50 in 50 adventure hooks. What works, what doesn’t, what can improve?

I’m in the final stretch of a hectic professional life, so I barely have time to write, post or respond. However, the Rolemasterblog must go on so I’m going to do a quickie for today. Hopefully this will spark some feedback.

We are nearing the end of our “50 Adventures in 50 Weeks” challenge we set for ourselves last year. It’s been a great experience in creativity, deadlines, limitations on using IP, and testing the limits of publishing. The last of my adventures start getting larger and more in depth and I’ll be putting in usable “stats” whenever possible using an abbreviated stat block that can be used with d100 and Rolemaster w/o any IP infringements.

Peter blogged previously about his views on the 50in50 and I wanted to toss out some thoughts and observations of my own:

  1. I’ve made a little money. Nothing significant, but I did buy hardcovers of Xa’ar, Emer III and Cloudlords the other day using my earnings.
  2. In hindsight, I wish my adventures were a bit “meatier”. That wasn’t the original goal of the challenge–it was supposed to be simple hooks and concepts–but looking over the published ones sparked new ideas.
  3. Reviews. No one wants to be criticized but it would have been nice to get some reviews from people. Even “I can believe I paid .50 for that” would have provided some insight.
  4. For my contribution, it seems like the “City of Spiders” and “Haunted Forest” were the two most popular. Some of my other products were encounters or people related so I wonder if the appeal was that they were both physical places that are easy to drop into a adventure or campaign?

Since we are going to continue to publish adventures past the 50 adventure limit I’m going to set a few more goals:

  1. Each of mine will be at least 3 pages of content.
  2. Include Rolemaster compatible stats
  3. Focus on places. Interesting NPC’s or encounters will be rolled into a “place”.
  4. Layouts. Everyone likes the battle maps so each adventure will have one.

I’m open to any suggestions as we move forward! What should we change or improve?

7 Replies to “50 in 50 adventure hooks. What works, what doesn’t, what can improve?”

  1. Sorry, I know you put a lot of effort into these and I look forward to taking a look at them. I’ve been busy myself, and what energy I have has been spent on giving feedback on the RMU action economy. I hope to get to giving you feedback in the future.

  2. The most popular of my titles were:
    Far From the Baying Crowd and Creatures of the Night. The first is a werewolf plot and the second features a hunting pack of Gargoyles.

    I don’t think humourous titles help in any way and I agree that if we could stat them out they would be more attractive.

  3. I think that physical places, especially small ones, are useful because they often can be dropped into existing campaigns without too much trouble. The battlemaps at some point should also come in a hex version; I’m getting hexes at the moment but they aren’t turning out quite right.

    There have been four (written) reviews to date. Two for Star Mangled Manor and one for Creatures of the Night on RPGNow and one for Gemsting Cave on tenfootpole org (duplicated on RPGGeek). I think for the negative reviews, the lack of stats did harm the hooks.

  4. I’ve enjoyed reading every module I’ve purchased. I’ve loved, as have my players loved, the ones I’ve injected into the game thus far. We only meet up once a month so I’ve only had the opportunity to use a few of them.

    I haven’t had an issue with the lack of stats. Even if there were stats included, I’m going to scale the difficulty up or down depending on the player level and number of players. Including spell lists (as best as you are able without violating copyright) would be helpful and items that the baddies would be using would be fun but not necessary.

      1. I’m not actually sure. I think possibly, yes, especially if it’s a generic name. I think Peter said only entire spell lists were out. However, I think if too many stats and references start showing up then ICE might get irked.

        1. I tried to share a pdf of a character sheet on the ICE forums and it contained the spell lists and the names of the spells actually know but not the spell description or any parameters and they refused to approve the pdf as it broke their IP rules.

          I had to remove the lists of actual spells and only include the spell list titles to get the character sheet approved.

          So we can name lists but not the spells on the list.

          I have named individual spells on individual lists but I think the breaking point is when someone could reconstruct the list from what you are sharing.

          I don’t think ICE want to explicitly define what is and is not allowable as we would immediately publish right up to the last dot and comma of what is allowable.

          All the time it is vague then we just probe around the edge of the minefield.

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