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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kobold Stew" data-source="post: 8153151" data-attributes="member: 23484">[SPOILER=Notes for the Suntower]Agreed on the challenge faced with these ingredients, but what a fun opportunity, for which I thank everyone. The 400-words I started with were abandoned in the morning. For me the tension I struggled with was between Divine Pestilence and Civilized Magic. I felt there were default expectations I could use for that, but I wanted to go deeper. I’m a bit uncomfortable “showing my workings” like this, but since it seems to be part of the exercise, here goes.After a preliminary foray with a three-way conflict between tech-wielding gnomes, snooty magicians going by the book, and wild druids for control of a lone tower in a plain (shades of the fourth Elric novel, probably), I settled in with a reincarnated dwarf barbarian now in the body of a gnome. That was the result of the divine pestilence, but the more I tried to make is consistent within world, the more space it took and importantly the more it was about the NPC and not about the players. Don’t get me wrong, I had fun writing it, especially trying to balance a presumptive cutseyness of gnomes with the dourness of dwarves:“The power of the flower tower bower,” the small creature in front of you grumbles, “is sour.” His large-nosed companion, also a gnome, seems reluctant to speak. Eventually he does. “The god-rot’s fraught. We’re squat. Distraught.” He groans, and brings his axe down on the table. It is not the first piece of furniture he has destroyed since he met you.I even had rhyming section names: The Pitch, the Hook, the Sitch, the Nook, the Witch, the Book. But that was all for me, not the players. It was self-indulgent, so it was all scrapped in the morning, and rather than having Reincarnation shenanigans, I went for a low-level rat-clearing experience builder that is standard now in online rpgs. I think the failed first draft was really good for my entry -- I can see how it shaped what I ended up with, but I don't like throwing away an idea I'm having fun with. But I did.I wanted to do something with Divine Pestilence, and the idea of a sentient swarm with a passable Wisdom score seemed fun (shades of Vernor Vinge’s Fire in the Deep) – they could become divine casters, and since I like to play Druids, they could be the unwitting victims of the (deceptive, eventually rampaging) Gnomes. So there was the beginning of my double-cross, which just needed to be turned triple.The Fool’s Errand and the Triple Cross had to be about the players, but it also meant they had to be misled. There had to be payoff there.I always wanted to set the adventure in a giant flower. Playing on the inherent silliness of gnomes (as I see it) and a memory of me once giving a girlfriend a 6’ sunflower when I met up with her off a train in Northern England in the 90s, and her embarrassment at carrying it around for the day. (We broke up soon after, as it turned out.). To make that work, I had to have the players shrink a bit, and that then led to an idea for a final conflict where the players were small and the gnomes suddenly enlarged and rampaging, and so that paid off in a way that I thought was fun and new (as a DM I could have fun describing it for and with players).The core was there, except for Civilized Magic. So I went back to my notes from the night before, and remembered Clarke’s law, which correlated technology with magic, and thought that was an honest interpretation of the ingredient (not tendentious) and also a way that gnomes might think of their non-magical gizmos. I thought of a fire-ball bomb, but settled on poison, sinking down floor by floor (moving at the speed of plot) because it gives the players a chance to race out of the tower if it goes off – a fun set-piece to play, with some moral stakes as they decide whether they rescue the rats they were trying to slay minutes before.Anyways, that was roughly my thinking and my process: throwing away the first 4-hours of notes after sleeping on it, and spending the off-time on Saturday when not playing with or trying to feed my toddler pulling together something else. We (I) also watched Princess Bride in the morning, for what it's worth. Fun! And thanks to all.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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