Short Adventure Wrap Up

When I first read about /Matt’s OSR Challenge - A September of Short Adventures back in July, I thought it was a neat idea, and I’m pretty sure I marked it to think about and come back to.  I think that had /Matt not continued to post, remind, poke, bother, and generally cut through the noise and clutter of my blog roll, I would have missed it. As it was, through most of August my thoughts were not on the challenge, and I hadn’t signed up. In fact, I think I only signed up a couple of days before the challenge began, and the reason is that I had an idea. For some reason I was thinking about Lassie, and how Timmy always ended up in precarious situations, and then I thought of an adventure title: All’s well that ends well. Of course I had this idea while getting ready for bed. Ignoring that, I grabbed my notebook, and flipped to a blank page.

I started writing down titles and ideas. Short ones, only a line or so each, flowing from a village to a town to a city, then on to the wilderness, and then to the realms of the immortals. Threads, in the form of the Dawnstone and Twilight Stone wove through the adventures.

Original Notes Page 1

I was purposely pushing myself with the adventures after the first dozen or so to tackle high level play. It’s never been my strong suit, and I wanted to see how I could handle it in this format. As you can see, the end result didn’t turn out exactly as planned, though I did manage to keep the basic ideas of most of the adventures.

The first adventures were written very quickly, and it gave me a bit of a buffer at the start, but after the first dozen things started getting a little more complex and I had to work harder at it. Many of the later adventures were written the night before they went live, and even still I wasn’t able to get adventure 25 posted before the official end of the challenge.

Original Notes Page 2

Actually, that isn’t true. Technically I could have posted it on the night of 9/30, but I really do try to keep to one post a day that goes live around 6am. I find that it’s good to have a schedule, and to try to keep to it.

All in all I have to say that like the Sample Dungeon project, the A to Z Challenge, and the various RPG Blog Carnivals that I’ve involved myself in, the September of Short Adventures has been an interesting exercise and I’m glad I participated. Like those previous projects there is a strong temptation to go back and tweak it based not only on what I wrote later in the challenge (I’d have made both the Dawnstone and Twilight Stone threads stronger) but also a bit on what others in the challenge did.