I’m going to pull back the curtain a bit. I’ve been following the OSR scene for probably 8 years or so. First on google+ and blogs, now mostly on reddit and a few blogs that I check everyday. My previous blog was The Luminescent Lich. I switched to substack because the google blogger interface was kind of janky and I like it’s format more. I kind of enjoy getting an email every time someone who I follow makes a post.
Overall I’m not super active in the community, I don’t have twitter, I’m not a member of any discords, I just have this blog. I kind of prefer things this way. I try to just eliminate as many distractions in my life as I can and just focus on actually writing.
Anyways, over the summer and fall I wrote an adventure. I wrote it for Prince of Nothings No-Art Punk III contest. A (so far) yearly contest he holds to encourage and discover traditionally designed (hence the name No-Art Punk) Dungeons and Dragons adventure.
I like to write, like a lot. I have tons of gaming ideas and material that I’ve been meaning to get around to actually putting into a publishable form. I have been unable to do so for the past couple years because various events in my life have left me with little time to really put something together in a publishable form. Thankfully I’m in a place now where my life is a bit more stable and I have more time to work on the various projects I have in various degrees of completion.
However, before I did this I thought, hey! I should probably try to write an adventure. You know, like a 30 page basic dungeon crawl adventure. As if I can’t do that I might as well commit seppuku right now!
As I strongly believe that at the end of the day D&D is a game. If you can’t be at least somewhat competent at the game elements of it it doesn’t really matter how good your writing is. No one will actually play it.
So I decided to enter the contest. I spent most of the summer writing an adventure. But then my basement ended up flooding in a storm and I was unable to playtest it cause dealing with that was not fun. But I decided to just finish it up as best I could and submit it anyways.
And so I did.
It is called Temple of the Beggar-King. The basic back of the book blurb is:
One-thousand years ago the Royal Guard of Leon III, the King of Kings, set out into the desert to find and destroy the stronghold of the mad prophet of the eastern wastes once and for all.
For forty years before, upon the desert winds, on the edge of the empire, the Beggar-King had wandered into the city of Jul wearing nothing but a dyed turmeric robe with naught but a simple copper bowl to beg for alms. The Beggar-King he was mocked as, for every night from the gutter he would preach his wisdom with alluring voice. Tales he told of the stillness of the desert; of how the mind could encompass the fullness of suffering; of how peace could be found only in the emptiness of sand. Led by the inward eye that could pierce through the midnight veil, he spoke softly of discordant things.
Soon his cult penetrated even the most elite. A murmur grew into a clamor and so the Beggar-King led a congregation of followers into the rocky hills of the Eastern Wastes to hide away, but to no avail. After a slew of suicides among the highest in the kingdom, into the desert the royal guard, the hand of Leon, marched. It is not known what they encountered, just that they, and the Temple of the Beggar-King, has been lost to time.
To my delight it seems to have done well and even sparked some discussion in the comments.
Pullitzer-prose, unconventional encounters and a hair-fine sense for dramatic foreshadowing are the watchwords of Temple of the Beggar King
In fact if this adventure does something well it is convey its nature through interaction. Exploration in the truest sense.
However, it wasn’t without it’s criticisms.
Speaking of lethality, if level 1 is comparatively forgiving (excluding the 36 ghast ambush) and reluctant even to use lethal poison (neutralize poison is certainly available to level 9 characters), I suspect level 2 might go a bit overboard.
Treasure is well described, ornate, thematically appropriate, and the distribution is a little fucked.
If you can get the fundamentals a bit tighter you shall have glory indeed.
Most of which I can see are entirely valid. And some of which, in the comments section, genuinely make me laugh out loud.
That Koan Riddle makes me want to punch someone in the mouth.
Of all the things in it (and there are some dark things) I didn’t think it would be the Koan riddle doors that would evoke such strongly held opinions.
Anyways, it all gave me a lot to think about. While I have been running D&D for years high level play is something I’m fairly unfamiliar with and the theme of NAP III was to write a high level adventure. I also haven’t playtested the adventure yet so I’m not entirely unsurprised of the criticisms.
It’s been a bit of an exhausting venture, it takes waaaaay longer to write an adventure than you think. Especially a high level one where system mastery and adventure design really come to the forefront.
But overall I feel like I have learned a lot and feel a bit more invigorated to take the criticism, tighten up and fine tune things, and actually properly playtest it. Writing an adventure is a very unique creative experience in the sense that it requires a lot of diverse skills and ‘modes’ of thought. The type of thinking and editing you’re doing while writing of descriptions or things is different from the analytical thought and examination you have to do when you put on your designers hat.
To this end I’m going work on a revised version of it and release it, probably in a few months time, after NAP III concludes. In the spirit of NAP I’m going to release any version as pay what you want. I truly believe that NAP is a pretty awesome contest and to see the community get together and actually get shit written is fun.
I think I’m also going to blog about this process as I find while there is a lot of advice to be found on how to write a good adventure (don’t make things too long, add interactivity, be evocative) there’s not a ton on the process of design. That is, to me, the process that kind of takes place after the main writing is done, kind of like how a movie is tightened up and edited together after the raw footage is complete. Hope to have some of you along for the ride!