"Going Down The Road To Hell!" Is Announced!

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Yes, yes, I'm engaging in some bold self-promotion for "Going Down The Road To Hell--Part I"--the first module in a trilogy of modules that I have written, being published by NATURAL 20 PRESS! Whoo-Hoo! Here's a brief teaser!--

____________________________________________________“Going Down The Road To Hell!”

Carradain—An ancient Elf kingdom that has stood strong and proud against the forces of darkness since the world was young—now dances precariously on the edge of disaster! The gibbering mouth of the abyss eagerly awaits to swallow the righteous elves with a storm of chaos and death! Lust, Murder, Rape, and Adultery have infiltrated the glittering, majestic realm of elves, and chew away at the kingdom’s heart like maggots to a corpse!

Prince Naythor—one of the greatest champions of the age—now serves the Dark Gods as a powerful Vampire Lord! Prince Naythor has raised his fist in rebellion against his father, the King of Carradain. With rebellion unleashed, Prince Naythor has kidnapped Enderathar, the Royal Unicorn, Princess Alleryn, and her royal entourage! The loss of the Royal Unicorn and the greatly favoured Princess Alleryn will surely mean the end of the Elf-King’s reign, and may unleash the forces of Chaos and War that will so cripple the Kingdom of Carradain as to make it ripe for conquest by the forces of Darkness!

The quest to vanquish the evil Prince Naythor leads to a strange realm where a righteous human empire marches with millions of ferocious legionaires into a dark, hellish realm ruled by a mighty Vampire King. Across blasted landscapes of eldritch cities, teeming with treacherous masses who have yet to kneel to the rule of the righteous Detheran Empire, bizarre life forms, and natural laws twisted by the power of the Dark Gods, the heroes journey through awesome sieges of millions of Beastmen and Undead warriors, gibbering monsters, and the struggling legionaires, seeking to defeat the tide of evil. It is through this orgy of blood and fire that the heroes must travel, searching through an ancient, enchanted forest, to find the great stronghold—where the evil Prince Naythor awaits! Only heroes of valor and righteousness will be able to tell if they are going down the road to hell and eternal damnation—or the road to exaltation and glory!

“Going Down The Road To Hell!” is an epic-scale module suited for 12 characters of 20th level, and adaptable to any campaign! Guidelines are included for smaller and larger groups. Epic adventure awaits!
____________________________________________________

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[Frostmarrow]

Good job, SHARK! I've read about your campaign before and I think you've nailed the epic feel. Millions of ferocious legionaires has a nice ring to it... From marching around in steel armor!

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hi SHARK!

Good luck with everything; nice to see someone tackling epic-level adventuring for a change!

Sounds really interesting too; especially the "bizarre life forms" bit!

 

[Crothian]

This sounds excellent. Any ETA, SHARK?

 

[Horacio]

Congratulations, SHARK, you deserve it!

 

[Leopold]

An epic scale module!! Consider it already sold to me SHARK!

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Filth hounds of hades, does this sound cool!

I'll be getting a copy, and I'm not going to tell my friends a word... This sounds like exactly the kind of adventure that I can run after my Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil-Banewarrens-Rod of Seven Parts-Necropolis-Return to the Tomb of Horrors campaign is done! (that is, if any PC's are left alive... MUHUHAHAHAHAAA....)

Man... SHARK... Michael Morris... the untapped talent on this board astounds me...

 

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Well, thankyou my friends! My module is very interesting, I think, and offers a lot of different options. I hope everyone likes it!

I must say though, from a design perspective, it's always kinda difficult, in the sense that well, on one hand, you want to have encounters and such flow nicely, and be rational, with lots of detail. Then again, though, especially with high-level characters, it's difficult to design a whole bunch of things, with too much detail, because the player-characters have so many options, they might entirely ignore this or that, or never go over here and do this, or they may not "pick up" on certain plot threads, and therefore miss out entirely on experiencing different encounters, as they were written, because the players didn't put the focus or the importance on that particular aspect. Result: The designer can at times, include encounters and plot threads that become entirely irrelevant, and have thus proven to be an utter waste of time, effort, and research.

I know sometimes I felt that I was adding encounters and details that may prove to be irrelevant. I attempted to approach the module design with somewhat of a "free-form" approach, trusting that, to a good degree, the Game Master must in fact do a lot of the set up and integration for the module to flow properly, "as written"--you see what I'm saying? To eschew a more "free-form" approach seems to me, to be too heavily scripted, and can "feel" like railroading, you know?

For example--with many different NPC's, at these levels, I'm not sure that providing pages and pages of specific directions and strategies is very useful, because, as very intelligent characters, they will adapt different plans quickly to whatever the player-characters do--thus making all those pages of directions and strategies irrelevant. In addition, I think individual Game Masters can select far more interesting spells, and deploy them in ways far better than any straight-jacketed way that I, as the designer, might attempt to provide. Personally, I usually end up tweaking and adapting villains strategies, spells, and so on all the time for my own groups, because my own groups seldom approach things in the way that I see most modules have been designed for them to do so--or at least the assumptions that some game designers seem to think a group of player-characters will respond, or approach a problem.

Does that make any sense?

I hope that the approach I have taken will be recieved well, as my desire is to build in, right from the start, maximum flexibility and freedom on the Game Master's part, as well as the player-characters.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[RangerWickett]

Man... SHARK... Michael Morris... the untapped talent on this board astounds me...

Yes, there's lots of untapped talent. Well, some of the people on this board have already been tapped. And then again, some are talentless.

The adventure was so big when we received the rough draft that we had to break it into three parts. So its release will be staggered over several months, starting this December.

And now, to poke fun at Shark. He may be a little too epic. when I got his list of suggested illustrations for the book, I showed them to J.L. Jones, one of the artists we've used before on Nat20 books.

Her response was "How big is this book?"

I grinned. "Probably about 200 pages."

She shook her head. "No, how big are the pages? Look at this one," and she points at one, "I couldn't fit this onto a two-page spread. There's too much!"

It will be a fun book to finally release, but the process of laying it out and illustrating it will be daunting.

 

[kenjib]

It sounds like something to really bring those drab epic levels to life! Good luck with your module.