For as much as I see people discussing adventure design & its structure, I rarely see people elaborate on what a 1-page adventure is and what elements are crucial to a good one-pager.

While working on Things Possessed of Power, I set a challenge to make the location more alive by having 1-page dungeons that connected to the underground locale (it is the Underdark after all). I needed to write 5 and I had no clue how you fulfill that ambition with the strict space limitations. I did some research. Turns out, there’s not a lot of agreement on what are the best 1-page dungeons.

History

Since I’m working towards a design goal, the history helps illuminate what the intention of the early 1-pagers was. They go back to the early days, but were formalized in 2007 apparently. The idea was to make a megadungeon of 30×30 tile 1-page dungeons, 1 page per floor. What stands out to me is that the room keys were limited to a “single phrase idea” “with limitless creative space provided” by the lack of detail. The intention was to provide just enough & nothing more. I do not think it was meant to be an exercise in refinement of writing, because “with just simple text, a referee could invent details on the fly, and still have the basic text for future use in order to jog his memory on how he handled the room in the past.”

This eventually led to the One Page Dungeon Contest. Which continues to this day.

Judgment Criteria

Since the contest is still ongoing, the judgment criteria might help explain what makes a good one. Unfortunately, it is sparse. You are graded on Creativity/Originality, Art/Design, Writing/Content, Playability/Functionality, and Personal Impression of the judge.

So in order to write a good 1-page dungeon, first you must write a good adventure/dungeon.

The Adventure Research

The Arcane Library released some good one-page modules that slightly veer into a little more than 1 page territory. We’ll look at one of those. Also, I went looking for recommended one-pagers and there’s little agreement on the topic (probably because there are so many). So I stole some of Black Citadel‘s list: Sky-Blind Spire, The Haunting of Hainsley Hall, and the Squirming Fragment of a Dead God.

Commonalities

They all include a map, the briefest of setups, and room keys. That’s it.

Everything does double duty except maybe the room keys. All of it is refined to the bare minimum necessary. A vocabulary/thesaurus are useful. What makes it good isn’t the structure of the material, but how much the material conveys in as little as possible. To some extent, it’s an exercise in writing.

These aren’t meant to serve as full, multiple-session dungeon delves. Instead, they are good hex-filler for a single session of play.

So why do these stand out?

Sky-Blind Spire by Michael Prescott

The past history (Setup) is explained in 3 short sentences. The current setup (What’s Happening?) is 4 short sentences with catchy ideas such as “sky-blindness” & goblins robbing a wizard’s tower for silver. A brief mechanical weirdness regarding how the tower is different on the inside compared to the outside is explain in less than 75 words. There are 6 random encounters of activity. Not just 1d4 wolves. It explains a quest that can be completed in less than 50 words & finally the room keys (although not all of them).

The writing is tight. There’s room for a GM to maneuver within the creativity. It doesn’t force actions. You have an idea of the factions. You will need to read it to figure out how it works before hand because of the non-Euclidian geometry & fill some of the empty rooms, but otherwise it’s fairly straightforward and simple to run.

The key is the uniqueness and how everything is reinforced through this theme of the sky-blindness & magic ritual as tower. It doesn’t key every room so a GM might need to improv some of those things, but for one page it has a lot of elements.

Haunting of Hainsley Hall by Skerples & Michael Prescott

This is by Skerples. Nearly 1/3 of the page is devoted to setup & background information. There’s a d20 hourly/room encounter table that’s nearly 1/4 of the page. And, the map & keys take up the rest. A haunted mansion adventure. Stay in it overnight, get money. Classic. The idea is basically the hook. The twist here is that the ghosts hired a medium to bring the adventurers in to help them get rid of a hermit – a gothic poet Lady who wants to drape over the dingy furniture & navel-gaze. Essentially, the ghosts are tired of her moaning.

Again, the writing is tight. It doesn’t explain things a GM can figure out on their own, but the unique things. For instance, “14. High Gable. Pigeons. Droppings everywhere.” I immediately picture Pigeon Lady in Central Park from Home Alone 2 except in the attic of this mansion. There’s an interesting mechanic regarding secret passages, but you have essentially everything for a good solid one-shot spread across 15 rooms. It compacts as much flavor into a single page & tries to create an unique experience through its twist.

