It might not surprise you, dear reader familiar with RPG fandom, that I've got a lot of unfinished projects in my virtual drawer. There's a reason we've got so many "retroclones" and "heartbreakers", it's both easy to find faults and to publish a complete replacement. Back in the days you might've put your D&D house rules on the fledgling internet as a Word document, these days you'll grab some public domain art and post your B/X variant. This time with the proper initiative rules…
Never mind that we all run–or want to run–adventures, and could, maybe even should publish them. So there's a plethora of products to indie-publish, or at least put on some web site.
But what to pick?
This is why I like the "game jams" that occasionally happen on troubled platform itch.io. They work well as a writing prompt, where you can work your way up to the projects you really want to do, testing your design, writing and graphics skills along the way.
Recently I joined the Appendix N Jam, named after the famous set of notes in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide by Gary Gygax where he listed his fantasy and sci-fi inspirations. I'm of the opinion that he mostly failed emulating that, but I won't complain about what was created instead (well, apart from clerics).
This jam had the them of fake inspirations as a kind of common theme to write short fantasy and sci-fi adventures for any game you liked. You got assigned a random grandiose title like "Invaders of Atlantis" or "The Null Conclave" and had to work from that.
Now, the main page of the jam had a lot of fake book covers for those works of alternate pulp history, and that's where my trouble started…
Covering Up
I joined a bit late in the duration, and after a few hours my assigned title was added to the Google Sheet of grandiloquence: "The Fisher's Haunt".
Like, their favorite pub?
Well, I guessed this was more about ghosts, and I'm not too much into that or most horror-adjacent topics. So I went to online image searching for inspiration. Lo and behold, you get a lot of Chinese and Japanese fairy tales with that, all with the proper art, so I decided to make that my core idea: Something, something, Asian ghost story.
And then I forgot completely about any setting or adventure elements and worked on a fake cover. Part of this jam-venture was getting more into the Affinity line of tools, basically a way cheaper and simpler version than the Adobe stalwarts like Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. And it didn't hurt that the jam creators published some assets to help here. Roughed up covers, fake price stickers…
My first attempt looked like a cheap paperback novel:
Okay, but not really scary.
My next attempt looked like a cheap issue of horror anthology comics, and I liked that a lot better.
This only took me a few days of playing around with artificial scratches, color correction, combining shapes and picking fonts. * sigh *
But what to put inside there? Time was running out, I had a few weekend hours and not even two weeks until the jam was ending.
Definitely not enough time to write and playtest a decent enough adventure, to be perfectly fair. When I don't have time for that, whether it's for something like this or my local groups, I have a few options. Either focus on a very limited set of locations/rooms, which is somewhat popular, or basically stop at the outline stage. Create locations, add some monsters and notes, and leave a lot in the hand of the person running this. I chose the later, along with a more involved and space-filling graphic design.
When I was looking for ideas, I thought what part of the original AD&D game was reflected in my fake Appendix N entry. As this had an Asian theme, I thought about some of the special abilities of the monk – speaking with animals and plants etc.; Also, I pictured the adventure reflecting the end of a more investigative scenario, where once the secret was uncovered, our intrepid heroes (maybe a saintly priest and his servant?) ran through a maze-like outdoor wilderness against the time to save a man's soul. This maze being one of the prototypes for dungeons, of course.
Not a lot of that ended in the final product, as I was too pressed for space, and the new cover pointed more towards a visual ghost story than the last chapter of a Detective Dee novelette.
But I wanted to create an "outdoor dungeon", and so I did.
I wrote a bit about hex map creation, but this time I did it all within a graphical application, no hex mapper. It's a small map, so that's not a big deal. Affinity Designer has a hex shape tool, copying and pasting a few of those together, then setting the outline to a brush stroke created a good basis.
Then I went for one of my favorite RPG related web sites: K.M. Alexander's mapping resource. He's a book author (buy them to say thanks!), and in his spare time he takes old maps, cuts out elements from them and converts them to Photoshop brushes. Affinity can use those, too, so I grabbed one of the Japanese brush sets and tried my best. I ended up with this dungeon-like structure, where rocks and trees form "walls". Not impenetrable, but it's easier to travel along the existing paths and open spaces. The random encounter tables feature some ghosts, and I would hope the players have ways to counter them. But if all you've got is a few +1 weapons and a tired cleric, that might not be enough, so I added some supernatural help - the shrine and the place where a saint was turned to stone can help you, as does one random encounter where you meet the retainers of the lord you're trying to help.
Ah, yes, the new core story: You're out to kill or appease an angry ghost who traded a lot of gold to a fisherman for the opportunity to live in his body after a certain time. The fisher turned lord doesn't like this, of course. He offers a huge reward to any who help him out.
After fleshing out those 7 locations, the main portion of the map was a comfortable two-page spread.
I quite liked the locations and what fills them, but… Well, I'll talk about my complaints at the end of this entry.
On the last of the four pages alloted, I put some semi-diegetic notes of some kids playing this adventure, forming the encounter tables and mechanics, plus the monster stats. This looked a bit more hand-drawn and annotated, but in the final revision I removed most of that. It was a bit too much.
Yes, it's a bit twee.
Learnings
Today the jam ends, and I'm quite content with my… content. I learned a lot about using Affinity Designer and Publisher. They both have their limits, especially the latter. I'm more used to the "business" side of DTP applications, creating software documentation and automated catalog creation, and Publisher is very sparse when it comes to automating things.
But so I got to play around more with the graphical, manual side, and the visual theme of the jam was a great fit for that.
Regrets, I've got a few, let's mention them:
- One or two rounds of playtesting this would've improved things greatly.
- This is a rather "driven" adventure, not going in a dungeon because it's there, playing to find out. I don't like that too much, especially when there's little space for GM hints and exposition.
- Without some graphical elements, there would've been more space for this. But that wouldn't have created the time necessary, and I was short on that in the last few days. Entering the jam a week or two earlier would've resulted in a different adventure.
- Providing more neat shortcuts and scenery for monks would've been great. It boiled down to a few notes on the last page, given more time and space the animal and plant population of this miserable wilderness maze could've contributed a lot to both the mood and the adventure. This is a fairy tale, so the foxes and badgers could talk to the PCs on their own, the Speak with Animals would then work fine as just getting more info and help out of it. More etiquette than mere translation.
I'm looking forward to honing my skills here. I've already got two more jams to plan for
- The One Page RPG Jam, where I will create a short sci-fi themed adventure/setting that chimes with the theme.
- The Indie Adventure Jam, where I will pick a more unknown game. Actually, I'll write a few bits and pieces of this game as my next few blog posts…
Once those are down, I'm ready for some larger projects of my own.
For the full game, just visit my itch.io page:
