What type of adventures do you write? Consider what adventures you’ve run recently and be sure you’re offering your players some variety. Perhaps there are rumors of an action adventure and of a mystery adventure, and the players can choose which to pursue.

Action

Action is the most straightforward adventure type: Those guys are causing trouble; go kick their asses. This works well once heroes have got some experience under their belts and feel confident about combat, but it gets dull after a while.

But an action adventure can easily become a slog. You need to add other elements from the four pillars of adventuring.

• Combat: The adventure is going to have a lot of that. If the idea is that the heroes know who they must battle, then they going to try to find them and battle them. But this also includes chases across rooftops, fistfights on rope bridges, and the like. Be sure to build your action encounters around interesting locations and make them dynamic and interactive.
• Exploration: There should be some need to figure out where the bad guys are and perhaps what motivates them.
• Social Encounters: You should include some encounters with victims and others affected by the bad guys that can help answer the question of where the bad guys’ lair is and perhaps how best to deal with them.
• Predicaments: The bad guys should have some traps set. And perhaps they’ve stolen a puzzle box or their lair is a ruins where they have blocked off a room that has a dangerous magical puzzle/trap in it.

Mystery

Who hasn’t heard about some weird mystery and wished they could investigate and solve it? Consider the strangest mysteries in history. Invent an answer for one and translate it into the idiom of the late Middle Ages. Then build an adventure around that. Take inspiration from the lost colony of Roanoke, the ghost ship Mary Celeste, the Oak Island mystery, the Ripper Murders, etc.

• Combat: Mysteries are typically light on combat, but in a thriller-type mystery the heroes may have to fight mysterious forces sent by whomever is behind the mystery or perils at the periphery of it.
• Exploration: Mysteries are all about exploring, finding clues, following trails, and discovering where things are and what is inside them. Make your locations awe-inspiring and filled with mystery and secrets.
• Social Encounters: Every mystery has people intrigued about them, passing rumors around. Perhaps there’s a sage who has leads for the heroes to follow up on. Perhaps a noble hires the heroes to find a loved one. Thriller-type mysteries tend to have confrontations in which the bad guys demand something or deliver a warning; at first this is merely bluster, but later it leads to combat.
• Predicaments: Mysteries often take place in or lead to spooky old castles, ruins, temples, and such. The scarcity of combat tends to mean there need to be more traps and puzzles, which is fine, because traps and puzzles are little mysteries in themselves. Good ones for a mystery include things like coded messages and torn letters that need to be pieced together.

Political

A political adventure is one where the heroes engage in a lot of discussion with various NPCs to determine what is going on and how to the navigate choppy waters of personal and public affairs. You’ll need factions allied and opposed to each other and some ultimate goal for the heroes to work toward.

• Combat: Political adventures are typically light on combat, but the heroes may need to battle whichever foes ultimate align against them, as well as monsters they meet along the way and assassins or thugs sent to derail their efforts.
• Exploration: The heroes may need to explore the social landscape as well as the physical locations. In a political adventure, a thief might steal thru a castle or guildhall looking for documents; a cleric might need to talk to several NPCs to understand how they are aligned.
• Social Encounters: Political adventures are all about the social encounters the heroes have in trying to negotiate deals, convince nobles to take action, convince monsters to go away, etc. Here is where a betrayal shifts the power structure and where the timely discovery of a secret turns the tables.
• Predicaments: Such adventures tend to be light on traps and puzzles per se, altho there are certainly tricks that some NPCs might play–claiming something that the heroes discover to be false. And an assassin might lay a deadly trap for the heroes or their NPC ally. But coded messages and such are also good fits.

Suspense

Suspense adventures are typically funhouse dungeons loaded with tricks, traps, and puzzles. Maybe its the tomb of a mad sorceress or tower of a necromancer. But it might also be a particularly wily wizard who must be captured but who keeps putting obstacles, traps, and puzzles in the heroes’ path. Maybe it’s an evil overlord who sends his minions after the party, and they keep popping up to cause trouble or capture heroes.

• Combat: Suspense stories tend to be light on combat, with the heroes perhaps fighting off the villain’s minions or monsters released from suspended animation by a trap. One way out of a predicament with creatures is to fight your way out.
• Exploration: Suspense stories tend to have a fair amount of exploration. There’s often a central conflict that can be unraveled with the right clue discovered in mysterious runes or in a packet of letters.
• Social Encounters: Suspense stories tend to be light on social encounters. They mainly come in the form of threats and warnings not to proceed further.
• Predicaments: Thrillers are all about getting the heroes into predicaments. Traps and puzzles are the bread and butter of a funhouse dungeon. And surrounding the heroes with bad guys who capture them or must be escaped is even more thrilling.