Post Mortem & Results
- Thread starter The1True
- Start date
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
We went to animation school together. He used to be a concept artist at a game studio.
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
Thanks @squeen for reminding me; there's an updated and hopefully more readily readable/printable version of the Summer Palace now too!
I'm taking a break from reformatting these adventures to playtest Irradiated Paradox (which may be an unpleasant collision with reality for me) but I've started mapping out the 'final' megadungeon in the slow-crawling Mountain of Change. Given what I've seen of other peoples' megadungeons, I'm guessing this is the rock I finally founder on (or invent some disappointing workarounds for).
@Grützi , if you're out there, I'm looking for permission to flesh out the last little bits of your awesome Arnlaug's Carcass settlement and use your map artwork as a base for the Bull's Run. I know you're a pretty busy guy...
I'm taking a break from reformatting these adventures to playtest Irradiated Paradox (which may be an unpleasant collision with reality for me) but I've started mapping out the 'final' megadungeon in the slow-crawling Mountain of Change. Given what I've seen of other peoples' megadungeons, I'm guessing this is the rock I finally founder on (or invent some disappointing workarounds for).
@Grützi , if you're out there, I'm looking for permission to flesh out the last little bits of your awesome Arnlaug's Carcass settlement and use your map artwork as a base for the Bull's Run. I know you're a pretty busy guy...
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
I read the Tower of Minotaur last night (instead of Conan!) and enjoyed it. I think it's a nice side-adventure. I have a bunch of thoughts on how to possibly improve it that I'd like to share, not because what you have isn't sufficient, but just because I'd like to open it up for some general adventure writing discussion (because I'm all puffed up and full of myself...the person that has published nothing!)
It's going to take me awhile (probably end-of-month) before I can collect my suggestions. Is there anything in particular you'd like addressed?
It's going to take me awhile (probably end-of-month) before I can collect my suggestions. Is there anything in particular you'd like addressed?
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
Go to town, that's why we're here! I think Tower was pretty straight forward. Some of the others I was concerned if I was successfully communicating the weird stuff I was trying to map or that could be interacted with. I think the only crazy thing here is the 'maze' trap. I guess since I went to the effort of reformatting everything, issues of format are officially on the table now
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
That is pretty awesome, but the mini-campaign sort of centers around finding this lost minotaur. Not that the players are ever going to see the title I guess...
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
I've been playtesting Irradiated Paradox. I gave the players the local area map which usually motivates them to explore, but they've been hewing to the Pointcrawl railroads so far. Maybe they'll start looking around once they've exhausted all the major quest threads? I'm afraid that our takeaway from the overload that was the Ptolus campaign is that it's best to look for and stick to the central plotline.
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
In the meantime, I've been slowly building the megadungeon inside the trundling demon endjinn called the Mountain of Change in the Bulls Run:
I've made life hard for myself by building these soaring three-dimensional spaces. I've collapsed it down into a HUGE 2D map, but it's a real mess:
That's 21 levels piled one on top of the other. I added a filter layer between each to give it some depth. As you can see, some of these rooms are the size of a regular sheet of graph paper and contain buildings which will now require interior mapping.
A lot of this can be solved by turning the larger rooms into 3/4-view battle spaces and map the building interiors in 2D off to the side, but that's not very VTT-friendly.
I've made life hard for myself by building these soaring three-dimensional spaces. I've collapsed it down into a HUGE 2D map, but it's a real mess:
That's 21 levels piled one on top of the other. I added a filter layer between each to give it some depth. As you can see, some of these rooms are the size of a regular sheet of graph paper and contain buildings which will now require interior mapping.
A lot of this can be solved by turning the larger rooms into 3/4-view battle spaces and map the building interiors in 2D off to the side, but that's not very VTT-friendly.
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
All from scratch. It seemed like a time saver when I started, but now... Sometimes you just make the project more complicated for yourself rather than do the difficult thing you know you should do right from the outset, eh?
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
That's the whole joy of a hobby.
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
This stupid thing. That's 20 levels piled on top of each other. All I did was build the framework and resolve to fill in all those little buildings and spaces with rooms in 2D. ... Almost immediately it became clear that it was going to be slow going in 2D, so I went back to build the rooms in 3D.
