Owlbear Hill — Adventure Site Contest 2 Post-Mortem

My reviews of submissions for the Adventure Site Contest 2 are complete, my scores are turned in, and I've spent some time reflecting on what I learned from the experience, both as judge and adventure site designer.

Thanks to the other judges: Ben Gibson, BX Blackrazor, Owen Edwards, and Grützi for their kind and fair words about this adventure, and for all the hard work they put in to conduct their contest reviews. I was honored to be asked to judge, and I hope I brought something helpful to the table. 

Also, congratulations to all the contest entrants. I've said before that it takes a lot of guts to write something and put it out there for other randos to critique. I have respect for every author and encourage everyone to keep writing, as all the entries had good, creative stuff in them.

Yes, my reviews were nit-picky, far more than I am in "real life," and yes, they were long-winded, but I believe it's more important for the author to hear what doesn't work than it is to hear what does. Criticism, not praise, is the entire point of the editorial (judging) process. And to make sure the criticism is sound, you have to dig into the details and tear things apart to get at them. 

I went through each submission with a fine-toothed comb and double-checked the rulebooks (where I could) to form my critical questions. Often, I found the answers; sometimes, I found new questions. I put everything out there in terms of what I noticed, even if it was nit-picky, off-base, or purely personal opinion. Everyone's tastes are different and I'm just some guy on the internet, so the stakes of my criticism are low. My only goal was to give an honest and thorough evaluation of each site, from the perspective of a DM preparing to run it in a few hours.

The most valuable lessons about professional writing I ever learned were from the experienced editors who were hardest on my work. Their lessons stay with you, help you recognize the same mistakes next time before you make them. I certainly carry them over into my own editorial duties, contest or otherwise, and I hope all the authors take my reviews in that spirit. 

In the spirit of accountability, on the other hand, I thought it would be fun to apply some of the same critical standards I used for the contest submissions to my own work. I won't be scoring the categories numerically, of course, because I already think my adventure is GREAT! 5 out of 5!! 

Kidding, of course. There are actually lots of flaws and things that bothered me about my entry, regrets big and small, and could-have-beens that I forced myself to live with to meet the contest guidelines. Instead of giving it a score, I'll discuss my personal satisfaction with the results. I'm also including some design notes and elaborating on the original writeup. Stuff that might help someone trying to run it better understand my intentions. 

Since the methods I use for judging are subjective, I'm going to apply some of the questions/criticisms from other judges to test my creative premises. This is for no other reason than to have something to bounce off as a discussion point, because it represents something in my writeup that probably needs clarification. I accept their critique as 100% valid and agree with most of it—and much of it was positive—but where I can provide an explanation for my creative choices, I will.

 Onward!

Adventure Site Contest II – Deadline for Submissions is One Month Away

With a month left to go, I turned in my submission for Coldlight Press' second annual Adventure Site Contest. I've titled it Owlbear Hill and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, thematically.

I've estimated it as appropriate for a party of 4–7 characters from 5th to 7th level. I was hoping to get it playtested before turning it in, but corralling a group of family men in their 40s to 60s is challenging in the best of times, much less over the winter holidays. I ran some solo fights using pre-gens and they were sufficiently tough without being easy TPKs. Much will depend on the characters' levels and capabilities (though that is always the case). 

If I've designed it accurately, a party of all 5th level PCs is going to have a hard time, while a party of all 7th levels is likely to come out on top without serious risk unless someone screws up. There's almost 95,000 xp in monsters and treasure (and much more if the players sell the magic items). For a party of five adventurers, that's about 19,000 xp each—enough to take a 5th level fighter to 6th, or a little more than halfway from 6th to 7th. Getting all of it is another story, but even if they only collect one-third, it's still 6-7k; not a bad haul.

Like Etta Capp's Cottage—my submission for last year's contest—this one started out as a simple adaptation of a previously-created monster lair. I have a folder filled with dozens of these things I've written over the years. In this case, it was an owlbear lair I first built for my Cold March campaign (my campaign world's "Viking region"). The original was designed between game sessions as an adventure site for 5e, after the party encountered some owlbears during one of their overland journeys and decided to track them back to their den. I later repurposed the site as a "lurid lair" in my 5e Gloomy Forest campaign (from which Etta Capp's Cottage also emerged).

The lair was a bit rough around the edges because I only had a short time to put it together, but I liked some of what I came up with, particularly the idea of using owlbear feathers as "treasure" and the hidden tomb with a doomed party of adventurers who died while trying to plunder it. As I began to convert it to AD&D, however, it seemed too "basic" for a contest in which some really talented designers are participating. It lacked punch and wow... fine for a quick session with my regular players, but unsatisfying for a global audience of discerning DMs.

I'd already decided to expand on the lair, but tacking on a whole tomb seemed the obvious and boring route. I wanted something different. While reading the owlbear's description in the Monster Manual, I took note of the opening sentence: "The horrible owlbear is probably the result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard."

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this idea, but suddenly I had my adventure site's elevator-pitch: This will be the lair/laboratory of a crazed magic-user who is producing an army of owlbears to unleash on the nearby town. As I continued flipping through the MM, however, I noticed how many other creatures are either known or said to have been created by some variation of "insane wizard's experimentation." This continued into the Fiend Folio, with lots of other ideas from the Monster Manual 2 as well. The adventure site spun out from there.

One of the fun things about contests like this are the submission guidelines establishing a hard page count and reader usability standards. They force you to boil everything down to its essence, trim off the fat, and parse your copy down to fit as much evocative content as possible within the limited space and layout restrictions. Some people keep it light and simple, with plenty of white space in the manuscript...all perfectly fine and admirable. I'm kind of the opposite...I try to include as much copy as I possibly can, clawing for every scrap of page space within the limits.

And though I'm obsessive about my own map-making, there is no creative pressure to create a work of art. The charm of a hand-drawn map takes me back to the early 80s when buying a pad of blank graph paper released a flood of imagination and adventure. Making maps was what really hooked me on D&D, and I figure out so much about the dungeon and what's going on within it by simply sketching, drawing, then fine-tuning the map. For me, it's as much a part of the content creation process as the writing of it.

On the flip side of the creation process, it can be frustrating to have to slice off chunks you really like due to the space constraints. In the original version of Etta Capp's Cottage, for example, there's an underlying story concerning her origin, the identities of the bodies in her lair, and the existence of a mysterious suitor who sends her gifts. Losing all of that was tough, but the condensed version still keeps much of the mystery while being vague enough (by necessity) that any DM can now put their own stamp on it.

With Owlbear Hill, I had a whole "slime lab" section in which the insane magic-user was crossbreeding various oozes and jellies with a gelatinous cube "starter," pumping out miniature transparent cubes with different slime effects, but I had to lose it. A couple pieces of the slime lab remain in the final version, and I'll repurpose the rest for something else. (Maybe do a sequel for ASC III??)

Once the reviews and voting are done (probably sometime in February/March), I'll publish the full details of the adventure site in a future post, whether it gets chosen for the final publication or not. As a preview, here's the introduction and site map.

"There’s a spot back in the woods they call Ol’ Bare Hill. Used to be a Chaos temple on top way back when, but then the Law came and knocked it down. We don’t go there…ever. These troubles that are going on…it’s that hill, I’m telling you."

I'm also a judge in this year's contest, though I'm a little nervous about my review/critique skills. Still, I've read, written, and run hundreds of adventures over the years, so I have some experience to bring to the table. Looking forward to the challenge.

EDIT: I participated in an episode about the contest over on the Classic Adventure Gaming podcast.