The Quest Brothers

resources for proactive role playing

Free DnD 5e Encounters for Dungeon Masters

We’re the Quest Brothers, and we believe in high-quality encounter design that puts the adventuring party in charge of driving the fun of the game. We post free DnD 5e encounters every week for Dungeon Masters and adventuring parties of all experience levels. We use a framework called proactive role playing to inform every step of our design.

5e Encounter Design with Proactive Role Playing

For years, we ran hundreds of D&D games that followed the same pattern: read, adapt, or write an adventure for our players, then bring it to them to entertain them. That’s a pattern that leads to burnout and uninspired play. If your players always react to the situations you provide, you’re responsible for all the fun.

That all changed when we compared notes about each other’s games and realized that part of what makes a TTRPG feel exciting is acting on the world and seeing it respond to your actions. Over the next year and a half, we developed a framework that guides Game Masters through running games proactively instead of reactively and encourages high player investment.

This framework has transformed the way we run the game and reinvigorated our love for it.

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If you sign up for our free weekly newsletter, you’ll be notified when a new encounter releases. You’ll also receive additional details and resources for running that encounter, directly in your inbox.

Start With One of Our Favorite Encounters

The Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying – Coming October 2023!

We’re proud to announce that our book is coming later this year! As the newest entry in the popular Game Master’s series from Media Lab Books, it focuses on usable advice and memorable encounters. If you like the character-driven encounters and ideas on this site, you’ll enjoy the book.

It should hit shelves in October 2023, but you can read more about it and pick up a pre-order below!

Did you find what you’re looking for?

If you didn’t find something that will fit your game on the front page, check out the archive. You can sort encounters by level and relevant tags, so it should be easy to find something that suits your needs.

Most Recent Encounter

An image of the sky with dnd aerial encounters.

Aerial Emergency

This week, we'll learn how to run DnD aerial encounters. Up amongst the clouds, chaos reigns as a group of griffon-riding invaders try to conquer the mighty flying city of the cloud giants.