Mattalorian's Guide to Adventure Chunking

T
he plight of every new and experienced DM Once you have done this, you should separate the
is the often overwhelming task that is campaign into the various arcs, corresponding to the "tiers
campaign planning. One common solution of play". The first arc is from levels 1-4. This is where your
is to overly plan, but often as soon as you players will meet, make first contact with some powerful
feel almost prepared, your players do beings and begin to find their place in the world. You don't
something that throws you back to square need to decide on your campaign's BBEG at this point. In
one. Many DMs prefer to simply improvise fact, you may not have even thought of them yet.
everything and let the story flow with little more than a All you need at this point is the starting location for your
general direction. players and an idea of the final event that will help them
The solution I found for this problem was right in front transition into the next tier, "Heroes of the Realm".
of me the whole time. The DMG has all the tools needed to While this may seem simple, this is the step that directs
easily plan out a campaign. But there's one problem...

and guides everything you do afterwards.

Once you have divided your whole campaign into arcs,

The layout sucks.

you further divide it into levels. Each level with have a

number of adventures required to reach the next.

All this great information exists but you have to all kinds of Knowing this number will help guide your decisions about
mental gymnastics to organize it in a way that makes it how to reveal and progress the story and keep a good
simple for DMs, new and old, to streamline their campaign pace for you and your players.
planning.

Lastly you divide down into the individual adventures.

These are the individual units that you will use in your
My goal is to bring all of this together in one place to help planning. Here you will plan out your story and campaign a
you, dear reader, create your campaign into adventures, bit at at time, with enough guidance to give you and your
effectively "chunking" your campaign into manageable players good direction while allowing enough flexibility to
pieces. change that direction without hours upon hours of wasted
Most of the content in this guide is not my original work.
creation, but is simply the system that I have found to This kind of segmentation is the key to how the entire
focus my creation and help to pump out multiple hours system works.
worth of adventure content in significantly shorter time.
This method also allows you to be massively flexible Step 1: Determine XP Budget
because you don't have to prepare very far in advance and
you aren't sinking hours into preparing things that become Now to the business of how I create adventures. Firstly, I
irrelevant if your party goes in a different direction. must say that this is simply the template I use, and if you
have a system that works better for you, by all means,
Crafting the Campaign keep using it (and maybe let me know). I do not claim to be
the authority on this subject. With that disclaimer, let's
The rest of this creation will be the bare bones process I go dive in.
through when creating my adventures. Hopefully by the The first thing to consider when creating an adventure is
end, you will have a basic understanding of the process I what level adventure is it?
use and you can take it and adapt it to your own campaign Typically this is whatever level your players are, but
planning and preparation. there are cases in which not every character is the same.
In this case you refer to the Average Party Level or APL.
Chunking Down This is standard practice even in all published adventures.
This also matters in how many adventures you need to
The first thing you must do is break everything down.
create for each level, and not all levels are the same. Table
Starting with your campaign ideas, you need to determine
1-1 is a good reference for how many adventures there
the usual things like your setting, magic level, etc. This is
will be per PC level.
This technique is exlusively XP based,
the foundation of your campaign. Then you should come
and so determining the budget of each adventure is key to
up with a bullpen of villains, evil forces, and powerful
making sure your chunks are meaningful and challenging,
figures and organizations that can serve as the antagonists
but not too taxing on your player's resources to be
of your campaign and arcs. These serve to give you a
extremely deadly. Table 1-1 details the recommended XP
variety of options of factions and ideals for your players to
budget per adventure.
oppose to ally with which gives your players the sense that
the world is alive and dynamic (and makes you look really
good).

1
Step 2: Determine Adventure Type In Conclusion
There are two main factors in determining the "Adventure Hopefully, you now have a bit of a grasp on how I use the
Type" for each chunk you plan. The Adventure Style is Adventure Chunking system to reduce and focus your
straight out of the DMG: Location based and Event based. campaign prep. It does take some getting used to, but I'm
These are the overall frameworks you will use to plan your confident that if you try it for yourself, you will find at least
adventures. You can find more information about these a few nuggets that will help you with your campaign and
styles in the DMG. session prep.

The other category is the Adventure Activity. This is what

kind of things the party is going to be expected to do in the Happy hunting! This is the way.

adventure. The four main types of Activity are:

Thwarting- straightforward adventure. Stopping a bad -The Mattalorian

guy or bad thing.

Delivering- getting something or someone from point A

to point B
Table 1-1: Adventure XP Budget
Collecting- Retreiving a target object, person, etc. from
a specific location Adventure XP to next Adventures per
Discovery- Find out, discover, explore, or uncover a APL XP* level level
location or item 1 300 300 1
Once your Adventure Type is determined, you can move 2 600 600 1
on to the next step.
3 900 1,800 2

Step 3: Determine Key Points 4 1,300 3,800 3

5 1,875 7,500 4
At this point you will determine the key scenes in an event
6 3,000 9,000 3
based adventure, or the key rooms in a location based
adventure. This is where all the action in the adventure 7 3,700 11,000 3
happens. There are many resources and tools to help with 8 3,500 14,000 4
this but generally, you will want 5-6 scenes for an event 9 5,250 16,000 3
based adventure and 10-12 rooms for a location based
10 7,000 21,000 3
adventure.
11 5,500 15,000 3
There is a bit too much nuance, detail, and various
schools of thought to dive deeply into in this (relatively) 12 6,500 20,000 3
brief guide, but I may touch on it in future projects. 13 7,000 20,000 3
14 8,500 25,000 3
Step 4: Determine Encounter Details 15 10,000 30,000 3
This is where most of your plan and prep time will go. You 16 10,000 30,000 3
will divide your adventure XP into groups to use toward 17 15,000 40,000 3
preparing encounters ranging from "Easy" to "Deadly" as
18 20,000 40,000 2
described by the DMG.
19 30,000 50,000 2
Location Based 20 40,000 n/a n/a
Each room in your adventure location should have
something interesting inside. One tool that I find very *- note that these values are per PC
helpful is the "Dungeon Chamber Contents" table found in
Appendix A of the DMG.
Once you have determined the contents of the rooms,
you can more easily stock your location with traps,
hazards, enemies, and, most importantly, treasure.

Event Based
Preparing encounters for your scenes and events is a it
more nuanced. Generally you start with a goal and use
your XP budget to determine the levels of difficulty for
each scene.
These scenes may include combat, and at least one
scene should have some form of combat encounter to
maintain a balanced game pace and feel, but social and
exploration encounters can also be used in the form of a
Skill Challenges or less traditional encounters focused on
roleplay.