Coldlight Press has put the Adventure Site Contest III compilation up on Drive-Thru RPG, featuring the top-rated 8 submissions (out of 30 total). My submission, Ophidian Temple, is one of them. The price is FREE, so check it out if you want some good creative sites to drop in your campaign for your players to visit.
Also, my adventure, Aethelberd's Tomb, received a "No Regerts" ranking on tenfootpole.org. Woot!
My upcoming adventure was formerly known by its casual campaign name, The Haunted Chapel. I didn't really need to call it anything else, as I knew what the name referred to. I wanted a more interesting title for publication, however, so I renamed it after the holy relic enshrined inside the temple: The Heart of St. Althus.
I considered several ideas for the cover. One was an image of the chapel ruins, to give players a visual reference of the site, similar to what I did for the cover of Bergummo's Tower. Another idea was an action scene of some of the monsters encountered in the undercroft, like the Aethelberd's Tomb cover.
I ultimately went with an image of the relic as it seemed like an easier (and quicker) thing to illustrate, so I drew a quick sketch:
After scanning the sketch and drawing some blue lines for perspective, I converted the sketch into the basic shapes of the illustration. I still have lots of details to incorporate, and then need to color the whole thing, but its taking shape nicely, I think.
The manuscript and maps for my next published adventure are complete, and I'm in the process of drawing the cover illustration. I don't quite know if I'll make my self-imposed, end-of-April deadline, but I'm happy with where I am. I'm confident I'll have it up on Drive-thru in the next two weeks.
In the meantime, I needed a creative palate cleanser, so I resumed work on my Below Gwarnath megadungeon map. I'm drawing this using the random dungeon generation tables in OSRIC, and I'm developing some custom stocking tables to incorporate specific monsters and magic items (and tech items from Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha), plus a ton of homebrew material from old, unused campaign ideas. I still haven't decided if I'm unleashing this on my tabletop group or my Roll20 guys.
As I said in my introductory post, I started this map to give me a little test-bed dungeon to show one of my 5e guys what AD&D/OSRIC is like. We have yet to play that session, but I enjoyed the dungeon generation process so much that I kept going. Before long, I had four interconnected maps, each on a 24x24 grid, with branches leading off-map in all directions. I placed those four maps at the center of a larger canvas of sixteen, 24x24 grid "zones" (the whole image is 24" x 24", or 7200 x 7200 px). The following maps are all lo-res, as I had to shrink them quite a bit to upload to the blog, but I'll post a link to the full-size map at the bottom.
I've posted this version previously but want to show the progression, so this is the map I had after the initial burst of generation. The original zone I drew for the playtest was F, followed by G, J, and K (I'd already strayed into zones A and B by this point, as well).
My intention for the next bit of mapping was to finish filling out zones A and B, then move methodically to C, D, E, etc. But the randomness of the dice carried me down into zones E and I, before bringing me back up to A. This is roughly 2 or 3 sessions of casual mapping from the tables (a few hours' work, tops) at the beginning of April..
The only zone I've actually stocked and keyed so far is the original one, zone F, that I did for the OSRIC playtest. It was also rolled out using purely the OSRIC tables, but it wasn't written with the full blown concept I've since designed for this future campaign in mind. It's more similar to the approach I took with the Hurricane Dungeon, which was to populate the level with little, independent vignettes connected only by the shared environment. There's no big theme running, here, just day-to-day survival for the dungeon inhabitants. I may revisit the key once I get my stocking tables where I want them, but this is my interpretation of the results as rolled from the OSRIC tables.
Ben Gibson over at Coldlight Press announced the winners of this year's Adventure Site Contest, and while my submission, Ophidian Temple, wasn't the top-prize winner, it did make it into the winners' bracket for inclusion in the anthology publication of the same name (due out sometime later this year).
The winner of this year's contest is John Nash, who entered a cat-themed adventure, the Temple of Bast for BECMI/RC. He wrote one of my favorite adventures for last year's contest, Sausages of the Devil Swine, which made it into my top 5 picks during judges' scoring. John's a highly creative author, so I look forward to reading his submission.
