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| William O'Connor's depiction of Sacrademus, a villain from my "Rolling Tomb" adventure. |
Around this time last year my first adventure pitch was accepted for "Tears of the Crocodile God". The last twelve months have been amazing - I've written four adventures for Wizards of the Coast, and I'm currently wrapping up my fifth. My third adventure - "The Rolling Tomb" - has just now been published in Dungeon 215. It's a piece of writing I'm quite proud of, and I really hope you get the chance to read through and play it!
"The Rolling Tomb" was based on one of Chris Perkins' ideas: a moving pyramid that crushes everything in its path. I'll admit taking on an epic-tier adventure was a bit of a challenge - I hadn't much experience running high-level games under 4E, so I had gravitate back to my longer-running 3E campaigns for inspiration. If you read through the encounters, you may notice nods to my favourite sourcebooks: "Sandstorm" and "Dungeonscape" in particular. For encounter construction I owe a lot to Sly Flourish's "Running Epic Tier D&D Games", whose advice inspired a number of villainous twists. Mike Shea is a top-notch designer, and I'd recommend his guide to DMs tackling high-level adventures in any system. "Running Epic Tier D&D Games" is currently being given away for free, so there's no excuse not to check it out!
Speaking of freebies, I'd advise any 4E fans here to check out fellow blogger frothsof's awesome fanzine "4E Forever": a mammoth 154 pages of houserules, monsters, traps, adventures and other crunchy goodness, dressed up in a pleasing OSR style. Frothsof really liked my Scalemail mass combat system, and asked me if he could include it in the fanzine - for which I'm very honoured. He even did a guest interview with me over on his blog, which you can check out here. Scalemail has been reflavoured to fit the fanzine's own in-house world, and is now the chosen mass combat system for further submissions. Thanks frothsof!
Speaking of freebies, I'd advise any 4E fans here to check out fellow blogger frothsof's awesome fanzine "4E Forever": a mammoth 154 pages of houserules, monsters, traps, adventures and other crunchy goodness, dressed up in a pleasing OSR style. Frothsof really liked my Scalemail mass combat system, and asked me if he could include it in the fanzine - for which I'm very honoured. He even did a guest interview with me over on his blog, which you can check out here. Scalemail has been reflavoured to fit the fanzine's own in-house world, and is now the chosen mass combat system for further submissions. Thanks frothsof!
Kudos and congratulations, sir - you're doing what I (and countless thousands of other DMs) have dreamed of doing, but after 20+ years of DM'ing and nearly knocking on 50, I think my time has passed me by.
ReplyDeleteBrilliant achievement. Keep up the great work :)
Thanks Mark, it's certainly been a fun ride! And hey, never say never ;)
DeleteThank you for the mention, and congrats on your continued success, Will!
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