Twenty-Eight Adventures Part 14: Cormyr, Shadowdale

My apologies for falling a day behind; this week has been busy and I just didn’t stay on my schedule. It’s also been unseasonably hot for June in Washington State. Normally we don’t push 90 around my house until mid or late July, and June can often be a cool and rainy month. Not this year, it seems! I wouldn’t mind so much—after all, an arid 90 is way, way more comfortable than a humid 90—except for the fact that we have no AC. We can often manage okay with strategic use of fans, but there is no denying that the house is hot.

Continuing on with my series of reflections about RPG adventures I’ve worked on, we move on to my last two 3rd Edition adventures: Cormyr and Shadowdale.

#18: Cormyr, The Tearing of the Weave

In the spring of 2006, I drew the assignment of joining a collaboration of in-house designers to knock out the start of an epic adventure trilogy set in the Forgotten Realms. My co-designers were Bruce Cordell, Dave Noonan, Matt Sernett, and James Wyatt. I was unenthusiastic about the prospect, not because I didn’t like those guys, but simply because we were all up to our elbows in working on the 4th Edition system and the 4th Edition version of the Forgotten Realms. Cormyr, Shadowdale, and Anauroch occupied the unfortunate position of being adventures for a system we were finished with, set in a world we were about to drastically re-envision. Worse yet, the audience knew that 4e was coming, so sales of tail-end 3e material were already dropping off. It seemed to me that the three big adventures just weren’t going to be worth the trouble.

Another tricky part of the triple-project was that the adventures were intended to work alongside a major storyline being developed in the Forgotten Realms novels. Early on in the 3e era, I was the team leader for Forgotten Realms RPG products, so I worked closely with the Book department on broad FR themes. But by 2006, I was no longer heading up a Realms team and wasn’t in the driver’s seat for the last half-dozen or so Realms products in 3e. The addition of big, hardbound adventure modules to my schedule caught me by surprise.

Finally, one more new requirement was handed down for the project: The adventures would all make use of the “Tactical Encounter” format, which Dave Noonan came up with a few months prior as an exercise in looking for new and better ways to present material for the DM. While I liked the Tactical Encounter format for certain purposes, I found it difficult to wrap a lot of narrative or description around the structure. We wound up using a sort of semi-tactical encounter presentation in Cormyr that presented the formatted encounters at the end of each chapter, and did not rigorously obey the requirement. (It was one of the few times that Bill Slavicsek, my boss at WotC, was seriously sore at me. Or one of the few times that he let me know that he was, at any rate.)

My part of Cormyr was Chapter 4: The Path of Shadows. I tried to have some fun with an extended journey in the Plane of Shadow and present plenty of mood along with the adventure. The thing I remember about this adventure was the evil boat I came up with for the journey through the swamp: the Necreme. That was kind of cool.

#19: Shadowdale, The Scouring of the Land

The second adventure in the trilogy based around Shar’s attempt to use the Shadow Weave to supplant Mystra, Shadowdale presents a very different type of story in which the PCs are cast as the leaders of a good uprising against evil oppressors (a classic story that is generally underserved in D&D adventures). My collaborators for this one were Eric Boyd and Thomas Reid.

In Shadowdale, I assigned myself Chapter 3: The Dread Lair of Alokkair. This was a classic site in Shadowdale that hadn’t been used as a setting for an official D&D adventure in many, many years, and it was just too cool to let a whole edition pass by without visiting it again. So I looked at the old info on Alokkair’s lair, and set about expanding and updating it to fit in with the overall story arc depicted in the adventure series. (It would be nice if the PCs had a compelling *reason* to go muck about in a lich’s lair when there’s a land to free from evil conquerors, after all.)

Thomas and Eric did a great job with the liberating-the-dale and beneath-the-Twisted-Tower chapters, which made this into a pretty solid adventure. I’m particularly proud of the “death tyrant” the PCs meet in area 24, and the advice to the DM for running the encounter. I never got the chance to run that at a table, so I don’t know exactly how it would play out, but I think it’s one of the more fiendishly clever things I’ve ever done as a designer. I won’t say more than that because I don’t want to spoil it for anybody!

I had no real involvement with Anauroch, The Empire of Shade (the third entry in the trilogy). So, I don’t have much to say on that one, sorry.

Overall, Cormyr and Shadowdale were tough ones for me. Part of being a pro is getting in there and punching hard even when you’re working on something because it’s on the schedule, not because you were hoping you could. I think Shadowdale is the stronger of the two, but they both seem to have been well received.

Next Time: My first 4th Edition adventure, Thunderspire Labyrinth.

