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Silver Rewards ($5 Tier) Masterpost | Encounter & Oneshot Archives
🕑 Added 2022-03-08 16:50:49 +0000 UTCThis post has links to all of the Patreon-exclusive developer blogs, homebrew encounters, and one-page oneshots that Silver members can currently access. Enjoy!
Developer Blogs
The Road to Vallaki (Jan. 14, 2023): choosing and designing random encounters, prompting exploration during travel, writing flavor text
Putting the Pieces Together (Jan. 23, 2023): creating dramatic encounters, streamlining session planning, explaining "narration" and "description," conveying design intent, writing in-game texts
These Boots Were Made For Walkin' (Jan. 30, 2023): designing meaningful challenges, organizing preparation resources, generating encounter ideas, avoiding escalating situations, understanding NPC resonance
Design Intent Matters (Feb. 5, 2023): making encounters mandatory, bottom-up adventure design, making animations, tying stakes to level
Grappling With the Impossible (Feb. 15, 2023): making impossible combats possible, devleoping adventure ideas, laying out modules, understanding the Wish spell
Musings of Madness (Feb. 20, 2023): creating puzzles, balancing verisimilitude and gameplay, incorporating player backstories, solving excruciating design problems
Pushing the Envelope (Feb. 27, 2023): tying NPCs to player flaws and bonds, creating room-level dramatic questions, reorganizing dungeons, adding random encounters, passing hidden information, understanding combat balance, filling out filler arcs, defusing dramatic questions
Keeping Things Moving (Mar. 6, 2023): diagnosing and fixing deadly and unfun combat environments, addressing long player turns in combat
Back in Business (Mar. 31, 2023): creating clues, manufacturing tension, understanding pillars of gameplay, developing dramatic questions for travel sequences, using ChatGPT for DMing advice
Revise, Revise, Revise (Apr. 6, 2023): building nonlinear dungeons, avoiding repetitious design, recycling inspiration, evaluating & revising monster abilities
Question Your Assumptions (Apr. 13, 2023): deconstructing module adventures, defining gameplay challenges, creating puzzle quests, understanding diagetic timelines, building dramatic tension, applying skill fundamentals, discarding first drafts, deconstructing adventure finales, building meaningful climaxes
Doing the Monster Math (Apr. 21, 2023): doing post-combat analysis, diagnosing game design problems, bottom-up statblock design, building multi-phase boss monsters, creating dynamic combats
Why D&D is Like Mario Party (Apr. 28, 2023): pillars of gameplay, creating gameplay challenges, developing combat encounters, social encounters, skill challenges, puzzles
A Dash of Drama (May 6, 2023): narrative tension, dramatic questions, exposition dumps, player engagement
A Return to Form (May 28, 2023): improvising sessions, redesigning challenges, applying random encounters to character arcs, streamlining complex statblocks
Soap Operas & Content Mills (June 12, 2023): developing NPC arcs, creating narrative tension, hooking player engagement, building suspense, connecting NPC relationships, creating deliberate content, conveying lore
A Designer's Framework (June 25, 2023): mastering narrative and game design, applying theoretical design principles
The Death of Izek Strazni (July 2, 2023): creating narrative arcs, creating gameplay challenges, running stealth missions
Why D&D Travel Doesn't Work (August 11, 2023): identifying & fixing problems with D&D travel and exploration gameplay
Reloading Skill Challenges (August 27, 2023): fixing skill challenges, tackling design problems, iterative design
Stories Are About People, Not Plots (September 14, 2023): creating meaningful narratives, character-first design, resonant storytelling
Watsonian vs. Doylist Design (Sep. 28, 2023): intentional design vs. verisimilitude and immersion
Reforging Vasilka (Oct. 24, 2023): designing arcs, emotional resonance, narrative themes
The Classes - Reloaded (Nov. 8, 2023): identifying and reworking class roles, designing elegant dynamic mechanics, balancing combat encounters for party composition
The Seance Sins (Nov. 17, 2023): killing darlings, the development process, removing content for the sake of content, creating interactivity and gameplay, understanding ranges of acceptable outcomes, using fail-forward mechanisms, intertwining exposition and gameplay
The Tragedy of Rudolph van Richten (Dec. 10, 2023): finding narrative purpose and themes, reconciling disparate themes, turning character arcs into narrative arcs and gameplay, the importance of bottom-up design
Tension, Agency & Scaffolding the Werewolf Den (Jan. 3, 2024) the nine types of scenes, balancing tension and agency, structuring dungeons and narratives
A Mansion Full of Ghosts (Jan. 22, 2024): adding content to empty places, structuring sandbox/flexilinear dungeons, identifying "key points" in dungeons
Balancing for Dfiferent Parties (Feb. 6, 2024): balancing encounters, crafting flexilinear (parallel) arcs
Choice & Challenge (Feb. 23, 2024): game design, player agency, narrative choice, player skills
Doylism & Newnism (Mar. 21, 2024): approaches to game design/DMing, homebrew campaign post-mortem
Reloaded v2.0.7 Release Notes, Pt. I (Apr. 18, 2024)
Reloaded v2.0.7. Release Notes, Pt. II (May 2, 2024)
Tension Curves in Castle Ravenloft (May 23, 2024): tension curves, sandboxes, narrative structure, climaxes
The Madam Eva Problem (July 25, 2024): stakes, goals
Inverting the Polarity (of the Dramatic Question) (August 20, 2024): exploration, dilemmas, catharsis
Method Dungeons (September 8, 2024): exploration, nonlinearity, verb rooms, building dungeons
Tsolenka Pass, Travel Encounters, and the Reference Frames of Chult (October 13, 2024): revising adventures, reference frames, hexcrawls, narrative structures, verbs
See more developer blogs in the Dragna's Developer Blogs collection.
Content Packs
Each content pack contains a thematic location stat block, NPC, two encounters, and a short adventure.
Fangs For the Memories, a vampire-themed content pack
From the Deep, a coastal horror-themed content pack
The Frozen Wastes, an arctic fantasy-themed homebrew content pack.
Boo!, a ghost-themed homebrew content pack
Homebrew Encounters
In Their Skin, a combat encounter for 3rd-level characters
Courtyard of Crows, a combat encounter for 5th-level characters
The Shamblers of Fengrave Marsh, a combat encounter for 8th-level characters
Horns of the Bull, a combat encounter for 4th-level characters
The Werewolf's Hunt, a combat encounter for 4th-level characters
The Aboleth's Antechamber, a combat encounter for 12th-level characters
Grains of Sand, a combat encounter for 7th-level characters
Our Worlds Within, a puzzle encounter for characters of any level
The Shadow's Maw, a combat encounter for 5th-, 6th-, or 7th-level characters.
The Misled Mob, a roleplay encounter for characters of any level.
The Woodland Predator, a combat encounter for 3rd-level characters.
Six Gothic Horror Encounters, including The Sickly Field, The Crashed Caravan, The Old Cemetery, The Sacred Memorial, The Isolated Chapel, and The Foul Orchard.
The Accursed Witch, an encounter for 7th- or 8th-level characters.
One-Page Oneshots
Murder at Silvercrest Lodge, an adventure for 3rd-level characters
Hunger of the Stars, an adventure for 4th-level characters
The Mind-Eaters, an adventure for 5th-level characters
What Granny Says, an adventure for 4th-level characters
Session Prep Videos
The Tyrant's Wrath—Session 1
The Tyrant's Wrath—Session 2
