Welcome to Worldwide Adventure Writing Month!

Come join the fun! The challenge to to write a 32 page adventure in the month of June. Then share your adventure with other GMs around the world!

Here are some links to people already participating!

805pm

Stuart

Tezrak

David Jacobs

maikeru

Jeff

Settembrini

Roger

Jeffrey (some graphics here NSFW)

all the gang at our official forum

If you have links to other participants, please let us know!

The Adventure Begins Tomorrow!

June is Worldwide Adventure Writing Month, where participants are challenged to write a 32-page adventure module to share with the rest of the internet community of RPG fans. We invite you to join in the project! All are welcome! This is your chance to flex your writing chops, promote a favorite game system, and help out other GMs worldwide.

If you need assistance of any sort, please feel free to leave a comment here, or to participate in our official WoAdWriMo Forum, hosted by Treasure Tables. Once your adventure is complete, Treasure Tables will be happy to host the file so that you may share your work with the rest of the world. Or host it yourself and we will gladly link to your accomplishment!

Have you decided to take the challenge, but are still having trouble picking a system or a scenario? Feel free to pitch ideas here or at the forum! Need some adventure writing help? Try the articles linked in this thread or check out these two WoAdWriMo blog entries.

Guest post: A Play-By-Post Opportunity

As mentioned yesterday, here's our guest post by WeaveWarden of MythWeaver outlining a great opportunity to make your WoAdWriMo project accessible to the world of play-by-post!

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The folks at Myth-Weavers are volunteering to help out with supporting WoAdWriMo by offering an extra way to spread the word and make your WoAdWriMo adventure accessible a wide audience of gaming groups. Myth-Weavers is a roleplay-by-post site that will be hosting your finished WoAdWriMo adventures as special "ready-to-play-by-post" game forums.

Wait, What's RolePlay-By-Post?
RolePlay-by-Post (or just play-by-post) is when gamers run their roleplaying adventures using the medium of online message-boards, often with the help of a variety of gaming-enabling features, like online character sheets, dice-rollers, out-of-character text, and so on.

So, what's a "Ready-to-Play-by-Post" game forum?
A ready-to-play-by-post game forum is the interactive online equivalent of a pre-made adventure (like the one you'll be writing for WoAdWriMo). The general idea is to take an adventure and make it supremely easy to play online.

The adventure information will be formatted for the message board and split into private (GM-only) threads so that it's easy for GMs to copy story descriptions, NPC quotes, and so forth directly into open-to-player game threads. The adventures' maps and images will be uploaded and hosted next to their part in the story, ready to be revealed at the right moment. Important NPCs will be given their own online character sheets for easy customization, and these sheets will be integrated into the Myth-Weavers dice-roller system so that GMs might not even have to look up stats to make critical rolls. The little perks roll on ad infinitum.

Plus, the ready-to-play-by-post adventures will be instantly copy-able for any group that wants to play them, so many different online gaming groups will get a chance to play your adventure!

What do I have to do?
Sit back, relax, and focus on writing your adventure! The WoAdWriMo team members at Myth-Weavers will take care of the conversion of the final adventures to ready-to-play-by-post for you! If you don't particularly care about online play, it's no sweat off your back, since this new way of sharing your adventure will be in addition to hosting your efforts in pdf format at TreasureTables.

If you have any questions or ideas about the ready-to-play-by-post games, go ahead and direct them to the official WoAdWriMo forums.

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Thanks for this generous offer, WeaveWarden. I'm unfamiliar with the world of play-by-post, but anything that gets more people playing games they enjoy is okay by me!

...and we're back!

Worldwide Adventure Writing Month is only a few weeks away! Look for more tips and words of encouragement as we dust off this blog and get ready to ramp up towards WoAdWriMo. Have you resolved to take the challenge? Need help picking a system? If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to leave comments here or at our official forum.

Tomorrow we'll feature a guest post by WeaveWarden of play-by-post site MythWeavers. In the meantime, do you need help building plots for your adventures? Doctor Rotwang's Adventure Funnel might be just the tool to help!

Two More Ideas on Structure

WoAdWriMo forum member Devin Parker outlines the adventure format of some classic Shadowrun adventures.