Twenty-Eight Adventures Part 13: Red Hand of Doom

Thanks for stopping by! At Sasquatch we’re gearing up for some summer work we’re not quite ready to talk about, although I hope to be able to say something soon. We’ll be at GenCon (in our very own booth this time), and we’ll be showing off our upcoming Ultimate Scheme game and selling various versions of Thule—and, with a little luck, some signed copies of Princes of the Apocalypse, Thule posters signed by Todd Lockwood, Thule GM Screens, and maybe some of our adventures in print format. If you’re planning on coming to Indy, come by the Sasquatch Game Studio booth and say hi!

OK, on to the adventure of the week. Look, I'm almost halfway done!

  

#17: Red Hand of Doom

In 2002 and 2003, our headcount in the RPG R&D department was beginning to trend down sharply. The magical days of Pokemon were definitely in the rear-view mirror by that point, 3e was already out in the wild and 4e was not yet in development, and of course the effects of joining Hasbro were slowly rippling through the organization. Shortly after the 3e release, it made sense to have dedicated team leaders when R&D could be split into three or four teams of 6 or 8 people each. But by late 2003 we were definitely in retreat, and my days as a full-time team leader were at an end. I resumed a half-time design schedule, and started back in again with Complete Arcane (where I came up with the warlock!), Stormwrack, and Risk Godstorm. Then in December 2004 I was assigned to write “a superadventure for 2006.” That project became Red Hand of Doom.

I was given a wide-open slate to do pretty much whatever I wanted to do, although there was a directive that the adventure ought to touch on Tiamat and dragons—we were already planning the Spawn of Tiamat miniatures and knew we wanted to feature Big T in our 2006 products. With that broad direction, I sat down to think up what would make a cool super-adventure. If you’ve been reading along with this blog for the last couple of months, you know that my adventure process often begins with something like, “Has anybody done [X] lately? Isn’t it time to do [X] right?” In the case of RHoD, the X that occurred to me was a good stop-the-horde adventure—a staple of fantasy fiction that just didn’t show up at D&D tables as often as it should.

In tying together “stop the horde” with “Tiamat,” I realized that hobgoblins would be just right for a serious invasion scenario. Banners with multicolored five-headed dragons seemed a little sophisticated for a hobgoblin horde; they needed a more primitive symbol, something powerful and simple. The idea of a hand as a representation of a five-headed dragon came to me, and thus the title Red Hand of Doom was born. (I later learned there was a Solomon Kane story called “Right Hand of Doom.” I’d never heard of it before I came up with Red Hand of Doom. Weird but true!)

There was some real confusion about whether or not it should be set in the Forgotten Realms, so I created a location (the Elsir Vale) which was a very close analogue of a particular area in the Realms. Then I built the outline and dove in, knocking out the first part of the adventure. Things were going great! But at that point I got pulled in for an emergency assist on Magic of Incarnum, and was tapped for 30,000 words to help fill out that book after the development team took it apart. After that, I was assigned to work on the new Axis & Allies Miniatures game. That was a ton of fun, too, but all of the sudden I was only able to write about a third of Red Hand of Doom. I got through the set-up, the Elsir Vale description, Part I, and a good number of the stat blocks in the Appendix (mostly rank-and-file like Doom Hand monks and Blood Ghost berserkers).

At that point, we brought in James Jacobs as a freelancer, and he knocked out Parts II, III, IV, and V. It wasn’t until May of 2005 that I returned to Red Hand, and spent a month stitching up my stuff with James’s stuff to make a seamless whole. (The free-floating events in part II came from my second pass.)

Fortunately, James Jacobs did a pretty good job picking up the work that was assigned away from me. Red Hand of Doom turned out pretty well! If Forge of Fury is the adventure of mine that has been played the most, Red Hand of Doom might be the best-regarded of all the adventures I’ve worked on. EN World named it #5 on the list of Best Adventures of All Time (and #1 for 3rd Edition) in 2013—check out the YouTube videos.

Things I like about Red Hand of Doom . . . I like the Drellin’s Ferry material in Part I, and the fact that the PCs get to see a town they care about overrun by the horde. The adventure is brutal on players who think that they’re clever enough to kill a horde by throwing fireball spells at it instead of trying to be *leaders* and unite the defenders of the Elsir Vale. I really wanted to cast the PCs in the roles of “the Captains of the West,” to borrow a term from Lord of the Rings; if you play through this adventure, your character gets to be awesomely heroic, and that is a ton of fun. I really dig James’s work in the drowned city in Part II, and the Battle for Brindol in Part IV is pure epic. He did great work! Oh, and one more thing: Mike Schley’s maps are beautiful.

If I have a regret about the adventure, it’s just that Part V feels a little too much like a letdown after the gigantic Battle for Brindol in Part IV. In retrospect, I wonder if it almost might have worked better as an either-or thing, just to really encourage player agency. You can beat the horde by rallying the defense of Brindol, or you can go find the fane and try to win there. Or maybe if I’d been really clever I could have set it up so you could do them in either order. I’m also a bit sorry that I had to hand over so much of it to James. As it turned out Magic of Incarnum vanished without a splash, although I did have a lot of fun working on Axis & Allies Miniatures, and that became one of my guilty pleasures in my last five years or so at Wizards of the Coast.

