It's been a productive week here up in
the hills and nothing makes me more happy than knocking a couple
projects off of that ever-growing hobby project list.
I waxed enthusiastically last week
about recovering a piece of my D&D tween past—the dreaded Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid. Happy to say complete with faux
typewriter font, craptastic illustrations and hand-drawn map that it
is ready and rearing to be played next Tuesday (a free PDF of that madness will be out after right that.)
The actual writing I found surprisingly
very difficult, in fact I would go as far as to say it was one of the
hardest pieces I have written in the recent past (and this coming
from a guy who had to write ballbuster grad school papers and churn
out insane amounts of timely copy in a newsroom.) The trick of trying
to complete something fragmentary and so distant in memory and life
space, while not bleeding over into total mockery or wholesale
revision is a crazy balancing act.
Here's a concrete example, I
retrofitted and reworked (slightly) an excerpt from a wince-worthy short story I had written in junior high (a year or
so after the adventure) to serve as the requisite module intro:
“The Twisted Druid needs a punch in the nuts.
Once known to the world as the Druid Onald Agon he lived a life alone deep in the dark wild forest among the tall elms, live oaks and grackles. Alone day after endless day his brain turned in on itself and thoughts of raw power ate at him.
It was then that the old pecan tree, twisted in trunk with blackened gnarled bark, began talking to him. Telling him to do things. Dark things.
First it was little things like cutting the heads off chipmunks. Then evil and eviler things until his heart became as black as the trunk of that ancient tree. And in that great embracing darkness he began drawing around him and corrupting others of the forest in a maze made from living perverted trees.
It made him laugh.
But the Realms of Men cannot abide such Evil forever. Heroes are gathering and it is time to enter the maze, slay the Druid and take his ill-gotten booty.”
It doesn't quite satisfy me. It's only
partially “true” to the writer's voice (no way would I have put “nuts punching” in the lede) and vision of
11-year-old Chris stuck in this weird and evocative ruined pile for his
summers. It perhaps bends the stick too much in the self-mocking
direction...yet...yet, I think the whole package will be heaps of fun
to run next week. And I suppose for elfgames that's what
really matters, right?
Nicely the sense of accomplishment from
knocking out that silly and vain project, lit up the fires for
finishing the Golden Barge as a publicly-presentable adventure and
not just the jumble of pen-scrawled cocktail napkins, bullet points,
chicken scratches and wine-stained maps that I use to run games with.
Not exactly sure yet what I want to do
with it but likely on the suggestion of the players put it out:
1. as a stand-alone gift-booklet for
anyone humoring me enough to play in my Golden Barge session at North
Texas RPG Con
2. bundling it up with the rest of my
write-ups of the surrounding Slumbering Ursine Dunes as a
mini-sandbox and throwing it into the Live Weird or Die
compilation of Hill Cantons setting hoo-ha and alternative mechanical
bits.
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