The Time of Horror Approaches, Maybe

Well that's unexpected.

In the past couple days, Broodmother Sky Fortress and The Seclusium of Orphone have both made their funding goals, so congratulations go to Jeff, Stuart, Vincent Baker and Cynthia Sheppard. Jeff's adventure was an early front-runner and even the naysayers couldn't deny that there was a good chance that it of all the adventures would make its funding. Baker's adventure had a fair way to go this time yesterday, but it's got there with just over two days left, so that leaves...

Oh.

By some weird twist of fate, that leaves my adventure as the next closest to its goal. Now I'm a long way behind the other two so there's a lot of money to make up in two days, but it doesn't hurt to try, and if nothing comes of it then the previous offer still stands.

To be honest, I think it's too late and I don't expect Horror Among Thieves to make its goal, but then I never expected it to get as close as it has done, to have attracted more interest than Monte Cook's adventure or the one by the bloke from GWAR. The fact that it has is down to you lot, and I can't thank you enough.

For those of you still on the fence, perhaps a glimpse at some of my other games writing will give you an idea of whether you'll like Horror Among Thieves. Dinner With Susan is an appparently well-regarded scenario for Call of Cthulhu that shares some elements with my new adventure, and the idea of being trapped in an enclosed space with some horror also cropped up in my contest-winning One Page Dungeons of 2011 and 2012. All three adventures are free and are somewhat indicative of what you can expect from Horror Among Thieves, and you can find more -- along with many examples of my art -- at my website.

Thank you again.

Special Delivery

We wrapped up our second Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure last night; second and perhaps last, as while it's close to being the perfect version of Dungeons & Dragons for me, I know that not everyone in the group is anywhere near as keen.

Anyway, I've scanned and cleaned up my scenario notes from the game, and they can be downloaded as a sort-of-a-One-Page-Dungeon here. For those interested in the tension between preparation and play, it took about a couple of hours to put together and gave us two four-hour sessions of play, although there was a fair bit of faffing about in the first session. I've dropped most of the LotFP-specific statistics, so it should be easy enough to import to your game system of choice.

Thanks to the Queen -- not of the Demonweb Pits -- giving everyone a couple of extra days off work, we should be meeting again tomorrow, this time to either play a bit of RuneQuest -- I haven't played since a total party kill about fifteen years ago -- or perhaps the D&D5 playtest, if I can get my head around the adventure in time.

One Page Dungeon Contest 2012

This year's One Page Dungeon Contest was a tough one, with over a hundred entries and a list of winners almost twice as long as last year's. So I feel even more lucky that my entry is among the winners. I suspect cheating a bit helped to secure me the victory, as my entry is not a dungeon as such, although it does have a map of sorts.

Congratulations to all the other winners, and well done to everyone who entered and made it such a hard-fought contest; I know the judges found it difficult this year to narrow the field, let alone pick winners. A collection of all the entries can be downloaded here, while the winning entries are here.

One Rough Night

Last year, I entered the One Page Dungeon Contest and was picked as a winner, despite submitting a One Page Haunted Village rather than, well, a dungeon. Rather than doing the sensible thing and quitting while I'm ahead, I've decided to enter this year's contest. Once more, I have failed to produce an actual dungeon, although in my defence, it does feature a map. Sort of.

Long-time fans of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay may find the title and the scenario in general quite familiar, and I must own up; after I came up with the idea, I realised the general similarities to the classic "A Rough Night at the Three Feathers" from White Dwarf #94 and so changed the title as an homage.

In terms of tone, the scenario is somewhat whimsical; my intent was to try and do a fantasy role-playing version of the classic farce, and I hope that comes out in play. There is room for dark intrigue too, and one of the characters is a powerful demon, so there's even potential for a Total Party Kill if the players really mess up or the GM has a thumping hangover.

No statistics are included, so the scenario can be played with any system. WFRP is, of course, recommended. You can download the scenario here (14mb) or here (3mb).

International Horror

I ran another Savage Eberron session last week, so look out for a summary of that in the next couple of days, including some musings on what I thought worked and what crashed and burned. I'm due to run another session this Friday, so the two reports might get bundled together.

In other news, my prize-winning horror scenario has been translated into Polish by the irrepressible Robert Oglodzinski of Ancient Scroll. If you're reading this, then you're probably comfortable enough with English to run the scenario from the original text, but if you want to see what it's like in Polish -- and Robert has added some tweaks of his own to the text from what I can tell with the aid of Google Translate -- you can find the translated Horror Comes to Haddonfield here.

One Page Dungeon Contest 2011

A couple of years ago, a group of gaming bloggers came up with the idea of the one page dungeon, which is -- as one might expect -- a dungeon map designed to fit on one sheet of paper, including all rules and statistics. It was designed to make building megadungeons easier, and the epic Stonehell was one of the first prooducts of the format, as fine a proof-of-concept as one could ask for. The Chatty DM goes into more detail on the history of the concept here.

Some bright sparks realised that the format could be used for simple one-shot dungeons too, and some other bright sparks decided that a good way to show off the format was to have an annual contest in which entrants could show how the format could be tweaked and twisted, and yet remain true to the original concept. The One Page Dungeon Contest is now in its third year and is going strong.

I've not entered before, and I had not intended to enter this year, but when the 2011 contest was announced, I realised I already had a one page dungeon, and so decided to submit it. I had no expectation of it getting anywhere, and to be honest, I entered it more so it would gain a bit of exposure to a wider audience; this worked well, as the number of downloads shot up soon after it was entered.

I was pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning and discover that this year's contest winners had been announced and that my scenario is among them! I suspect I may have won by virtue of submitting the only horror-themed scenario, and I'll have to buck up my ideas if I'm to enter again, but it's still an exciting bit of news.

Congratulations too to the other winners, and thanks to all the other entrants, who nonetheless worked hard to get their adventures done in time for the competition deadline. You can download all the entries in one pdf bundle from the contest page.

One Page Horror

Here's a little something to celebrate my favourite holiday:

When the village of Haddonfield discovered that the wizard Langenkamp was engaged in dark magic, they raised a mob and burned down the old windmill in which he dwelled. With his dying words, Langenkamp laid a curse on the villagers who sought his doom, a curse which would have come to nothing had Cropsy, a young farm labourer, not sneaked into the mill for a nap and been caught in the conflagration. The death of an innocent provided the mystic fuel for the curse, and now the people of Haddonfield are trapped with no hope of rescue.

It's a short piece, based on the One Page Dungeon concept, so should be easy to slip into an existing game or to run as a one-shot for Halloween. It lacks system-specific rules, but there should be enough information to make generating appropriate statistics easy enough. The scenario is more or less setting neutral too, although a general mediaeval fantasy feel is implied -- and easily changed if desired. It's also packed full of shameful puns and references, as is usual for me.

You can download Horror Comes to Haddonfield here. If you do run it, let me know how it goes!