More Progress & Thoughts about Layout

Design for Release from the OGL Vault is almost done, I think. Surely, minor points will still come up and play testing may show flaws in the design that have to be fixed. But all in all, it is settled how the encounters are supposed to work, what each NPC, encounter & location bring to the story, and how everything hangs together.

Reviewing the distinct parts of the adventure, I find that I have used very different ways to organize and layout the information:

Gazetteer-style Locations

Chapter 2 of Release from the OGL Vault contains the gazetter of Pentée, which describes various locations in the city, along with NPCs that can be found at the locations. The gazetter does not make explicit reference to the story or detail any encounters, but some of the information provided about the NPCs will be important to the story. Thanks to the capabilities of Bent Goblin Press' LaTeX style, I will be able to reproduce these facts at other places in the document.

1. The location name is followed by its number, which is also used on the map and within the text when a reference to the location is required.

2. In a sidebar, the location is described as an itemized list, with bold text drawing the DM's attention to the most important facts. There may also be stage directions contained in the location description, but here none are necessary.

3. The location's description is followed with some information about the location. Important facts about the location could be highlighted like -- re-reading the text now, I think I probably should add such markup to the information that Ernt Crowboar is the proprietor of the inn.

4. A subsection for each NPC that can be found at this location follows.

5. the most important aspects of the NPC along with the salient facts about the NPC is provided as a sidebar.

6. The facts have been extracted from a more verbose description of the NPC, which follows the NPC's sidebar.

I am not entirely happy yet with the presentation of the NPC. Firstly, information about race and alignment is missing; secondly, I am wondering whether having the NPC's sidebar also encompass the verbose description of the NPC might enhance readability.

(As you may guess, the NPC Ernt Crowboar is my own alter ego in the city of Pentée. All of the NPCs in Release from the OGL Vault based on real persons (and there is many of those) reflect, I think, the admiration I feel for them and thus hopefully will not make anybody angry. (The villains of the story are not based on persons, but on organizations.) Even so, to balance things out, I decided to also put myself into Pentée and poke quite a bit more fun at my person than on anybody else.)

NPC-driven Encounter Flow

Chapter 3 of Release from the OGL Vault contains the first part of the adventure, in which the characters arrive in Pentée, are drawn into the story and start adventuring. This chapter is structured in encounters without bullet-list location descriptions, because (1) the encounters focus on interactions with NPCs and (2) the locations already have been described in the gazetteer. Many of these encounters are very likely to occur at a certain location (namely, the location at which the NPC is likely to be found, as detailed in the gazetteer), but several could also happen at different locations.

Instead of location descriptions, there is boxed text that should help the DM with getting the encounter started, maybe also for relating certain climatic or simply funny/entertaining occurrences in an engaging way. The boxed text setting up the encounter will usually encompass some description regarding the location so as to add atmosphere -- I rely on the DM to modify things on the fly, should the encounter with the NPC occur someplace else.

Flow-free Encounter-Locations

Chapter 4 of Release from the OGL Vault describes a manor house in great detail. This is a building the characters will enter in some way to carry out a heist. There is no way of knowing at time of writing, how the characters will enter the manor (though some are more probable than others) and what the manor's state will be at that moment: will it be day, will it be night, will everything be quiet or will there be a party going on? Each location must therefore contain all the information necessary for game-mastering the heist, but descriptions of interactions with NPCs and general considerations about the heist and what might occur must be kept separate from the location descriptions.

DM Scenario Planning

Chapter 5 of Release from the OGL Vault contains what is "missing" from the manor's description of Chapter 4, namely all the information required by the DM to run the heist. It contains

• A collection of all facts contained in the manor's description that is relevant for the heist (again, extracted and re-produced with Bent Goblin Press' LaTeXstyle.)

• Suggestions of how the characters might enter the manor.

• Information about difficulties and obstacles during the heist.

• Information of how to handle failure (i.e., the characters get caught.)

• A few encounters that are likely to happen during the heist.

Topography-driven Encounter Flow

It will be no surprise, that Release from the OGL Vault contains a chapter on the location in which the OGL Vault can be found (Chapter 6). This chapter resembles most closely the "traditional" adventure structure, where a dungeon's topography dictates at least part of the adventure's flow. Here, the structure of an encounter description follows the following pattern:

1. The location name is followed by its number, which is also used on the map and within the text when a reference to the location is required.

2. In a sidebar, the location is described as an itemized list, with bold text drawing the DM's attention to the most important facts. There may also be stage directions contained in the location description -- here we have one, the "Second glance" info, with a footnote detailing the precondition for indeed taking that second glance.

3. The location's description is usually followed with some general information about the location that does not belong into the itemized location description that describes what the characters can see (and, ideally, also hear and smell) when entering the location. Important facts about the location are highlighted.

4. Information that can be skipped at first reading (and even can left out when running the adventure) is clearly marked with its own sidebar.

5. Things that can happen in this location (often but not always driven by the characters' actions) are described in clearly marked paragraphs.

6. Information about locations/encounters that can be reached from here close the location/encounter description.

Where does that leave us?

Five different styles of laying out information for five chapters ... am I overthinking things? But I think the respective purpose of each chapter, of what it needs to convey to the DM, is different enough in each case to warrant different adventure layouts.

Last week's progress

Thanks to a few days off around Easter, I have made nice progress also with respect to the writing of the adventure, adding another 3,500 words:

The bulk of the writing concerned the dungeon, for which the final rooms (including the adventure's climax) hadn't even been designed properly yet. Time to think during some extended walks in the mountains around the Easter weekend allowed me to finish the design in good time for getting much of the writing done in the subsequent days.

On the Trello board, almost everything in the Design column has been moved into the Writing column, with some additional entries that I had forgotten about last week. Still a lot todo, but good progress, all in all, I think!