Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Drew Id" data-source="post: 1415599" data-attributes="member: 12175">Definitely before the adventure, but not neccessarily what prompted it. I had crudely mapped out the first and second episodes of Medallions before we ever started, and by the middle of Episode II I had mapped out Episode VI. (Episodes III, IV, and V were directed by fludogg, ledded, and pierce respectively.)  I don't necessarily write out entire episodes or anything like that. I just collect ideas from different sources and then pull them together into a single adventure.I do try to research well ahead of the game, though, because I can never be sure how much time I will have in the days leading up to a new episode to put things together. Specifically, we ran this session (session 1 of Episode II) on June 11, 2003, but I was doing the spider research by May 14, 2003, because I stil have some of those web sites listed in my "Favorites" folder in my browser. As for what prompted the adventure, I wanted to be sure (based on player feedback) that the first few episodes of Medallions ran the spectrum of possibilities, from horror to sci-fi to magic-mystical to conspiracy-centric. I didn't want to establish a pattern where the villain, the level of mystery, the tone, etc. was the same from episode to episode. I wanted there to be "funny" episodes, and dark episodes, etc. and some that were more grounded in reality and some that were completely out of left field. So, when Episode I was all about conspiracies and magic, I wanted (at least initially) for Episode II to be more of a classic monster-of-the-week. And in my group, from three years of D&D 3.0, giant spiders always rated highly on the goosebumps scale, so that had to be where I started. After I decided on giant spiders, I found a compiled list online of basically the top 10 "origins" of movie monsters. The list was stuff like "built in a lab", "found frozen in arctic ice", "from outer space", etc. Being already familiar with Bio-steel just from being a trivia geek, plus knowing that Birmingham is an international hot-spot of advanced genetics and research, the lab connection stuck. Unrelated side note here, as a DM: My original plan for this session was nowhere near how it turned out. I do not railroad my players. (Although I do occasionally lay tracks out in front of them and then chase them with a train.) My initial outline for this session was a good long stretch of investigation with some minor freak-outs here and there, and only after several more leads pointed to RGI would the group probably decide to go there and sniff around. Instead, (1) unexpectedly Joe decides to fixate on the idea that the key to everything is at RGI, and (2) suddenly decides that directly barging his way in, in the middle of the night, is the best way to confront this issue and (3) even more unexpectedly, he convinces everyone else that this is a good idea. So suddenly a whole session of hints and allegations becomes a "what do I do when they are already banging on the door?" kind of thing. Actually, a lot of Dr. McGovern's confused tone with being unsure how to handle these people who might be either helpful or threatening was easy to roleplay because I was scrambling to catch up. But, I knew from my timeline what was going on at RGI that night with the "spasms", so I figured hey, if they come in that night, then they are gonna see this, so just let them see it and let the plot fall where it may. They cleverly skipped part of the plot and jumped right into the middle, which is why it seems like they suddenly got a whole lot of info in a very short time. Anyway, now I'm rambling... thanks for reading, and stay tuned for the next update, where the group finds out the bad news.</blockquote>

Verification