That took months.
Then when I started rendering the new more detailed levels out and bringing them into 2D, I found that the resolution of the camera needed to be changed and now everything had to be resized before it could be brought into the original file. Bla bla bla. So much grunt work added to the process. Anyway, I got that done and started cleaning everything up again at which point I started to encounter render artifacts; missing linework, weirdly tapered lines that made whole rooms disappear, little bits of geometry poking through from the level above etc. I had to go back in to 3D and clean up a ton of geometry and rerender it. Gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair out the whole time.
A sane man would have realized how fucking pointless this is ages ago and binned the whole stupid thing. Honestly this was just supposed to be a bonus boss-monster fight with a mountain-sized bio-construct, with a little bit of running around inside the thing to get it to power down or something. I pictured a couple of key set-pieces inside and thought I'd mock them up real quick in 3D. Here I am almost exactly ONE YEAR later. If I quit now, it's all meaningless!
Oh how I cackled while writing that last sentence!
Here's a couple of the new levels to give you an idea of the detail of the undertaking:
All those large blank areas needed filling in don't you see-yeeeheeheeheeee gneeeeeeee
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
It looks very cool.
I agree that there's something very tedious and time consuming about 3D modeling. That's why I decided to learn traditional drawing over 3D-sculpting and ray-traced rendering, and also stick with 2D CAD for map-assistance.
Power on man, you'll get there.
I agree that there's something very tedious and time consuming about 3D modeling. That's why I decided to learn traditional drawing over 3D-sculpting and ray-traced rendering, and also stick with 2D CAD for map-assistance.
Power on man, you'll get there.
Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
My perfectionism runs to setting building, but I recognize your obsession.
The1True
8, 8, I forget what is for
It's been a summer. International moves are such delight.
Anyway, it's not just me, but this project that's been in limbo since we wrapped the playtest back in the Spring.
So why am I not finishing this thing? It basically just needs formatting at this point and some minor rewrites and edits.
Definitely, one of the problems is that, though I'm not a perfectionist, I keep adding things; fleshing out the dungeon of the Tesseract, fleshing out the Rot Crawl in the darkness beneath the mushroom mountains, stuff like that. But that's just a symptom; like if I'm legitimately working on something, then I don't have to feel guilty about not formatting the final draft, right?
This is pretty new for me. I've never had trouble wrapping up papers for school (as a student and a professor). I literally work on final polish for an animation studio. If I couldn't wrap up scenes there, I'd be out of a job, so I don't think this is an inability to see something through to its completion.
I'm starting to wonder if it's a fear of finishing.
Like this whole NAP thing has had a real chilling effect on me. I mean, hats off to the guys who contributed, that's some great game design and some fun scenarios. No shade from me there. It's the negativity; the rejection of a whole chunk of the community implied by the title. Like, when I first got into the blow-SR and reading the reviews, the stuff that was carrying this hobby forward was artpunk. Reviews on this very site put me onto stuff like DCO and the wild experimentation coming out of LotFP. I myself have shilled for Luka Rejec's trippy UVG. I'm sorry that people's personal politics are conflicting, but S3 is hands down the best thing ever written, fight me. The weird is right there in the foundational DNA of the game!
I've written/compiled/synthesized this whole weird, Wild-West/Gamma World mini-campaign out of our crazy ideas and now I'm obsessing about the conservatism and hate in the community I've chosen. I mean, there's a tiny audience for this, and if the prevailing attitude rejects anything but the driest of low-fantasy, medieval simulationism, then what the hell's the point?!
So that's the first thing.
