No idea about Draci Doupe, but here is some advice to build and run a simple, fun intro adventure. I will give examples for everything, but the real rewards are in coming up with your
own ideas..
Encourage action: don't overthink your story. Much of it will be created by your players right at the table. What you want is an effective
adventure hook to pull them in and start interacting with your adventure. That means doing things. Throw them into the action and make every step they take interesting.
Bandits are raiding the village! They have carried off the loot through the forest to the old silver mines, but the trail is still hot! Can you recover the goods before the band pass through the mines and are never seen again?
Make it about decisions. Think of every encounter (place or situation) as a decision-making point. Do we go left or right, do we investigate this mysterious thing, do we ambush these enemies, sneak around them or try to capture one of them? Put your players into situations where they have to make choices and live with the consequences, but make most of these situations open-ended so they can come up with their own ideas.
The muddy road continues through the forest, but an overgrown side-trail splits off to the left, making for a shorter but more hazardous way towards the cliffs. The main bandit group went forward, but it seems a small scouting party chose the less travelled way, and they were dragging something heavy with them.
The room is full of miners’ picks, a loaded mine cart, and there are old tracks going off into a low timber-reinforced passage. However, you also see an ancient iron door set into a reinforced stone wall. The dents and scratches show someone has tried to forced it open, but failed. A faded sign says: ‘Keep Out!’
Let them do your work. Take their ideas and run with them, incorporating them into the adventure. Learn to do an effective action–reaction loop; react to their decisions and give them new choices and complications. Computer RPGs are mostly about combat because they aren’t very good at environmental simulation. The advantage of tabletop is that it is much easier to let the players make decisions that aren’t coded and expand your design on the fly.
They investigate the hollow tree trunk? You never thought about that, but whatever. As they approach, they hear a buzzing sound. It is full of bees… and delicious honey!
If they choose to dress up as bandits and infiltrate the band under the cover of darkness, give it a decent chance to succeed – of course, make it a tense experience. But what happens when a bandit gets suspicious and tries to question them?
Design the wilderness and the dungeon like a network. Don’t make it a linear ride with sights. Create side passages, dead ends and intersections. Make routes loop around and feed back into each other. Take advantage of interesting terrain and different ways to approach their objectives. Add navigation-related challenges, terrain obstacles that need a little creativity.
There may be multiple ways to enter the dungeon, and multiple routes to explore it. The main caverns are guarded by the bandits; the narrow side passages are safer, but they hold some dangerous abandoned things which may be worse than the bandits. There is a collapsed rope bridge in a cave, but they can improvise a crossing with their rope and some iron spikes. Or descend into the chasm and see if there is a way off of that.
Adventure over realism. As you create various locations, don’t be hung up about making it historically or ecologically accurate. You are designing a fantasy adventure. The places you create should be full of wondrous, risky and interactive things. It is better to design an abandoned mine with talking magic statues and dark pools inhabited by giant frogs than a boring, dusty place that
really captures the technologies of the mid-15th century. Try to think of something interesting for every area you write about. Make things odd. Don’t overexplain the fantastic.
There is a stone font here, carved with the patterns of many hammers. The water springs from the mouth of a carved fish, and there are two levers next to the font, both in the upright position. A skeleton, its bones encrusted with minerals and limestone, lies next to the font, still clutching a rusty pickaxe.
Realism means consequences. The ‘realism’ you are looking for is not necessarily mundane reality, but solid cause-and-effect stuff. What matters is making the game world self-consistent, and turning things that happen there into more adventure.
A character is caught in a rusty bear trap, and aside from taking damage, he must roll a saving throw to avoid crying out. If they cry out, the sound may attract the nearby bandits (give them a hearing check or a flat 1:6 probability on a die). If the bandits come and get killed, their fellows may eventually notice they are missing and investigate. If they discover there is a group of dangerous foes in the mines, they may become much more cautious and alert… or they may try to get on the move again to leave this cursed place.
Add some complications to the basic concept. Multi-layered plots are very easy to do, and they make the whole adventure feel alive. You don’t have to make it complicated.
There is an insane hermit in the woods, a former miner, and he sneaks into the mines by night to search for his long-lost fellows. He is sneaky and dangerous to both the players and the bandits. There are also a set of crypts in the deeper passages, and they may still hide something very valuable… and dangerous.
Reward exploration. Make curious and clever players find interesting information, extra treasure, an advantage over their opponents, but most of all, help for survival. Let them find a lot of clues about dangerous things. If there is a trap, add a few broken human bones. If there is a monster, make its lair stink.
If they think about asking someone in the village about the silver mines at the start, let them meet an old miner who can give them a tip or two. If they look behind the waterfall, let them find a secret, unguarded way into the mines (unless we count the giant leeches in the flooded cavern…). If they sneak into the brigand chief’s lair, let them find sealed documents which proves that he intends to betray his men (and to whom?).
Don’t inv
alidate their choices. Sometimes players do something you never thought of, or just go off the tracks and head into a direction that isn’t in your notes. That’s okay (although you can warn them the trail is getting colder). Come up with a way to continue their adventures. Bluff if necessary.
They never liked those villagers anyway. They set off for the mountains in pursuit of a misinterpreted clue and don’t . Well… that way is the… that’s right, TheValley of the Orcs. That’s also an interesting place, although the bandits and their loot will be gone (but they will return in a future episode!)
It is okay to fail, it is okay to succeed. Sometimes characters die or fail in other ways. That’s okay. Don’t make your adventure super-hard, but allow for casualties. This ups the stakes, and dead characters can be replaced rather simply. Also, if the characters win way beyond your intentions, that’s also fine – the players have earned it.
But not all failure has to be deadly. Maybe someone fails a Jump check over a chasm. Do they fall and die? Well, maybe they just lose their backpack or weapon first, or suffer some damage.
Arnult the Grey is killed off in a nasty giant frog-related accident. The player sighs and rolls a new character. Fifteen minutes later, the characters meet Lothar the Strong, a mysterious ranger who is hunting the bandits to avenge his dead brother. He is ready for action.
Link it together. Add links to new adventures and sequels so there will be something interesting for the next time as well.
Maybe they find a map in the brigands’ stash that leads to an abandoned monastery reputed to hold a magical well. Or they find the bandit chief’s secret letter, which shows he was following orders from someone, and they will meet at the crossroads at Dead Horse Pass in two weeks. Or...
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