NAP Wrap up
Looking back at where we are
The submission is finally done, and was delivered to Prince on the 29th. The last few weeks were all about readability testing. Not as flashy as actual play maybe, but just as important. This boils down to proofreading by my long-suffering wife and sending drafts out to other referees to get their feedback (more on this later). Many spelling mistakes were caught and the maps got changed around a bit as a result. The last few playtest sessions went well, but nothing to report as far as changes to the module
Now that the contest is out of my hands, it's time for the first post mortem. There will likely be another after the review is released.
Answering the judgeman
NAP III was organized to generate high level modules, something sorely lacking in the modern ecosystem of the OSR. As such, the criteria for judging are focused on how the module handles aspects of high level play. Those criteria are:
The degree to which the adventure has embraced the possibilities, wonder, potential and spirit of high level oldschool D&D
The degree to which it has taken the [player capabilities] into account in that its challenge is not easily defused or rendered trivial by their deployment
The degree to which the adventure has solved this problem by requiring their use, rather then blunting or diffusing their potency
The player capabilities are easy access to information via Divination or other magical means, High mobility (also mostly through magic), high levels of resilience, and auxiliary forces (henchmen, armies, magical constructs etc)
For the first point, the module I have presented focuses on two things, domain play and wargame play. The players are given a domain with a stronghold out of the gate, and their task is to defend and expand it into a hostile territory. At the same time, and enemy stronghold is looking to do the same thing from the other side of the presented map. There is also a strict time limit in the form of an encroaching never ending winter, which threatens to swallow the region whole. This set up gives players an incentive to go out and conquer the region with their own army, which was a key tenant of high level play in the days of yore. There are also several neutral factions, which can be assimilated either via conquest (at the cost of military resources) or diplomacy (at the cost of time). For the setting, I've tried to go for good vanilla, with a minor lich antagonist, a cursed prince and his consort as minor antagonists, and an alpine woodland region. Ice skeletons, mammoths that have been revived, the works.
For the second and third, my main focus was on requiring the use of such capabilities, such as flight and divination especially. The main counter-agent is that many things are going wrong at once, and players can not be everywhere at once. They must delegate or chose what to lose and what to defend. The second is that there is much information that is simply missing. The true nature of a few artifacts is undiscoverable, as well as the location of the lich's phylactery, without such. The castle itself has numerous entries, none of which are great. A few will shoot at flying characters, or cause them to lose spells. A few of the secondary locations are significantly more lethal that would normally be warranted for the amount of gold, however this is to reinforce the idea that high level characters should not be going there.
Assessing myself
As with all projects, there are things I'm happy with and things I'm not so pleased with. The second category never truly goes away, but this one I feel has some glaring issues.
The most major one is premise execution. I may have bitten off far more than I could chew, even with the generous time frame. My group has very clear opinions on what high level play looks like, but almost none of them translate well to paper; and I am not a very skilled author (yet). This module works under the premise that some threats are too minor for high level characters to handle, and that they should be sending henchmen or followers off to handle that. However, late play testing revealed that should players simple ignore the low level threats entirely and beeline for the main one, their overwhelming force is far too much and they steamroll. I tried to mitigate this by adding a large defensive army, and some fear checks to drive off low lever characters but I'm not sure it is enough. Some of that I hope will be mitigated by a fresh set of players not having an idea of where everything is, meaning more time wandering and chances to lose resources.
The next issue is related to readability. I normally like to send my drafts out to a few trusted referee friends to get a feel for how my mad scrawling are coming across to others when they try to decipher them. However, in this case I ran into a few issues. The first is this is high level, and many of my friends are not interested in running high level, only playing it. Which means their feedback generally boiled down to "yeah this would be cool." The second, and more major, is my move to ACKS. I am the only person in my normal group that runs ACKS routinely, so there is some amount of system shock and additional learning curve involved. All this too say, I am worried that what is written hasn't had enough passes through the anti-crazy filter to make a cohesive product.
Finally, this year has been an uncharacteristically dramatic one for me. I've had two gaming groups break up over internet drama that should have had no affect on them. There has also been work and familial drama unrelated to gaming that affected my time severely. I had to drop out of several interesting games, the most regretful of which was the Shadows over Sojenka game. The upshot of this is that is my play testing schedule has been bare bones at best, woefully insignificant is likely more accurate. Lack of play testing in a contest centered on producing playable content is a death sentence. One which I will receive with grace if carried out (rightfully) by Prince.
Overall, I think I produced an okay product, but not a contest winning one. I'm debating on releasing it as-is or keeping it "in the shop" to polish up the rougher edges. The challenge was a good one, but not one I was actually ready for. That fact coupled with the aforementioned external issues means my output suffered.
The good in the bad
I do think much good came out of this. I got to dig fairly deeply into the ACKS domain play rules, which was a lot of fun. I learned Domains at War in the course of testing, and set the seeds for my next campaign, which will focus on actual war-gaming. I'm pretty happy with the design of my overall antagonist, a malformed lich that gives up a lot of lich's normal powers for an easier path to lichdom, which players can discover and utilize themselves. The few play test sessions I did get were some of the most fun gaming I've had this year. At the end of the day, I had fun writing and editing the thing. The production is the most fun part after all. Getting something from your brain in to a book so someone can run it at their table is a joyous creation act. I look forward to next year's NAP, hopefully something more in my wheel house; and I look forward to putting some of the ideas that occured to me during this contest to paper. But for now, I believe I am done writing for a few weeks at least. I have a war game to prep for, after all, and some kickstarter books to look forward to. So for now
Sail On,
-ShockTohp