The second is, the more I playtested this, the less I riffed off those super-simplified stat blocks. They were frustrating to me as a DM rocking a 3.5 game with a bunch of players who use the system to its fullest extent and require fully fleshed out monsters for a challenge, and right here in my list of edits, I can see Malrex confused by the half-assed compromises I baked into those blocks, (like saying a monster was "+6 to hit". What does that even mean to a referee using an earlier edition? I could maybe get away with "to hit: as Clr lvl 6+2" or something equally correct but unsatisfying for all editions.) I'm not sure there's a way to make everybody happy. I fucking love this community. I love old school games. I want to sit around talking about them all day long, ad nauseum. I convert and run classic TSR adventures all the time. I'm running a 3.5 Barrowmaze campaign on the side. My bookshelf is full of Bryce's The Best and Prince's ***** reviews. I love this shit, and the edition war makes me fucking sick to my stomach. Like the shear vitriol and intolerance coming out of some of these crusty old douches is so depressing. Only the most reactionary are disagreeing with these guys, which makes me wonder if this is the prevailing attitude in what remains of the scene...
So I'm stuck wondering if I'm going to get a fair shake publishing this thing with the stats that I used in my game, or if I need to convert everything to a ruleset I haven't used in 21 years so I don't get reviled or worse yet, ignored by the people I'm writing this for.
So insecurity or procrastination? A little of A and a little of B?
Anyway, it's not just me, but this project that's been in limbo since we wrapped the playtest back in the Spring.
So why am I not finishing this thing? It basically just needs formatting at this point and some minor rewrites and edits.
Definitely, one of the problems is that, though I'm not a perfectionist, I keep adding things; fleshing out the dungeon of the Tesseract, fleshing out the Rot Crawl in the darkness beneath the mushroom mountains, stuff like that. But that's just a symptom; like if I'm legitimately working on something, then I don't have to feel guilty about not formatting the final draft, right?
This is pretty new for me. I've never had trouble wrapping up papers for school (as a student and a professor). I literally work on final polish for an animation studio. If I couldn't wrap up scenes there, I'd be out of a job, so I don't think this is an inability to see something through to its completion.
I'm starting to wonder if it's a fear of finishing.
Like this whole NAP thing has had a real chilling effect on me. I mean, hats off to the guys who contributed, that's some great game design and some fun scenarios. No shade from me there. It's the negativity; the rejection of a whole chunk of the community implied by the title. Like, when I first got into the blow-SR and reading the reviews, the stuff that was carrying this hobby forward was artpunk. Reviews on this very site put me onto stuff like DCO and the wild experimentation coming out of LotFP. I myself have shilled for Luka Rejec's trippy UVG. I'm sorry that people's personal politics are conflicting, but S3 is hands down the best thing ever written, fight me. The weird is right there in the foundational DNA of the game!
I've written/compiled/synthesized this whole weird, Wild-West/Gamma World mini-campaign out of our crazy ideas and now I'm obsessing about the conservatism and hate in the community I've chosen. I mean, there's a tiny audience for this, and if the prevailing attitude rejects anything but the driest of low-fantasy, medieval simulationism, then what the hell's the point?!
So that's the first thing.
The second is, the more I playtested this, the less I riffed off those super-simplified stat blocks. They were frustrating to me as a DM rocking a 3.5 game with a bunch of players who use the system to its fullest extent and require fully fleshed out monsters for a challenge, and right here in my list of edits, I can see Malrex confused by the half-assed compromises I baked into those blocks, (like saying a monster was "+6 to hit". What does that even mean to a referee using an earlier edition? I could maybe get away with "to hit: as Clr lvl 6+2" or something equally correct but unsatisfying for all editions.) I'm not sure there's a way to make everybody happy. I fucking love this community. I love old school games. I want to sit around talking about them all day long, ad nauseum. I convert and run classic TSR adventures all the time. I'm running a 3.5 Barrowmaze campaign on the side. My bookshelf is full of Bryce's The Best and Prince's ***** reviews. I love this shit, and the edition war makes me fucking sick to my stomach. Like the shear vitriol and intolerance coming out of some of these crusty old douches is so depressing. Only the most reactionary are disagreeing with these guys, which makes me wonder if this is the prevailing attitude in what remains of the scene...
So I'm stuck wondering if I'm going to get a fair shake publishing this thing with the stats that I used in my game, or if I need to convert everything to a ruleset I haven't used in 21 years so I don't get reviled or worse yet, ignored by the people I'm writing this for.
So insecurity or procrastination? A little of A and a little of B?