NAP III: Temple of the Beggar-King
It's almost here!
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, the Beggar-King. 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, have been lost to time ever since.
Temple of the Beggar-King is an exploration of the strange, often involving a dark interpretation of Buddhist themes and ideas. This adventure involves both elements of horror and violence, as well as high weirdness. It’s aim is to both horrify the players and leave them curious, to draw them deeper and deeper into it’s ensnaring mystery.
So, about a year ago I entered the No-Artpunk contest with my adventure Temple of the Beggar-King. Overall it garnered a favourable response:
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.
One favourable enough that I decided to self-publish it as a more complete project. In the spirit of NAP I decided that I would publish it pay-what-you-want for the pdf and pretty much at cost for the printed version.
Well, it’s been a long road but the time of final release draws near!
I probably would have published it a bit sooner, but various life things got in the way a bit and took up time (as I imagine is common for most in the OSR scene). Regardless, I now hold a printing proof and it all looks good! It may not seem like a lot but I’m proud of how it turned out.
There are things that I’d still like to improve, but for my first time doing something like this, and for a project with a near 0 dollar budget, I think I’ve managed to turn out something that is at least workmanlike in it’s quality.
It has been a long road with a lot of lessons but I’d like to share the following:
This shit takes longer than you think it will. Having a full time day job and life tends to make everything a little bit slower.
The Affinity suite is pretty much all you need in order to do layout and prepare your work for publication. It’s all I used. It also goes on sale every once and a while so wait until a sale.
It’s a process that will involve many different skills. Some more fun than others. I enjoy writing. I don’t mind layout. I can’t do art. Writing refreshes me, I can work an 8 hour stressful work day, clock out, and write in the evening for an hour or two and go to bed feeling refreshed. If you’re going to attempt a creative project, you really need for parts of it at least, to be something that refreshes you. Otherwise you’ll burn out. In this vein, while I would say I’m okay at layout, it’s not something I find refreshing. It feels like work to me and clocking out after a 8 hour work day to do another 2 hours of layout makes for a long day.
I don’t really have any advice for this beyond either you have to pay someone else to do the parts that feel more like work to you, or just kind of be disciplined enough to get through them.
The key to any good creative project is being detail orientated. Choosing one word over another, cutting one line over another, tweaking colours, spacing; the more attention you pay to details and twiddling about the better the end result will be. Little things can matter immensely and it should all be an iterative process, each draft or tweak refining what’s there.
At the same time, at some point, you have to let it go. Rarely is anyone’s first work a complete masterwork and often if it appears to be, it’s probably their first released work, not the first thing they’ve ever done. Would I do things differently if I had to do this project all over again? Certainly. But there is always next time.
If you’re going to spend any money on art, spend it on a good cover. People are visual creatures. A good standout cover goes pretty far for getting eyes on your project.
Anyways, I’m going to leave this post a bit short. Just got to get a last few things in order but very soon it’ll be available on drivethroughrpg for the low low cost of free!!!!