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Dungeons & Dragonshas a lot of different ways you can put together a campaign. You can create a fully personal setting and cast, a daunting but rewarding process. Some DMs will prefer to run from a book, with laid-out encounters and scenarios that are carefully engineered to fit a premeditated journey.
The vision you have for your game may not line up perfectly with the curated path of a prewritten module, or perhaps you want to splice together two stories from different sources. A good blend allows you to get the best of both the prewritten and personal styles.
Prioritise The Sections You Would Enjoy Running
Prewritten campaigns cater to multiple types of play, often transitioning between broad sections that fit within a certain style of game running. You want toidentify the sections that fit well into your style of DMing,either fitting into your existing process for preparations or complementing your style of running a game.
Some modules will tell you to roll randomly across several options to give your players, whether for loot, encounters, or more. You can and should put your thumb on the scale if your vision differs.
Example Modules
Open World / Pointcrawl
Most modules have sections where you can choose the order in which you travel to locations and complete objectives.This benefits groups that value player choice highly.
Rime of the Frostmaiden opens with the players exploring the Ten Towns of Icewind Dale in any order they choose. The laterdungeon crawls form a more linear experiencein contrast.
Dungeon Crawls
If you’re not an expert mapmaker you may rely on the heavily structured content of the module.Room layouts, encounter orders and puzzles come with pre-defined solutions.
Dungeon Of The Mad Mage is entirely composed of dungeon crawling. Each floor is broadly self-contained, soif one doesn’t appeal to you, it can be easily skipped.
Exploration / Wilderness
Some groups love the travel sections between adventures as much as the narrative. Some modules lean heavily on this.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh has expanded rules for ships, crews, and vehicular combat. If you don’t enjoy them, you caninstead ‘fast travel’ the group between points of interest.
Roleplaying Hooks
Prewritten characters and character prompts are a great tool for DMs and players who struggle with improv, butDMs with a specific vision might prefer to make their own.
Icewind Dale gives each player aunique secret that can act as a character-building prompt.These secrets can create conflicting character goals, so some groups might drop the mechanic.
Unique Mechanics
The unique mechanics of a module can fit into a DM’s approach to running a game bygiving them extra rules to play with specific to the campaign.
TheGlitch mechanics from Turn of Fortune’s Wheelcan fit well with a DM who likes killing PCs (or players who dislike losing characters).You can adjust the mechanic to the group, changing how many versions of a character exist and how often they die.
Customize The Game For The Players
On top of playing into your own strengths as a DM, you also want to use the parts of the module or your own work that best mesh with the group you’re running for.
Here are a few different character considerations you may want to consider and how you can incorporate them into prewritten campaigns:
DM Considerations
Legacy Characters
Some characters have existingbackstories from previous campaigns, with side characters, items, and lore already set in stone.
You’ll want to see areas where you may tailor the experience to play off these existing hooks.Replace a minor antagonist with their reoccurring nemesis, or have a faction NPC recognise their past achievements.
Higher Starting Levels
Many tables swear by the efficacy of starting starting at level three butCurse of Strahd is a level one-to-ten adventure.
Rebalance early content to match a higher starting leveluntil they catch up to the intended level for an area.
Use alternative starting points that enter a module later into the story. Curse of Strahd already has an alternative starting point forcharacters who played the Death House intro game.
Homebrew Content
The lively homebrew community is one of the greatest strengths of Dungeons & Dragons, but these canclash with modules that assume specific character choices.
Work out beforehandwhether a player’s homebrew species would draw special comments from NPCsand whether it would change dialogue with NPCs and factions.
Incompatible Setting Books
Even among official books, you’ll sometimes have incompatible settings:Dragonlance doesn’t have Warforged,and Barovians are unlikely to trust a Thri-Kreen.
Someoptions can be kept mechanically the same but given a new lore: “warforged don’t exist here, but your character can be a golem.”
Other times, it meansmodifying the narrative to match: “Giff aren’t native to Icewind Dale, but you got marooned here, and your Spelljammer was stolen.”
Sometimes, a character concept will be incompatible with a game. Discuss with the players what module they are looking to play andexpectawhat tions there are for character creation.
Splice Together Characters For Continuity Between Stories
A great way of personalising a module is to write in some custom NPCs. These could be characters you’ve created for your setting already or NPCs from a previous module you ran. The easy way to do this without the game getting bloated is to replace some non-essential characters.
Making these interactions feel unique is a matter of ensuring the players remember the characters and that the characters remember each other:NPCs should bring up and discuss events from outside the module to create a sense of continuity.
Recycle Smaller Sections Of Larger Books
Sometimes a book doesn’t have what you’re looking for in a campaign, and the sunk cost fallacy demands you somehow work its content into your game. It happens to the best of us, and the trick to making it work is tobreak it up into smaller parts that you’ll be able to slot into later projects.
Depending on your ability to adapt, you’re able to expand this beyond repurposing D&D modules. There’s nothing stopping you fromstealingpaying homage to a character concept from Amber, a campaign premise from Pathfinder, and world lore from the Silmarillion.Keep an eye open for system-agnostic details and traits that can be easily recycledor what changes you’d need to make to fit it into a new context.
