One of the most important and difficult adventures you can create is an introductory adventure.

An introductory adventure is any adventure that is intended to be a player or game masters first session. Shadowrun has the classic Food Fight, D&D 5e has the well trodden Lost Mines of Phandelver, and Dungeon Crawl Classics has its deadly Portal Under the Stars.

These adventures have three difficult goals that they have to hit with precision.

1. They must be layed out in a method that is efficient for reading, while allowing a GM that is completely unfamiliar with the system to quickly find the information they need.
2. Present a reasonable challenge to a group of new players.
3. Teach the games core systems while also training players to consider more advanced systems.

Without hitting all these points an introductory adventure will set both its players and GMs up for failure.

This list of requirements means that we need to consider introductory adventures as less of a ‘easy’ adventure and instead as more of a tutorial. Similiar to how you wouldn’t expect someone who has never played a video game before to understand and enjoy Dark Souls without help, we need to ease players into the systems slowly. We need to introduce the language of the game first.

Lets break down what that means.

Every aspect of our lives has an assumed language to it and RPGs are no different. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should start by saying “This 20 sided dice is a d20, we use it to make attack rolls, saving throws, and skill checks.” Instead we should introduce them to the language of play. In a recent introductory adventure that I wrote, I had to introduce players and GMs to the D&D 5e language. The language of the game is “combat simulation with talking as an option” so I had the first encounter be a robbery of the store that the party was shopping in.

By using a familiar setting (a store) and a familiar situation (a robbery) that they have seen in media before I can introduce fantastical elements one-by-one to the events. This way, the players are not overwhelmed with confusion. The four robbers each then represent a different type of challenge. One is a beefy minotaur that fights with her horns, she has a lot of health but deals miniscule amounts of damage which trains players to understand that numbers are more important than appearances. The second robber carries two clubs and a low chance to hit but she has pack tactics which trains players to look at how they’re positioning themselves. The third robber wields a gun which deals massive damage which trains the players to use the environment, in this case the cover that the store shelves provide, to their advantage. And the final robber uses a flame thrower like spell which introduced both AoEs and saving throws to our players.

As you can see in just this one encounter we have introduced players to reading enemies, positioning, environmental usage, and special abilities. In a perfect world this would be seperated and done in a non-lethal environment, such as in a training session, before they are forced to use these skills in various combinations during a real fight. But, that isn’t always viable either because of word count or the story being told.

One of the best examples of this that I’ve played is in Crypt of the Everflame for Pathfinder 1e. The first combat in this adventure is an illusory test by the players mentor, they then have to fight real enemies in a flat room, travel through a maze of traps, fight a monster that uses the rooms lighting to its advantage, dive down underwater to retrieve a key, and fight a group of monsters that can only be destroyed by a specific type of damage. All of this is on the first floor and presented in distinct rooms. On the second floor they must face similiar challenges except that they are combined to train the players in the language that Pathfinder expects them to use.