About writing an AP, From Mr Pett:
'Blimmey that was hard.’
Writing a whole adventure path is tricky – very, very tricky - and those who do it all the time, James and Rob and all the lovely Paizo crew, deserve some sort of medal.
So why did I decide to write the Levee Adventure Path as part of the Blight city guide? Was I ill, mad or just masochistic? Probably. More importantly, how was it going to hold its own in such fine company and why would people support it? The end result is very pleasing, but there’ve been some tricky and dark moments on the way to completing Levee, the companion-piece to the Blight city guide and which forms part of the kickstarter book. I hope you don’t mind me sharing a few thoughts on this adventuring beast as she seems to have slithered beneath the oozing bulk of her kin the Blight city guide and been hidden.
First up, the Blight is at the dark and sweaty and gritty end of role-playing; friend or foe is never easy to determine, although being righteous amongst all the sin is something to really be proud of. There are lots of fantastic settings on the market, but to me, great though those settings are, they only really come to life when you walk the streets – when you and your friends take in the air, mingle with the locals and soak yourselves in the atmosphere of the place imagination has birthed. In short, when they have adventures.
For the Blight to truly come to life, she needed to be explored without bounds. So the Blight’s crooked sister Levee was conceived...
Levee is a 9 part AP taking PCs from 1st on to 10th level, where they’ll be attracting the attention of some – if not several – of the Blight’s more formidably unpleasant characters. This doesn’t mean that the AP is a short one, however, it runs to over 300,000 words – in fact as a draft there’s more AP than setting. When I started Levee with Chapter One – Hereafter – I decided that I’d like to keep the whole setting lower level, so the whole AP uses the slow advancement track. There are several reasons for this – first off the setting is low level – it’s almost impossible to get to high level without getting noticed and upsetting someone – or several someones. The second and more important is that lower level is more dangerous, death is a constant potential companion without cure, and to me dangerous is good. To give you a taster, to set out the claustrophobic angle I wanted in the third adventure – Sea’s End – set aboard a demented whaling vessel and her equally disturbing crew, it’s important that escapes are limited, if not impossible, from the vessel the adventure is largely set on.
The players must rely on their wits as much as their talents to survive.
Levee is an urban horror AP with plenty of twists and turns, and quite a number of moments where I hope you’ll all go ‘what?’ and doubt my sanity as much as I do.
I also love really well developed NPCs, and Levee is brimming with them, from the early foreshadowing of the BBEG (villain? – perhaps, perhaps not…) to the climax, which brings together all the threads and major NPCs of the AP into a final, potentially very twisted, ending. To give you a sample of that, Chapter 6 – the Susurrus Theatre - is very role-play driven, it needs to be as a foretaste to the carnage and fear of the next adventure in the series - My Benefactor. In this adventure, the PCs wander the Dark Theatre districts of the Artist’s Quarter, and come close (perhaps intimately and uncomfortably close) to some of her strange locals. This interaction is more relationship than just communication, so that as the AP comes to its climax in Utopia, the friends and enemies you’ve made are happy to put their lives on the line for you – or against you.
A good adventure, as James is always happy to point out, needs great monsters, and there are some new and horrible ones to interact with, particularly those birthed in Between, the crooked shadow that lurches alongside the city. A good adventure needs plenty of dice rolling as well as role-play, and there are many moments where a slaughter-without-dialogue approach is the best way; sometimes talking too much might just get you all into a heap more trouble.
So what is Levee? It’s the Twilight Zone meets Hammer Horror, it’s gothic meets Eraserhead, Alice and Frankenstein, Barker and Doyle - it lurches from one district in the city to the next, and sometimes back again. By the time you reach the climax (if you do) the Blight will be home, but by then you’ll have seen her swollen underbelly, her crooked corners, her selfish days and her inbred nights, in gruesome intimacy. Perhaps by then you may have grown to love her - or hate her.
And just to be clear again as Greg has mentioned, I’ve no intention of leaving her; if she does well and there is demand, there will be more and more adventures in the Blight. I love to walk her streets by night when the noise is clearer.
As we begin to drift in the Sargasso of our Kicktstarter – after an awesome first week, thank you - we need all the help of our friends on the esteemed Paizo boards, where I’ve had the privilege of slithering and hobbling for a long, long time now. Please do come along and check out the website for updates, whiz a question or five over these boards and I’ll be happy to help, but do support us if you can – it won’t happen without you.
Rich
