Rebuilding Ultimate Scheme, Portland Beer

I’m back! I set my blog aside for a couple of months after finishing my tour of adventures I’ve written for various RPG systems, but now I’m ready to resume. I’m just going to wander around a few different topics for now, and we’ll see where this thing goes. I’m assuming that many of you read this because you’re interested in what I do as an author and game designer, but I intend to mix in a few thoughts about current events, pop culture, or politics as they strike my fancy. (God knows there is no shortage of things to say about politics this election season!)

Anyway, this time: Rebooting Ultimate Scheme, and brew pubs in Portland.

Ultimate Scheme

We’ve re-launched my Ultimate Scheme boardgame on Kickstarter! (When I say ‘we,’ I refer to Sasquatch Game Studio, the small game publisher I founded with Dave Noonan and Steve Schubert.)  Here’s a link—please, feel free to share it around and help me spread the word!

http://kck.st/1pBFzda

I designed the game back in 2014, and we’ve shown off different iterations to many people over the last two years. We took a shot at launching the game on Kickstarter back in January, and to our surprise, we just didn’t get that “critical mass” of backers. So, we took the game back to the workshop to see if we could bring it in at a lower funding goal, offer a better value to our backers, and change the emphasis on our pitch to make it about the fun theme of the game and less about the details of the mechanics. The mechanics are nice and clean, but the thing that people love when they see Ultimate Scheme is the idea that they’re playing an Evil Genius and they have a bunch of wacky plots to pull off.

We did some legwork to research potential manufacturers, and we eventually found an outfit that could produce an affordable print run of 1,000 units for us. While the business plan sure looks better if we assume we’re running off 2,000+ copies, we had to adapt to the idea that we might be looking at a $20k Kickstarter instead of a $50k Kickstarter—people know us for our RPG work, and we are still trying to get noticed in the boardgame market. The manufacturers we originally targeted weren’t interested in print runs below 2,000-ish copies, so we found an outfit that would work better for us.

We also took a hard look at the game components to see if we were making a game too expensive for its market. In my original design (and my prototypes) I used wooden cubes for the resource markers, mostly because I love Lords of Waterdeep and I thought that was the gold standard for what components we ought to shoot for.  The result was classy, but it meant more expensive manufacturing, leading to a MSRP of $50 or more. So we reworked the components to go to nice, heavy cardstock, linen-finish punchboard tokens instead. That let us bring the MSRP down under $40. And the tokens let us make better use of Lee Moyer’s handsome icon designs. You’ll have an easier time telling the Finance tokens from the Science tokens when one is clearly a dollar sign and the other is clearly a gear-and-atom than distinguishing green and blue wooden cubes.

The last big component shift was changing the box size. We originally planned a “square” box like Ticket to Ride. It turns out square boxes can be more expensive to ship, and shipping adds up fast. Saving $2 to $4 on each unit you ship can make a big difference to your bottom line if you’re mailing out hundreds of reward packages to your backers. So, we adjusted the box size to more of a “book”-type package, which involved reworking the cover and making some adjustments to the board design.

Finally, we also redesigned the cover. We thought our original cover was pretty good, but folks just gave it a “meh.” You hate to buy things twice, but when your audience tries to tell you something, you’re stupid if you don’t listen. So we went back to Claudio Pozas, our illustrator, and commissioned a new cover image from him.

So, the upshot of all these component adjustments and finding new printers and new outreach and marketing (I didn’t talk much about those, but we did some of that too) is that we were able to slash our Kickstarter funding goal from $30,000 in the original to $15,000 in our current Kickstarter, and we knocked $15 off the “baseline” pledge level that gets you a copy of the game.

It’s a weird truth of Kickstarter that you are a lot more likely to get $30,000 by asking for $15,000 and funding fast than you are by asking for $30,000 and hoping you just squeak over the finish line. People want to see that projects have a good chance to succeed, and the sooner you can put the audience’s minds to rest on the question, the better off you are.

And, if you haven’t done it already: Go ahead and share the link to our Kickstarter! We can use all the awareness we can get.