Next Week: Cormyr, Tearing of the Weave.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 12: Prison of the Firebringer

Welcome back! One of the advantages of working out of my home is that I can listen in on ball games while plunking away at various projects. Since I live in the Seattle area, that means listening to a lot of Mariners games. Baseball broadcasts are good “white noise” for writing, just like cranking up my favorite playlist in iTunes. And, since the M’s are a West Coast team that has to play a lot of games in other time zones, a lot of their games air around 4 pm our time. Sometimes they’re even on around 10 in the morning if they have an afternoon game on the road, which is great for my writing schedule.

Before the season started, I thought the M’s were positioned to make a move in the AL West and perhaps take over the division. So far this season, that hasn’t happened; they’re still a couple of games under .500, and the Houston Astros are playing ridiculous baseball. But I am hopeful that the Mariners will hang in there and make up ground—they’re a good, well-balanced team, and there’s just no way the Astros can keep up their torrid pace.

So much for baseball—back to gaming, and my third and final Dungeon magazine adventure.

#16: “Prison of the Firebringer,” Dungeon #101

For several years after 3e came out, my responsibilities as the head of the Forgotten Realms team edged out most of my hands-on design work. In theory, this let me work on helping other designers be better, but of course the downside was that I wasn’t didn’t get to do something that I liked and was pretty good at. I was always looking out for opportunities to pick up some writing contributions, so I regularly pestered Bill Slavicsek (the head of the D&D creative team) for assignments to help out with. But most of my creative energy went into a big burst of after-hours novel-writing that included the books City of Ravens, Condemnation, and The Last Mythal series.

In late 2002, I was really feeling the itch to do some adventure design again, so I started work on a big new adventure for a home FR campaign I was running. Usually in my home games I don’t bother to do more than slap together quick outlines and terse notes with stat blocks as needed, but for whatever reason, I found myself expanding those basic notes into full-on adventure presentation along the lines of what we were actually publishing at the time. I eventually pulled together 20,000 words of pretty solid adventure, so I decided to take it to Erik Mona (who was editing Dungeon magazine at the time) and see if I couldn’t sell my home campaign adventure, since I’d already gone to the trouble of writing it out. Erik loved it, and even though it was monstrously big for a Dungeon adventure, he picked an upcoming issue and cleared the space needed to accommodate “Prison of the Firebringer.” Everybody wins!

My idea for “Prison of the Firebringer” originated in the “Known Dungeons of Faerûn” section of the 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, which for my money is four pages of the best D&D ideas you can find in one book. The brief description of the setting spelled out a wizard’s school, dwarven ruins, and froglike monsters. A few months later, I pitched in to help out with Silver Marches, one of the first 3e Realms sourcebooks. Ed Greenwood and Jason Carl were the primary designers, but Silver Marches needed a good deal of reorganization, development, and expansion, so I wound up contributing 10,000 words or so to the manuscript. In my work on Silver Marches I expanded the information on the Dungeon of the Ruins, inventing the name “Bazim-Gorag” and describing a unique slaad lord hidden in the depths. So far it was just a colorful adventure hook, but then I picked up my own idea for a home game, and began to write a real adventure based on the drive-by description from Silver Marches. As it turned out, Bazim-Gorag made the leap from Dungeon Magazine to Realms canon a couple of years later when he was picked up and featured in Champions of Ruin. He also appeared in the 4e Realms.

The mechanical premise of the adventure is simple: If you know a boss villain is in the last room and you can make any preparations you like, just how tough of an encounter can you take on? I assumed a well-prepared party would halt just outside the prison and summon up a dozen big, beefy elementals, or go back to civilization and buy spell scrolls of seriously over-leveled spells like time stop so that they could take on a monster who is otherwise a very lethal fight for the party. That’s not the way it went in my home game, though. My players included Ed Stark, Dave Noonan, Warren Wyman, and (IIRC) James Wyatt. The best story: The monk and the sandwich. (SPOILER ALERT!)

At the conclusion of the adventure, the party reaches the magically sealed archway beyond which the slaad lord Bazim-Gorag is imprisoned. Bazim-Gorag has a pretty good idea that the party is coming, and like many powerful slaads, he has the ability to assume a human-like guise. So, he takes the form of a regal human lord, and greets the party at the doorway to his prison. Bazim-Gorag attempts to persuade the party of PCs that they ought to help him escape from his “unjust” imprisonment, and promises to reward them richly. Roleplaying ensues.

“I’d be very grateful if you could help me with your magic,” I say, playing the part of B-G. “I was trapped here by a treacherous archmage, and your assistance would be greatly appreciated.”

