Basic But Vital Tips
by Terror's Martyr

Obviously, scenarios can differ in many ways, but all good scenarios
essentially have some things in common that every designer should pay
attention to:

1. Limit your outdoors. 

Place yourself in the shoes of a player.  You open a scenario called "Quest
for the Sword", or something.  The opening town is decent.  Then, when you
emerge into the outdoors, you're swamped by a massive, empty world with
only one town in each outdoors section.  Not a good idea.  When you're
making a scenario, lots of outdoors may SEEM like a good idea, but it
rarely is.  A scenario can take place in less than 10 outdoors sections, no
matter how large the scenario is.  Not only will you not be able to provide
+20 interesting outdoors sections to provide, but it will be a burden on
both yourself and anyone playing your scenario to wade through that many. 
Slice your outdoors down a bit, it pays off in the end.  And also, as a
rule of thumb- an outdoor section should have at least one town in it,
preferably more. 

2. Limit your combat. 

Immediately after finding the dungeon in "Quest for the Sword", and quite
annoyed after traversing simultaneous outdoor sections for fifteen minutes,
you (the player) stumble upon a dungeon.  Inside that dungeon, there are
many rooms.  These rooms exist, of course, to hold lots and lots of
monsters.  Not interesting monsters either, just lots of them in tedious
fight followed by tedios fight.  As a designer, this may SEEM like a good
idea, but it's not.  Players will want to fight a limited number of
monsters in any one dungeon.  Either make the monsters they fight
interesting, or don't place many of them at all.

3. Plan Ahead: Endings are a GOOD thing!

Blades was made so that you could dream up your own adventures, and there's
nothing wrong with doing so. What you need to do before you begin a
scenario, however, is make sure that your scenario has a clearly defined
STARTING and ENDING point. If you don't know how or where your scenario
will end, you will most likely end up creating a large, fluid puddle of a
plot rather than a unified storyline. As a designer, this may SEEM like a
good idea, but it really isn't. A shorter scenario loses focus of its
objective if it swamps itself down with too many menial sidequests, whereas
a larger scenario can have a few sidequests, but requires more focus and
planning to be successfully executed without deviating from the plot laid
out for it. Sidequests and other types of missions are not the end of the
world. They should be, however, either little in number or related to the
plot. You don't need to draw every town or dungeon before you make it, but
always keep in mind how that dungeon or town will advance the plot.
Scenario design is tricky, but if you approach it with a modicum of sanity,
then it becomes much easier.

Note from Jeff Vogel:

Ignore this advice at your peril.