Six weeks after talking about regular play... In fairness, I spent November making daily D&D posts of a different kind. For NaNoWriMo, I wrote over 50,000 words for a novel with D&D at its heart. This is the fifth or sixth time I've tried writing for NaNoWriMo, and the first time I've successfully finished the 50,000 words. It was a great experience, and now I need to continue the novel, and convert it to an adventure campaign.
That was actually the seed behind the novel, the route I saw to completing the challenge. I have been playing D&D for over thirty years, and constantly working on campaigns and ideas during that time. We've been wanting to play a proper dragon quest for years, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to work on that. Usually we talk about dragons or giants until we decide to just plop down a map and a monster and play out the encounter. With the new edition, there are added rules for lairs that felt like they would be fun to incorporate. It also seemed important to build to a final encounter of that magnitude, rather than just skip the preliminaries.
Against this was the successful completion of an adventure that had seen our characters work from 1st level to 5th level over a series of connected adventures. I had gotten an idea, and fully worked out a campaign arc to cover it. I actually typed it all up with maps and tables and directions for running with the intent of using it as a sellable PDF adventure online. This worked out very nicely for the preparation and execution. For the dragon quest, I decided to work it out in the same way, but by telling it as a story of how I expected it to develop, I could succeed in the novel challenge as well.
It worked... for completing the story challenge. Now, I need to go back to game mode and convert the story into a campaign. Stories take a life of their own, and the novel became more about character development than game progression, but I think it serves well as a prelude to the adventure. I can set up an arc for our characters that shadows the novel's events. That is the beauty of the book, it fleshes out a background that I can set the adventure within, for locations, motivations, interacting groups, etc.
What I wasn't prepared for was the lack of focus that came once I finished November and stopped writing every day. I wanted to break from the story to get back into game mode, but it was a different discipline, and I struggled with the transition. This post is about getting back on track and redirecting energy into game development.
I started by looking at maps. I found one I like with a courtyard and stable areas, that also had a tower with stairs descending into a basement. I could tell at a glance that it was "abandoned", probably by force. But the suggestion of a basement left me thinking that something was left behind. They came looking for someone or something, and they carried them away, but missed their objective. It was still in the basement. While the characters investigate, the raiders return to recover it. The party takes defensive positions and holds off the attack. They find the artifact, and realize they are in a bigger story.
It's a start, and it's rough, but it works. I like the idea of the party defending a building instead of storming one for a change. In terms of the novel, I left the party crossing a moor with a powerful magic item in their care, looking for information from a wizard on the item's function. The plan was for them to get captured and carted off to a mining community near the dragon's lair. This allows me to switch those characters out for the party made up by our players. The novel party got captured (maybe their rescue can play into the story of the adventure later on), and the artifact got left behind.
Now our party has the item, and can pick up the quest by visiting the wizard and learning what they have found. I think in terms of daily dungeoneering, it is helpful to spend time each day working on the puzzle, even if it just fits one piece. This break for November meant distancing myself from the pieces, but gave me a nice framework. Maybe it was clearing the table for the puzzle, counting the pieces, turning them all face up, even setting the edge pieces together. It seemed external to building the puzzle, and at the end of the month it didn't look like much yet, but it let me put myself in a position to go forward and build an actual dragon quest that will be fully developed and detailed.