“You must have quite a story to tell!” says Ed Stark, playing his character—a high-level monk. “Can you explain how you came to be trapped?”

“Of course,” says Bazim-Gorag. “You see, a long time ago this wizard promised me—”

“Say, do you want some beer? I have beer in my backpack,” says the monk.

“Well, okay,” says B-G. “That’s very considerate of you. Now, as I was saying—”

“I hand him a flask full of beer,” Ed tells me, making it clear that his character is carrying out the offer.

“OK, he takes it,” I tell Ed. “He nods and goes back to his explanation. ‘I did what the Ar-Magus asked me to do, but then he reneged on his payment. Instead, he imprisoned me here—‘”

“How about a sandwich?” asks the monk. “Would you like a sandwich?”

“Umm, sure. That’s darned decent of you,” says Bazim-Gorag. “I haven’t had a sandwich in forever. Now, about your part in this—”

“I hand him the sandwich,” Ed tells me.

“Okay, he’s got the sandwich,” I reply, struck by the unusual affability of Ed’s monk, and wondering how exactly the slaad lord is going to bring this conversation around to getting out of prison.

“So he’s got the beer in one hand and the sandwich in the other?” Ed asks.

“Uh, sure, I guess,” I reply. Last time I checked people had two hands, after all.

“Great!” says Ed. “I kick him in the nuts!”

Needless to say, we’re all in stitches for a good long time. I decide that Ed’s monk has, indeed, managed to achieve surprise with this ploy (he sure surprised me!), and gets his free nut-kick and stunning blow attempt. Bazim-Gorag has a Fort save of +25, so he’s almost certain to not be stunned, except I roll a 1 on the saving throw. A bad initiative roll follows, and the whole party piles on and goes through one-third of Bazim-Gorag’s hit points before he even gets a chance to act. As it so happens, the party fights Bazim-Gorag to a draw, even though one of the characters is butchered by the angry slaad lord. They wind up withdrawing, and use magic to bury the place. But the beer and sandwich story survives to this day.

Next Week: Red Hand of Doom!

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 11: Rana Mor

Hi, thanks for stopping by! I’m back on my target schedule after last week’s pilgrimage to the craft brew capital of the US, Portland.

The excitement this week is that my younger daughter, Hannah, is now starting driver’s ed. That involves riding around with her behind the wheel and trying to maintain a calm demeanor. Yesterday we returned from a drive around town, and she zoomed the minivan into the driveway with the apparent intent of shaving the side off my parked Mustang while I yelled, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! STOP!” The minivan came to a rest with its passenger-side mirror touching the driver-side mirror of the Mustang. Tears ensued (hers, not mine). No damage, just a few more gray hairs for Dad.

OK, on to D&D stuff. This week, I’m looking back at my second adventure for Dungeon magazine, the jungle temple of Rana Mor.

#15: Rana Mor

After my early work on the 3e system, I took over the Alternity product team and ran that group for a couple of years. But with 3e coming out, we were ready to wind down the Alternity product line. My boss, Bill Slavicsek, called me in to his office one day and offered me a new challenge: He wanted me to take over the Forgotten Realms team and shepherd the Realms into 3rd Edition. So, with some regrets, I stepped away from Alternity (most painfully, the Warships supplement that was going to be the Trillion Credit Squadron of the game line) and returned my attention to D&D. Along the way, I retained some part-time design duties. The next thing I was asked to work on was a Dungeon magazine adventure.

Through my early career at TSR and Wizards of the Coast, magazine articles were generally treated as “overtime” opportunities for those of us on the R&D staff. We usually weren’t assigned work on Dragon or Dungeon, but if we wanted a chance to do some extra work on our own time and make a little extra money, the magazines were the place where we could do that. (TSR and Wizards, unlike most other hobby game publishers, prohibited their staff designers and editors from doing freelance work for other companies.) However, “Rana Mor” was an actual assignment—the business team wanted to get some good adventures by prominent writers into Dungeon early in the 3e release cycle. Later on I had to refuse a separate payment for the article two or three times, because people didn’t understand I’d been assigned to do it as part of my day job and kept asking me to submit an invoice.

Anyway, I hadn’t written a Dungeon magazine adventure since 1993 (“Prism Keep”), but I was happy to get a chance to pitch in. And, for once, I wasn’t trying to write to a preexisting title or sell copy. I had carte blanche to do whatever I wanted to do, as long as it was a 3e adventure and could fit in the magazine format.

With that in mind, I sat down with the new 3rd Edition Monster Manual and looked for creatures I might want to feature in an adventure. I found myself drawn to some of the new creatures that were making an appearance in the 3e MM for the first time. (I think the idea of coming up with some brand-new critters that highlighted interesting aspects of the new system came from the fertile mind of Jonathan Tweet; these turned out to be some of the most interesting monsters in the new edition, or so I thought.) I noticed that a bunch of the new monsters clumped around CR 6, so I decided that my Dungeon magazine adventure would feature as many of the first-timers as possible. Creatures like the chuul, destrachan, digester, and tendriculos all made the cut.

