Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rune" data-source="post: 7828069" data-attributes="member: 67">[spoiler=Commentary on my own R1M2 entry]I was kind of in a weird place with this set of ingredients. Kind of the reverse of where I usually find myself with these things, really. All of the ingredients kind of fell into place for me (in that, while some of the ingredients relied on alternate definitions and/or interpretations, they all were going to be directly relevant to the PCs). Sort of. I actually came up with three sets.First, I had a wuxia-themed set involving a drunken master devotee of the Monkey King, a woman pretending to swindle the Monkey King’s castle (located in the mountain he was trapped under, of course). In reality, her intent was to assassinate the Monkey King. Somehow. It looked like it could be fun. But there was no way I was going to be able to do it in 24 hours, nor 750 words.Next, I thought of a noir private investigation adventure. The first four ingredients fit in pretty well. A femme fatale. A red herring. A tryst. A speakeasy. The last two kind of worked, too: A boss who fancied himself an occultist. A raid by the feds. But they just weren’t feeling quite right and the boss, in particular, didn’t really have a good reason to be. They just weren’t quite gelling for me. I still felt pretty good about my ability to do a fun noir adventure, but I decided to try one more set.What if I had an overprotective mother in computer form? A fake threat? Assignation of alcohol-spiked resources by the computer? A subterranean vault under siege? A frivolously drunken philosopher/spiritual leader? Literal timelessness! It was all going to work.So, after the first few minutes, when I was figuring out what the entry was going to be, I didn’t have to put much energy (or time!) into making the ingredients work. I did ultimately go back and give some of the looser interpretations some alternate manifestations for the reader to latch onto. For instance, a fabricated clandestine meeting with a nonexistent Outsider (at 00:00, no less). A patsy in the form of the drunken philosopher.My problem, once I got into it, was that the adventure itself seemed lacking. With every draft, I was not only fighting the word count, but also trying to expand the roles of the PCs. Make it less linear. Give the PCs a reason to do it in the first place.As I developed her, it became clear that as MOTHER gaslighted the PCs, she was herself becoming more and more paranoid and undone (irrevocably?). Therein lay the adventure.How to get the adventurers involved? Don’t give them a choice! Complete freedom to do what they will, sure, but the PCs begin the adventure accused of a crime (that MOTHER actually did) and unable to acquire food (except through unsanctioned means). Yup, they’d have to do something.I knew early on that the adventure was going to need to be a one-shot (a gamble for usability, but at least it’s right in the subtitle). I did include a reason for the capsule to be underground (fueled by draining the planet’s depths), but no reason why space-faring wasn’t a better survival option. I had to be content with the idea that this version of humanity invented controlled time-dilation instead of space flight. A version of time-dilation that didn’t involve approaching the speed of light, apparently. It would have to do.I was pretty proud of the entry as I posted it, but that’s not inherently indicative of much. I’ve been proud of some clunkers in the moment of posting. Only time and perspective would tell if I had managed to expand the adventure well enough without cutting out too much context.Edited to add: One more thing that amused me as I was writing was the likelihood that there was initially a 49% chance the PCs wouldn’t be problematic for MOTHER (by her own calculations, anyway), but by taking measures to interfere with them, their response (which was certain to imperil the primary directives) became a certainty. [/spoiler][USER=50987]@CleverNickName[/USER], you really put up some tough competition, there. You may have had less time to work on it than you would have liked, but the crux of the adventure was very solid. I really didn’t have a feeling for which entry I thought would win. But I was already mentally writing words of congratulations to offer my opponent as I read the judgement.Good show!</blockquote>

Verification