But really, in an adventure, what's actually in it is only half the deal. What the relationships between the things in it are are just as important Plus: most DMs have a few ideas about what they want in the adventure to begin with--it's making it all fit together that's the hard part.
I use the following method myself sometimes with megadungeons or worldbuilding and used it yesterday with Mandy--who is new to DMing and trying to figure out how to write adventures...
Step 1. Think of a handful (or more) of things you want in your adventure (or dungeon, or world, or city, or whatever--it works on any scale). These elements can be anything: monsters, NPCs, items, cities (possibly even themes, though I've never tried that). In this example I'm using: Witch, Giant Spider, Magic Dagger and Evil Monkey. If it's hard to pick elements, you can use one of the zillion random dungeon/hexmap/etc. generators out there to pick some for you.
Step 2. Write the elements across the top and down the side of a grid like so:
You put them in the same order left to right and up to down.Step 3: Start with the top entry in the left hand column--"witch", move right, skip the first column (it also says "witch") then go to the second. "Witch-Giant Spider" think up a relationship between the witch and the giant spider, write it in.
Then go on to the next column--write in the relationship between the witch and the magic dagger, then the monkey.
Step 4. Go down to the next entry in the far left column--"Giant spider". Skip the first two columns, we already did "witch" and the second column is "giant spider". Go to "magic dagger"--we haven't done the "giant-spider--magic dagger" relationship so we do that now. Then "giant spider--evil monkey" etc. When you're done making a relationship between every element and every other element in the adventure it'll look like this...
And that's pretty much a whole night of D&D right there.If you do it for a lot of elements, it'll end up looking like this mileage chart...
...with a long diagonal of empty spaces down the middle. (They've repeated the same values in the top right half and bottom left half of the table for convenience--you obviously don't have to do that.) After a few sessions of a campaign you can take all the NPCs and monsters you invented in the breach and stick them in the chart and start building up a world with some internal consistency. and it starts to write itself.Anyway, there you go.
By the way: anybody know what these kind of mash-up charts are called? They are kind of like Punnett Squares, but they aren't exactly that.