Now the question got tricky: What kind of adventure would such a mishmash of creatures actually work well in? All the monsters I was looking at seemed to feel like they might fit in a jungle environment . . . and that gave me my idea. I decided to write an adventure that would present a D&D-ized version of Angkor Wat, or at least a very pulpish version of jungle ruins. (Think of the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland.) Thus Rana Mor was born.

In my original draft, the final crypt chamber was guarded by a summoned angel (a trumpet archon, IIRC). Chris Perkins, the editor of Dungeon magazine, pointed out (rightfully) that it was a tough dose of feel-bad for players to fight an obviously good celestial being in order to loot the crypts. He suggested changing the greater glyphs of warding to more straightforward traps. The water trap was all mine, though. One other weird thing about the adventure: I deliberately designed it with oversized doors at key points to make sure players couldn’t just use knock spells to get around the puzzles needed to access different parts of the temple. Early in 3e I was very concerned about honoring the rules as written and making sure that we didn’t invent new rules to serve as plot devices.

While I was working on “Rana Mor,” the R&D department was committed to regular weekly playtest sessions, so I had an opportunity to play D&D and get paid for it. I DM’d “Rana Mor” for a selection of my coworkers for a few weeks, which led to what is probably the single most horrific demise I have ever inflicted upon a PC while running a game. Early on in the adventure, the party is sailing up a jungle river in a small sloop, working their way up to the location of the ruins. The encounter I wrote for that part of the adventure was a hungry chuul that would climb up from the river and board the ship in search of a meal. So far, so good.

I don’t recall everyone who was in that game, but one of the participants was Anthony Valterra, who worked on the D&D business team. Anthony’s character was a half-elf rogue/sorcerer type, some kind of flamboyant (and squishy) jack-of-all-trades. Anthony’s half-elf had the misfortune of getting too close to the chuul, which grabbed him with its claws and shoved him into its mouth-tentacles, promptly paralyzing the unfortunate PC. The chuul rambled around the deck for a round or two with the paralyzed half-elf, but the rest of the party was landing big hits on it. My encounter description specifically said that the monster was looking for a meal, and that it would retreat if knocked down below half hit points (I was trying to be a nice guy, I guess). So, the chuul decided its mission was accomplished, and slithered back over the side . . . the half-elf still clutched in its mouth.

The party stood there on the deck, looking into this black jungle river. And not one PC even considered the idea of going over the side and following the chuul into the water. (If there is one thing I’ve learned as a D&D designer, it’s that players HATE water. They’re like cats, they want no part of it.) So, there were some bubbles on the surface, and Anthony’s half-elf was Never Seen Again. He was dragged off paralyzed to an underwater burrow, where I like to think that maybe he drowned before the chuul started to eat him.

Anyway, “Rana Mor” is one of my favorites. I felt the setting was full of color, the evil tribes quickly earn the hatred of most PCs, and there’s a good mix of interesting monsters and puzzles. I wish I could have made it bigger (Angkor Wat is gigantic, after all), but Dungeon magazine does not have unlimited space, so I had to keep the ruined temple to one floor.

Next Week: Back to Dungeon magazine for “Prison of the Firebringer.”

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 10: Forge of Fury

Sorry for the late post this week—yesterday I partook of my twice-a-year pilgrimage down to Portland to sample the finest brewpubs to be found. I make the trip with a whole gang of engineers from a major aerospace manufacturer that shall remain nameless, and I’ve been doing it for something like three or four years now. Anyway, I was out of the house all day on Tuesday, so I didn’t get the blog posted.

Speaking of Portland and beer, the discovery of the day for me was The Commons Brewery, which I had never visited before. I had the Walnut (an excellent dark ale) and the Biere de Garde (a “French farmhouse ale,” also excellent). If you’re in Portland sometime, I’d heartily recommend the place. I’ll even post their website to be a thoughtful guy:

http://www.commonsbrewery.com/

Okay, now to carry on with my tour of RPG adventures I’ve worked on during my career. This week, we’re almost at the halfway point!

#14: Forge of Fury

I’ve never had the chance to investigate the actual sales numbers, but I am pretty sure that Forge of Fury is far and away the best-selling of all the adventures I have worked on. As the second adventure to be published for the wildly successful 3^rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons game, Forge of Fury was purchased and played by a vast audience compared to some of my 2e or 4e adventures. It’s one of those adventures that it seems *everybody* has a story about. I’m happy to have played some small part in setting the scene for those tales of adventure!

