Adventure: Bad Moon Rising

Bad Moon Rising was the first adventure I was able to drop players into after they graduated out of the Starter Set box. It places them in the town of Triboar, at the peak of a rash of killings at the hands of a werewolf who's identity is a mystery. This adventure is designed for parties of 3-5 characters, averaging levels 4-5.

The goal with this adventure was to emphasize role-playing and problem solving so the players could get a better feel for who their characters are as people, and give story driven players a break from the hack and slash dominated dungeons of Wave Echo Cave and Cragmaw Castle. Accomplishing this meant fleshing out Triboar as best as I could with lots of locations, NPCs, and opportunities.

When I design adventures, especially in the open world (as opposed to a dungeon), I try to build as detailed a world as possible, and have certain events taking place in that world, but avoid a specific point by point story line as much as possible (as players will always find a way to do something you didn't anticipate and screw up your plans).

When we started this game, I gave the players a little "OK, we're out of the Starter Set; you're big boys and girls now, and you shouldn't expect content to be spoon fed to you" speech to encourage them to think about problems from multiple angles and explore the world from their character's perspective.

A quick note on software: I know I'll catch flack for this, but I really hate Photoshop. I've spent a very significant quantity of time around Adobe products (in my day job, I do film and video production, and we do most of our post-production work in Creative Cloud), and I find their interfaces to be needlessly cumbersome and complicated, for no reason other than making designers feel good about themselves for being able to master the software. So when I don't have to use Adobe software, I prefer not to, and as such, most of my maps and graphics are laid out using Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (I'm several versions behind the current release). I've been using Paint Shop Pro for decades, and it does everything I need in a way that is vastly more intuitive than Photoshop (for less than a quarter of the price). So I'll be including my .paspimage files in these archives for anyone that can make use of them, but by and large, I expect most people will be better served by the flat jpegs I'm including.

I also bounce back and forth between MS Word and Google Docs when writing, but for these posts I'll just be providing the adventure text in PDF. If anyone needs an editable format of the document, leave me a comment and I'll be happy to work with you on providing what you need.

I'm including character sheets that I put together for notable NPCs in this adventure, but when this was written, the idea for this blog hadn't occurred to me yet, so the character sheets are hand written and scanned, and my handwriting is awful. Sorry about that. I'm working on coming up with a good way to do digital character sheets for NPCs in future releases.

One final note: this adventure was written while I was still finding my stride, so its format is a little different than future ones will be. More bullet points and less read-through content. I'm always striving to improve my format based on what worked in previous sessions, so please bear with me as things evolve.

BadMoonRising.zip
(49 MB)

Download "Bad Moon Rising", an original adventure for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, designed for a party of 3-5 players, averaging levels 4-5.