Rejected Dungeon Submissions

[howandwhy99]

De Mo-NAY.

--Erik

And the Count's wife Shomei who figures prominently in Sepulchrave's storyhour.

PS: What about adventures that break the rules like a prisonbreak or "sealed in alive" scenario? Both assume a railroaded beginning hook, no choice to just "leave" the dungeon, and potentially only one way out.

Yet both are legitimately enjoyable scenarios if set up properly.

 

[Alzrius]

The following was my rejected adventure submission:

Working Title: Dust to Dust

Type: D&D adventure for characters of 14th level.

Plot: Dark times are brewing in the World of Greyhawk. The evil mage Iggwilv has escaped her captivity by Graz’zt and is back on Oerth rebuilding her power base. Slowly she recalls old allies and vassals to her. One such vassal is her daughter, the vampire warrior Drelnza.

In this adventure, the Church of Rao in the city of Polvar (in Ket) has recently suffered from an act of internal sabotage. One of their own, brother Kuris, attacked several of the guards and dug up the sealed box that contained the ashes of Drelnza, from when she was slain in the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth years ago. He then delivered it outside the church’s walls where something spirited it away. Brother Kuris now claims innocence for his crimes, claiming he doesn’t remember doing what he has been accused of. The head of the church, Abbot Zarantil, is scared and worried that the church under his care may be responsible for undoing the good name that Canon Hazen worked to bring to it if someone is somehow able to revitalize Drelnza. He thus contacts the PCs as outside agents to thwart whatever scheme is going on, and to return Drelnza’s remains.

Clues and divinations will reveal that brother Kuris was, in fact, possessed by a demon, and that the dust of Drelnza have been taken to a cavern in the southern Yatil mountains. Once they manage to track the conspirators there, they must battle them even as Drelnza begins to reform, and prevent her from regaining her full power, culminating in the PC’s putting a stake in her heart as her body regenerates, and stopping a powerful evil from returning to the Flanaess.

Major foes: Naltivur, a shadow demon with 6 levels in the Fiend of Possession prestige class, he is the one who possessed brother Kuris and retrieved Drelnza’s remains. Also, commanding the operation to restore Drelnza is Agony, an (awakened) living spell (the living spell template is from the Monster Manual III) of the spells power leech and psychic poison (both from the Book of Vile Darkness) accidently created by one of Iuz’s Boneheart, and further modified by Iggwilv herself, Agony is one of her new lieutenants. Several minor demons and a few human mercenaries make up the bulk of the remaining forces.

Rewards to be gained: Abbot Zarantil is willing to give the PC’s up to 50,000 gp to recover the remains and be discreet about it. He is likewise willing to throw in a pearl of power (7th level spell) to be kept by the PCs, though this depletes his church’s funds. Likewise, defeating the NPC’s gains them access to several magic items meant for Drelnza, including boots of striding and springing, a cloak of resistance +3, a +1 composite longbow [+4] of seeking, +5 spiked padded armor, and her signature weapon (unusable by the PCs), a +2 keen unholy frost human bane halberd.

Estimated length: The estimated length of this adventure in terms of words is around 10,000 words, though this can be altered. At least three maps will be needed: one for the church in Polvar, one for the map area from the church to the cave in the Yatils, and one for the cavern complex itself.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

I sent in a low-level side quest that went as follows:

The PCs are distracted by an oddly behaving creature jumping into a wagon to hide. Assuming they investigate, they will have a hard time coaxing the animal (I have forgotten what type it was) out. While they are doing that, a 1st-level wizard and a higher-level wizard's familiar turn the corner and attack.

What happened basically was this:

A powerful EEE-VIL wizard killed a rival. The rival's familiar fled the scene. The evil wizard sent his apprentice and his improved familiar (an eyeball, IIRC) after it. The apprentice gets worried when he sees the familiar talking to the characters, and attacks. The reasons for rejection I got were:

1) It apparently wasn't clear to the reviewer at Dungeon that the eyeball wasn't the 1st-level apprentice's familiar, which would have been an obvious error if it were true.
2) A 1st-level apprentice and an eyeball weren't seen as challenging enough for a 1st-level party. (My assumption was that the eyeball would be hard to hit, and would be stunning party members while the wizard used his few spells and crossbow. I also allowed for upgrading by adding some warrior henchmen to the mix -- that could have been adjusted.)

What I liked about the scenario was that it introduced both a longer-term enemy in the form of the evil master, plus a possible patron if they helped the killed wizard's familiar get help from the wizard's cleric ally in the form of a raise dead. It also seemed like there was a dearth of 1st-level adventure hooks in the gaming world...

 

[Dirigible]

Last one was about a rich noble that invites the characters to his estate... only TO HUNT THEM DOWN IN THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME OF ALL!