Forge of Fury was the second entry in a series of eight adventures that came to be called “the adventure path.” Early on in the series, we didn’t have any strong mandate to establish common elements between the adventures—they were a “path” only in the sense that the level progression would support playing them in order, and they were not remotely intended to contribute to some kind of overarching narrative. (This is in direct contrast to the approach Paizo uses with its Pathfinder adventure paths.) So, I very consciously avoided ties back to the Sunless Citadel.

As far as the adventure itself, I approached Forge of Fury with the determination to build a good, old-fashioned dungeon crawl. If you’ve been following along with this series of blog posts, you know that I worked on a number of story-based adventures toward the back end of 2^nd Edition D&D. Well, part of our whole plan with 3e was “back to the dungeon,” so I set out to write something that would be an interesting and challenging place to explore without much in the way of story overhead for the DM to worry about. Plus, 3e was new enough that I didn’t want to try anything too fancy—I wanted to present a meat-and-potatoes dungeon, not a gourmet adventure. Forge of Fury is what it is; the world will neither know nor care if your PCs take one look at Khundrukar and decide to go do something else.

(Easter egg: I used the name again in my novel City of Ravens for a macguffin called the Orb of Khundrukar. Jack Ravenwild hears the name only once, so he garbles it into the Orb of Kundugar when he tries to name it later.)

I seem to recall that I suggested the title, which is something I didn't get to do very often. (Might be wrong about that, it's been a while.) I picked the title to fit the basic premise the D&D team had settled on: A dungeon crawl highlighting "dwarf settings" in some way. Moria was out—hey, it’s only 32 pages!—but I was reminded of the secret stronghold of Mîm the dwarf from Tolkien’s Silmarillion (it’s in the story of Túrin Turambar), so I took a little inspiration from Amon Rûdh. When I sat down to plan out the dungeon, I decided that I wanted to feature a lot of verticality, and create a maze where navigating from level to level really meant something.  The cross-section map in the adventure is there because I went and begged Ed Stark (D&D team leader at the time) for an extra quarter-page map to help the DM grokk how these levels stacked on top of each other.

I started off by working out the XP and treasure budgets for the adventure. This was fairly new tech in 3e, and it took quite a lot of planning to figure out just how many monsters needed to be in the adventure to provide a good expectation of leveling to 4^th and 5^th during the adventure. The treasure budget was also problematic because I had a hard time fitting magical weapons into the adventure, and the basic concept for the Forge suggested that there ought to be a good number of them present. I eventually cobbled together a workaround in which I assigned a “get chance” to some of the more well-hidden treasures. My thinking was that most parties would miss a treasure or two. So, it’s not really over-treasured, unless the DM is really going out of his way to make sure the players don’t miss anything.

I’m sorry about the roper. We decided that it was important for the early adventures in the Adventure Path to teach people how to be good D&D players, and one of the lessons I was asked to impart was “you don’t have to fight every monster”—sometimes you can just run away. So, I looked for a monster that would be too strong for a low-level party but *slow*, so that the PCs could get away when the time came to flee. The roper seemed like a good answer for that . . . but, of course, a roper grabs you and *prevents* you from running away. I should’ve seen that coming. (If you happened to get washed down the underground river to die a terrible death in icy, lightless water a few hundred yards downstream, you may find it interesting to know that I was thinking of the Whirlpool Death from the old arcade game Dragon’s Lair when I wrote that part.)

Idalla the succubus isn’t actually my design. My editor, Miranda Horner, observed that the adventure was full of things to fight, and not a whole lot that might decide to talk to you or trick you instead of killing you. So, she removed the encounter I’d written for that room, and replaced it with the succubus. (A vestige of my original encounter remains as the note about the wizard who died in that room.) I think she was right about the need for a change of pace somewhere in the dungeon, although I wish we’d done more to “fit” the succubus into the rest of the dungeon ecology.

Nightscale the dragon is in the adventure because I was given the marching orders right up front: There *had* to be a dragon in the adventure. In all the stories I’ve heard about Forge of Fury over the years, Nightscale is responsible for a truly impressive number of character deaths. She might be the single most effective monster (in terms of total kills scored) of any monster I’ve ever put in any dungeon. We had a great playtest group in the office going through the adventure, and I distinctly remember Curt Gould’s gnome sorcerer using levitate to get up out of reach, then riddling the dragon with magic missiles. Well, Nightscale got tired of that real fast, so she burst out of the lake and flew up to maul the gnome in mid-air . . . where he slowly bled out to –10, bobbing unconscious 30 feet up in the air where the cleric had no chance to reach him. Good times, good times!

All in all, Forge of Fury seems to have been well received by a lot of folks. I’m proud of the interesting map and sheer density of adventure crammed into that 32-page booklet. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Next Week: A long-delayed return to Dungeon Magazine, “Rana Mor.”

