Adventure Arcs are a new way to prep & run D&D Games

You crack open the adventure you intend to run. The gaming group is showing up in a few hours and of course, life took you off course this week. You wish you had more time to prep, but alas this is where you are now. Digging into the adventure you find that much of the material is either not suitable for your current campaign or doesn't really fit in with the way you like to run your games. Now you're left with a couple of options, freestyle (which is fun and fine) or wing it with whatever resources you have on hand.

Neither of those scenarios are acceptable for those of us who like to present our players with interesting and unique scenarios that have been well thought out and take the story of our world forward.

Adventure Arcs Magazine aims to flip the script, changing the way we think of prepping and playing D&D adventures. AAW Games, who has been publishing professional adventures for over 12 years has taken it upon themselves to reinvent the adventure format. Long has the GM had to cater to the adventure, but why? Why not have the adventure cater to the GM?

Adventures as we have come to know them are typically somewhere between 64-200+ pages of text with fancy illustrations and cartography presented in a 2-column layout. Finding what you need and plugging it into your specific setting, campaign, or session is not always easy, sometimes requiring a lot of extra research, extrapolation, and integration. AAW Games has changed all of this, presenting their Adventure Arcs concept with a series of LEGO-like building bricks of varying colors. Each color representing a different part of the overall "adventure", something AAW is referring to as an "Arc". Since the different sections are designated and color-coded it makes it a lot easier to quickly locate what one needs plug into games as needed.

For example, Adventure Arc #1: The Red Tree of Grudges (Crowdfunding on BackerKit October 22nd) has specific sections within the magazine indicated by the color green and deemed "Wilderness". This particular entry (below) has arctic biomes describing a variety of unique terrain types one might encounter whilst adventuring in a dangerous winter wonderland.

In addition to a breakdown of what kind of challenges one may encounter here there is also a table with temperatures in both Fahrenheit and Celsius as well as a number of different equipment needs for traversing such terrain. For example, snow shoes may be utilized to cross deep snow while crampons can assist with climbing in icy conditions, there are even skis to help one cross frozen lakes with speed and better weight distribution or make movement and travel much faster when heading downhill. This is just one of many entries in the first issue of Adventure Arcs Magazine each of which can snagged by GMs to use in their own games and adventures.

AAW Games described Adventure Arcs as "Play Together" or "Plug & Play". The goal being to make the game of Dungeons & Dragons more fun and accessible to all DMs regardless of how they run their games.

While this article delves into this new way of prepping and running adventures a bit, there is a lot more to cover. AAW Games is hosting an official launch party on BackerKit October 22nd, 2024 with perks for early and return backers. If you're a D&D 2024 fan and interested in getting in on the ground floor of Adventure Arcs Magazine, sign up to be notified when AAW Games launches their party and this new magazine line.