Ongoing Work: Release from the OGL Vault
Already from afar, the City of Pentée beckons travellers and ships alike with the silhouette of the five high-rising towers that circle the residence of the city's ruling family Vatseer van der Kust. It is a prosperous city, with well-off burghers and well-fed farmers. Trade is brisk, and visitors to Pentée have a tendency to stay there: the city has long spilled over its walls, with more and more buildings beging built just outside the city's defenses.
Thus starts my current project "Release from the OGL Vault". At time of writing this, I have managed over 20000 words with at least another 5000 (my current estimate) to go.
Inspiration struck me after reading a posting on EN World, which unfortunately I am unable to find anymore (if you know, what posting I am talking about, please get in touch: I promise a free copy of "Release from the OGL Vault" (once it is released) to whoever is first to point me to the posting as well as to the author of that post). The posting was made at the height of the OGL debacle and went something like:
Wouldn't it be awkward, if one of the heists in "Key from the Golden Vault" was about surreptitiously replacing a contract with a different document?
After I had stopped laughing, I started playing with the idea to actually write exactly this adventure: "Release from the OGL Vault" as heist adventure, a companion piece to "Keys from the Golden Vault", so to speak, which would allow the players to put right in a fantasy world what was going so terribly wrong at that point of time in the real world.
Little did I know that only days later, the OGL debacle would resolve itself in a way that still seems quite fantastic to me. Which did not dampen my desire to write the adventure. To the contrary: now, I would be able to write the adventure as a celebration of a freed 5E (the adventure starts in the City of Pentée -- see what I did there?) and love letter to the 5E community.
I think it will be another two months or so before I am done: like I said there are at least another 5000 or so words to write, there will be testing and proofreading (e.g., the boxed texts, I have to clean up the layout, etc.)
If you want to stay up-to-date with how "Relase from the OGL Vault" is developing, have a look at the Developer's Diary or sign up to this blog!
PS: Because nothing is better for procrastenating when there is actual writing to do than playing around with cover design, there already is a tentative cover!
