Taking a Bird's Eye View

I have a worm's eye view and a bird's eye view simultaneously and it's immensely helpful to understand what is happening on the shop floor when you are harnessing many talents and telling an intimate story on a large scale.
(Richard Eyre)

I'll be honest, I found the quote about having "a worm's eye view simultaneously with a bird's eye view" by googling for quotes about the bird's eye view. I am very happy that by chance I found one by a story teller, a renowned British theatre and film director.

I was googling (or rather "duckduckgoing", as I stopped using Google a long time ago) for the quote, because I got the feeling that I have been working for too long now with a worm's eye view - my Trello board, helpful as it is, tracks little things missing here and there in the adventure text, but I am sure that there is quite a lot more missing than I have currently on the Trello board. Also, I fear that if I continue in my current way of working -- namely adding bits here and there, I will never finish writing. At some point of time, I need to start at the beginning of the adventure and work my way through it, fixing everything and only moving on once I am satisfied. This will not replace a thorough review once I think I am done, of course.

So end of last week, I took a step back. I created a thumbnail-overview over all pages that exist in the current draft and color-coded the chapters:

Then, just looking at the overview, I tried to gauge what still might be missing:

• Introduction (red)
  Currently, the introduction is mostly about the story's background and the story itself: the immediate past, the near future (i.e., the adventure the characters are going to experience), the distant past (which explains certain aspects of what is happening) and the status quo (which may or may not be disturbed, depending on the characters' actions.)

  I am not entirely happy with jumping around in the time -- I did it to move the description of the adventure's story as much to the front as I could, but now I wonder whether I should not better go from distant past to status quo to immediate past (or maybe that should be the present), to the near future.

  Maybe by adding a short synopsis at the very start of the introduction that informs about the very basics of the adventure, I can pull the most salient information of what the characters actually are going to experience to the front, follow it with the background and then describe in more detail the adventure's story?

  That, I feel, should then be followed by a more thorough overview over the adventure (using the flow chart from last week) with a focus on information that helps the DM prepare and run the different parts.

• Pentée Gazetteer (orange)
  The gazetteer still lacks an introduction to Pentée though that will be rather short, partly because quite a bit will already have been explained in the background section of the introduction, partly because Pentée should be usable in any setting, be it The Forgotten Realms, Exandria, a homebrew world, etc.

  Other than that, the gazetteer is pretty complete, but I have ideas for a few more NPCs I want to add. Also, I should think about ways to "break apart" the large amount of text some more. The addition of the small map snippets in the margin for every location that I have implemented two weeks ago (too small to be visible in the thumbnails) should help some, and I am still musing about the layout for NPCs. One idea I am currently toying with is to use the initials of NPCs also in a graphic way, e.g., by putting a small circle with each NPCs initials into the margin at the start of an NPC's description.

  Images would help, of course, but since this whole project is a labor of love with very uncertain prospects of recouping any money I might spend in its creation, I don't think it is advisable to commission art. But I may try to find some more usable free photos that can be turned into illustrations.

• Adventure's first part (green)
  The first thing to wonder about the adventure's first part is, whether it should come first (i.e., before the gazetteer) or second -- as is currently the case.

  Looking at some published adventures old (Ghosts of Saltmarsh) and new (Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen) suggests that the gazetteer comes first.

  What speaks for this order is that the DM should at least have some sense of the location in which the adventure takes place when going into the details about the adventure.

  What speaks against it is that the volume of the gazetteer may feel overwhelming to the DM, who cannot know, which parts of the gazetteer will be relevant for the adventure, and which will not.

  Currently I tend to leave the order as is, but may preface the gazetteer with a sidebar encouraging the DM to skim-read the gazetteer.

  The adventure's first part itself will both need some additions and some rewriting. Additions will be necessary, because for several encounters, I have so far only written the encounter's beginning rather than the complete encounter. Rewrites will be necessary to break apart some of the boxed text to make it shorter and/or integrate the characters a bit more into what is happening.

• The heist (blue)
  Oh boy, so far all the content in this section is auto-generated by pulling together all the facts, clues, and secrets contained in the following section that I have marked up as relevant for the heist's preparation.

  This will have to be extended significantly with guidance for the DM both on running the heist's preparation as well as running the heist itself.

• The heist's location (purple)
  This is where the heist takes place. One could argue that the location description is a kind of gazetteer and should preface the information of how to run the adventure at this location, but I think that here, the DM is better served by first getting the distilled information about the heist before (skim)reading the location description.

  The text itself should be almost completely finished -- I just have to finish one last room description and add one more passage between two rooms that I came up with a few days ago.

• Ogl's Keep (grey)
  The adventure's continuation, starting with an encounter outside Ogl's Keep, followed by location-encounter descriptions around and inside the keep that create a topography-driven encounter flow.

  This section lacks some information regarding the journey to the keep, and information regarding one specific confrontation is still missing, but otherwise I think it is pretty complete.

• Ogl's Dungeon (yellow)
  Another topography-driven encounter flow in the form of location-encounter descriptions.

  Three encounters still need to be described, the rest should be fine.

Furthermore a closing section for the adventure is still missing, but that will not be more than two pages or so.

Rather than putting this all into a Trello board, I will now start with the introduction and work my way forward.