Monopoly?

Right, I better get cracking on that adventure in which a sane wizard builds a dungeon to house crazed adventurers.

 

[cthulhu_duck]

I saw the thread about the list of plots NOT to use and I wonder what other plots there are out there that have been rejected.

Any chance of a link to the thread about the list of plots NOT to use?

 

[Christoph the Magus]

I've sent in a couple different proposals over the years. Some of them I'm still working on in the hopes of having them published somewhere (most of them were pre-3E), but one that I'll NEVER touch again was called "Deadly Dancing Bear."

Main premise was that a bear was set loose from the circus by a jealous competitor. It was trained to dance to music and when it came upon a singing bard it tried to dance with him but ended up squishing him instead. The nearby village found the body and the hunt for the evil creature was on!

As stupid as this idea sounds, this was the one proposal that I sent in that Dungeon actually liked. I rewrote this damn thing 3-4 times before finally being told, "Not too bad, but I'm afraid that we're switching over to a new game system (turned out to be 3E) and we have already set aside enough 2E modules to meet our needs through the switch. You are more than welcome to rewrite it using the new rules when they become available." Uhh, no thanks, seeing as this was the adventure idea that I was least interested in and I only kept rewriting it in the hopes of being published.

I've stopped reading Dungeon/submitting to Dungeon now. I mean, why bother, really? That are tons of places to submit your work, and Dungeon has become increasingly too "weird" for my taste. (At least as of the last time I read a copy-probably 2-3 years ago.)

 

[Richards]

I've had numerous adventure proposals (and adventures) shot down over the years. Here are a few that come immediately to mind (these are all from the AD&D 2nd Edition days):

With Minimal Danger - The PCs are drugged and shrunk down to 1/12th normal size (a variant on a sheet of smallness - remember those?) by a wizard's 1st-level apprentice who had just done the same to his master. (For good measure, he had cut out his master's tongue to prevent him from further spellcasting.) The adventure consisted of the PCs making their way through the wizard's house, avoiding things that were especially dangerous to them at that size (including his rather large terrarium of minimals), until they could undo the effects and regain their normal size. When I submitted it, I wasn't aware that there had been a "PCs get shrunk down" adventure ("Chadranther's Bane") published just a few years earlier.

Worm Hunt - This Side Trek was basically a cry for help from farmers whose fields have recently been devastated by a purple worm. The PCs are asked to follow the worm through its tunnel and slay it. When they meet up with it, wiggling around spastically, it proves to be an easy kill - too easy, in fact. It turns out its recent tunneling broke into a passage to the Underdark, where it encountered - and ate - a black pudding. The problem was, black puddings are immune to acid (including stomach acid), so the ooze has been having a virtual smorgasborg inside the poor worm, eating enough to split into two a couple times over. When the PCs rip open the now-practically-hollow purple worm husk, out pop a bunch of hungry black puddings looking for some variety in their diet. Surprise! It's a bait-and-switch (okay, bad pun) adventure!

A Boring Little Adventure - The PCs encounter the remains of a halfling merchant's cart along a forest trail, obviously the result of an ambush. Tracks indicate the attackers were insectoid. While tracking the trail made when one of the pack horses was being dragged back to the insects' lair, the PCs encounter a small band of aspis drones gathering food. They defend themselves if attacked, but they weren't responsible for the ambush; in fact, their nest is willing to send a small band of aspis drone warriors to help the PCs battle the real culprits, a small nest of boring beetles. This one suffered from poor timing as well, as the Dungeon staff had just accepted an adventure where a small village is under attack by a nest of boring beetles.

Time Well Spent - The PCs receive a letter from a wizard associate of theirs, asking them to help him unearth some ancient magic he's uncovered deep in the woods. He's nowhere to be found, but they can track down his dig site - it's a time well, a sort of permanent magic circle that can call forth objects/creatures from the past that were on that very spot (assuming it's had time enough to charge sufficiently). In his tinkering with the time well, the wizard accidentally activated it, and since it had been charging for a long time, it called forth a prehistoric creature (one of several possibilities, depending upon the level of the PCs). They have to fight the beast and hopefully recover enough of the wizard's remains (he was the creature's first present-day meal) to get him resurrected or whatnot. (Incidentally, this time well has just used up its temporal energy and will have to recharge for years before reuse; therefore, it's been "spent.")

