Welcome back! My apologies for the interrupted blog posts;
the last three weeks have been very busy for me. First my partners and I at
Sasquatch Game Studio launched our Primeval Thule 5e Kickstarter, then I headed
out for a family vacation at Glacier National Park, then I came home just in
time to head out to GenCon. Time for blogging has been in short supply lately!
I’ll talk a bit about Glacier and GenCon in future posts,
but this week I wanted to revisit our 5e Thule Kickstarter campaign and provide
a bit of an update. We are over 200 percent funded, topping $30k with just
about two weeks to go! Naturally, we’re using that support to make Primeval
Thule 5e the biggest and best product we can. Right now someone who pledges in
at a level that includes digital rewards will receive not only the Primeval
Thule Campaign Setting book, but also PDF adventures by Rob Schwalb and Steve
Winter, along with a Thule 5e Gamemaster’s Companion that will include new
Thulean monsters and additional adventure sites and hooks. And, if the campaign
continues to go well, we’ll soon be adding a Player’s Companion to provide
additional spells, narratives, and other character-creation info for Thulean
PCs. If you’re looking for great new 5e content, this is a good place to start.
Here’s the link:
OK, on to my next adventure retrospective!
#24: Dark Legacy of Evard
In late 2010 I was assigned to work on D&D Encounters
Season 5. The Encounters program was a sort of “outreach” content plan designed
to provide D&D players with a weekly D&D game at their friendly local
gaming store. Basically, you show up and play for an hour or two one night a
week, and over the course of three or four months, you’ll play through the
adventure currently being shared by all other people participating in the
current Encounters season. It was a very successful program for Wizards of the
Coast and brought many thousands of gamers out every week. My job as the
designer assigned to the next Encounters season was to create a fun, episodic
adventure that would keep ‘em coming back for another 13 sessions.
While I came up with the storyline, some of the big elements
had already been settled on before I began work on the adventure. So, I was
given the marching orders to create an Encounters season that was more of a
ghost story than a dungeon crawl, something that revolved on the story of
Evard. Evard, like Mordenkainen or Otto or Bigby, was a name that had been
around in D&D since 1st Edition. However, while those other mages had
actually been characters played by real people participating in the earliest
D&D campaigns, Evard was mostly just a name associated with a spooky spell
or two. Toward the end of 3rd Edition, the character had emerged a bit more in
the lore that was developed around the school of shadow magic, and Evard
finally showed up as something more than just a name—the creator of the school
of shadow magic, a dark, sardonic personality who dabbled with sinister magic
and mocked those who disapproved of his studies.
Thinking about the idea of spooky magic, a dark wizard, and
an adventure intended to showcase overtones of horror in D&D, I hit upon a
simple question: Who’s buried in Evard’s
Tomb? (Yeah, it’s a version of the old New York joke about Grant’s Tomb.)
And when I realized the answer was not the obvious one, the story of Evard’s
old rival Vontarin, the town of Duponde, the reckless young mage Nathaire, and
Evard’s terrible curse all fell into place. I borrowed a bit here and there
from Clark Ashton Smith’s excellent fantasy horror stories about the haunted
province of Averoigne to polish up the “feel” of the setting and story. (In
fact, the name Nathaire is from one of the characters in “The Colossus of
Ylourgne.”)
The Encounters format was very tough to work in, because you
couldn’t assume that the DM running your adventure would have the same players
at his table every week. Likewise, you couldn’t allow for the adventure to be
tackled out of order—people would be talking about their experiences in Week X,
so if some table played out X+3 on that week, they could spoil the story for
other tables. That was tough for me, since my design taste runs a lot more
toward sandbox-style adventures where people can engage whatever story thread
they find and follow it as long as they want. For Dark Legacy of Evard, I had to embrace a much more rigid storyline—I
couldn’t let the players make a decision in Week 3 that would make the Week
5-6-7 content irrelevant. So, I decided to make it the most flavorful and
suspenseful linear narrative I could manage. If you can’t give players the
chance to make a lot of big choices, you can make sure you deliver a riveting
story instead.
Going by what I saw of people writing up their Encounters
season responses, my approach seemed to work well enough. Dark Legacy of Evard was well received, and people seemed to really
groove on the spooky setting and the old story of Evard and Vontarin. Based on
the number of people participating in the Encounters program, Dark Legacy was probably the most
widely-played of my adventures since Forge
of Fury. You can still find it on DriveThruRPG.com if you’re curious (it’s
for 4th Edition D&D).
Next Week:
Thornkeep, my first non-WotC adventure!
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