Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Editing Micro-Adventures

I just released my 15th micro-adventure, Chambers Island over on my Patreon page.  A little while back I asked my patrons if there was a particular theme they wanted to see.  One said a swamp adventure with Cthulhu influences.  Love that idea.  I originally mapped out an entire swamp area.  It was too big for a micro-adventure, but thought I would do a second micro-sandbox, but it became too long.  I got jammed up.  Had too many ideas I was trying to fit in. 

So I drew the swamp island above.  I had this visual of the players seeing the island from the distance.  A crumbling tower with out buildings in various states of collapsing.  Channeling a little Apocalypse Now with corpses and body parts hanging from the trees.  But as I started writing, it was obvious it wasn't going to fit.  Grrr. 

Some projects just beg for a larger canvas.  This one did.  I'm not sure if I did the adventure a disservice by forcing into my micro-adventure space.  I plan on returning to it again and flesh it out into a full-fledge swamp hex crawl.  Even as big and bad a Cthulhu is, he cannot survive the power of the edit.

Instead what I tried to develop was a mix of subtle and in your face references of The One Who Shall Not Be Named.  Like with most micro-adventures I hope to have a few ideas planted within that the GM can run with.

There is a lot of give and take.  While I have to sacrifice some of my ideas, I hope the brevity of the adventures makes it easier for a GM to pickup and play.  And that is after all the reason I started these.  I wanted to make the adventure accessible with minimal clutter.  Ideas are good, but they take space to explain.  I try to stick with one idea and give hints of things beyond not said.

Anyway, Chambers Island is free for anyone to download.  Just hit the link above.  You'll get the PDF of the adventure, a detailed GM map and a blank players map.

Enjoy.   

2 comments:

  1. Very nice. I love that map (in a very real and legally binding sense).

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  2. I really like the way the buildings came out on that map. Very cool.

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