Description Economy

How do you transport all the information that the DM needs to create a great adventure experience?

"Laboratory" is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. 

It is no use to have long descriptions in the adventure. The wall of text makes it hard to find what you need and thus hard to provide an immersive experience to your players. If you spend your time reading and searching through the adventure notes, your players get bored.

There is a reason that the original dungeon levels of Gary Gygax consisted only of the map and a single page with notes about the monsters and treasures to be found -- this way he saw everything he needed at a glance, and he could improvise to flesh things out. He was good at inventing colorful detail on the spot. In my own experience too, the best adventures are those that you riff from minimal notes. Indeed, nearly all the advice from Gary in OD&D about how to set up your dungeon, campaign world and towns is extremely practical. 

Bryce Lynch, in his riveting reviews at tenfootpole makes this point again and again: he wants specific, concise descriptions, just an evocative line or two to get his imagination going and help him make up the rest. The primary goal of a good adventure module is to stimulate the DM's imagination for improvisation. This does not just work better in practice, I think it is the only way it really works. There is no way you can put in all the details and have the thing be playable.

I call this "description economy" and in the description economy posts, I consider approaches and tools to concisely convey the needed information to run an adventure, and spur your creativity.

Overall, I think these are elements that allow you to prepare and run dynamic, exciting adventures:

• An information packed floor plan, overland map or town map
• A minimalistic key, describing factions, monsters, treasure, NPCs, traps, magic items, etc.
• A random encounter table to procedurally generate a dynamic envrionment
• A DM screen to inspire your imagination in descriptions

Depending on the type of adventure, other helpful tools can be

• A rumor list
• An adversary or NPC roster (especially for detective advenures)
• A schedule or timeline, especially for heist adventures
• Plan of battle

If you are writing for others, you have to provide a lot more detail that you normally would ad-lib, and need good writing, editing, organization and production, and a lot more guidelines on how to do this.

The trifecta of map, key and random encounter table works on nearly every scale:

• Site (e.g. Dungeon, Castle):  Floor Plan. Key with monsters. Random Encounter table. 
• Town: Town map. Key: military and NPCs, buildings the characters are likely to interact with (inns, guard, wizard, market, weapon and armor vendors, jewelers, temple). Rumor table can replace random encounter table.
• Region: Region Map. Key: major areas, factions, settlements, keeps, dungeons and towers. Random encounter table(s). Here is an example.
• World: World Map. Gazetter that briefly describes the regions, empires, races, and how they stand to each other. Replace Encounter Table with history of the world and fallen empires.

You do not need a world map -- the characters may not know what the world beyond their home looks like, so neither do you need to until they go there. Even the region map, while useful to have at the start, is not a must have. You can grow while you go along.