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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MortalPlague" data-source="post: 6154932" data-attributes="member: 62721">The elements were handed out towards the end of one of my gaming sessions with my regular group.  I loaded up the page on my phone after the session, and found six excellent ingredients staring back at me.  They were marvellous, delicious ingredients that could all play very nicely together.  With one of my gaming buddies, I went home and we threw ideas around.He suggested the idea that the Wealth of Information was a set of books.  I jumped on the idea, immediately deciding that Hearsay and Heresy would be two of those books.  We spun the story of the god of knowledge who created the books in his monastery, and went through the 'fall of civilization' back story.  I knew from the start that I wanted the books to be magical, nearly artifacts, though with a very limited scope.  In my rough hashing-out of ideas, the bridge was going to be an encounter in the Hallowed Library... I was thinking a Last Crusade-style bridge of faith.  But I wasn't happy with that.  The poison pill was going to be a literal pill with a god-slaying poison, which the villain would carry to feed to the god.Hearsay developed over a few passes.  Initially, the book would have read the minds of people around it, snagging random surface thoughts.  But then I came upon the idea that it could provide background elements by stealing snippets of conversation from the past.  The idea that they could also hear the orders of the man they were chasing really appealed to me, as did the fact that Hearsay has no filter.  It doesn't know what's important or not, so it just samples random snippets.  The potential for a DM to throw random amusing lines from completely hapless NPCs was too much fun to pass up.Towards the end of that night, I realized that the bridge was really just a plug-in element, and I wanted to give it some more thought.  I was still bouncing ideas off my buddy, and I was talking about some elements are really flexible and others are more nebulous.  The decrepit bridge, I told him, could only be one thing.  And then the idea hit me.  It could be a starship bridge.I ran a mental check through all the elements.  I briefly considered switching the whole adventure to sci-fi.  I noted the irony that I've never actually run or played Expedition To The Barrier Peaks.  Then I decided to run with it.  I figured that this sort of competition is the one to take risks in, and a fallen AI posing as a god was a nice final reveal for the adventure.  It actually served as a third form of heresy, and it made Salander a crusader, not a villain.  It offered the adventure a choice at the end, whether the PCs sided against Asceon or against Salander.  It did, however, weaken the poison pill element (turning it to a jar of lightning).The next day, I typed it all up, smoothing out bumps as I went along.  I tried to throw player choice into a few places, since the adventure was a little linear (the choice whether to fight or sneak through the city, for instance).  I found a few plot holes that I had to patch up.  I went back and forth on the amount of back story to include.  And then I submitted that huge block of text.Last Notes:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The footnote about Further Adventures was put in so it didn't look like I had forgotten about Harmony and History.  Also, the entry didn't feel complete without at least a brief look at the other books and their powers.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I must have changed the villain's name six times before I settled on Salander.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I named Asceon in a split second as I was typing, and it was the Right Name (tm).  I felt very good about that name.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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