Adventure Site Contest - Intro and Review Standards
Judging since I have already been judged.
The submission window for the Adventure Site contest from Coldlight Press
has ended. This contest was created to continue on the tradition of reviewer-hosted contests, such as the Wavestone Keep contest from tenfootpole (held in my honor) or the legendary No Artpunk by Age of Dusk. The contests offer a great avenue for aspiring designers to get real feedback from trusted voices in the ttrpg scene, and polish their craft in a much faster way than relying on customer feedback or random review cycles would normally allow. This particular contest also has an added bonus in that anyone who submitted is allowed to volunteer as a judge. The benefit of this is that is exposes those volunteers to a wide variety of other products by other designers, and let's us hone our skills of critique. These skills can then be turned back on our own work in the future, further helping us become better designers.
As you may have inferred, I both submitted and volunteered to judge, as I think the experience is very valuable. As such, here as my reviewing standards:
Parsability: This is different from simply "layout." Lot's of good layouts are not easy to parse at the table and brevity does not equal easy to parse (looking at you OSE house style). This will likely only be a minor point, with these adventures being so small.
Je ne sais quoi / vibes: These adventures are small, however they should still have personality and spark the imagination. When reading an adventure, I should be imagining how fun it would be to solve it as a player, thinking about what it would mean if it was placed in a campaign and over all engaging with the location as a location, not as a few pages of stats and descriptions. This point is vague, but is likely the most important. If the adventure doesn't make me want to run it, there isn't much more I can say about it.
Portability: The are supposed to be able to fit into a wide variety of campaigns and settings. The ability of the author to accomplish this while style providing uniqueness for point 2 is what's really being looked at here, at least in my opinion.
These standards are certainly not perfect, but they are what I have. This is my first time judging anyone's work other than my own (at least publicly), and I am sure that I have much to learn on how to critique. But I learn best by doing. Also, I will not be giving numeric scores, but I will rank the entries at the end of the posts (excluding my own of course). So, get ready for a deluge of posts in this contest upcoming. Thank you again to Coldlight Press for providing the opportunity!