To Jam or not to Jam, that is the Question
So, there is a Game Jam going on, the Game Jam: Baldur's Gate (Fall 2025) organized by Roll20.
"Bent Goblin Press" has been completely inactive regarding the writing and publishing of adventures since the release of Release from the OGL Vault in January 2024 -- after taking a whole year to write a 100-page adventure, I was completely exhausted. I didn't even manage to write a blog post about the nice mention "Release from the OGL Vault" got from Teos Abadía on the Mastering Dungeons podcast.
So now, this Game Jam. Since 100 pages took me 12 months, trying to write up to 25 pages in one month, seems like a no-brainer: don't do it!!!
Yet, I am tempted. I have this old idea kicking around, which never got beyond a title, a title image (which I cannot use anymore, because I have lost the URL of the source image and its free license), a concrete idea about the plot, a vague idea about structuring it, and one fleshed-out NPC. The idea would fit perfectly into Baldur's Gate, one of my favorite city's, as I wrote when the Baldur's Gate City Gazetteer was made available for free for some time.
So on October 2nd, I set down and took stock of what I had. The one thing I have going for me is that formatting the adventure is no problem: I spent what must have been months modiying the DnD 5e Latex Template into the distinct style of "Bent Goblin Press."
On October 2nd, I created a new page design for an adventure set in Baldur's Gate and put all I had into my template. This amounted to the following:
In the meantime since then, I wrote the first two encounters and another NPC, which brings me to this:
Since I was unable to write a single line on the weekend of October 4th-5th because of other stuff going on (we visited Linz -- if you ever wondered, which city has the most wacky tourism campaign, look no further: their slogan is "Take a risk, visit Linz", so there might be a relationship to Baldur's Gate after all), that is actually a lot of progress for me. But there is only three more weeks left, and still many pages to go.
For now, I will continue working on the jam, but I am not overly hopeful on finishing in time...