Saturday, September 10, 2016
Working on my Corsairs of Tallibar ( #judgesguild ) adaptationfor #tridentcon
Working on my Corsairs of Tallibar ( #judgesguild ) adaptation for #tridentcon . The difficulty is paring this 45-page page adventure down to the 4 hour convention slot. The dungeon alone has over 70 rooms, and they are very descriptive with regard to the decaying contents of the previously inhabited rooms; I think this was influenced by the description of the stronghold in B1 In Search of the Unknown.
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I could simply let the players explore what is presented, but there are a lot of "empty" (just rotting furniture) rooms between the interesting ones.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm wondering what I'll do about I1 as well. It's pretty massive.
ReplyDeleteZach H Corsairs of Tallibar? Or a different Corsairs? Is it any good? Worth buying?
ReplyDeleteCharley Phipps maybe make heavy use of roving denizens, to/from the main sites? To help draw players to those main sites.
ReplyDeleteGuy Fullerton That's a good idea. I was considering the optional tournament start but it does drastically limit the scope of the adventure.
ReplyDeleteGuy Fullerton Yes, Corsairs of Tallibar. If you follow the #tridentcon hashtag you'll see a few others posts I've made. I think the adventure is well-written, but in striving for realism it goes heavy on the long descriptions of mundane room contents. The interesting rooms are interspersed throughout. I think it would work well if run over several campaign sessions, but for a short con it needs some editing.
ReplyDeleteBasically, the problem for this one is one of editing - not writing. Pare down the module to the best bits (which will both give players clear choices and allow more time for them to wander a bit while not blowing your time slot so it's not as "railroady" trying to get them through it). I have this module floating around somewhere, will see if I can dig it out and offer some more specific suggestions. Gnat the Beggar's "addendum" post to the review which got your started with Tallibar has some ideas worth considering: https://www.acaeum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?cache=1&t=12360&c=1.
ReplyDeleteSide note on tournament adventures.. if memory serves, A1 was a very good example of tournament vs. campaign adventure design. While the tournament version has the same flavor and flow as the expanded campaign version, you can clearly see the difference between the edited/tournament version and the version recommended for campaign play. This can also be seen in the other early TSR modules (all original tournaments) - G1, G2, G3, A2 and A4 all come to mind - but A1 stood out for me as the best example of difference in design focus.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of converting modules to 4 hour convention games,. here's good example we are probably all familiar with - B1.
ReplyDeleteB1 has two decent sized maps, and a fair amount of meandering involved; good for teaching mid-70s mapping techniques at the time, but bad for convention game design. If converting to a convention game, the first thing I'd do are pick out the key elements/rooms that make it such as awesome module:
- the Room of Pools
- the wizard's lab
- the fungus garden
- the trophy room
- the possibly evil shrine
- the bedrooms (and their clues to the former owners' lives)
- the magic mouth
- the trap with falling portcullis
- the teleporters
That's nine starting rooms / encounters to focus on as the key elements of the adventure. For a convention game, you'd probably want to omit the lower caverns level entirely (unless you shrank them in scope and put a single encounter down there like the minotaur encounter from B2 in it).
With suitable contents and some critters NPCs populating them, those nine rooms - with some filler wandering hallways and empty rooms - would probably be enough to fill a 4 hour convention slot. Say, 5 of them as minor encounters with or without combat at 10 mins each or about an hour total. Three of the others with minor combat, say 20 minutes each or another hour total. One with a "boss fight" at 30 minutes. And then other rooms & corridors filling the remaining 30 mins to round out 3 hours of actual adventure. Have a few empty areas for extra exploring if things go fast (say, an optional lower caverns section that you may or may not use) and a few spare wandering monster type combat encounters prepped and you're good to go.
The exception being if you get pure hack and slash players with zero interest in exploring / experimenting with the cool stuff in those rooms - in that case, you'd want to adjust by throwing in a lot of wandering monster combat encounters once you realize after an hour of play that that's the sort of group you have at table.. the single biggest variable with convention games being you never know who'll sit down to play in terms of player experience and preferred style of play.
Andy C thanks for all of the great advice, which I will refer to as I continue to work on this. So far I have re-drawn the map for the 1st level and have been cutting out rooms that are essentially empty of interesting items.
ReplyDeleteBTW, Corsairs of Tallibar also has a "Room of Pools"! That's literally the name of it.
ReplyDeleteOverall, there's a strong vibe of the Sea Cave from the Sample Dungeon crossed with the abandoned stronghold of B1.
ReplyDelete