My adventure in Dungeon magazine, "Massacre at Fort Dolor," was published a couple days ago at the online home of Dungeon magazine: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/duad/20080828.

I am very happy with how it turned out, especially the art. I am completely hopeless when it comes to the visual arts, so any piece of quality artistic work leaves me awed. I wish I could have done a better job with the maps, but the cartographer did a fine job of creating the maps exactly as I envisioned them.

It is scary to think back when I was writing this, as I turned in the text of the adventure BEFORE DDXP 2008, which was in February--practically 4 months before the 4e rules were released and several weeks before I had a final draft of the rules. If I were to rewrite the adventure now, I can envision many changes I would make. But that is how just about any creative process is, I think.

Anyway, I hope people get a chance to play it, DM it, and make it part of their D&D games. Greg Marks, one of the other Factionmasters for the Xen'drik Expeditions campaign, also has an adventure in Dungeon this month, and I am looking forward to seeing that as well.

smerwin29

Wow. A week has passed since GenCon, and I feel like I am still recovering. Even when there is no big excitement happening, GenCon is always draining. With LFR officially launching there this year, I feel like a ran a marathon.

I am not, by nature, an optimistic person. I tend to hear only the negative feedback and fret overly much. A few years ago at GenCon when I was one of the writers of the Mark of Heroes Special Event, three different people stopped my wife and I as we walked between the doorway and RPGA HQ to say how much fun they had DMing/playing the adventure. After we got to HQ, my wife said, "Isn't that great!?" I had no idea what she was talking about. As nice as getting compliments is, I literally forgot in 30 seconds that people has offered them. There is something to be said for never being satisfied and always striving to be better, but it does take a toll. Then I began to worry that I came across as ungrateful for the compliments. Just a small peek into an ugly psyche.

That anecdote just goes to illustrate how neurotic I can be about projects I am involved in. So GenCon this year was particularly nerve-wracking. Thankfully, Dave Christ and his team of HQ workers and DMs pulled off a great event. And Chris Tulach put in his 80+ hours per week to make sure anything he could control was ready. Sean Molley and Pieter Sleijpen, the other two Global Admins, were there as well, doing their usual crack work. Even the players, for the most part, were great and patient.

While that launch went better than I could have hoped, there was other great news as well. I found out my Dungeon adventure "Massacre at Fort Dolor" was going to publish this month. It was also revealed that the new Dungeon Delve book from WotC, which I worked on along with some other RPGA veteran writers, was going to hit the shelves in February 2009. And I was relieved to know that the adventure Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress (Adventure P3 in the series published by Wizards) would be released in March 2009. I was keeping mum on all these projects, and they all finally became public in one form or another, so now I can talk about them.

Now I can fret for the next 6 months about how they will be received . . . :-I

smerwin29

As a young kid playing D&D in my friend's basement in the late 70s and early 80s, I would leaf through the classic D&D adventures--Keep on the Borderlands, White Plume Mountain, Tomb of Horrors, and others--and dream that maybe someday I could create something similar. How cool would it be to create something that thousands--or maybe even tens of thousands of people--would test their characters' mettle against? How awesome to not just tell a story, but to create something that would allow others to live their own stories?

Through the intervening years and various editions of D&D, I continued to play and enjoy the hobby. The dream of creating an adventure for honest-to-goodness publication slowly began to take a backseat to other realities: jobs, chores, family, and the endless obligations of living in the 21st century. On a whim in 2001, I decided to look into playing in the RPGA's Living Greyhawk campaign with the release of 3rd Edition D&D. I connected with a wonderful group of players in my area, and we started playing. Since the RPGA runs on the back of volunteers, I eventually had the chance to offer my time to do a little work for my local Living Greyhawk triad, led by Sam Weiss. Far from glamorous, the work involved creating some NPCs and areas of Keoland where adaptable adventure could be set. The work was fun, and it rekindled that flame--the love of the game I grew up playing and the desire to give people the means to have the same kind of fun I got out of the game.

Step by step I got more involved. Volunteering my time to the Keoland Triad for various projects eventually led to a spot on the Triad editing adventures. The flame grew stronger. The Triad work led to writing adventures for Living Greyhawk and Living Kingdoms of Kalamar. The flame grew hotter. Campaigns came and went, and I continued to seek opportunities to learn as much as possible about the game and the craft of designing adventures.

In late 2007, I was selected by Chris Tulach to be one of the three Global Administrators in the Living Forgotten Realms campaign run by the RPGA. I couldn't have been more excited. I cannot even begin to count the number of hours I had put into various campaigns since 2001, mostly on a volunteer basis. I did it all because I wanted to get better at creating games, and I wanted people to have fun with characters and worlds and plots we all shared.

Then came the email. Andy Collins, RPG System Design & Development Manager for WotC R&D, emailed me. My LFR position meant I had to have some advance rules knowledge of 4e, and I assumed the email was an update for that. It wasn't. Someone was needed to help develop an adventure for R&D. That pre-teen kid I used to be, sitting on a stool in his friend's basement gripping a tattered copy of Tomb of Horrors, fell right off his seat.

Although I had a lot of projects going, I couldn't turn down an opportunity like that. And so started a new journey. Bruce Cordell, with whom I would be designing the adventure, emailed me the details. My wife asked who Bruce was, and as an answer I just started pointing out all the books on my shelf that he had worked on. There are many, and they all contain great work. I have to admit that just the act of pulling all those books off the shelf intimidated me. But I was up to the task, right? After all, I had written a few dozen or more adventures for the RPGA across many campaigns, and I had edited more than that. How much harder could it be?

Yeah, but this was 4th Edition, and I really didn't even have a final copy of the rules yet. My total experience of 4e adventure writing was one adventure for Dungeon magazine, and making notes for a couple of Living Forgotten Realms adventures. Ah well, I've never before let a total lack of knowledge get in my way, so I wrote down one of the first rules of writing that I learned on an index card next to me: "Always be finishing."

So now it is over, and I look back through my work notes and my personal journal on what I have learned. I know I can certainly churn out word count. I know that compared to 3rd Edition, writing adventures for 4th Edition certainly isn't going to be any more difficult, and parts of it are certainly much easier. Adding levels or a class template to monsters is so much easier. Working on creatures that would have had me banging my head on my desk in 3rd Edition were a breeze in 4th. I didn't use any math much more difficult than what my daughter does in 1st grade in changing monsters. I know that I love the new skill challenge format: any mechanic that can help a DM or adventure writer make better encounters by making them think inside a format is a good thing--precisely why sonnets make such great poetry. The methods of putting encounters together help make them more dynamic and potentially fun for the player. Oh, and I know that Bruce Cordell is a great person to work with: very knowledgeable and the most generous and supportive of collaborators.

Now comes the interminable wait until the adventure is released. It'll be worth every second.

smerwin29