While I'm obviously disappointed I didn't nab the top nod, I'm pretty proud of this one. It's deadly and has a fairly brutal time clock running that ramps the finale up to '11' if the party dicks around too long. Here's a link to download the adventure for yourself. Ben ran the temple recently for his table and said they had a fun time with it. Let me know how it runs for you.
I'm currently working on a couple of projects. I'm in the final review/fine-tuning phase of my next adventure for publication. It's an adventure I wrote probably 20 years ago. It was before I returned to D&D with the 5e playtest because the original manuscript was designed for my homebrew ruleset (built upon Bard Games' super-fun Arcanum series).
The adventure is set in the burnt-out ruins of a holy chapel in which the past fire hid a terrible secret about the goings-on there. The location was in my long-running King's Realm campaign, which was a Northern European/Arthurian setting, so the site's layout is very much based on a Christian chapel. This campaign wasn't explicitly "real-world" so the religion wasn't a Christian one, but it was monotheistic and similar to the CoE's organization, the king asserted Divine Right, etc. The "modern" religion of the Realm was also predated by a pagan religion that worshiped nature (and regarded the fey and elvenkind as holy). I poured two decades of creative energy into this world, so it had a lot of flavor and internal logic.
That was the first difficulty of converting this adventure into a publishable form. The events surrounding the chapel adventure were part of an ongoing thread that made total sense in the context of the whole campaign, but was meaningless padding without the context. I want my published adventures to be as modular as possible to give the DM maximum flexibility in inserting it into their campaign, so I had to strip out a lot of the adventure's background material and boil the "story" down to its core elements (the latter part wasn't actually that difficult). With the details toned down, I think many of the semi-Christian analogues to the adventure's flavor can be adapted easily to the DM's world.
In adapting the adventure to OSRIC, I've had to convert some of the mechanical elements to fit the system, but also expanded the material slightly. It's now a tight little adventure site with a pretty simple "plot" and a tidy resolution. It's a perfect side-quest or "on-the-road" adventure for cleric and paladins, but I did have to create some new hooks to make it palatable for more mercenary-type parties.
The manuscript is done but being edited, I'm finishing the fine details of the updated maps, and I still need to do a cover illustration, but my goal is to have the adventure done and published by the end of April. It's currently titled "The Haunted Chapel" which was all I needed for my own campaign purposes, but I'm thinking it might need a more evocative title to draw some attention. Then again, the simplicity lends itself to the modular design and I don't want to step on the DM's ability to adapt the adventure. It is after all, in fact, a haunted chapel.
My second project is partly for fun, partly for a future potential campaign. I discussed a bit of inspiration in a previous post, surrounding an idea to consolidate lots of my old kilo- and mega-dungeon material into a single creative concept. I'm calling it "Below Gwarnath" and its shaping up to be fun project.
Initially intended as an OSRIC demo for one of my legacy 5e players, I used the random dungeon generation tables in OSRIC to develop a sample dungeon map for my friend to bang around in and test drive the system. I first drew the map in Roll20 and was surprisingly pleased with the results so I then converted it into my house style in Photoshop (and added a few routes off the map, with the intention of expanding it). And expand it I have.
My latest adventure is now live on DriveThru RPG. This started out as an adventure for my first 5e campaign, but the players failed to bite down on the hook. They rescued the goodwife being held captive by the brigands, but noped out when she told them about the "whispers from down in the well." (Cowards.)
I ended up using the dungeon in another 5e campaign, but re-imagined for a Viking-themed setting. Several of the same players were in this party, and this time they bit. It played pretty well and they recovered the magic hammer, Angbolt, but never encountered the otyugh.
This is my second adventure for publication, and I have several more in development. It's gratifying to put my work out there, and hopefully others will enjoy running (and playing) it.
I've completed the illustration for the cover of my next adventure. I'm happy with it, though I could keep tweaking it forever. Better to call it "done" and move on to the next project. I'm giving the adventure a final review and edit, and hope to launch it on DriveThru this weekend.
