Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Slave Pits: An Update

Back in July, I was experimenting with a layout design for trying to write up my version of the Slave Pits of the Undercity. My own personal goal at the time was to have something ready for the re-release of the AD&D core books by WotC. Unfortunately, life interfered in a major way, and my own internal deadline came and went. Thus, a lot of the motivation for working on the project faded, and I have only half-heartedly worked on it since.

As I noted in the posts about the layout experiment, I don’t really enjoy writing modules — I like making maps and notes, playing and improvising. So, despite the fact that I really like the work I have done, it is work. Recently, however, I have been grinding away at the project, because this is something that someone else requested and I promised myself I would finish.

Thus, the number of posts I have written has fallen because I have made a hard charge to get this thing done. There are still several things to do before I get a finished rough draft, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

One of the things that I was interested in at the outset was how efficient this layout was going to be. It looks like this might come in around 70-73 pages, which includes the background information; encounter areas for the island, the village, the castle and the temple; three dungeon areas with a total of 140+ rooms; a new monster and new magic section; and all of the maps. For a comparison, Patrick Wetmore’s Anomalous Subsurface Environment which includes a campaign setting and a dungeon with 101 rooms comes in at 87 pages.

And here comes the crux of this post. I want to ask a question of the folks out there that have more experience at this than I: For the purpose of letting people get a hold of the .pdf of this project what are the easiest, safest and best ways to grant this access?

4 comments:

Anthony said...

I'm quite looking forward to this. A1 is one of my favorite modules, and your re-imagining of it was inspired. Enough so that it could actually get me off my arse to finally run a game again. :)

Alan said...

As for allowing access to the pdf, here are a couple suggestions:

- upload it to mediafire
- upload it to your google drive, and share it with the public

Tom Hudson said...

"Share" is a bit vague?

You can upload the PDF to Google Docs/Drive and make it readable by individual named email accounts, or by anybody who gets the link. Skimming through my drive folders I've got more than a dozen oldschool files that people have shared with me that way. If they update it, I get the updates automatically; if I want to keep a version, I can make a copy for myself.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, so that's the most natural way for me to do it; there are probably other good alternatives.

Unknown said...

Not sure about how to share, but I would love to see your version of A1. Heck you inspired me to try to re-work it myself, I used your idea for "Huwind" as a jumping off point. All of it is on the backburner now, but I think I might try and work on it more now.