As you might
guess, I took a nice holiday break and let the blog slumber for a few weeks. I
meant to start things up again last week, but I’ve had a hundred things going
on with finishing up the stretch goal projects for Primeval Thule, prepping our Ultimate Scheme Kickstarter, and
beginning the rewrite on my novel Valiant
Dust. The blog seems to be the item that always slides to the bottom of the
list.
Speaking of
the blog, I’m finally getting close to finishing up my tour of old adventures I’ve
worked on. It’s time to pick a new theme. An obvious one would be novels or
game sourcebooks, but I’m a little tired of talking about myself, so I’m
considering a more or less random tour through Games that Rich Likes. Got any suggestions for things you’d like me
to write about? Let me know!
One current
event of note: The world is a less interesting place now that David Bowie has
checked out. I discovered “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders
from Mars” when I was in college and played the hell out of that record. I had
a few other Bowie albums and liked them pretty well, but Ziggy Stardust is
genius, pure and simple. Everyone knows the title track, but I always liked a
couple of the deep cuts like “Starman” and “Moonage Daydream” (both picked up
recently for movie soundtracks, incidentally—I guess other folks like them
too). Anyway, it really caught me off guard. Bowie was great, there was nobody
like him.
#31: Princes
of the Apocalypse
Shortly
after I knocked out my work on the D&D
Starter Set, Chris Perkins of Wizards of the Coast approached me to sound
out Sasquatch Game Studio about WotC’s new “studio” model for producing big
D&D adventures. Taking on a huge Forgotten Realms project wasn’t exactly on
our radar—our plans post-Thule were centering in on my Ultimate Scheme boardgame—but we were intrigued by the idea, and we
recognized that it would put Sasquatch “on the map” for the general gaming audience
with a much bigger and more prominent product than we could pull together on
our own. So, we decided that we were in. Focusing on the Elemental Evil
campaign meant pushing Ultimate Scheme
back, since El Evil (as I came to call it) would require 100 percent of our
manpower and resources for six to nine months. In fact, that’s why we’re just
now getting to an Ultimate Scheme
Kickstarter; if we hadn’t done Elemental Evil, we would have launched the
boardgame last year.
Dave, Steve,
and I met with the D&D team at WotC (primarly Greg Bilsland and Chris
Perkins) to dig into what they had in mind for Princes of the Apocalypse. The first thing that surprised us was
that WotC wanted the Elemental Evil adventure to be set in the Forgotten
Realms. “Really?” I asked. “I mean, really really? Because that’s always been
Greyhawk, and people are going to holler about getting the chocolate in the
peanut butter, aren’t they?” (Possibly a bad metaphor on my part, since
chocolate and peanut butter are awesome together. It’s a reference to an old
Reese’s ad campaign.) But Wizards was very sure about it: They wanted Elemental
Evil in the Realms, and they even had a good idea of where they wanted set: The
North.
Our first
reaction was a bit of skepticism—after all, I know the Realms quite well, and I
can tell you that there is more set down in print about the history of the
North and every flyspeck village along the Long Road than just about any other
corner of Faerûn. But as I looked at the area that Chris and Greg had identified,
I realized that there was indeed an opportunity here where we could develop
something really new and interesting for the Realms, while anchoring it
carefully in the existing continuity. Wizards had also worked out the broad
storyline of the adventure. What we had to do was to translate that story
document into “actionable” plans. For example, Wizards asked us to make sure
each of the four cults had a “surface outpost,” but we used that guidance to
create sites such as Feathergale Spire and the Sacred Stone Monastery.
I wore a lot
of different hats for Princes of the
Apocalypse. First off, I wrote large sections of the adventure, including
Rivergard Keep, Sacred Stone Monastery, the earth and water temples, and the
temple of the Elder Elemental Eye. I was the art director for Sasquatch, which
meant that I created the art orders for the book, contracted illustrators, and
provided feedback to help develop sketches into finals. (Kate Irwin at Wizards
was tremendously helpful in that task.) And finally I was the overall project
manager for Sasquatch, which meant I was trying to ride herd on all the
designers and editors, keep up with WotC’s deadlines, field WotC’s extensive,
extensive, feedback, review everything that was being written, and pull together
the book’s design turnover. I was originally going to write the earth and water
nodes too, but I had to hand them off to talented freelancers Jeff Ludwig and
Steve Townshend—I was just buried by the amount of things I was trying to do.
Let’s just say it was a crazy nine months or so, and I learned some hard
lessons.
While the
process was brutal at times, I’m very pleased by the way the adventure turned
out. As I’ve mentioned more than once in this blog series, I’m a big fan of
sandbox-style play. Princes of the
Apocalypse is the biggest and most ambitious sandbox adventure I’ve ever
pulled together, and there are enough storyline events and investigations
between the adventure sites to allow the players to feel like the adventure is naturally
developing from the choices they make. I have a few regrets about things—for
example, we needed to do a better job at helping the DM identify where NPCs and
clues and story elements appear or recur. As it stands, the DM needs to study
the adventure pretty carefully to get the most out of it. But Princes of Apocalypse rewards that
effort with a great campaign.
Next Time: My Shadows of the Demon-Lord adventure, The Giant’s Tribute.
