Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?


log in or register to remove this ad


I mean, there's no lie.

530680588_30661954960086071_4250205999491740630_n.jpg
 


So, I've read about a third of the 232 entries in the Appendix N Jam -- sorry, people who are charging for the PDFs during the judging period, I'm skipping yours -- and while it's a lot of work, even at four pages each, it's been really helpful.

I'm learning a lot about things I want to do differently when publishing my own PDFs, but I'm also seeing how often background, etc., just doesn't matter. Some of the best adventures waste one of their four pages with background that never impacts the adventure at all.

And cutting generally is a good idea for adventure writers. There are tons of people who clearly feel constrained by the four A5 pages limit and turn their font size waaaay down and have almost no margins, so they can cram in text that is almost completely superfluous.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are a number of writers who can evoke exciting adventures with just a relative handful of words, printed at a decent size, with plenty of white space. I am going to be going back and seeing what I can trim from my entry and my previously published stuff, after this. Super-inspirational.

While buying and reading hundreds of adventures is cost prohibitive for most of us, this jam, where almost all of it is going to be free through at least Aug. 15 -- I'll be raising my price to $1 after that and also publishing it on DriveThruRPG -- is a huge opportunity to read a lot of really good stuff at one time. Highly recommended way to spend some free time this weekend.
Bryce Lynch from tenfootpole.org has what I consider really good guidelines for adventure writing. He's a brutal (but generally fair) reviewer.
 




Pets & Sidekicks

Remove ads

Top