Into the Feywild...

Well I've been churning away at making the campaign setting I've been talking about for a little while now. It has been slow going for a few reasons. The main thing is that, in my experience, writing adventures soaks up a lot of creative juices and poses a lot of problems for the DM to have to some to terms with as it develops.

You sit down and furiously type up an idea you have for the adventure or for a portion of the setting or for an NPC and you sit back and think it looks good. Then you, you know, go about your life as per usual. Working, eating, sleeping, surfing the internet, chores, family stuff, that sort of thing. And during those times you com up with new inspirations so you write those down too. Finally you begin to reach critical mass where the pile of random ideas you've been dreaming up starts to coalesce into the basic outline of an adventure or campaign.

Overjoyed you go over your notes and start to stich things together. Only to find that many things don't go with one another and that what you initially wrote down isn't what it transformed into in your head two weeks later when you came up with something to go with that. Now the bits don't match.

So you begin to edit out the stuff you don't like and keep the stuff you do. You kneed this all together and then let it rise for a bit then come back and keep working ingredients into it and kneading it down again and again, adding more here or there until finally the core of the adventure comes into being. Unchanging, this will act as the skeletal system of your overall adventure. Attaching all the bits that make the skeleton move and function properly is the next step.

So you brainstorm particular areas of your adventure as they interest you and the details make it begin to come alive.

And change it again, of course.

This whole process continues for a while. You have to make sure you have all the right elements to be able to run the thing behind the screens. Which is much less writing than having to, say, write everything all out like if you were selling the adventure, thankfully.

After a long while you complete enough areas that you feel confident enough to begin statting out portions of it to be ready to run. Creating encounters and monsters, second guessing the difficulty of encounters based on your group's capabilities as players and based on whether or no this or that monster or NPC you've never run before is up to snuff for their level and role. Sometimes they aren't.

I'm not to the statting out portion yet. I'm still creating and filling in certain major blanks. But many major portions of the adventure are knitting together nicely. I've written maybe 14k words of notes on it so far with maybe only half of that salvageable because previous writings were later changed to make things mesh together better.

The meshing is what takes the time. It's one of those things that sleeping on is the only way it helps. You run into a roadblock and give yourself a few days to think on it and presto a solution presents itself.

So far this is going well and Im very much enjoying developing this much detail for the adventure. I want to give the PCs plenty of leeway for total adventure freedom within this setting and so far so good.

I'd tell you all more about the setting but I don't want to give anything away just yet. I will say, however, that I have decided on a way to utilize magic items in the plot a little better. Let me explain: in 4e magic items need to be acquired to have an appropriate amount of power for your level s those items go without saying. But other items - quest items - should break the rules a bit and be all about NPC interaction rather than stat boosting. Recovering these items here or there in the course of the adventure gives the PCs more tools to deal with NPC and can change some NPC reactions to the PCs if the PCs play their cards right. So I'm excited about this idea so far and how it will fit in to the overall adventure.

Anyhow I haven't forgotten abou this blog but it's necessary for me to remain in the kitchen cooking this baby up for a while longer. Plus I want my players to get the first reveal at the table and not in this blog. Hopefully it meets with a good reception in the end. We shall see.