On Saturday, I found myself having to write a D&D adventure. Despite running a campaign for about two years (averaging about one game session per month), I haven't had to do this very often.
Before the first session, way back then, I wrote up a bunch of bits of backstory (small slips of paper connecting each PC to two other PCs). Then, I wrote up some background about the major local forces.
One was the Worg Juice Corporation, which produced highly addictive energy drinks via suspicious means, thereby unleashing misery and disruption upon the rural population. The others were goblin and gnome organizations living in a cavern system a thousand miles below the surface. At the time, I had decided that their way of life had also been wrecked by the Worg Juice Corporation because the balance of trade had been ruined by demand for previously worthless crops (glowing carrots) changing dramatically as a result of it being a component of Worg Juice, upsetting the balance of carrot-mushroom trade. (Somehow, during later play, I drifted away from glowing carrots being essential and replaced it with a far more complex formula for Worg Juice involving other more "exotic" factions.)
Then, I sketched out a small town and wrote up a couple NPCs – the Worg Juice CEO, one middle manager, dwarven security guarded, one town "dissident". I wrote out an introductory event: The harvesting of Worg Juice concentrate from the lake as a corporate tourist event.
I also sketched out the underground cavern network. The defining element at that point was the Worg River, an underground river that forked and fed an "upper" and "lower" basin. A weir at the fork, I handwaved at the time, was controlled by some kind of dwarven priestesses of something, and by sending more water to one basin or another, they controlled the agricultural fates of either the goblins of the upper basin and their carrots or the gnomes of the lower basin and their mushrooms.
For the most part, I filled out the cavern rooms by finding some free adventure online and mapping the contents to some of the rooms in the upper basin on my map. Hence, I got some generic encounters like giant bees and skeletons, which I figured would be fine for a crowd of people that mostly had never played D&D.
I was going to work out details on Worg Juice HQ, but I ran out of time.
The first session was pretty fun, but unsurprisingly, the PCs spent a lot of time diving into Worg Juice HQ, which did make sense. So, I improvised a chase through it. They went after an unhinged Worg Juice superfan (or addict?), then in turn were chased by security and discovered corpses and secret doors, and eventually got outside.
There was some frisson in that experience. Improvising is exciting, but it was really intense for someone that had not DMed in like 15 years. So, I think it was in the next session that I deus ex machina'd them into the underground caverns by having the Item Mart they were shopping in slide down a sinkhole into the underworld.
After playing through a bit of the "upper basin", I decided the pace at which we played* would mean there was no need for an upper and lower basin, so I redrew it (looks like the attached picture) and replaced the encounters with what I thought would be more fun.
The cavern layout did not change much over the 1.5 years that the players played in it, though I would often change the contents and the wandering monsters. However, in a sense, I never needed to come up with something, whereas I kinda did last Saturday! OK, more later on fast D&D adventure-coming-up-with!
* There are eight players, many of which are rather thorough. They sometimes have eight-way discussions, which take awhile, although are pretty fun. So, some sessions would just span a single room. There were a few sessions that resembled "bottle episodes."
