Writing for others

When you are writing adventures for your own use, all you likely need is the plan of the dungeon and  a minimal one page key of sketched notes to jog your memory. That is how the notes of Kuntz and Gygax looked like for their Greyhawk Castle campaign, and one of the reasons it was so hard to turn it into a published adventure. I personally love it to write the notes right on the map, so you have everything you need on a single sheet of paper.

When you write an adventure for use by others, you have to do a lot more work. You have to provide the essence of your imagination in concise, evocative descriptions, so another GM can recreate the experience you had in mind without getting lost in a wall of text, and you have to organise the information to make it easy to use. You have to provide a hook, as there is no natural starting point from you ongoing campaign.

• Provide hooks that appeal to various motivations like greed, serving the community, protecting the helpless, gaining knowledge, uncovering a secret, or revenge (hard to do for generic hooks).
• Provide a clearly readable map, rich in information about doors, lighting, stairs, elevations
• Organise the information with formatting, bolding, bulleted lists
• Provide summaries and overviews (e.g. synopsis, background, factions, timeline of events, NPCs)
• Include tools to run it (random encounter tables, rumor tables, adversary rosters)
• Provide a digital version of the map for use with game table software
• Include professional artwork - or at least charming amateur artwork, if you can
• Get editing to make sure it is correct, not missing pieces like numbers on the map for the key.

Then publish it as a pdf. Provide a preview too -- if you make it pay what you like, use the whole thing.

Henchman Abuse has a great example with the fantastic ASE, and the Arcane Library is really working hard to make the adventures easy to use with clear, functional formatting.

To give you a practical feel for the difference, here is the same adventure two times:

• One time, in the form of scribbled notes on the map I made for myself.  This took me maybe a quarter of an hour to sketch out, and that is for rerunning it. The original version was even sparser, and most of the really fun parts were invented on the fly during play. You can see that this is next to useless for you, albeit fine for me: The Beer Adventure - Self-play Notes 
• A cleaned up version, that blows this up from one page to five, and took me more than a full day to produce. Note that that still does not include artwork, professional layout, a cool cover, or an actual editor reading it, digital maps or player maps. But at least you can run it: The Beer Adventure - Publishing Edition

Beer Tomb is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.