The average adventure, no matter what its form, has a very simple structure. When one does not know this structure, one usually ends up reinventing the wheel every time one writes a new adventure. that is not very practical.

The structure goes something like this: The player characters go somewhere, overcome a challenge, get a reward, and go somewhere else to overcome another challenge for another reward, possibly with the help of the first reward they got. For example, they kick in a door, defeat a troll and takes the big weapon it had so they can defeat the ogre behind the next door.

This is a very simple structure. Many entertaining adventures have been created by simply repeating it over and over again with the proper variations. So let's see what we can vary, shall we?

The combination of a location, a challenge and a reward is usually called a scene. Complex scenes may have more than one of either location, challenge and/or reward, as noted above.

Adventures basically consist of a lot of scenes that have a common story to them.

Let's have an example of a scene slightly more complex than the troll & ogre thing: Inside a church, the players must figure out why the priest keeps avoiding their questions clumsily. If they realize he refuses to speek because someone else is present, they may just root out this intruder and capture him. That will allow them to get some very good information from both the priest and their captive.

Pick location, challenge(s) and reward(s), and you have a scene. Now let's look at plot and structure.

Plot

Structure