SilverClawShift
2008-03-25, 08:01 PM
For a while now, my group has been creating, testing, tinkering, and playing with homebrew material. It's something we enjoy doing for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being the oft used phrase "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". We like D&D enough that we feel compelled to not only expand upon it, but to expand upon it in a way that is similar enough in style and quality that our results can be set side by side with official published material with a nod.
We're not perfect mind you, that's just our stated goal when working on new stuff. Well, one of the things we've always wanted to make is a real, honest, sit-down-and-play-it, ready campaign.
We're thinking seven chapters, roughly four levels per chapter (yes, the story DOES end in epic levels. That's actually out of necessity for the storyline itself, it simply becomes something that can only be addressed as "epic" in D&D terms). Each chapter would have an overall themeatic feel that differentiated it from the rest, but with ties that made it clear they were all part of the same adventure, featuring the same groups.
Our primary creative goal is to treat the whole thing as "Officially-unofficial". We're not professional designers or publishers, we're players with a vision. Our DM wants things to be laid out and explained the way he would lay things out preparing a game for us. Sort of a By-Gamers, For-Gamers mentality.
I could rattle on and on about what we're setting up here, but that's not the point of the post. The real point here is a small list of questions, the most important being: What do you look for in a published adventure?
Is it the story itself that interests you? The villains? The NPCs? The locations? Do you want the occasional new monster or class, or new twists on old stuff?
I know not everyone like pre-made adventures. We haven't used many, because we're too busy playing our own. Most players and DMs are the same way. That said, our DM is a guy who knows what he's doing when it comes to hosting a game, and people interested in learning how to run things more smoothly often turn to ready-to-play adventures, so we're still planning on working on this.
Does anyone have any insight on this?
We're not perfect mind you, that's just our stated goal when working on new stuff. Well, one of the things we've always wanted to make is a real, honest, sit-down-and-play-it, ready campaign.
We're thinking seven chapters, roughly four levels per chapter (yes, the story DOES end in epic levels. That's actually out of necessity for the storyline itself, it simply becomes something that can only be addressed as "epic" in D&D terms). Each chapter would have an overall themeatic feel that differentiated it from the rest, but with ties that made it clear they were all part of the same adventure, featuring the same groups.
Our primary creative goal is to treat the whole thing as "Officially-unofficial". We're not professional designers or publishers, we're players with a vision. Our DM wants things to be laid out and explained the way he would lay things out preparing a game for us. Sort of a By-Gamers, For-Gamers mentality.
I could rattle on and on about what we're setting up here, but that's not the point of the post. The real point here is a small list of questions, the most important being: What do you look for in a published adventure?
Is it the story itself that interests you? The villains? The NPCs? The locations? Do you want the occasional new monster or class, or new twists on old stuff?
I know not everyone like pre-made adventures. We haven't used many, because we're too busy playing our own. Most players and DMs are the same way. That said, our DM is a guy who knows what he's doing when it comes to hosting a game, and people interested in learning how to run things more smoothly often turn to ready-to-play adventures, so we're still planning on working on this.
Does anyone have any insight on this?