Jeez, Radiating Gnome! I can't help but think there's gotta be
some way to cut down the length of that block of exposition...
Ha. Smartass. I deserved that.
Actually, I was feeling really smug when I started writing my entry - "I'm going to jump right in and skip over any sort of backstory -- it's not necessary" then I realized I'd just moved backstory into the damn exposition that Cringle gives. So, I figured, what the hell, label it what it is (exposition) and move on from there.
Had I been writing for HBO, someone would have been having sex while you read that part.
As I did last time, I wrote a reflection on writing the entry after I posted, but before seeing the judgement. Here's how that went:
[SBLOCK]
I found this batch of ingredients incredibly frustrating.
Weeping Willow and Sinking Ship seemed very cool, easy to tie together. Trust is vague, but that leaves a lot of room. Beginning of Time seems to force a time travel adventure, which I tend to dislike handful of reasons. And unlikely Appointment is a weird one open to a lot of interpretations.
But "nobody special". That one's pure evil.
I mean, think about it. Lots of our stories are about "everyman" and "John Q Public" -- at least at the start -- but those stories tend to be about how that person rises to the occasion, how they BECOME someone special -- which means they're not really nobody special at all, just someone who's special-ness hasn't been revealed yet.
So, how do you work with nobody special? How do you keep that someone not special at all -- they don't get a name,they don't become something special, they could be anyone?
F***ed if I know.
The other thing that struck me about this batch of ingredients was that it really didn't feel like a D&D adventure to me. Time, trees, sinking ships….these are all elements that really were tugging me in another direction.
So, I spent a bunch of time thinking about how to try to connect things. The Willow and beginning of time…. that seemed like a natural connection, somehow. I knew time travel was going to have to be part of it, but one thing I really did not want to do with this adventure is create one of my pet peeve Iron DM tropes -- the travelogue adventure through ingredients connected by magical travel.
What I mean is this -- it's not unusual to see an Iron DM entry that uses some sort of magical travel -- time travel, extra planar travel, whatever -- to string together three totally weird and unrelated scenes that just happen to cover the difficult ingredients for the contest. I felt the ingredients, with the influence of time travel, trying to pull me into that trope, setting up one sinking ship as one scene, one that led to trust somehow, another that led to a willow tree. Boom, dust off your hands, and you're done. Meh.
So, I started trying to force some more organic links between elements. Like I said, trees and time connect pretty well for me. The specific of the Weeping Willow put me onto Sorrow as a theme to play out. Of course, the Titanic fits that pretty well. The throwaway joke about Lovecraft's elder gods and tentacled horrors being blurry images of the willow tree amused me, and I left it in.
So… the tree is somehow at the beginning of time, and it's setting the tone for the age because it's a weeping willow. It's a tree of sorrow, and that's why we have troubles, blah blah blah. I'm on the hunt now.
The idea of trees and time brought me Santa Claus (Chris Cringle) as the servant of the Evergreen trees and their ideas about how time and reality should be ordered. At first, his intentions were good and sincere -- ending the age of sorrow would put another tree on top and things would be better for humanity.
Of course, that got stuck in my head pretty quickly -- like "nobody special", the idea of ending sorrow has all kinds of consequences when you lay it out. Without sorrow or need or pain or difficulty, we would never be driven to achieve or improve. So, the idea that the Age of Sorrow is the Age of Man got fleshed out a little bit.
And then, I was left looking at my desire to NOT have a travelogue. The players needed to go to one place, and somehow that one thing they did would change everything.
So, as I often do when I'm stuck, I start browsing around on Wikipedia. I've still got the "nobody special" thing rattling around, not sure what to do with, and I start looking at all the "special" people who died on the titanic. I start looking for someone special in the list of passengers whose survival might have been a very good thing -- someone whose good works ended because he or she died when the ship went down. Reading about Stead cemented that one for me. He was very special, and yet behaved very selflessly and honorably, and died for it.
He, of course, was just one man, but as a symbol, he could mean everything.
So, I started piecing things together.
Looking at my use of ingredients…..
unlikely appointment may be sort of weak, tacked on as the hook. I talked myself into settling for that -- you're never going to get everything just right, especially on a list of ingredients this hard.
Weeping willow is pretty good -- it's a tree, it's important, and it's specifically important as what it is -- a symbol of sorrow.
Sinking Ship is absolutely covered. Beginning of time is workable.
Trust -- the Pcs have to win Stead's trust twice. Could get dinged there.
Nobody Special -- that nobody is not really keyed in the adventure --it's anyone nameless, available on the scene. I could get dinged there, too, but I think I did well with it -- once you name and describe the person, they start to become special.
And, as a final note, lets talk for a minute about editing. My entry -- coming in under the word count limit -- didn't get the rigorous comb-through it usually gets, and you can totally see it. This, alone, should cost me dearly:
"They find the elderly Chinese woman sitting beneath the tree, crying. She greets them with a weak smile, and they turn and see the grove of pine trees is dead. Nearby, the grove of pine trees is a charred, dead wreck. There are signs of the wounds given to Cringle and his allies on the trees there. All of the trees there are clearly dead, and as the players watch they turn to ash and blow away. "
But, wait, there were dead trees? Where?[/SBLOCK]
Thanks to DeuceTraveller -- his excellent entry proves that all that stuff I couldn't see a good way to do was totally doable. By my entry had more Santa, I guess, and everyone loves Christmas.
-j