Brew Pubs in Portland: Last week I went on one of my semi-annual beer pilgrimages to Portland. I join a group of Boeing engineers who take the day off to take the train from Tacoma down to Portland, buy a transit pass, and try out new craft beer places. This time around we hit Pints, Zoiglhaus, the Horse Brass Pub, 10 Barrel Brewing, and Backpedal Brewing. All were excellent, but I really loved Zoiglhaus and Backpedal. Zoiglhaus had a great menu of German food (try the brat!). Backpedal was extremely basic—no warm food, just beer and tables, they’re the base of operation for the pedaling bar you see in town—but they were super-friendly and the beer was amazingly good. On a day when I drank a lot of good beer, the Red Druid at Backpedal really stood out.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 28: The Moon-Door

Well, I’m finally there! After almost a year, I’ve finished with my look-at-each-adventure retrospective. During the course of writing these 29 blog posts, I discovered that I did *not* have 28 adventures, as my first count indicated. Instead my final count comes to 33, since I managed to forget or overlook a few in my initial list, and I also wrote a couple of new ones during the course of the series.

My real total might be 34, because I skipped over my work on the 2^nd Edition First Quest boxed set. I know I worked on an adventure for it, but I just cannot bring any details to mind and I can’t swear as to which of the adventures in that set are mine! I guess that’s a drawback to a long career—sooner or later you forget some things you worked on.

One more thing before I move to the adventure: If you haven’t checked it out yet, take a look at my Ultimate Scheme Kickstarter! We’re really coming down to the wire on this one, and we can use all the support we can get.

http://kck.st/1ny7Ely

Even if it’s not for you, please—share the link and help spread the word!

#33: Secret of the Moon-Door

After finishing our work as the design studio for WotC’s Elemental Evil, my fellow Sasquatches and I realized that we had a good deal of 5e knowledge and an audience with a serious demand for more 5e content. After some brief deliberation, we decided to move forward with plans to present a new version of our Primeval Thule Campaign Setting compatible with the newest edition of D&D.  Not knowing if or when a 5e Open Game License would be made available, we looked closely at the 3e-era OGL, and we realized that it would work just fine for a 5e-compatible setting.

So, in the summer of 2015, we launched our second Kickstarter. This time we wanted to produce just one version of our Thule setting, not three in one book. For stretch goals, we at first planned to create more PDF adventure content for the 5e Thule game . . . but on thinking it over, we decided to provide a mix of bonus material, including a player-oriented book (the Player’s Companion) and a GM-oriented book with monsters and rules variants (the Gamemaster’s Companion). For the third book in the set we decided to collect the first two stretch goals—the adventures by Steve Winter and Rob Schwalb—into an Adventure Anthology. Better yet, we figured out how to make the booklets available as print-on-demand softcovers as well as PDFs.

That all seemed good to us, but I was dissatisfied with the Adventure Anthology because I felt it was pretty thin at just two adventures. I wanted to make sure we were providing good value for the dollar. So I talked with my partners, and we decided that we’d add a “bonus” adventure to the Adventure Anthology to make it a threesome instead of a duo. That became Secret of the Moon-Door.

Primeval Thule had its origins in my love for Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea stories—one small corner of the Cthulhu Mythos stories that happened to match up very well with my favorite game, D&D. Secret of the Moon-Door is my homage to Smith’s stories. In fact, the plot is based on a mash-up of Smith’s story The Door to Saturn and some parts of Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

(If you’re a fan of Lovecraft and D&D and you haven’t read Clark Ashton Smith, I’d really encourage you to do so. Smith’s Hyperborea stories feel like something halfway between Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar and Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. They are the most D&D-ish Cthulhu stories around. Some of the best are “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” “The Testament of Athammaus,” and “The Ice-Demon.” Smith’s Atlantis stories are pretty good, too. Check ‘em out!)

I set out to provide a party of Thulean heroes with plenty of Smith-like touchstones such as a wizard trafficking with Things from Outside, subhuman savages, and an expedition to an alien sphere to bring justice to an evildoer who thinks himself far outside the reach of any human power. More than that I really can’t say without dropping major spoilers (I probably spoiled a bit already). But I think there’s a nice mix of mystery-solving, a simple puzzle, and a truly far-out setting for the adventure’s climactic scenes. I hope you enjoy it!

Next Time: Beats me! Having just finished a long stroll down memory lane, I’m inclined to spotlight a few of my favorite games from my collection and talk about why I like them. But if you have something you’d like me to blog about, let me know! The topic spinner is spinning.

