Worldwide Adventure Writing Month

[freyar]

Ok, probably many people here already know about this, but...

June is Worldwide Adventure Writing Month (or WoAdWriMo for short), created by Jeff Rients (who I think I've seen post here from time to time), with forum and storage hosting at Treasure Tables. The idea is to write a "full-length," or 32+ page, adventure (for any system) to share with the rest of the world. My impression is that the page count is not a big deal, since it can include designer's notes, but the intent is to get some adventures out there for time-strapped GMs to use. There are a number of adventure-writing resources linked on both the WoAdWriMo site and Treasure Tables, so there's support if this is your first time writing. Also, MythWeavers will convert your adventure for their PBP forums.

FWIW, this seems to me like a reasonable opportunity to get some of your stuff noticed, whether you want to promote your homebrew setting or even some OGC material from a 3rd party publisher that you really admire.

And, from my own purely selfish perspective, I think it'd be fantastic to see what kind of adventures the creative people at EN World run, so go ahead and write up one of your old adventures if you have one lying around!

I'll try to post when I see the first adventures appearing, too.

 

[delericho]

Hmm, when I first heard about this I thought it was a great idea, and fully intended to take part. Now it's upon us, I'm not so sure. Will I have the time to generate that sort of length of text?

Guess we'll see in 29 days.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hey, if the writers for WotBS can pump out an adventure in a month, we can!

BRB, gone writing.

 

[WeaveWarden]

The WoAdWriMo (or "WARM") site also has a pile of encouragement and ideas to help people get through the month. The TreasureTables site, which is helping with hosting, also recently released a big ol' list of adventure-writing resources.

If you think about it, after you factor in maps, stat-blocks, tables, and so forth, the primary text of the adventure won't actually have to be terribly long. Jeff Rients did some back-of-the-napkin calculations for a classic D&D adventure and it didn't look so bad.

Just trying to be encouraging (for myself and all the other writers).

 

[freyar]

WeaveWarden, thanks for the bump and the encouragement! I'm also going to try to put something together myself...

 

[Mark CMG]

Too busy to participate personally by I encourage the sentiment, as well!

 

[delericho]

Well, sorry to say that's me formally out.

I had spent the last few days assembling ideas, notes, plots and settings with a view to doing WoAdWriMo, and todays sat down to start the actual writing. Sadly, it has proven an absolute disaster.

I recently purchased a new laptop, and found that Windows Vista was incompatible with my version of Office. So, I upgraded to the latest version. I took one look at the new interface and immediately searched for the "Classic View", only to find there wasn't one. "Okay," I thought, "I'll manage."

Today was the first time I used the tool in anger, and have just found that I can't do anything with it. None of the commands are where they should be, nothing works quite right, and everything just takes far too long. It's incredibly frustrating - I was really good with the old Word, having spent a lot of time and effort learning to use it. Microsoft have taken all that hard-won experience and flushed it.

(And another impressive achievement by Microsoft - prior to today I wasn't a Microsoft hater. It takes a really special type of interface to change that so quickly.)

 

[Emirikol]

Oh, this looks fun. I've been dying to elaborate on my Snakes onf Flying Carpet scenario

Speaking of...32 pages is actually pretty lengthy. YOu can whip up most scnearios, with statblocks in 10-12 pages. What the heck you goinna do with the other 20 pages...I guess I could call WOTC and see how they take a 10 page scenario and fluff it up to 32 LAUGH!


jh

 

[delericho]

I guess I could call WOTC and see how they take a 10 page scenario and fluff it up to 32 LAUGH!

Use the Delve format?

 

[freyar]

Oh, this looks fun. I've been dying to elaborate on my Snakes onf Flying Carpet scenario

Speaking of...32 pages is actually pretty lengthy. YOu can whip up most scnearios, with statblocks in 10-12 pages. What the heck you goinna do with the other 20 pages...I guess I could call WOTC and see how they take a 10 page scenario and fluff it up to 32 LAUGH!

What does it say about our hobby when I don't know whether Snakes on Flying Carpets is a joke or not?

As far as length goes, the sponsors have suggested that you could even have "designer commentary" as filler, if you so choose. It's pretty informal, I guess. But you can throw in maps, etc, which would take up some more space. I'm putting in some OGL critters (from the CC) and finding that a new style statblock/description can give 1-2 pages each. There are some OGL magic items I have my eye on, also, which will also get a similar treatment.

delericho, this might be kind of late if you had to pay to upgrade, but I'd suggest Open Office, a free office suite which is compatible with MS Office documents. (Well, I don't know about Office 2007 or whatever the new version is, but it works with older versions.) Open Office claims to run on any windows starting with win98, and my wife tells me that the layout for the word processor is pretty similar to Word 2003.

As for myself, I'm hoping to get a chunk written in the next week --- I'm taking a holiday from work.