediately pertain to the players’ motivation for going on this adventure.

Tips & tricks for a strong opening:

  • This is your chance to make the players (and their characters, but especially the players themselves) hate the boss villain. Sell it!
  • If you do read aloud text, consider giving it to the players ahead of the session so they can read it on their own, or as a hand-out while you read it. Different people consume information better in different ways, at different paces.
  • If you do read aloud text, keep it short and punchy. 2-3 paragraphs of 2-5 sentences each is already pushing it for many people.

If your opening—read aloud, described, or even presented as the adventure pitch in session zero—contains key NPC or place names, or concepts new to some or all of the players, create a brief list of these names or terms with a single sentence description for them to refer back to. Nobody enjoys reading “Vecna absconded with the Rod of Seven Parts to the pinnacle of Mount Clangeddin in Abellio, the first layer of Arcadia, in order to use the dominated artificer Kyvius to mend the artifact so that he could attune to it.” That’s gibberish to most people.

All of the Above…or None?

Some people are just a little extra, and GMs are very, very often guilty of that. You should focus on what you have time for, and nothing more. If you have time for multiple things from the above list or something else special for your adventure, go for it! Just know that any of these things should be first on your list to drop, especially if game time is tomorrow and you don’t feel fully ready to run the adventure. There’s still one step left, and you don’t want to skip it.

That said, one alternative or additional consideration specific to scenarios focused on mystery and investigation would be creating a timeline of the events leading up to the discovery of the crime (which is probably the opening scene), or a list of secrets and clues that must be seeded throughout the game session.

Learning How to Learn: This step is going to utilize a lot of the same concepts as before, but it crucially relies on spaced repetition. By now, you’ve looked and re-looked at your adventure cards, you’ve created connections between them both in focused bursts of work and in relaxed, diffuse periods during sleep or breaks in-between previous steps. Those spaced out, repeating visits to the information really helps solidify it all in your long-term memory. There’s also a bit of a potential procrastination-buster hidden in this step: it can be a very creative step, and therefore it’s extremely rewarding to spend some time on art, refinement, inventive writing, and other processes that are very different from the more analytical steps we’ve been doing up to this point.

5. Adventure Time!

Coming out of step 4, make sure you’ve got one more night of sleep between you and game-time. Then, about 15-20 minutes before the session starts, flip through your adventure cards. Glance at your outline and whatever additional materials you’ve created, like maps or intro text. Crucially, take this time to review the players’ characters themselves. You’re not trying to commit new things to memory here—I’m particularly referring to the player characters—but instead you are simply having your brain focus on the big picture.

As you ease into the game session, during the inevitable 10-30 minutes of hello’s and how-ya-doing’s, your brain is going to naturally shift away from all that adventure material. But!

  • New connections are still forming!
  • Old information is still being reinforced deep in your memory!
  • The control you have over the opening of the game is still where you have the most power, and thanks to this process, your brain is ready to wield it!

That last bit is hugely important. RPGs aren’t about reciting the novel in your head to your players, or leading them by the noses through a gauntlet of your favorite characters, conflicts, and internal drama. They are about playing to find out. They are about sharing the experience of exploring an adventure to see how it turns out when your particular group of players come in contact with it, which will be different every time the adventure is played, even if by the same group!

Learning How to Learn: More than anything else, this step is about deliberate practice: revisiting—one last time—the important information that came before it to refresh your memory, recall all those inspiring moments and connections, and hit the ground running when your friends show up to play the game. (Of course, we are relying on the Pomodoro Technique since we’re doing this just ahead of game time, and the concept of interleaving is once again doing some heavy lifting to commit this information deeper into your memory.)

As you run the game, you will notice how this process pays off.

  • You aren’t flipping through pages and pages of adventure material to find the answers to a player’s question.
  • You don’t need to re-focus your thinking from the exciting back and forth with your players to the focused reading of the next dungeon room entry and back again, because you remember the details mostly off the top of your head.

Everything should be running smoothly, and although you had to put some elbow grease in, you didn’t need to read and re-read dozens and dozens of full pages of text, but instead just a handful or a dozen bite-sized pieces of information on index cards. That’s the value of breaking up the information, cutting out anything the players don’t directly interact with or absolutely need to know, and having done so over the course of a few days, always in small chunks of time.

Conclusion

You’re not just using a published adventure to save you some time, you’re getting both value out of the adventure (which you’ve likely spent money on), and learning a process of simplifying something and thoroughly committing it to your memory. Your game will be customized to the fun you want to have, the fun your players expect to have, and to the natural learning processes of your brain, allowing you to run the adventure with ease.

Game on!