Adventure design tips

• Perhaps the #1 adventure design tip: good adventures maximize meaningful player decisions. As the Adventure Design Deskbook says:

  seek to maximize the number of meaningful, potentially-informed decisions the players can make during the course of the adventure. By “meaningful,” I mean that the decisions aren’t just trivial options with no real influence on what’s going to happen. And by “potentially-informed,” I mean that the players should have enough information – or the potential to have gotten that information – to make a good decision rather than an arbitrary selection between options.

• Identify any chokepoints in the adventure—secret doors players must find to finish the adventure, or pieces of information they must get form an NPC. For each such chokepoint, list three different ways the players can get whatever they need to get past the chokepoint.
• Players like handouts. Give them one or two each session.
• Add set dressing, particularly to make combat area more interesting—chandeliers to swing from, chairs to throw, oil slicks to slip on, et cetera.

A sense of continuity

If you write your own adventures, a sense of continuity will make the game world more realistic for the players—like the real world some things never change, and the world often works in predictable ways. Even if you're using pre-made commercial modules, a few minor customizations can make it feel like the different modules were meant to go together.

Replace the generic with the specific. Develop a stable of motifs, characters, and locations which you can substitute for similar ones in pre-made modules or use over and over again in your own adventures. Create two or three small or medium sized villages of distinct character. Use them again in different adventures; the villages in many pre-made modules are generic enough that you can substitute a village distinct enough that your players will remember it from previous games. Do the same with minor characters—collect a set of recognizable barmaids, informants, and shopkeepers.

For example:

• Make a recurring minor character memorable with a verbal tick, like always repeating a previously used phrase at the end of dialog: "I sure do wish you gentlemen could find out if shady potions dealer had anything to do with the disappearance of Mrs. Moob. I sure do wish." Used immoderately, the verbal tick thing cab become annoying.
• rosy-fingered dawn
• pastel color palette of a Mediterranean village

Some of these pointers I borrowed from The Alexandrian.