Chapter 2: Building Adventures

Illus. by C. Lukacs

attlefield adventures mix familiar aspects of adventure design with new considerations that are part of the war genre. The tenets central to good adventure design in a traditional D&D campaign—balanced encounters, a player-driven plot, and a calibrated system of rewards for risk—still apply when you’re creating a battlefield adventure. But you’ve got new concerns as well. You have to handle PCs who have relative freedom to move around an entire battlefield, picking fights as they choose. You need to know how the PCs’ actions affect the actions of thousands of NPCs. And you have to handle pacing in an environment where the larger battle will rage on even if the PC spellcasters are out of spells and their front-line melee combatants are sorely wounded. Battlefield adventures are hybrids of the familiar and the new. They’re also hybrids that draw inspiration from both site-based adventures (such as traditional D&D dungeons) and event-based adventures (such as political- and intriguebased scenarios).

Site-Based: A battlefield adventure takes place on a single site—the battlefield. By the time the battle begins, you’ll know the ins and outs of the defensive structures, terrain features, and other elements the PCs will be fighting over throughout the adventure. If a battle takes place in a forest, for example, you can bone up on the relevant battlefield elements in Chapter 3 of this book and page 87 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Elements such as cover and difficult terrain will be present in every combat you introduce, so you’ll be able to adjudicate the effects of terrain and obstacles quickly. Even if the PCs go where you weren’t expecting, they’re essentially staying at the same site, so you can use the same battlefield elements and groups of enemies (called maneuver elements) to create encounters wherever the PCs have wandered. The players at your table will probably never know you didn’t have that specific encounter planned in advance.

Event-Based: In a battlefield adventure, the fortunes of allies or enemies can change rapidly depending on the PCs’ actions. If the PCs successfully infiltrate the enemy castle’s north tower, for example, they can silence the catapults that would otherwise keep the rest of the army at bay. Certain subsequent encounters become more or less likely depending on the choices the players and their characters make. In some ways, events that occur during a battle serve a function similar to that the doors and corridors of a dungeon: They block off some possible future encounters while allowing access to others, and thus they channel the PCs’ efforts. But there’s one important difference. In a site-based adventure, the PCs can usually go back and explore areas they chose to bypass before. But events that transpire 17