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 9: Dark Matter

Welcome back! I have to say, I’m a little surprised by the amount of Alternity chatter that picked up on Facebook after last week’s post. I didn’t realize there were that many Alternity fans still around! For that matter, I didn’t realize I had contributed to as many Alternity adventures as I evidently did. I completely forgot about “Cauldron Station,” and I left Black Starfall and Red Starrise out of my initial count.

This week, it’s on to my only Dark Matter adventure, “Exit 23.” I actually drove across the Idaho panhandle on I-90 just a year or two before I wrote the adventure, so I had a great mental image of what I was shooting for. There is an Exit 22 on that road, but not an Exit 23!

#13: Exit 23

For a short time after Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR and moved most of the D&D team out to Seattle, I worked on Alternity projects. Then, after Last Warhulk, I drew what was probably the plum assignment of my career at TSR/WotC—I was given the job of designing 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons along with Monte Cook and Skip Williams. (Jonathan Tweet joined the team a little later, and Peter Adkison contributed where he could and offered plenty of suggestions and feedback.) For eight months I worked on 3e every day, and I am gratified to say that many of my contributions are still a big part of 3e’s descendants today. Like barbarian rage? You’re welcome!

At the eight-month mark, an interesting new opportunity came my way. The RPG team underwent a major restructuring, in which some of the more business-minded creatives shifted over to join a brand team headed up by Ryan Dancey. I was asked to step up and replace Jim Butler as the creative director (AKA product group leader) of the Alternity product line, which we were continuing in parallel with the new D&D game. With some hesitation (because 3e was awesome!) I took the new position. Heading up a product team really cut into my available design time—instead of writing, I was managing the team, coordinating freelancers, creating outlines, contributing to product plans, and reviewing other people’s work. As a result, from 1999 through 2005 or so, my creative output slowed down quite a lot.

As the leader of the Alternity team, I did have the opportunity to shepherd along one of my favorite projects ever: The Dark*Matter Campaign Setting. This was a beauty of a campaign hardbound that presented a wonderful brew of conspiracy theory, fringe science, and UFOlogy as a setting for your Alternity game. When I was a kid, I owned a Reader’s Digest collection called Strange Stories and Amazing Facts. Well, Dark*Matter is pretty much that book translated into a RPG setting. Interestingly enough, Dark*Matter was part of the original Alternity pitch by Bill Slavicsek and Lester Smith—from the very get-go, a modern conspiracy/weird science setting was envisioned as the second Alternity product line after Star*Drive. 

It wasn’t my job to contribute to Dark*Matter as a primary writer, so I tried to stay out of the way of Monte Cook and Wolf Baur and let them run with their ideas. (Part of being a good CD is knowing when to get the hell out of the way!) I did get to pitch in a bit here and there when we needed some extra words, and I contributed to some other Dark*Matter stuff later on. But then, very late in the project, the business team requested that we add an introductory-level set of “fast play” rules and a beginning adventure for the Dark*Matter setting. Everybody else was plenty busy, so I rolled up my sleeves and jumped in to write “Exit 23.”

“Exit 23” is an introductory adventure, so it’s short. It talks the GM through the job of running the adventure, and presents a good snapshot of what Dark*Matter is all about. Looking over “Exit 23” now, the story is evocative, it presents a good mystery to solve and the right clues to do it, and it’s a good mix of action and horror. I’m especially pleased with the improvised-weapon angle of the adventure—I think clever players will have a blast coming up with ways to fight the supernatural with only materials on hand in a tiny little Idaho rest stop. Finally, I’m kind of proud of the pregen PCs for the adventure. They have good backstories and really fit the setting. One silly thing: I garbled the French for the villainous organization. It should be Corbeaux. Sorry!

The adventure is loaded with little in-jokes you probably won’t notice unless you know me very well. For example, the adventure takes place in the imaginary White River Rest Stop. As it turns out, I live about a stone’s throw from the White River in Washington state. One of the pregens is named after the family doctor. Another pregen is named (sort of) after a good college friend. Most designers sneak in those sort of references, and as long as they’re subtle, no one minds. (Although I distinctly recall drawing the line at ‘Becky’ the evil githyanki captain, who appeared in one manuscript I was reviewing.)

Next Week: Perhaps my best-known adventure, Forge of Fury! Would you believe I left it off my initial list of adventures for this series? I think I'm up to 32 now, not 28.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 8: Alternity!

Hello! As you might expect, I’m continuing on my survey of old adventures. This week, it’s all about Alternity.

Back in the tail-end days of TSR, I was brought onto the Alternity team as Bill Slavicsek’s co-designer after Lester Smith left the company (he was Bill’s original partner on the idea). Bill and Lester had the core mechanic worked out, but I distinctly recall that I convinced Bill that negative steps where you subtracted the difficulty die were necessary because there wasn’t enough difference between d20+4 for something that was easy and d20+d12 for something that was pretty hard.

