Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="seasong" data-source="post: 536015" data-attributes="member: 5137">Regarding the six month time: If I had written out the adventure, and then started editting it for that time period, it would likely give me an unfair advantage. But I put together all elements, wrote it, and did a final quick edit in the space of about an hour. I also tried to avoid any previous tropes that I knew about.With that said, I'm generally pretty happy about Dark Feast as well <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />.The Stirges: AGH, how did I miss that!? One paragraph would have expanded that out so the PCs could fix the problem entirely. Okay, it's after the fact, but if anyone wants to run this:The Twin Snakes: Ach, I love 'em, myself. And no, they don't 'fit', other than helping fill out the carnival's feel. But I dearly do like them, yes I do.Hook #1: Actually, I may not have been clear... "making everything right" involves making the PCs disappear. As an alternative #1, you could have the carnival refuse to sell them the oil, and have the PCs try to steal it... and then get caught.Hook's #3 and #5: She would care because they are ignoring the lamps. That affects even a manticore. And in #5, it's the townsfolk who are asking the PCs for help - Shawn just passed the word that they were heroes, to set them up and get them out of Muhamara's hair.Lack of Combat: Yeah, that's my influence <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />. I don't see it as a weakness, personally. I ran the Up There scenario (from my first IronDM experience) with hardly any combat, and only one of them was even vaguely related to the core of the scenario. I prefer allowing the option to avoid combat entirely, while still providing plenty of things that the players could fight, if they wanted to.Creation Process:I wrote this on a caffeine buzz. The manticore running the circus was the very second thought I had - the first was to have the manticore be bound by the hypnosis ball, but I figured that was too obvious.Once I had the manticore as the ring leader, I had only to fill out the carnival. I came up with a few acts, from which Shawn and the Serpent Sisters came about... and then my muse suggested that perhaps they were latecomers, and the history of the carnival wrote itself. With a firm idea of how and why the carnival troupe was what it was, Muhamara filled out, and I decided that she was the reason for the 'better act' latecomers.I left off the stirges for practically the whole writing process. I just couldn't figure out how to fit them into the carnival acts, so I ignored them, focusing on ways to make the carnival a cool place for the PCs to get conned, gipped and robbed, and any fights challenging.When I did finally get around to the stirges, I simply couldn't come up with a good way to involve them in the carnival. So I switched tracks, and decided on an intersection scenario - one where there were two things that needed the players' attention at the same time. On the one hand, a thieving carnival; on the other, a swarm of blood-sucking little swamp monsters. The town grew out of the need to isolate the PCs (so they would stick around for the stirges), and I re-organized the scenario to make the focus seem to be on the stirges first, with the carnival (my best developed part) as the 'side show'.Of course, I promptly forgot to give the PCs a way to finish off the stirges <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.</blockquote>

Verification