  

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 27: The Giant’s Tribute

I’m slowly getting close to finishing up my adventure retrospective. It’s been a busy few months; during the summer and fall I was working like crazy on Primeval Thule 5e and my new sci-fi novel Valiant Dust (coming in 2017 from Tor Books). These days I’m pushing hard on ULTIMATE SCHEME, my new boardgame. We’re planning on sending files to the printer at the end of February, and there’s a zillion things to do!

Let me take a moment to engage in some naked self-promotion: ULTIMATE SCHEME is awesome, and you should back it now at Kickstarter. It’s a lighthearted game that mixes some resource management and worker placement mechanics with a fun theme of global mayhem through villainous plots. If you’re into good Euro-style mechanics, nerd culture references, and lots of replayability, I think you’ll like it. And tell your friends, too! We’re fighting to get the word out and we can use all the help we can get.

Here’s the link: http://kck.st/1ny7Ely

Don't make me melt the icecaps to get your attention!

#32: The Giant’s Tribute

As you have no doubt noticed by now, the overwhelming majority of my adventures have been published by TSR, Wizards of the Coast, or my own little outfit, Sasquatch Game Studio. But last year my friend and occasional collaborator Robert Schwalb asked me if I’d be willing to pitch in on his Shadows of the Demon Lord project by serving as a stretch goal adventure author. Since Rob had just committed to doing the same thing for me by helping out on Primeval Thule 5e, I was pretty much obligated to say yes. But I was also real curious to see what happened when Rob managed to slip the leash and run off to do anything he wanted.

As it turns out, Rob asked *everybody* to do short SotDL (that’s Shadows of the Demon Lord) adventures, and he was clever enough to stagger out the schedule of adventures so that no one got buried early on with the landslide of adventures he arranged. My turn didn’t come up until about five months ago. By that time, Rob was looking for SotDL adventures suitable for high-level characters. Since I didn’t know all that much about the setting, I asked Rob if there was anything he felt was under-served by the previous adventures. Rob thought about it for a moment, then said, “No one’s done much with giants yet.”

So, giants it was!

I read through Rob’s excellent setting and the interesting rules set for his game, and thought hard about what a “Demon Lord” giant adventure ought to be. The classic D&D giant adventure is, of course, the G1-G2-G3 series (Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, and so on). But the giants you fight in those adventures are not really all that unnatural or horrifying. Sure, they’re big and they have lots of hit points, but they really act like big 10^th-level orcs. You cut them down four or five at a time, and you feel pretty mighty about it.

I asked myself what would make a giant horrifying, and I thought about the classic giants of myth: Wicked, sinful brutes that gleefully devoured children or ground your bones to make their bread. SotDL giants are pretty stupid, but something that is big and filled with evil cunning and an instinct for petty malice . . . that’s a little more interesting. It reminded me of the Raver-possessed giants from Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, and I found my hook: (SPOILER ALERT) What if the PCs found out the hard way they weren’t dealing with a dull-witted brute, but a demon that had possessed the biggest, strongest thing around?

The nice thing about the format for the Shadows of the Demon Lord adventures is that they’re pretty short. A short adventure is just the right format to challenge the PCs by presenting a situation they think they understand (a giant is demanding tribute from a village), put a nasty twist into it (the giant has a demon’s magic and wickedness), and deliver on an exciting finale. If you have a chance to play it, let me know if the adventure delivers!

Next Time: Secret of the Moon-Door, the last in my series!

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 26: Elemental Evil

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.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 25: Primeval Thule

Time is flying by these days! I’m pushing to finish up all the Thule 5e stretch goal projects and make sure our Thule 5e books all get to where they’re supposed to go. I’m also up to my eyeballs in prepping our next Kickstarter project, Ultimate Scheme.

Ultimate Scheme is a Euro-style boardgame I designed a year ago that is now well on its way into production. Here’s the basic pitch: You’re a sinister genius or secret organization out to take over the world. You’ve got an ultimate scheme such as Become a God, Destroy Rock ‘n’ Roll, or Global Chaos. You’ll need to execute a number of stepping-stone schemes such as nuclear extortion, making a deal with the devil, or creating a dance craze to pull off your master plan. For you boardgame nerds out there, it’s basically a “worker walkment” game that’s easy to learn and hard to master, built around a not-too-terribly-serious theme. You’ll be hearing more from me about this soon!