The Butterflies of Doom - Unlike the four above, this one never got past the proposal stage. A wizard hasn't been seen for days, and weird things are happening at his manor, where he instructs a small school of apprentices in chaos magic. The PCs are hired to enter the manor, find the wizard and his students, and stop the weirdness that's been emanating from the house. It turns out that a "magical flux field induction" experiment (involving five wands of wonder arranged in a pentagram) went horribly wrong, and raw chaos energy has not only transformed the wizards and servants (and various other creatures, like the eponymous butterflies from the back garden, who now have an insatiable thirst for human blood) in the manor, but the very building itself - there are rooms with variable gravity, dimensional anomalies, animated objects running wild, and so on. Half of the adventure was to be just making it through the weirdness of the house to get to the basement level, where the PCs would meet what the wizards have now become.

There are plenty more I could add to those, too.

Johnathan

 

[James Jacobs]

I've stopped reading Dungeon/submitting to Dungeon now. I mean, why bother, really? That are tons of places to submit your work, and Dungeon has become increasingly too "weird" for my taste. (At least as of the last time I read a copy-probably 2-3 years ago.)

I'd be interested to know what constitutes "too weird." And 2–3 years ago was about 24–36 issues ago, now that the magazine comes out monthly. Weird adventures have their place, but our current thinking is that people play D&D to play D&D, not to play "weird" adventures.

In any case, some advice for writers who are seeking to get published in Dungeon.

1: Check out the latest issues; this is the best way to see what tone of adventures we're looking for, as well as what types of adventures we've already published.

2: Avoid certain monsters that have been overused in the magazine recently. Our current list of "overused monsters" includes dire rats, half-dragons, vampires, lycanthropes, and doppelgangers.

3: Make sure your adventure takes place in an interesting location. A wizard's tower is boring. If that wizard's tower is made out of a titan's femur and is perched on a mountaintop graveyard, it's not boring.

4: Make sure your villain is interesting, both in appearance and in goal. Avoid stacking on too many templates or prestige classes. Using one of these is a great way to give a villain a unique look and personality. Using lots is a great way to make the villain too complicated and weird.

5: Make sure in your proposal that you describe the adventure part, and not the backstory. We get far too many proposals that spend two pages on backstory and then less than a paragraph describing what the PCs actually get to do in the adventure. Remember; you're writing an adventure, not a short story.

6: The current caretakers of Dungeon are really big into nostalgia. (Perhaps too much so, but that's a different story.) Don't be afraid to use NPCs, locations, monsters, or magic items from older D&D adventures. If you do, make sure to indicate where this person/place/thing came from. We're pretty obsessive about these things, but there's plenty out there that we don't remember (or never knew about in the first place). And like the template/prestige class issue; a little goes a long way in this category. A proposal that uses 6 NPCs from Forbidden City, a location from Ghost Tower of Inverness, magic items from Queen of the Spiders and new monsters from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is overkill.

7: Keep an eye on messageboard threads like this one here (and others over at paizo.com). We editors are usually lurking and watching, and once in a while we post stuff

Currently, what Dungeon is looking for the most are low-level adventures. Particularly, shorter low-level adventures (5,000 to 8,000 words). We also hope to publish adventures once in a while that incorporate some of the capstone systems that Wizards of the Coast produces, but we only rarely see proposals for them. (I'm talking here about psionics, epic level, ghostwalk, incarnum, and similar alternate systems.) In one way, it's harder to get one of these adventures accepted since we probably won't print more than one a year (for each capstone system), but in another... you probably won't have much competition.

And keep posting those rejected adventure proposals! They're fun! If I can find where I put my big folder of rejected adventrue proposals, I'll post some of them here too.

 

[Roger]

Naltivur, a shadow demon with 6 levels in the Fiend of Possession prestige class, he is the one who possessed brother Kuris and retrieved Drelnza’s remains. Also, commanding the operation to restore Drelnza is Agony, an (awakened) living spell (the living spell template is from the Monster Manual III) of the spells power leech and psychic poison (both from the Book of Vile Darkness) accidently created by one of Iuz’s Boneheart, and further modified by Iggwilv herself, Agony is one of her new lieutenants.

I'm not trying to be a jerk or pick on anyone, here.

That being said, if I were an editor, seeing this example of English usage in the cover letter wouldn't exactly fill me with joy at the prospect of reading the manuscript.

Official Dungeon people: Would you mind giving us a rough idea of what percentage of submissions are rejected due to bad English versus bad plots versus bad mechanics etc etc?

I suppose I'm mostly asking out of idle curiosity. On the other hand, if people realize that, say, half the submissions get auto-bounced because they don't include the Standard Disclosure Form, hey, who knows. Maybe the situation will improve.



Cheers,
Roger

 

[Alzrius]

I'm not trying to be a jerk or pick on anyone, here.

That being said, if I were an editor, seeing this example of English usage in the cover letter wouldn't exactly fill me with joy at the prospect of reading the manuscript.

...I admit I could have added a semicolon or another period, but the above criticism seems unduly harsh. My writing sample that you quoted was not so bad as to be deserving of that.