Squirming Fragment of a Dead God by Harry Menear

If Sky-Blind Spire has all of the elements of a solid dungeon adventure design, Squirming Fragment does as well. This time, the uniqueness is a fallen star god sliver is found by a troll and sentient plants are emerging from the crater. The idea itself is interesting enough to be a hook. And this is really where the strength of good 1-pagers lies. They utilize the limitation of space & have every element do double duty. Think of it as a lyrical rapper writing double & triple entendres.

This adventure lacks a random encounter table, but makes up for it by having a main baddie in the dungeon that may be doing various things and might be necessary to avoid. The writing is less evocative than Sky-Blind Spire. But it appears to be using terseness to provide details about everything in the rooms, similar to Haunting of Hainsley Hall. The GM will need to provide more of the flavor.

I’m noticing the pattern of compact creativity, that conceptual density from before.

The Shadowdark Difference

Arcane Library’s Wavestone Monolith is a good example of the Shadowdark format. Unlike the others, it’s set to an A5 format so it uses the back for room keys. It’s a very structured format. Let me show you (partially, it is a commercial product so we’re going to blur it some).

Every single 1-page dungeon for Shadowdark from Arcane Library uses this set of elements in this structure. Where others use every inch to pack as much information onto the page, this formatting structure sacrifices available word count in favor of clarity through structure. Remember this is half an A4 page and it includes, everything except room keys – which are on the back (other half of the A4 page) & rife with details.

Kelsey does essentially the inverse of the other 1-pagers we see above. In fact, her style follows more in the Gus L. philosophy of one-page dungeons (Maw of Snails, Grieving Road). Both boil down the setup details into the most crucial elements (around 50 words) & trusts the GM extrapolating from there after reviewing the rest of the keys. It uses the majority of the space for the adventure & location details. Also, by being structured, there’s less confusion for a GM. The unique element here is the placement of a special artifact treasure piece that serves as the enticement since Shadowdark facilitates dungeon crawling & always has that singular hook of “get treasure” always implied.

You’ll also notice the title isn’t really a hook. There isn’t really a lot of double entendre writing required with this structure. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist, just that things can basically exist as they are. It also means the dungeon & adventure needs to be well-written because it is going to carry, not the GM or concept or gimmick or twist.

So what makes Wavestone Monolith so good?

It is a strong adventure location without the GM having to build it. Hazards, obstacles, traps, tricks, factions, a great threat, minor threats, all of it is there & compressed into fewer than 10 room keys. Every single thing that you need to run an adventure (minus monsters statblocks that are in the core book) is here. One thing that stands out from having run it, is that even though it’s not a planned scene or moment in the adventure, every room is developed enough to afford that opportunity to occur at the table.

For me, this is where this method is stronger than the other one-pagers listed above that favor a more setup heavy structure. It’s a good adventure first, wrapped in conciseness & quality.

“Deep within the sweltering jungle, a monolith of black basalt floats upon an undulating lake hidden in a cave.” That’s evocative. “Wielder stops aging, but skull permanently turns into nautilus shape….” That’s interesting.

If you are a good writer, this format structure shines.

Conclusion: How do you review one?

Allowances need to be made for the fact that as an one-pager, it is limited in capacity to be indulgent. But similarly, it still needs to be a good adventure. As illustrated above, there’s different ways to approach quality & emphasis on where the GM needs to place their efforts. There’s a hyperfocus on theme. Some details are presumed determinable by a GM while others are given to create atmosphere. The creativity & writing will make a good dungeon great. That doesn’t change when you shift down to an one-pager. It’s just less.

It’s more.

If anything, to review effectively, I think you may need to try to make a good one-pager just to understand how hard it is to do so much with so little. It’ll highlight why something may be bad even if it’s not immediately obvious to someone picking it up to run quickly.

One-pagers are also not for every GM, it will require you to prep or improv in ways that full modules won’t. That’s okay. Not everything needs to be for everyone.

But, as an adventure writer, let’s give it a try. Steal as you see fit. Scarabakki are just an ancient insectoid ancestry. This may be part of the upcoming Things Possessed with Power so it may change.