Speaking of fun things from Sasquatch Game Studio, that brings me to this installment of my adventure collection: the adventure I wrote for the Primeval Thule Campaign Setting.

#30: Cavern of Golden Tears

A couple of years ago, I had what I thought was a good idea. “Hey Rich,” I asked myself while driving back and forth to Redmond. “If you could write any game you wanted, what would that be?” And the answer I came up with was a RPG setting that brought Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea stories to life for today’s D&D and Pathfinder fans. So I invited my good friends (and former WotC colleagues) Dave Noonan and Steve Schubert to join my little cabal, and Sasquatch Game Studio was born.

Along the way, the initial concept of Primeval Thule—basically, the subgenre of fantasy that I like to think of as “fantastic horror”—broadened a bit to absorb influences such as Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Pellucidar, and pulpy sword and sorcery stories in general. Much as the old Dark Sun setting captured “desert” sword-and-sandals adventure, we decided to build the 21^st-century d20 setting that could capture lost worlds, barbarians, thieves, and a little dash of Lovecraftian horror. In my opinion, a game or setting should meet the “you know it when you see it” test, and I think Primeval Thule holds its savage head high in that regard.

We also decided to try out the experiment of seeing what happened when you created one IP (intellectual property) and supported it with multiple game systems. We initially built Thule for Pathfinder, the new 13^th Age game, and the 4^th Edition Dungeons & Dragons system license – and just this month, we’re bringing out a 5e version of the setting. So if this sort of thing interests you, check out DriveThruRPG for the pdf version, or ask your FLGS to see about ordering it for you!

Okay, on to the adventure part of this whole thing. We wanted to make sure Primeval Thule was playable “out of the box” so we made room in the outline for several short adventures. Mine was Cavern of Golden Tears, my best take on a pulpy sword-and-sorcery tale complete with hostile natives, a lost city, and a sinister priest of Set who’s out to beat you to the prize. It’s all about capturing a memorable hook—a hidden ruin where a dead king weeps tears of gold—and presenting it as if you were playing through a Conan story.

As it turned out, I used my design draft of Cavern several times as a playtest/demo of Primeval Thule—I ran it at PaizoCon, GenCon, and once or twice in private settings. At the time I felt it was a good taste of what the setting was about, and I’m lazy enough to fall back on “What have I already written?” when I’m looking around for a scenario to run. I also put together a fun group of pregen PCs for the convention games, including the ranger Zargon the Deadly, Marresh the thief of Quodeth, and Isko Yhoun, the Atlantean wizard. (In one game session I killed Zargon dead in a single round of combat when he failed to note the approach of a saber-tooth tiger. Heh.)

Is Cavern of Golden Tears any good? I’d have to leave that to the readers. As I’m getting close to the end of this retrospective series, I’m naturally drawing closer to things I worked on quite recently, so it’s harder to get a sense of what other people think about something as compared to what I think about something. Cavern of Golden Tears really isn’t that old yet, and hasn’t been played by all that many people. But I think it’s a fun little one- or two-session expedition into the jungles of Thule, and I hope that the folks who have seen it enjoyed the trip!

Next Time: Princes of the Apocalypse.

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 24: D&D Starter Set

Turns out this is a busy time of year, and keeping up on a regular blog post is a little challenging. My apologies—I really had planned to finish up this little retrospective series before the end of the year. Juggling the Primeval Thule print job, our PDF accessories, and shifting Sasquatch to a new distribution partner wound up absorbing a ton of my time and attention over the last few weeks. Plus, there was an exciting new development this month: My agent sold the first three books of my Sikander North military sci-fi series to Tor Books!

So what exactly is Sikander North? About a year ago, I found myself with a good writing window and asked myself a simple question: If I could write anything I wanted, what would I write? I decided that since I enjoy sci-fi with plenty of military action, “geopolitics,” and thriller trappings, that’s what I ought to focus on. So I came up with a take on the future that’s inspired by the Great Power rivalries of the late 19^th century and the dreadnought era, and a character that I could write some fun stories about (the aforementioned Sikander North). Valiant Dust, the first book in the series, should debut in 2017—it’s almost done now, but I need to do one last set of revisions for Tor.

As much as I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to write Forgotten Realms novels, it’s always been my goal to break out of the shared-world reservation and write my own stuff. So, as you might imagine, this is a very exciting bit of news for me. I’ll keep you posted on the progress!

