How to: One-Page Adventure Jam

On 21 August there was a workshop with Green Ronin and Ian Lemke on designing encounters and short adventures. Due to the heartless betrayal of technology, the recording was incomplete. This post then, is my short summary of what I can recall from the workshop, pertaining specifically to one-page adventures..

Luckily, there will be another worskhop in the coming weeks, but for now, this can give some hints and tips about writing your one-page adventure for the 2025 jam (and future jams if you happen upon this post at some later date).

Short

One-page adventures are, as the name indicates, short. This does not mean that the story, when played, has to be short, but it means that the text must be short. Thus, making use of existing stats for NPCs and ship, by referring to their page number and publication, is recommended. This way you won’t have to spend space on anything bur a short description of the NPC.

Stay on topic and target: what is the main incentive, plot, and climax? How will or can the characters get there? This is centre stage, decide on this and keep to it. Do not stray too far with from this. We all tend to, as we know how creative players can be. Trust the GMs who will run it to be able to handle what they handle every time they play.

Keep the incentives low on unnecesary detail and high on applicability or interpretational value. Keep it simple.

Simple

Focus on story, plot, and characters. Refer to rules only when necessary.

Make use of existing rules, like advanced and challenge tests, but the pro tip is: limit your adventure to one or two of these extended tests. They take up space and while incredibly valuable and useful to condense long stretches of in-game activity, one-page adventures should also be easy and quick to read, get into and put on the table.

Avoid too convoluted plots and complicated series of events and differential causal incidents. Be ambitious, but do not over- or underestimate your fellow GMs: be clear and explicit about plot, characters, relationships, consequences, and motives.

For more thoughts on writing one-page adventures, check this out.

Inspiration: Look to previous submissions

Look up the collection of 30 one-page adventures on this page (scroll down adventure and location column). Here you can see good examples to follow, and perhaps you can identify ways you think you would rather avoid.

It is an incredible collection of creativity, well worth looking over before you write your own one-page adventure. If not for plot and content, then for the economic use of space to write a whole adventure on one page.

Inspiration: Previous winners

Look up the previous winning submissions to see what convinced the community vote in previous years:

• Dancing on Saturnian Ice (volume 1 – 2021)
• Those Who Trust (volume 2 – 2022)
• A Rock and a Hot Place (volume 3 – 2023)
• Tides of Misfortune (volume 4 – 2024)

Peers, reviews, and revisions

The intention of the jam is also to actually jam, which I take to mean: play together, respond to each others ideas, process, and output. This can be through discussions in the Facebook groups, Discord, Green Ronin’s Atomic Think Tank, Reddit, Bluesky, or Twitter. With your own players and GM friends, or wherever else you have this kind of discourse.

This is not mandatory of course, but we have had instances of peer reviewing and participants revising their adventures all the way up until the deadline. This makes the event also a social and collaborative activity, which is very much a good thing in my book.

Good luck in your writing and I am looking forward to reading it!