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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DragonDroid" data-source="post: 236233" data-attributes="member: 5512">Let me start with the following: If you're one of those who cooked up a quick idea within one week for WoTC's campaign setting contest, you'll vehemently disagree with me. I've also hidden my identity to avoid possible bias, for I want to see how far I go in the contest. Besides, it's too late - they already have my idea.Okay, I'm one of the many RPGers who (perhaps foolishly) submitted his campaign idea to Wizards of the Coast for possible consideration for a campaign setting. Now, after reading RangerWickett's reason for NOT submitting his idea, I kinda feel that I wish I hadn't sent that idea in the first place, in spite of the rewards that would come.I created my submitted idea in December of 1996 (it was actually for a video game, then a possible novel), and have constantly revised it for my game idea/novel, then as part of a campaign setting for D&D. Everyone thought that the ideas I used was quite interesting. I was writing three novels based on that world (two are about 50% finished, while the third is just an outline) when I heard about thisAt first, I thought that it was great. 120k and a guaranteed job? Hell, as a broke college student, I'm in! But after I sent it last Tuesday, I felt something I have never felt in my life: I might have sold my creative soul. Much of it, anyway, but something I put my heart in during my teen years.120,000 is a LOT of money: almost three years' worth of good income, in spite of taxes. Unfortunately it is not worth five and a half years of my vision. And it is worse if I only get a mere 20k for NOT being one of those selected. C'mon, 20,000 measly dollars for your RPGing soul? And you can't even use that work for anything you would write anymore! I could get 20K for two good books; if I get that far, odds are I have a good executable idea and can write a pretty good novel after a couple of attempts. And I would have fun with that as well.I'll admit it: I have not written a single published work of any sort. (I submitted a couple of short stories to a couple of fantasy magazines, but they were all rejected.) So, odds are that my first novel under WoTC, which would 99% of the time be accepted, will bomb terribly. And odds are, they'll hire people to pick up the slack when I could not, for better or for worse. Probably the latter. The other write-for-hire novelists, no matter how good they may be, can't write the book like how I would envision it. For example, if I created a world, then someone like R.A. Salvatore created a deviant character this side of a Drizzt clone and killed much I held dear in that world, I would feel VERY insulted unless the book bombed, or I got the rights to the world back immediately. And I would still not forgive WoTC for twisting what I wrote.Between what I wrote and what RangerWickett wrote, what do you think?</blockquote>

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