TheGreatGreenGod

So there's this cool messageboard see, at "Paizo dot com" that I've belonged to since like forever. Over in that digital world men (and women) call me the the Great Green God, GGG, Triple G, 3G, Gx3, or G-Cube. My reasons for joining lay in my want to write for Dungeon Magazine, and the need to understand my audience and editors. You see, I've been a Game Master for the better part of my life. And not just D&D (not even mostly D&D), but lots of games from lots of companies. I figured if I could write for a magazine well enough I could move on and write for other media (like novels). Paizo was to be my stepping stone.
In the ancient past that was 2005, while I was but a noob on the relatively new boards, five complete strangers (four of whom are still here) and myself embarked on a quest to write our own mini-adventure path. Most of us had not written an adventure before, some of us were unpublished, and one of us, Tom, spoke English only as a second language. The one thing we had incommon was a love of writing adventure material. After a couple of weeks of brainstorming our ideas gelled and we sent off a proposal. A month or two passed and we got the okay. While some of the editors disliked our use of odd monsters and choices - Tom's spriggan in "Vile Addiction," All the apostrophes in names like Steve's necropolis at Pan' phar in "Spawn of Sehan," and my desire to make the yak folk into the next drow, which gave "The Dread Pagoda of the Inscrutable Ones" its Eastern flavor, it got the covetted green-light and then all we had to do was write it. Several months, and 900 emails later our quest was complete 35,000 + words, complex maps and Exag: the City of Clay, a mysterious precursor metropolis that had only ever been been discribed in page of electric text came to life - and still hadn't met.
Since then we added a few members (we're up past thirty now), and I still haven't hooked up with any of the originals save Steve Greer at this last Gen Con. Anyhow what does any of this have to do with Deviant Art? Well I make it a habbit to try to get in touch with artists that illustrate my writing and wouldn't you know that UDON did the arc's art and that the opening splash page for the Dread Pagoda was done by the fabulously talented Ngboy (see my favs). Anyhow I had to get an account to thank him poperly about six months ago, and did so, and then for some reason last night near midnight my time in the Rust Belt, I decided to use it. So here's to my next great electric collaboration and yours.

GGG

Ah, Blogging. Instead of saying anything constructive about myself I'll just pretend I've been blogging all along and let you, the reader figure it out as we go.

___________Encounter 1: DELVE FORMAT VENT
Encounter Level: Seemingly Insurmountable
SETUP
Like an artist, our heroic Player Freelance Game Designer/Writer has gone through and added the information to bring his creation up to spec with the Delve Format only to find that his initial 4,000 word short adventure which he knew needed about 1,500 more words to cover all the bases exploded out past 12,000 words even before he had put all the encounters in.
As the encounter opens the PW is sitting at his computer tearing his hair out over the addition of multiple 250+ word statblocks of common monsters, a detailed explainations for underwater combat, and making Diplomacy checks, and getting lost in a forest (all pulled from the SRD), the rules for being blinded and five lines of text that he's already repeated four times, but is going to repeat here, read:

Illumination: There is no light source in this area. PCs must employ their own light sources or use senses such as darkvision (if they have them). Otherwise, they are effectively blind. The other creatures here rely on darkvision.

TACTICS
The format's goal is to make the DM's job as simple as possible by including all the pertinent rules, information, and mechanics on one or two facing pages, while driving the author mad. It fights to the death or 1,700 words (whichever comes first).

DEVELOPMENT
The Player Writer (PW) will have to actually go in and remove half the spaces between words to make his adventure fit.

CONCLUSION
My adventure is going from 9 encounters and a random encounter chart (approx. 5,000 words) to 5 encounters period (about 8,000 words).


Matt