Green Bard of the Twisted Wood PDF

Finally finished April's big dungeon, Green Bard of the Twisted Wood. It's 26 pages long, with five maps, six new monsters, a couple of my older monsters updated to my current monster making rules... and boy, did it kick my butt. Took the entire month, really. There were a couple times I tried to finish this over a weekend, realized I wouldn't be ready by Map Monday, and had to do a different map instead.

Lessons learned:

• I probably shouldn't do multi-map modules with a one-month deadline. Especially of those maps are all for a single sprawling level, with precisely positioned corridors. One theme of this map is that there is a choice between multiple paths, and those paths take you all around the perimeter of the level, twisting and intertwining around each other, so I had to check over and over to make sure I knew which path was which.
• I also had to make a tiny version of the entire dungeon, to use as a diagram showing where each map was in relation to the full dungeon. Lining everything up, copying, filling, and shrinking that diagram took a while.
• I used a new set of monster-maker tables I'm working on to stat up monsters for this adventure, and I think I need to do more work on it.
• I did learn a lot more about what I can do in Inkscape, including some tricks I used for the illustrations.

There's a lot more I could have (should have) done with formatting, and I did not run spell-check, so I'm sure there are typos galore. But at the moment, I'm kind of proud of it. I'm sure I'll be less pleased tomorrow.

Hag Pits of Viper Marsh PDF

I wasn’t finished with the PDF early enough to post it on the weekend, and for a while, I thought I wouldn’t be able to post it on Map Monday, either… but I did it. Hag Pits of Viper Marsh is now available for download.

It’s a short adventure featuring a one-page map that crosses three sublevels, paired with a one-page room key and a separate “monster reference table” so that you don’t have to flip pages back and forth. It’s in the “deep + terse” format, with several pages of background material explaining what’s going on in the dungeon and where things could lead if adventurers brave the lair of the ogre hag. The actual room descriptions, though, are very brief, allowing the GM to fill in as many details as desired.

Part of the delay in getting this done was because I was trying out a new layout program, LyX. I will need to practice with it much more before it will really generate PDFs I’d be proud of… but in the short term, it’s going to be good for quick tables.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
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(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.