Need an adventure in a hurry?

Pssst.... over here. I gots an adventure you can run and I'll let you have it for cheap, real cheap. Ok, for you it's free. And best of all, I know where you can get hundreds more just like it and they're all free for the taking. What I am talking about? I'm talking about looting the dungeons of computer rpgs for use in your home game

Lately, I've been playing The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and like most popular computer games there exists a lot of online websites and walk-thrus for it. While these websites are great aids for the computer games they were created for, they are also fantastic sources of adventures, names, plots, and maps for your D&D game.

Need proof of their usefulness? Here's an example from The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages Wiki. The adventure is The Desolate Mine which most players of Oblivion are very familiar with.

First off, you can snag the plot outline which you can use as a prod to own imagination and use that to build on or just steal it whole. Just snip out the parts that don't make sense in D&D terms or that you don't like. I clipped this out for my plot outline:

Burz gro-Khash asks you to deliver a weapons shipment to some Fighters Guild members in the Desolate Mine to the northwest. When you get close to the mine you may be attacked by goblins - a sign of things to come. Inside the mine speak to Rienna, who will reveal that the mine has been infested by goblins. She instructs you to give the weapons to the two other fighters (Elidor and Brag gro-Bharg) standing by the fire.

Once you've distributed the weapons, it's goblin hunting time! Follow the three fighters into the mine and hack at any goblins you encounter. All three fighters subscribe to the unpopular school of "rush head first into battle without a strategic plan", which may well end up getting some or all of them killed. Keep up and help them as best you can. They also tend to split up after a point, so it's impossible to follow all of them. It's recommended to stick with Rienna, as she's armed with only a bow, and thus more likely to get swarmed than the two melee-guys.

Once all the goblins are dead, return to Burz gro-Khash for your reward. Your reward is dependent upon how many of the other three fighters survived.

Now you just need a map and some stats for the goblins. The map comes from the same site and the stats for the goblins can easily come from the D20 SRD.

Now all you have to do is do the stats for the boss goblin and the traps shown and you have an adventure that would probably fill a night's gaming needs for a low level party and required very minimal time or work on your part. And the cool thing is that there's hundreds of adventures like this just for the Oblivion game alone much less the thousands that must exist for all the other computer games out there.