Adventure Submission

Adventure Submission

Adventure Submission is fairly free-form. Adventures can be long or short, site or story based, open to a broad class of players or narrowly focused, serial or one-shot; really anything you can think of that you want to run.

There should be two sections: Summary and Detailed Overview. After you submit your adventure it will be discussed, (you may get suggestions or requests to make changes) and you will (probably) be assigned a judge whose job it will be to "cover" you.

Write up your submission and send it to l4w.judges@gmail.com. (You can just start off with a summary if you like.)

Summary

A paragraph or two including hooks (how characters get involved), length and the general purpose of the adventure. You should also mention if you're planning on adding any major new NPCs to or filling in the background of the home-base of the setting (i.e. Daunton or the Proximate Isles).

Detailed Overview

Also called "the spoiler section"; this includes details of the adventure. What you're including, the backstory, etc.

We're working on getting a better sample up. For now please consider the following which was shameless copied from LEB.--Graf 02:32, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Detailed Overview Should Include (from LEB)

A Dungeon Master of some kind is necessary for any adventure, even an extremely short vignette. In order to start an adventure, the DM must request that the current judges in charge of adventure approval approve the adventure. Any adventure needs to submit the following information in order to be approved:

1. Who are the players: This can be a specific list or this can be a description of what kinds of characters are likely to fall in line with this adventure.
2. What is the background: Describe the setting, the people, and the motives that make this adventure.
3. What is the story: What is the story of the adventure itself? Who are the bad guys? What are they doing? How is victory achieved or defeat met?
4. What is the challenge: Specifically, what are the likely challenges the group will face? What levels of characters are expected for this adventure? What are the encounter levels and xp budgets of any combat that will be encountered? Will challenges be overcome through combat, stealth, skill, or diplomacy?
5. What are the rewards: What kinds of rewards are there to be found? Fame, money, magic, and experience should all be expressed here. Anything that can be a reward is important for the judges to see.

The judges may ask for detailed descriptions of the above, and it is important to establish whether this is a campaign, an adventure, or a short vignette. Experience in play by post may also be important (a new DM may be discouraged from trying to run a very long adventure more than a DM that has had success before). If there are any questions as to the DM’s reliability, they will be made by the judges (previously abandoning a game will limit the DM to doing a few Vignettes to warm up before taking on a new adventure, for instance).

If an adventure is approved, then the DM can begin recruiting if necessary. The L4W tavern thread The Hanged Man is one place to go to find a party of adventurers, though other methods of recruiting are available as well. The DM can choose to disallow characters from joining, as they need to. It is their adventure, and they should have the right to decide who can play. After the adventuring party is formed, you will usually be assigned a judge, but if not you need one before you start. This judge will help the DM where necessary, but most responsibility falls on the DM to run the adventure.

After the group is filled and the adventure thread starts, the DM will need to record all awards information as the thread progresses. After every point where experience or other rewards are awarded, the DM needs to contact the judge that is watching their game with this information. The judge will need to officially award the XP and treasure to the players before they can add the information to their sheets. This is done because it is very important that the judges have ready access to the DM’s notes in order to deal with a missing DM or other problems.

Also, while a game is running, the DM needs to keep a post with the interface information and a list of all characters playing in the game. This information is kept in the Adventure Index. This is important, because it allows anyone curious to find the information on the basic parts of an adventure necessary to relate to it, and also gives Judges a list to go to for finding all the characters related to the adventure. Characters that abandon an adventure or leave mid way should be listed, but notation of their condition might need to be added if they are not to receive experience for the adventure past a certain point. After the adventure is completed, the DM will give final awards for experience and treasures, and resolve how the PCs leave the adventure if it is site based. If there is an option for a continued adventure, it is important to plan for some players to be able to leave and for new members to join a group, because this is the nature of a living campaign setting.

Adventure submission FAQ

Are published adventures allowed here?

Published adventures are perfectly welcome, though many DMs find that they need tweaking to work well in a play-by-post environment. For example: a published adventure with 7 encounters will usually be intended to advance the PCs about one level or less, (with quest XP and so forth), and is intended to be completed over the course of two or three sessions. But in PbP, it can take six months to a year to get through the same adventure, and with L4W's time XP system and doubled XP from encounters, characters can advance two or three or even four levels in that time. This obviously can have an unbalancing effect on the adventure. Later encounters will often be too easy as written. It sucks when your BBEG at the end of a year long campaign goes down in one round without doing any damage. Also, you'll need to give out a lot more treasure than is written into the adventure.

If you want to run a published adventure in L4W, we encourage you to go right ahead. But we do recommend that you consider cutting about 1/3 to 1/2 of the combat encounters, particularly ones that aren't integral to the plot. You should also be prepared to modify later encounters heavily, once your PCs start to level up and you get to know their play style and what they're capable of as a group.