In practice, the Shadowrun adventure templates always seemed to work for me as a model for games where the PCs aren't necessarily going to travel in a simple A-B-C progression through the plot. It works well for PCs who will be acting independently, following their own leads, investigating people and places at their own discretion. It generally feels pretty versatile, allowing for such free-roaming PC behavior while still maintaining a plot (rather than simply an "Explore The Hex" type oldschool AD&D module). On the down side, it requires the GM to really familiarize himself with it before running it; doing it cold means a lot of page-flipping and possible mistakes.

Click here to read Mr. Parker's breakdown of the Shadowrun format.

On a more old school tip, here's David Cook explaining how the A series of modules for first edition AD&D were created (from the forward to the compiled A1-4 Scourge of the Slavelords megamodule):

First, each designer chose a low-level monster that would be the basis for his round: orcs in A1, hobgoblins in A2, and gnolls in A3. Next we decided on the number and type of encounters that would occur: nine encounters to fit the time limit of 3 1/2 hours. We guessed this would give a good team just enough time to get through every encounter.

...

We also set what would happen in each encounter. Thus we came up with the following list:

2 Traps
1 Trick to fool the players
1 Problem the players had to solve
1 Encounter with the basic monster of the round (orcs, hobgoblins, gnolls, etc.)
1 Ambush prepared by the basic monster of the round
1 Encounter with the basic monster and a friend (an ogre, for example)
1 Encounter with an unintelligent monster
1 Encounter with a brand new monster
1 Grand Finale

Using this list, we each went to design our tournament rounds.

What's interesting for our purposes is that even with the smaller stat blocks of yesteryear, the A series of modules clock in at around 30 pages each.

Planning by Pagecount

I am pleased to report that more folks have signed on to take the WoAdWriMo Challenge. Without a doubt there a still some out in internet-land who are still on the fence. Here's one way to make the 32 page goal seem a lot less daunting: Try cutting up the task into distinctive pieces of only a few pages at a time.

Here's an example. Say I want to write an old school adventure module, with a dungeon in the middle of a wilderness area. That easily breaks down into chunks. The wilderness area will include a two page map spread, and at least four pages of description of various encounter areas. The dungeon will be three large levels and two small levels. The large levels will each have full page maps and maybe three pages of text. The maps of the two smaller levels will share a page and will need maybe 3 pages of description between the two of them. A mini-dungeon elsewhere on the wilderness map will require a single map and three pages of text.

That ought to cover the basics of an old fashioned site based adventure. For extras I want a village that the PCs can use as a base of operations. That will need another page for a map and maybe 2 pages of text. The main villain and couple henchmen will need full NPC write-ups, say one page for the villain and 1 split between the evil lieutenants. Let's see where this puts us as far as pagecount goes:

2 wilderness map
4 wilderness description
5 dungeon maps
15 dungeon text
1 town map
2 town text
2 NPC

That's 31 pages! Wow, that worked out a lot better than I thought it would when I started this exercise. If anything, this particular project could go over the 32 page goal, as the list above fails to include several items that will add to pagecount. I don't have an introduction or a table of contents or index. I have allocated any space to illustrations. I was thinking 2 half-page and at least 4 quarter-page illos, in addition to the cover image. And I wanted to include at least one new monster and magic item in an appendix, simply because I can.

For more plot and story oriented adventures more of your pagecount will be taken up with things like background information on the situation at hand, more NPCs, story flowcharts, and things like that. But I think this same basic method could help out those kinds of adventures as well.

Again, I urge anyone still hesitant to take the Challenge: just give it a try. We will help you! Do not hesitate to ask for assistance either here or at our forum.

Resolve to take the Challenge

If you are still on the fence about joining the WoAdWriMo team, now is the perfect time to make a New Year's Resolution: to write a complete 32+ page adventure module by June 30th, 2007.

Don't worry if the size of the undertaking seems intimidating. Maybe you just need to look for ways to make our challenge easier on yourself. Do you have a favorite homemade adventure? The fact that it's old hat to your local players doesn't disqualify it from becoming a WoAdWriMo module. Flesh those notes out, give them some real polish, and you'll be surprised how close you are to the 32 page goal. Do you have a system that is particularly easy for you? If you think to yourself "Oh, yeah. Making foes in System X is a snap," then maybe that's what system you should use for you WoAdWriMo project.

And finally, don't hestiate to take tired, old clichés out for a spin. Dragons menacing princesses, tramp star-freighters smuggling spice, and slick espionage agents packing Walther PPKs are clichés for a reason: that stuff works. And you'd be surprised by the number of veteran gamers who would appreciate your spin on these tired old ideas.