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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8152836" data-attributes="member: 5948">Commentary/reflections on my round[SPOILER]That was brutal.  Word count killed me.  I last did Iron DM many, many years ago (Half-Elven Mayor and Magic Fruit were two of my ingredients, and there was a vampire involved, though the rest has faded from my memory...) and I don't remember there being a word limit in force then.  Once I got the shape of it all, I banged out 1100 words with relative ease and then spent hours and hours and hours trimming it to fit the word count.  The Fool's Errand and Triple Cross were particularly hard, because i took them very literally and that led to my plot being complex and requiring a lot of wordy explaining.  Piles of stuff fell by the wayside, but i think/hope it's mostly details that can be assumed by inference - that Lobdibble was 'lucky' because he was using magic to aid/ingratiate himself with the PC, that the flowering tower arose atop the party venue because it was a site where revelry was imminent.  The other thing i really really wanted to do but couldn't fit in the word count was encourage the GM to use the Buffy season 1 episode The Puppet Show as inspiration/reference.  In this, the creepy animated ventriloquist's dummy turns out to be a good guy.  If a GM lays seeds that remind their players of the episode, it helps make the animated garden gnome's betrayal at the end more unexpected.  Flora as written is actually reasonably historically accurate, if Wikipedia is to be believed.I think the Divine Pestilence ingredient was the most formative for me. It's such a world-shaking epic-level concept that you have to fight hard not to write a world-shaking epic-level adventure around it, and it's real, real hard to fit one of those in 750 words.  I resolved the problem by making the god smaller (part of the reason I chose Buffy as a system was because the setting has throwaway references to ancient minor gods all over the place so Flora need not be a big long-term feature of the campaign after this), [USER=23484]@Kobold Stew[/USER] solved it by playing with words and making the pestilence itself a divine spellcaster, which i thought was a very clever angle.The other reason it became a Buffy adventure was the gnomes.  Why did it matter that it was GNOMES who were rampaging, rather than, say, halflings?  What's so special about gnomes?  In a D&D setting, perhaps not much, but in a modern setting, then gnomes become garden gnomes and there's an obvious thematic connection between garden gnomes and flowers from the Flowering Tower, and it grew from there.[/SPOILER]Just a minor rules question for future reference - is the 'an adventure for game system X' text included in the wordcount or not?  I assumed it was, just to be on the safe side, but would have cheerfully committed murder a couple of times last night to have those 7 words back</blockquote>

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