Okay, on to the meat and potatoes of the blog post today: My ongoing look back at adventures I’ve worked on over the years.

#29: Lost Mine of Phandelver

About two years ago, I decided to part ways with Goblinworks and focus on Primeval Thule, my own writing, and freelancing work as the opportunity presented itself. (I liked Goblinworks just fine, but the 75-minute commute each way was stealing too much of my day.) Anyway, I sent a note to Chris Perkins at Wizards of the Coast to let him know I had some bandwidth to take on any work he might have, and it turns out Chris had just the right project: the adventure that would be included in the new D&D Starter Set for 5e. I’d worked on 5e for a few months right at the end of my time on-staff at WotC, so I was happy to dive in and pick it up again.

The opportunity to work on an adventure that appears early in an edition’s life cycle is both fun and challenging. It’s fun because you know that a lot of people are going to see it, and some of your work is going to wind up becoming a touchstone of shared experience across many thousands of D&D players. I wound up writing the second adventure in both 3e and 4e (those being Forge of Fury and Thunderspire Labyrinth), plus Reavers of Harkenwold in 4e Essentials Dungeon Master’s Kit. It’s cool to create starting towns and introduce monsters and villains that players might be seeing for the first time ever. The challenging part is that writing early in an edition—potentially before the core rulebooks are published—means that some things just haven’t been figured out yet. The encounter-building rules and treasure rules that would appear in the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide weren’t even close to finished when I worked on the 5e Starter Set.

The other challenging part was that Wizards of the Coast provided me a list of “make sure you include X” about as long as my arm. There were dozens of locales in that corner of the Sword Coast that WotC wanted to touch on, a bucket of old Realms lore, different types of dungeons, a mix of combat, exploration, and roleplaying . . . I kind of started to think of the mission statement as “write the kitchen sink adventure.” That daunted me a bit at first, but then I realized that it actually dovetailed nicely with the idea of a wide-open sandbox, which is probably the strongest and best example to give a new DM on how adventures should be put together. Plus, these days, new D&D players are almost certainly coming to the tabletop game after years of experience in World of Warcraft or console games featuring ideas like “quest hubs.” Creating a D&D adventure for beginners that used those expectations effectively made a lot of sense.

So, with that in mind, I looked through all the material WotC had dropped on my desk, and winnowed down the list of locales and elements to something I could fit in the space I had to work with. Borrowing a bit of Realmslore, I decided to “hide” the final dungeon (the mines of Phandelver proper) and make the finding of that dungeon the major story thread tying together the earlier pieces. As it turns out, the story of the Phandelver Pact, Phandalin, and that little era of the history of the North is actually quite confusing and contradictory in places, so I had to work pretty hard to present something that was not too deep in Realmslore for a casual FR fan to understand. In a perfect world I actually would have omitted a lot of that material, but fitting the new adventure into existing Realmslore was important to WotC (and me, too, to be honest).  I was also handcuffed a bit by things like the requirement to feature the banshee Agatha but not let her fight the PCs and making sure all the player factions got into the mix—nothing that was really onerous, just a bit more complicated and nitpicky than I would have liked.

When I was close to wrapping up the adventure, Chris Perkins asked me for a title suggestion. I just drew a blank. This was a kitchen-sink adventure, after all, and it was hard to figure out what it was *about.* The best I could come up with was something like “The Lost Mine,” but that felt super-generic. Since I couldn’t come up with a title hinting at the sort of activities or plots the heroes were facing or a clever twist on a well-known turn of phrase that would apply, I settled for adding a proper noun that would at least make the title distinctive. I thought the suggestion was weak and I figured WotC would brainstorm up a better one, but it stuck. So, there you have it: Lost Mine of Phandelver. Sorry if you don’t like the name.

Next Time: Primeval Thule!

Twenty-Eight Adventures, Part 23: Loch Finnere

Greetings again! I’m afraid I got caught up in a collision of Primeval Thule 5e deadlines and fell behind on my write-something-each-week resolution. The good news is that I seem to be mostly climbing on top of the pile again—I’ve got the 5e Primeval Thule Gamemaster’s Companion pretty much in hand, I’ve got Steve Winter’s Red Chains adventure for 5e Primeval Thule edited, and I’m digging in on my assignment for the Primeval Thule Player’s Companion. Plus, I think I’ve got two printers, one bindery, three freelance illustrators, and a freelance cartographer all pulling in the same direction, so things are slowly coming together. Finally, I tried out a change in the Ultimate Scheme play sequence last week that worked like a charm. It might be the change that takes Ultimate Scheme from being a good game to being a great game. We’ll be Kickstarting it after the holidays, aiming for a midsummer release in 2016. So get ready to get your sinister genius on!

