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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wicht" data-source="post: 6154102" data-attributes="member: 221">As I read through the ingredients, the decrepit bridge was the first ingredient to grab hold of my imagination and I immediately thought of an old covered bridge in the country. And of course it had to be haunted. While I agree with the judge that the bridge reads like mere scenery in the write-up, it was actually the seed that germinated the rest of the scenario. Without that bridge, the scenario would have turned out very differently.You can have a lot of things happen on or near a bridge: suicides, murders, drownings. There can be all sorts of stories surrounding it. My next step was poison pill. Hearsay and heresy were both percolating, but poison pill needed some thought and so I googled it, read the definitions and tried to think of the concept of a poison pill in a medieval or fantasy setting. The idea of one community trying to annex another was the logical thought, but it had to be being done in the context of a bid for control that could be thwarted. Marching armies was too direct and thus out. Perhaps one community trying to establish itself as the leader of surrounding communities... There was a thought...Religion was a real possibility for a reason one community might have greater authority, a new prophet, spiritual leader or temple could cause the influence of a city to grow. And religion allowed for heresy... and if the heresy was on the part of the village that did not want to be controlled, then that village could craft a poison pill plan to keep the other community away... And they could use hearsay to create confusion and a mystery... They could provide a wealth of information, misleading information that could have the PCs chasing their tales...  And maybe at the same time, there should be a really big library somewhere (the library was an ingredient that never fully developed, though I included it). About this time, I decided to have the big city be entirely the good guys and the village be entirely the bad guys. The Wicker Man came to mind and I decided to go with a primitive druidic faith that ate people. Werewolves was a logical choice and I may have been partially swayed by <a href="http://pathfinderchronicler.net/the-silver-lady-by-jonathan-mcanulty/" target="_blank"> some writing I have done about a similar village in Golarion </a>. Hallowed Ground, to me, initially was the bridge, though the new temple, and the villagers sacred tree were also in the mix.   The list I turned in at the end was actually my first words on the screen. My second step was coming up with names and writing the backstory. I went from there to writing up the adventure itself. I meant to play up the mystery angle of the bridge a bit more, but time was short for me, and I did not get to fully flesh out this aspect of the story, but if I were going to write it up as an actual adventure, I would spend much time trying to fully develop the various stories the villagers told about the bridge to make the bridge more central to the adventure.</blockquote>

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