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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 5633576" data-attributes="member: 3192">Not the result I was aiming for, but I didn’t really fulfill my part.  Thank you to the judges for reviewing. I see the contest a little like a contract where they put forth effort to analyze entries for the participants benefit, only this time I didn’t hold up my end of the deal. I appreciate your giving feedback in spite of this.  Thanks to Waylander too for making that possible. You deserve the win, best of luck in the championship.The rest is a drawn out examination of my entry for those interested.[sblock]My take on high level adventures is everything is bigger in scope. The dungeon, monsters, magic items, spells, etc., all are vastly more challenging for the players. In-game time typically passes more quickly, travel extends farther and is faster, and enemy’s henchmen forces are bigger too.  What I posted was mostly a starting situation and background with this scope, but didn’t include all the meat needed in the ongoing scenarios. More detailed if/thens for potential conflicts and future timelines didn’t make it in.  This was partly time-related, but the word count really hit me this go around too.  If everything was smaller, it might have looked more like a traditional location-based adventure with goals, knowledge, and timelines for the major NPCs.  But, from my point of view, high level adventurers do tend to look more like regional campaign locations, but without lack of future planning. One thing that may have led to confusion was a major screw up with the PC level requirements.  This is 7th-8th in my house rules where levels are all equal (lvl 1 PCs vs lvl 1 regions, treasure, monsters, etc.) AD&D has a system I've yet to understand. It’s from DMG p174 where a level 8 "very old" blue dragon covers 7th to 16th dungeon levels, which I take as PC levels too. So this is more a 10th-12th level adventure and right in line for stronghold play.Ingredients: When I saw institutionalization I couldn't pass up how this is a major element of high level play. For me, city-states and baronies are different power levels of strongholds PCs create or conquer. A likely possibility was the PCs overthrowing the beginning draconic government structure and gaining loyal citizens through trial and error from instituting their own structures. Sticking their authority in the hooks made this most of the adventure. What I was worried about was if the rest of it would be ancillary to this major element of play.  Why a dragon? I don’t know. I couldn’t answer that one. I guess because D&D players want to engage in the machinations of dealing with one at some point. He’s disrespected in the city, but wants his “treasure” back for easy control again. It's a major motivation. Plus, in the end, he's still going to cheat the PCs unless they ditch the game he's playing with them.  The Lost ingredient as rulership against multiple enemy factions didn’t feel direct enough to me to qualify, so I was aiming at the initial navigation of the major NPCs and factions merging into a more traditional overland search where retaining spatial orientation is a factor. Sslaritha is a witchdoctor per DMG p40, but retains little witchy-ness per se. A more traditional witch is likely a Druidess, but Druids, like most AD&D sub-classes, are very setting specific. This comes into never having reached a final stage where I usually focus on flavorful descriptions and names using evocative language inspired from the design - kind of how authors title a work at its end. Also Sslaritha’s a lord because she holds regional control and engages in stronghold rulership. I was thinking of playing on parthenogenesis for the gender duality I read into witchlord, but dropped it early on as a nuance taking too much time to make work.The breeding ground was supposed to be ground because the basilisk didn’t care for doing such in water as originally attempted. The blinding of the creature was for easy handling once finally found by Sslaritha, thus waking the dragon due to its bond to it.  Neither of these elements made it into the final entry. Rereading it, the timeline of the background away from the dragon's lair is off and confusing and too split apart for coherence. This demonstrates to me the need for finishing the work. What I keep handing in is some version of the in-transition second drafts and not a final draft.  That is my biggest challenge at the moment. As it stands it is lacking in providing more details and coherence than my previous work and that one has many elements I still view as needing clarification.  Finally, there is a lot of weakness inherent in the scenario itself. Wicht’s questions about the sensibility of the situation and dubious background actions of its major players point out a few. There are more unmentioned. These really come from the kernel of the adventure not being hammered out enough early on. I found something that worked for me to build a long term adventure and I started on that hoping to clear up and make connections for inconsistencies later. That time never really came and its a bad strategy to start with. It comes down to motivation and balancing what I want to explore with providing readers a quality, playable adventure.Anyways, I kind of expected to get ribbed for more monster machine madness with the basi-lizards. <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=":)" />  But I'm happy to learn I get another go around for one more entry. Thanks again.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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