So yes, I’m running my own Kickstarter for Big Trouble For A Little Blood & Visitors To Fairhaven. But today I’m going to talk a little about another Kickstarter campaign.
Journey Into The Madlands is a post-apoc setting book for Old School Essentials. The book is 8.5"x11" softcover with a black & white interior and will land at around 52 pages. These pages will contain:
A regional gazetteer and map highlighting key areas.
A bestiary of truly strange creatures
A focus on the Dread Forest, a peculiar location.
A concise adventure: Kaku Robotics Factory
A town filled will political tension to use as a springboard for adventure
Rules to run the game using Old School Essentials.
And why am I talking about it? Well, I wrote the adventure (Kaku Robot Factory) and the region known as The Dredd Forest. It was my first time writing an adventure in the Old School Essentials style and it taught me a lot. While it was easy to start writing in that style, I quickly learned that it can be hard to do it properly.
So I knew Jeff from listening to and guesting on his RPG Ramblings Podcast. But most folks will probably know him from the Gary’s Appendix series. So we’d known each other for a while when I saw him post on twitter, asking folks if they’d be interested in writing a post-apoc adventure. I think I was the first or second person to respond and then we began.
Jeff told me a bit about the setting, what kind of adventure he wanted, etc. The essence is that he wanted a short adventure that he could easily slot into a larger region. I think (hey, it was like 2 years ago when this began. I don’t remember everything!) that I gave him 2 adventure pitches and we went with a my robot factory idea. The robot factory adventure was originally something I had written as a possible pamphlet adventure for MCC. I’d use a free Dyson Logos map, existing monsters from the core rule book, and write each area very concisely since I was hoping to make it a pamphlet adventure. In the back of my mind, I was allowing for it to become a 4 or 6 page section of a zine if I couldn’t get the word count low enough, but that was the original goal. At that point, the adventure was titled “Cold Oiled Killers” and was about a group of Morticon-66s. These assassin droids travels across the wasteland of Terra A.D. but came back to this central location to perform self-maintenance and receive new orders. I had some Gene Police connections here where they’d found this facility, reprogrammed and reactivated the assassin droids. The Morticons were patrolling the nearby area and killing non pure strain humans, which was stopping a lot of trade and travel. The PCs could destroy/deactivate all the robots or reprogram them, but subtle Gene Police coding meant they’d likely revert to their killer ways.
But I had to change things to make it work for Jeff’s needs. Plus, he wanted new creature stat blocks so I couldn’t just reference MCC creatures anymore. The assassin droid facility became a droid factory where the droids could be programmed or specific jobs. The Gene Police were removed and a facility AI now controlled the droids. Plus, the map changed. Jeff wanted to commission an original map so I drew a sketch of a map that had 3 possible entrances to the facility and multiple ways around, even though it only has about 12 keyed areas. Creating a new map allowed me to rethink how information would be presented to the PCs in most circumstances.
So writing in the OSE format proved a little tougher than I thought. As with most things, it’s easy to do it poorly but hard to do it well. I looked at some notable adventures from that product line such as Halls of the Blood King and Winter’s Daughter. The OSE room description format is basically this:
Descriptive Room Name
Obvious thing the PCs see (further detail that they can uncover by interaction that is still written using player facing terminology)
sub-bullet point with detail about something like 1-in-6 chance of thing occurring. This can be written with GM facing terminology.
Important thing in the room: Describe to the GM what the situation is with a monster or something like that. This section is for things that just require more length than is conducive to the bullet point format.
It took several revisions. I was doing things like putting judge facing information within the parentheses. For example:
Fungal biomass covering all surfaces (spilling from the fridge).
became
Fungal mold covering all surfaces (spilling from the fridge).
Jeff did some of the final edits to get it where it needed to be and I’m grateful for that. When you are choosing to use fewer words to describe something, each word choice becomes more important.
Later, LIKE A YEAR LATER, he contacted me asking if I’d like to write the Dredd Forest, which became the region that the factory is placed within. He’d written a couple brief paragraphs describing what he thought it’d be like. I took a few days to brainstorm some ideas and wrote down different elements that I thought would be fun to include. Then I narrowed those down to what I’d prefer to write about and what I thought might best fit with the setting’s tone. Then we had a video call and discussed the ideas to further narrow down the design goal.
In the end, The Dredd Forest became a place where coal mines burned forever. Malfunctioning Kaku droids, programmed to put out these dangerous fires/ mine coal, continued to ineffectively work while other Kaku droids hunted them down, as they former group was long overdue to return to the facility. I wrote in a random environmental hazard table and some more setting info. In the end, Jeff said it was very different from what he’d originally thought, but that he really dug it. And that’s the beauty of collaboration.
Hope y’all enjoyed the overview of my work on Journey Into The Madlands! If it sounds like your jam, go back it!
What’s your preferred style of post-apoc gaming? More grounded or more gonzo?
What else is going on?
Big Trouble For A Little Blood
This campaign is live! Two new level 2 and level 3 new adventures for Weird Frontiers, and a new zine for Weird Heroes of Public Access (WHPA13).
MURDER HOUSE! - A Level 0 DCC Horror Adventure
Night falls like a scream over Ives House as the guests arrive. Do make yourself comfortable, the will reading is about to begin...