Alternity happened at a strange and bad time in TSR’s journey. The company was vapor-locked and couldn’t print books, but we were still coming in and trying to work every day. Some of my co-workers whiled away the days playing Doom. Doing nothing wasn’t in my nature (and definitely wasn’t in Bill’s!), so we put our heads down and worked hard on the new SF game. It was way better to feel like we had a reason to keep coming in to work!

I could tell many stories about the Alternity development process, include some of the most infuriating sorts of interference and office-politics I ever saw in my twenty-plus years in the game biz. (If you see me at a con, ask me, “Does there have to be gravity in the future?” and I’ll regale you.) But since this series of posts is about adventures, I’ll move on to my Alternity adventures.

#8: Cauldron Station

When I composed my list of adventure credits, I completely overlooked this one. It appeared in the Alternity Science Fiction Roleplaying Game Gamemaster Guide, and also in the Fast-Play Rules booklet (a free promotional item intended to provide a little taste of the new game). So, between this and the adventures in the First Quest boxed set that I forgot about, I’ve actually published 30 or 31 adventures, not 28. I won’t bother to correct the blog title now!

“Cauldron Station” was intended to be simple. When I was working on Alternity, I was on something of a hard-SF kick, so I was always looking for ways to emphasize the science in the sci-fi game. That’s not to say that “Cauldron Station” is based on any real science, it’s just that I wanted to create a scenario that made the players pay a little attention to the technology keeping them alive on an inferno planet.

#9, #10: Black Starfall, Red Starrise

Two more promotional adventures I worked on back around the Alternity release. In all honesty, I usually approached marketing-oriented pieces with a real lack of enthusiasm—I didn’t like drawing those assignments because I wanted to work on big, serious adventures. But part of being a pro is doing good work even on projects you’re not excited about. I remember that I was actually pretty happy with how Black Starfall turned out. I managed to catch a pretty good “technothriller” vibe, and that was one of the sub-genres we hoped Alternity would support. Rather annoyingly, I cannot actually find a copy of Black Starfall in my house, so I couldn’t re-read it to remind myself of why I liked it.

#11: The Last Warhulk

In the fall of 1997, I finally got the chance to write a *big* Alternity adventure. It was a darned busy time for me, since my family and I moved from Wisconsin to Seattle in August of ’97 as part of the WotC-buys-TSR move. The Last Warhulk was pretty much the first thing I worked on after the move.

Being an ambitious fellow, I set myself a difficult challenge for the adventure: I wanted to include a complete deck map of the Warhulk. That put some real constraints on just how big I could let the Warhulk be. My main inspiration for the robotic ship was Fred Saberhagen’s berserkers, and in his stories front-line berserker battleships might have kilometers of armor and be fifty or a hundred kilometers across. I couldn’t square that with the goal of avoiding the cop-out of providing no deck plan, so I decided to go with a smaller Warhulk and keep the map. (A fair number of readers seem to feel that was the wrong move, and wonder why the Warhulk isn’t miles across.) I will point out that the “small” Warhulk is still about three or four times the size of an Iowa-class battleship.

Despite the fact that the Warhulk has a pretty thorough map, it’s not a keyed-location adventure. It’s set up in event-based acts and scenes that use the Warhulk as a backdrop. Parts of the adventure can be pretty railroad-ish; there are places where I really forced the action (for example, the outcome of the first visit to the ship’s control room, or the timing of the ship jumping to its next target). I feel bad about that, but it does build a strong narrative and conveys an excellent “thriller” script for the right group of players. By way of making up for that, I provided a lot of different ways for the players to take out the Warhulk: Kill the AI, detonate its own ordnance, sabotage the engines, and so on. There is a lot of room for player creativity here if you push the NPCs to the background, where they belong.

The Last Warhulk has some extremely lethal parts, and I wish I’d paid a little more attention to just how dangerous the battle scenes were. Unlike 3e, 4e, or 5e Dungeons & Dragons, we never built any kind of hard encounter math to figure out what made for a balanced combat in Alternity. In all honesty, we sort of defaulted to, “What should be in the room? That’s what’s there,” which is a very 1e-2e way of doing things. Looking back on it now, it amazes me that we wouldn’t have worked out some kind of basic guidance for what kind of opposition is too much for a group of heroes to handle. People learned to eyeball it in earlier editions of D&D (if nothing else, the encounter charts by dungeon level helped with that), but Alternity was different enough that we should have expected GMs to have trouble determining lethality.

Oh, and one thing I did enjoy about the adventure: The personality of Ares 22 is a lot of fun. Your players will *hate* that AI before they’re done.

Overall, I’ll give The Last Warhulk mixed reviews. Some people loved it, some people felt it was flat. As they say: YMMV.

Next Week: “Exit 23,” my adventure for the Dark*Matter Campaign Setting.