Oct 23, 2019 by [ "James R. Miller" ]
Categories: rpgs Tags: 5e dnd homebrew lets-write-a_module

Let's write a module part 4: Summary paragraph

This blog post will look at expanding our single-sentence summary into a summary paragraph.

Our single sentence

A soldier makes a deal with a devil to get revenge after he returns from a long campaign to find his fiancee married to the town’s mayor.

Our job is to take the foregoing single sentence and expand it to a summary paragraph. In a novel-writing scenario, we would use five sentences to correspond to a 3-act structure:

  1. a “setup” sentence
  2. three “disaster” sentences
  3. an “ending” sentence

For our adventure writing, we can follow this same premise, but keeping in mind we want these to be situations instead of black-and-white plot points.

Our Paragraph

Here’s my first stab at expanding the single-sentence into a summary paragraph:

A soldier returns to his childhood home from a long campaign waging guerilla warfare to find his beloved fiancee married to the town mayor. The soldier kills the town mayor in a fit of rage and then attempts to flee. Stricken with grief, a devil appears and tempts the soldier into an infernal contract giving the soldier powers and reinforcements to wage his revenge on all members of the town that encouraged or otherwise blessed the marriage. The soldier, using his new-found resources and powers, ambushes and kills those deserving the soldier’s revenge. As the soldier grows more corrupt and confident, he summons a powerful new devil reinforcement but the soldier loses control, and the devil escalates the infernal influence on the town.

Is that the best paragraph ever? No. But does it have the skeleton of a low-level 5E adventure? It sure does!

Can you see several situations and encounters in it?

  1. There’s a situation where the PCs could witness the soldier learning of the betrayal and watch the soldier kill the town mayor in his rage. The PCs are given the opportunity to intervene. Maybe the soldier is captured or not. It doesn’t really matter to the story as long as the soldier lives.

  2. The soldier’s visit and deal with the devil can happen with the soldier on the run or in prison. Ideally we’d have the deal occur just as the PCs come close to the soldier, so there would be a possible fight with the new-found reinforcements.

  3. There now can be a series of encounters with appropriately challenged devils / corrupted nature animals interspersed with some clues on tracking down the source of this evil. For example, trying to find out why the solider and his devil reinforcements are ambushing groups of town folk but only killing certain townfolk and not all.

  4. As the PCs level up, the GM can pick an opportune time to have the devil-summoning ritual occur (and fail), allowing the more powerful devil to take the place of the Big Bad Evil Guy, perhaps even having the more powerful devil be the one that tempted the soldier all along.

  5. And the final showdown for the level 5 PCs will be a fight against a devil and some devil underlings, with possibly the corrupted solider figthing along with it.

That’s plenty of rough material for 5 levels of 5E adventuring. It’s simple enough to hold in your head during a session, and once we flesh it out, it will be simple enough to hold the goals, motivations, and resources of the villains and other NPC groups in your head during a session as well.


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