Authors/Publishers--Material that comes from your own games?

[MEG Hal]

Hey, feel free to go off on an aside. Seems I've hijacked my own thread several times already

I am a little surprised at your answer, though. I haven't picked up Bluffsides yet, but I seem to remember Interludes having a feel of "history" about it. Would have figured you guys romped through that a few times yourselves.

We really focused on the Bluffside "area" for a feel and identity BUT we made it modular for any mid-magic fabtasy setting so we did start from scratch, and we ran through it when it was made, but most of what ya see was developed specifically for TG!!!! This area really grew in our minds and was developed from the start very well by Jim Govreau, Curtis Bennett and myself, originally Bluffside was a stopping point of an adventure that Curtis wrote-----man did that change our lives!!!!!

 

[Walter_J]

So you did run through it after it was finished. That's cool. I should say it changed your lives! Interludes has been in rpgnow's best seller list since it came out! Some interlude! Yeeesh!

 

[HellHound]

The entirety of Thee Compleat Librum ov Gar'Udok's Necromatic Artes is from my own campaigns.

 

[Damien]

I know that many of Necromancer Games' products, particularly Rappan Athuk, come from years of intensive gameplay--except the lowest level (no one's survived that long in a Bill Webb Rappan Athuk campaign, apparently). Another upcoming adventure of theirs, The Sword of Air, is also a dungeon of long standing, and one that is apparently extremely deadly.

 

[jaldaen]

I'm a from scratch kinda guy when it comes to the work for hire jobs that I get from various d20 companies. Also strangely enough I have a talent for choosing topics that I know little about, but want to explore in depth... I do this mainly because:

1) It broadens my overall knowledge and coming from a Liberal Arts background I'm all about the jack of all trades master of nothing approach ;-)

2) I don't have to worry about getting overly attached to the work because I know that I'm only going to be writing the material and rarely running it in my own campaigns, which are usually more Monte Haulish/Death Marches ;-)

This is because when I write I am much more serious minded and interested in play balance and what would be interesting additions to the OGC...

3) Last but not least I hope to publish some of my personal stuff one day, probably through my own company or if I get the book I'm working on published through some sort of licensing agreement... ;-)

-Joseph Miller

 

[Steve Conan Trustrum]

The upcoming book, SpirosBlaak, is a mix of ideas that were brought to me by the publisher and my own ideas for a homebrew world that I had begun working on for my own use and web publication about two weeks before being approached to take on the project.

A lot of what made it into SpirosBlaak would have ended up in this homebrew setting, which I would have run my players through, but as I wrote the manuscript all of those ideas and game sessions that would have been just for fun instead turned into 6 months of playtesting a product in development. Given an adequate timeframe, I always try to playtest my material by incorporating it into my games or, just as frequently, I don't have to playtest the material as its something I've already been using for ages.

 

[DungeonKeeperUK]

I know most of what I write is not from past material in my own games, though it is often a base that I adapt into my writing...

The work I did for Bluffside was for th most new material, though alarge section of it (The Sewers) is somehting that my players have come across on more than one occasion in the past...

As for playtesting, I try to run everything by my players to see how it pans out, in fact I have 2 groups now... one very Role Playey and one very Rules intensive so I can get a view from two sides of the coin.
With Bluffside it was kind of playtested amongst the ThunderHead groups as it was written, it was very much a group effort with all writers commenting on each others work, it worked out real nice too..

 

[Keith Done]

Hi,

I revisit older campaign material and convention modules because they were so much fun. I then re-jig the material so that they can be played without any need for pre-determined characters and, during the process I may change things that reflect my change in writing style over the past 25 years (eg. a dungeon complex will now always be given a backhistory and logical reason why it exists).

Regards,

Keith

 

[der_kluge]

Nothing that I write comes from my game, because I'm not DM'ing right now, I'm playing! So, that affords me the time to write mainly.

I DM'ed for many, many years, although not as steady as some probably have. I've written a fair number of modules for Planescape, Al-Qadim, and the standard faire, but those would obviously be hard to port into D20 modules. But most are designed to be fairly generic as far as players are concerned. Who knows, maybe I'll resurrect some of my old stories and publish them, especially since Thunderhead is doing an Arabian-flavored Desert sourcebook.