This is a case study showing how KORG came up with, wrote, and ran the AD&D adventure "Waves of Sorrow". This event was run at Gen Con 1995, and was the third team event KORG had ever run.
The first step in creating "Waves of Sorrow" was coming up with the general idea. This was done at Gen Con 1994, after we'd finished running that year's team event. We were basically just sitting around musing about what to do for next year when someone suggested an underwater adventure. But instead of making it normal characters with Potions of Water Breathing and the like we'd make the characters be merfolk, tritons, and other underwater races. It was unclear what the whole point of the adventure would be at this point - we spend most of our time throwing out suggestions for monsters, characters, and the like. One thing we agreed on was that we'd try to use monsters from the various monsters books that you never see in gaming - so no aboleths or storm giants living underwater. Instead we'd use eyes of the deep, morkoths, and other little used deep sea monsters.
In late 1994 we came up with the basic idea for the event: the merfolk's home was becoming unlivable due to a rift in the planes of existence. An opening to the demi-plane of minerals was causing huge amounts of salt to pour into the ocean, rendering a vast area of water poisonous to all sea life. The merfolk party members would be out looking for a new are of the ocean for their people to live in. At this point we'd decided to make all the characters merfolk (as opposed to a mix of merfolk, tritons, and so on) largely because of the difference in power levels between the various ocean races. After many suggestions the name "Waves of Sorrow" was decided on. We wrote up a description and submitted the idea to Gen Con. It's worth noting that the description, in true KORG fashion, was rather vague. It said something like "Merfolk must struggle to save their people". This turned out to be important later, and was done on purpose - since you have to submit an event in January, you need to leave yourself room in case the event changes a bit.
After some preliminary work we decided that the whole plain of salt thing wasn't working. So we changed the whole thrust of the adventure - now the players would be trying to track down a sahuagin raiding party before it reported back to its king. The idea was that the merfolk community was hidden from the more numerous sahuagin, and relied on that to remain in existence. Despite this radical change in the adventure the description in the Gen Con pre-registration book was still fitting (which is exactly why we try not to write ourselves into a box).
The general ideas for the characters were thought up next. Often KORG comes up with a few character ideas then assigns the work of coming up with statistics and backgrounds to individual people. In this case we had a paladin, two priests, a mage, a thief, and a ranger. In every case we needed to come up with changes to the character class due to being underwater. The ranger, for example, had a pair of barracuda as his animal friends, and the mage used large shells as scrolls. Various histories were invented for all of them, and we worked at weaving the overall story into their backgrounds. As always, coming up with names took awhile. It's important to make memorable names that won't be too hard for players to pronounce and remember. Our final choices were: Hydrasil Whaleshadow, Delia Silverfin, Tritheka Sunwater, Pike Tiderunner, Arcadia Stillwater, and Yarben Undertow. As you can see we tried to make the names re-enforce the whole "you're underwater" concept.
Lots of ideas for encounters were tossed around. We found ourselves basically making a linear adventure - while tracking down the sahuagin raiding party the players would encounter X, Y, and Z. This wasn't too bad - it was unlikely the party would feel rail-roaded, since their whole mission was to follow a trail to its end. Still, we were looking for ways to give the players choices so they'd feel like they controlled events. We looked up every underwater creature TSR had ever published information about, and made up some of our own.
The first draft of the encounters was written by a KORG member during a plane ride to Tokyo, Japan. This is one place we made a bit of a mistake - by writing the first draft in a situation where he was completely cut off from other KORG members all the encounters were basically written by the same person. This can lead to an adventure being more predictable than you'd like, as well as making everyone else feel left out of the creation process. Plus things that seem cool at 20,000 feet over the Pacific ocean after being awake for 28 hours don't always make much sense later on.
As is typical for KORG team events, we had a bit of a crisis in figuring out what to do for round two. When designing events we usually have no trouble in coming up with a strong first round, but sometimes it's hard to figure out how to do the final. (In our team events we normally run two rounds, with the best teams from each first round advancing to the final). This was no exception. Finally we hit upon an old standby - the arena! It was decided that the party would catch up to (and kill) the sahuagin raiders at the end of round one, only to be captured by another, much larger sahuagin war party (who would use nets to avoid the old "you'll never take me alive!" problem). Round two would more or less be the sahuagin forcing the merfolk into an underwater arena until they got a chance to escape. We also decided to pull in something you'll occasionally see in multi-round events - the character switch. At the beginning of round two the sahuagin king executes the paladin, forcing that player to take over the role of a different character (and also helping to strike fear into the players themselves). In this case the player of the executed character would receive Dak, a stupid (but incredibly strong) locathah warrior. Dak's fighting ability would prove invaluable in the arena, and he was quite popular (for some reason big, dumb fighters often are - maybe because they're so willing to take a hit for the rest of the team).
Now that we had the whole adventure written out, we could move on to play testing. We gathered up six people willing to spend an afternoon finding out what mistakes we'd made, and ran them through both rounds of the event. As always, play testing found spelling and other errors on the character sheets and handouts, as well as pointing out places where the adventure itself needed cleaning up. Some puzzles were adjusted to be a bit more challenging, and several combats were made tougher (as the play testers breezed through them without any problem). Often when we play test we find out an adventure runs a little longer or shorter than we thought, so we have to add or subtract stuff to better fit the time slot available at Gen Con.
Producing the actual event is always a chore. Basically, you spend hours getting everything looking just right, printing it out, finding some typo, and then printing again (we keep all our events on computer to make this process as easy as possible). We created some handouts to help get players into the mood, describing how things would work differently under water (for example, the Fireball spell and plate mail armor were non-existent). Typically we print out copies for every round we'll be running something, instead of trying to collect stuff at the end of a session to use later. That's more work, but makes things go much smoother at the convention itself. Anything you can do that's more work before the con but less work when you're actually there is a good thing. Never think to yourself "I'll take care of this when I get there". The lack of time and sleep make it very hard to come up with stuff on the fly.
Finally we got to test out our adventure at Gen Con itself. It was pretty well received - we had over one hundred players total, and most seemed to enjoy themselves. A lot of people commented on how cool it was to play in an environment where an armor class less than 5 was very good. For the final round of play 35 out of 36 people who had advanced showed up, which is a tremendous compliment (often people who advance to a final won't show if they've got something else they could do). Part of this was no doubt the team nature of the event (if you've got 5 friends telling you to be there you'll probably go), but this is the best KORG has ever done with getting folks to show up for a final.
The adventure itself was pretty good. Many of the round one encounters were pretty standard "without warning, the monsters attack" variety. In round two we lucked into a bunch of teams that really seemed to like arena battles. Many of the players seriously got into the whole thing, playing up to the imaginary crowd of sahuagin (who booed the merfolk savagely, of course) and visibly reacting when strange beasts they'd glossed over in the Monster Manual were unleashed against them. Dak, the brutal locathah, was MVP for the arena battles since he could inflict terrible damage even when unarmed (for Dak bare claws and an 18/00 Strength were weapons enough). Overall the adventure had plenty of hack and slash, some great role playing opportunities, and even a few puzzles.
To see a more in-depth description of the event, you can go here.