Mad Gaming Madness

Continuing with the comedy items are these two, which are, again, of extremely limited use. I don't tend to use curses much, but the curses on these items feed into the humor. EDIT: Accidentally posted an earlier draft of this blog post. Oops! Fixed now (5/18/2023).

This year has been the worst so far, at least as far as dithering over my One Page Dungeon Contest submission goes. It's the same story every year: I have a million ideas, but none of them really gel, and as the deadline looms I end up polishing the shiniest turd just so I can get something done. Anyway, without further ado, I present Magic Shop Mayhem.

So this year, I had several really good ideas for my One Page Dungeon Contest submission. Sadly, my imagination was captured by the material in the thread " Ten Foot Poles: How Do They Work? " on RPG.net, and especially the idea of the Most Ancient and Worshipful Order of Roodsmen and Pole-Tenders that we developed there. As I was driving one of my DMs home last week, I suddenly had the idea for my submission -- the Vault of the Pole, the testing ground for apprentices of the Guild who seek to become journeymen. I pictured apprentice pole-tenders (called "tenders") frantically trying to overcome the obstacle course in a series of dungeon rooms while a deep sonorous bell tolls every minute or so. And so, that's what I went with.

As I've done the previous three years, this year I produced an entry for the One Page Dungeon Contest . This year's entry came in just under the wire; I had four different ideas that I worked on at one point or another, then I went ahead and completed one I started in 2011 and never finished. Inspiration is a fickle mistress.

This year, I originally started with something different, a modular starport sheet with associated Visio file, so you can make starports in minutes. In my sci-fi home game, this is something I need that I've always intended to make; I thought the One Page Dungeon Contest would spur me to finish the idea. Unfortunately, I didn't really have an adventure in there - it's basically more of a GM tool. And the contest is for a "Dungeon," so...

Apparently, they published all of the 2012 One Page Dungeon entries in one handsome volume ! I'm thrilled! There's some great stuff in there!

Much like last year, I ended up with some additional materials after I was through with my submission. In this case, I made up a business card and the label to a Rescue Ball* package. I figured I'd post both the .pdf files and the images so that GMs can use them with the adventure, or edit them with details specific to their campaigns.

So, this year I've decided to go sci-fi. It's not just that my home campaign is sci-fi and several others I'm involved in are sci-fi; it's that I think there's a distinct fantasy bias to the entries that limits the usefulness of the one page dungeons. Since the easiest way to diversify is to start with my own entry, that's what I'm going to do.

Well, this year's One Page Dungeon Contest snuck up on me again. I'd checked back in March, but I guess I was too early. Now I have only six days to get mine done. I had a number of ideas last year that I put down some preliminary notes for, but of course my current submission follows none of those ideas. I've decided to do a sci-fi themed encounter, mostly because none of the ones I've looked at in the current year's crop are sci-fi and I think that will make it stand out more. Of course, the whole point of last year's Wilderlands of Dire Omen submission was to have a framework in which to put other one page dungeons. I've not abandoned that concept, but I will push my current fantasy-themed effort to the back burner and try to finish it up for next year.

As I said in my last post, I'm a big fan of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting from Judges Guild. I also loved the old Arduin setting by Dave Hargrave. Both of these settings were classic fantasy settings created by big fan readers. In the old days, we didn't have the kind of exclusivity of setting you get nowadays -- you could easily imagine Luke Skywalker setting foot in Middle Earth and going toe-to-toe with Elric and Stormbringer, or some other gonzo conglomeration of properties. Eventually, the lucrative aspects of licensing properties became important to the rich guys, and they made it difficult to create this kind of thing. But for a while, you could see it happen. Anne McCaffrey's Pern series got this treatment a lot; if you've ever wondered why they never did a movie or TV show, it's probably because they saw that licensing the property would not be exclusive, since Anne was nice to her fans and let them semi-officially publish derivative works. H...

Well, here's a link to my submission for this year's One Page Dungeon contest : the Wilderlands of Dire Omen. NOTE: This is the updated version that fixes the problems I had with formatting the PDF. This is what I had intended to submit to the 1PD website!

The year before last, I became aware of an interesting phenomenon known as the One Page Dungeon. The idea is simple: instead of a whole book of keyed encounters and a suite of maps, a 1PD tries to make do with just a simple map and key. Most of the text in a standard adventure is superfluous, goes the argument -- monster stats, historical background, and the like can be found in various supplements or generated on the fly, and usually change with campaign or gaming system. At its core, the 1PD tries to distill the essence of an adventure scenario to its essential elements: the map and a key. The idea originally came about during the development of one of the megadungeons in the 90s. A forum member proposed that the contributors should produce their dungeon section on a standardized 30x30 graph with a key on the same page. The idea evolved quite a bit, and then a few years ago a contest was announced. I didn't manage to get in on it in 2009, and I missed the cutoff in 2010 by days...