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Message: <blockquote data-quote="el-remmen" data-source="post: 8152138" data-attributes="member: 11">Below [in the spoiler tag] is my reflection on writing my first IRON DM entry in something like 16 years. . . I wrote it before judgement.[SPOILER="After 16 years this IRON DM is rusty."]This was difficult and at times 750 words felt impossible. It still does in retrospect.I copied down the ingredients by hand soon after they dropped and spent about a half hour before bed making notes, just playing with ideas and then slept on it. Overnight a foot of snow fell, so I spent the morning clearing walks and the driveway after a coffee and a quick look at my notes - thinking some.When I finally started writing that afternoon, I got to about 1400 words when I realized that my usual approach to writing was not going to work in this medium. Usually I write a lot. A LOT. I write thousands of words a day sometimes. But no matter how much I write, my favorite part is the paring down. But in this case, I hated the paring down. My usual strategy for writing almost anything is to hawk up a bunch of raw junk, let it gestate a few days and then getting back at it for another draft or two. This was not gonna fly for IRON DM with a word count limit. In the old days I settled for turning in what came out at stage one (hardly edited), here I not only have no time to let the writing itself sit, but I have to hack at it right away for length over clarity. [Hoping the judges can connect the dots. 750 words is hardly enough for an outline!] So I had to change my approach and write the bare minimum. No references to levels or rules, just generic monsters - even the "Star Beast" (which I'd usually give a comparable stat block for) is the vaguest of suggestions. I could not write even one sentence explaining it. I could barely even get in the pale shadow of one of my favorite things about writing adventures, NPCs and their personalities and how they interact with the PCs.I think if I had written this at the pace I started it at, it would have easily been three of four thousand words. I may still write that version. I did keep the 1400 word version. In that version there is more about the coins, about the fallen dwarves, about applying some kind of radiation template on the undead. I describe the geography of the area. But I only got about halfway through!As for developing the adventure itself, my immediate thought at "measured steps" was a trap like one of the ones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where stepping carefully to spell "Jehovah" or whatever is the key. Once I realized, I wanted it to be rhythmic steps in time with avoiding the meteor's pulses, dancing became a way to bring that in and connect it to the businessman NPC.I did a google search for heavy metal, as to avoid just plain old weight or the musical genre, and discovered "heavy metal poisoning." That led to the strip mine and the uncovered meteor and their radiating poison.Once I had that, making the "foreign coins" be made of that metal made sense - originally I had a bit about how the dwarven community reached a height using the huge meteor's metal - and thus their money had spread somewhat long ago. I wanted this to be a stronger hook and I wanted to include concise rules for keeping the coins on your person and getting poisoned. Neither were possible (Speaking of stronger hooks, once I came upon the blackmail idea I really wanted one or more of the PCs to be the ones blackmailed - but since that kind of info really depends on playstyle and the particular characters, I just kept in the suggestion, which I nearly cut for space, but I loved the idea too much).Silver Star is probably my weakest ingredient. . . since it is not really silver (I wanted to describe it as silvery/quicksilver under the surface, but didn't have room) or a star - though I guess is it a "fallen star." I tried to tie it in a bit with the music by using Earth, Wind & Fire's "Shining Star" (why did I pick a band with three words in their name? I ended up cutting the band name! I imagine this part as like a musical interlude scene from a Guardian of the Galaxy or maybe the criminally underratedly weird Hudson Hawk).  Originally I wrote out the beats with notation for where the different pulses happen.[MEDIA=youtube]Zu9a29UR2dU[/MEDIA]Disguise kit was actually the hardest to integrate, and in the original version of my mind I was going to go more into their use and the patterns of movement and behavior of the undead in and around BV (by the way, I referred to it as BV throughout to save word count <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f923.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":ROFLMAO:" title="ROFL    :ROFLMAO:"  data-smilie="18"data-shortname=":ROFLMAO:" /> )Immediately upon seeing Dream Surf I decided I wanted to skip the obvious incarnation (a dream ocean or ocean in dreams, or even traveling through dreams on a surfboard) and go for a weirder idea where Wendon Futz (did I include the businessman's name or did I cut it for space?) could search dreams like he was using dream Google.I am not sure how well I did but the closest I can remember to having this feeling as I prepared to post my entry (since the last IRON DM I participated in, I guess) was when I did my comprehensive exams for my PhD program![/SPOILER]Anyway, regardless of the outcome, thanks to [USER=6777923]@practicalm[/USER] and to [USER=67]@Rune[/USER] and even though at times working on this felt brutal and torturous (a feeling that immediately lifted when I clicked "Post Reply"), more than anything it really deepened the respect I already have for everyone who has been participating in this tradition and helping it to evolve.</blockquote>

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