Even if you don’t have the time or inclination to write your own adventures, you can still customize modules and other published adventures to tie them in better with your own campaign or PCs. Below are 14 quick ways you can add personal touches to someone else’s adventure:
- Substitute a recurring NPC from your campaign in place of one in the module.
- Change the name/race/gender of one or more of the NPCs.
- Change the type of some of the encounters to better reflect your game setting. Example: if your world doesn’t have many orcs, use kobolds or goblins.
- Add more opponents to one or more encounters to up the difficulty level.
- Subtract opponents from one or more encounters to lower the difficulty level.
- Change the location of the adventure.
- Substitute a trap for a monster.
- Substitute a monster for a trap.
- Replace one encounter with something unique to your game. Ex: change a published riddle to a questions about your settings history.
- If the adventure is a rescue or escort mission, make the rescuee or the person escorted an NPC connected to one or more of the PCs.
- Change the language clues are written in. For example, instead of common, have a clue written in Elvish/Latin/Solomani. If you want to make it more of a challenge, make it a language no one in the party knows.
- Give the PCs a map of the adventure area with errors.
- Substitute one of the treasure/reward for something unique to your campaign. Example: instead of a +3 sword, put in a legendary sword from your world’s history.
- Change the names in the adventure to ones that fit your setting.
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