Saturday, May 8, 2010

One Goal Attained! A Tower of the Stargazer question for you!

The Tower of the Stargazer draft is completed and sent to the editors. 12000 words, in the three days I had allotted. I feel like I've just done some actual work.

A general question for you... I've put some "designer notes/tutorial/extra explanation" text in the adventure to basically be an aid to new Referees in putting adventures together and help in deciphering published adventures in general.

Basically, I want this to be the go-to module that people suggest when someone asks "What is a good adventure for a first time Referee to run?"

And I also want the adventure to be robust enough that experienced Referees find it interesting enough to want to run.

Ambitious to be sure, but it's small potatoes compared to the greater goals of the box set.

I was thinking that including copies of the original hand-drawn map and copies of the index cards I originally used to run the adventure might be a cool idea, to demonstrate how adventures made for one's own use differ from those written to be run by other people.

It'll increase the size of the module by 25% (16 to 20 pages) so it'll increase the cost a bit (not 25% though).

Do you think this is a worthwhile and useful idea for a tutorial adventure?

10 comments:

  1. Perhaps have these things as free downloads on your website? They sound like they fall into the 'cool, but not essential, and therefor optional' category.

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  2. Useful, yes. There's been talk on the Fight On! boards of publishing adventure notes, rather than finished scenarios, the idea being that it might be easier for a reader to see how the scenario works if they can see a more "pure" form of the information.

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  3. I rather thank that it would be a nice touch. There are various publications that tell you how to write a scenario, but to see the process in action is another matter.

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  4. Could I suggest that notes on what decisions you made as you revised the map/adventure might be more useful than just the original documents.

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  5. I'd say that while that might be interesting, the idea of showing your creative process is too large for a work of this scope to throw it in as an afterthought. Better to put that material up as a web bonus - just write a long blog post about your creative process in developing the adventure and add the scans of your notes to that. This way the finished adventure as an artifact is focused and the description of the creative process gets its due as well, instead of both having to be compromised for the sake of the other.

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  6. Columns, man, graphic design with columns--that's the wave of the future

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  7. I'd love to see those, in some shape or form. Any insight into the creative process for building a working game is interesting, newcomer or old guy. At least that's my perspective.

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  8. Not worth it, ditto.
    This idea of harkoning back to the basic game books, with their walk-through adventure, the one with the yellow mold crusted on worthless goblets... cool, but for 1977, so if anything free download.

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