For those of you living in the Cincinnati area, I’ll be out your way next week. I’m going to be a guest at AcadeCon, November 13^th to 15^th at Hueston Lodge. I’m going to run a couple of Thule games, run a couple of Ultimate Scheme games, and maybe even play a game or two if I can. I hope to see you there!

#28: Banshee of Loch Finnere

Next on my list is a little PDF adventure I wrote for the Accursed game from Melior Via: Banshee of Loch Finnere. This was something new for me on a couple of counts. First of all, it was the first thing I’d ever published outside of the TSR/WotC/Paizo family. Secondly, it was the first thing I’d written specifically for publication as a PDF. A number of things I worked on over the years were made available as PDFs after they were printed and distributed as physical products, but Banshee was intended for digital publication from the get-go. Finally, it was the first time I’d written for the Savage Worlds game system, one of the more successful and broadly published non-D&D RPGs out there.

My contribution to the Accursed setting came about because Melior Via happened to be Kickstarting their new game around the same time that me and my fellow Sasquatches were Kickstarting Primeval Thule (the first one, for Pathfinder, 4e, and 13^th Age). I’ve known Ross Watson of Melior Via for many years, and when he reached out to ask about some cross-promotion for Thule and Accursed, I was happy to oblige. The Accursed guys offered to serve as a stretch goal for our Primeval Thule Kickstarter, and we offered to return the favor by supporting the Accursed game. As it turned out, John Dunn of Melior Via wound up writing our Night of the Yellow Moon adventure for Thule. I, in turn, wrote Banshee of Loch Finnere for John and Ross.

In case you haven’t heard about Accursed before, it’s a dark fantasy setting in which evil has essentially won. The world is in the hands of a small number of powerful and terrifying witches, each of whom rules her own dark domain carved out of the defeated nations of the old world. The “heroes” of the setting are actually monsters who have turned against their mistresses—vampires, zombies, golems (Frankenstein monsters), and so on. It’s a nicely done world, a little reminiscent of the old Ravenloft setting from TSR. I started my work by reading through the Accursed files, and trying to wrap my head around the idea of what would make a good adventure in the setting.

Reading through the book, the part of the setting that really caught my eye was Caer Kainen. It’s got a great Gaelic/Black Cauldron feel to it, and I found myself thinking of Scottish ghost stories. I hadn’t worked on a horror-based ghost-story adventure in quite a while (the closest would be Night of the Vampire, Part 6 of my blog series). The first thing you need to figure out about a ghost story is, of course, who’s the ghost? Why is he or she haunting the living? And why is it important to stop him or her?

A number of years ago, I read a good book on writing by Orson Scott Card, and I remembered a bit of advice from that book: In any given setting, who’s in the most pain? Who needs things to change the most? That’s a great choice for a villain, or a protagonist. I realized that the story of Caer Kainen’s fall began with a terrible betrayal. The heroic king was seduced by the witch known as the Morrigan, and abandoned his wife and children. Later on, when the witch drew him completely into his doom, he slaughtered his family with his own hands. As bad as it was for the kingdom that the heroic king was lured into evil, the most tragic part in this play belonged to the betrayed wife and mother of murdered children. That would be someone with a reason to be angry and miserable in death, but she came to blame the wrong people for her tragic fate. After all, a ghost that hated the right people for the right reasons wouldn’t need stopping, would she? For this to be a tale of horror and betrayal, Queen Aideen’s vengeance had to be focused on the wrong victims—in this case, her own family, Clan Finnoul.

More than that I won’t say, because if you do wind up playing through this adventure, you’ll want to be surprised by the twists and turns. As far as I can tell, Banshee of Loch Finnere was well received. Even if you don’t play Savage Worlds, I think it would be easy enough to pick it up and use it in your game system of choice.

Next Time: Something that quite a lot of people have played through in the last year or so: Lost Mine of Phandelver!