Shaping Springdale
September 13th, 2010
Hello everyone. Today I thought I’d do something a little shocking and talk about the design process for one of our recent products. As you may have heard from all the hype and regular reminders, we recently published an adventure module, The War of the Goblin King. Before you all rush off to the download button, I should tell those of you who haven’t heard that you won’t find it there: The War of the Goblin King isn’t being released for free, but can be acquired for the (in my opinion) very reasonable price of $5, meaning that it’s practically free if you skip your next trip to Subway (or your preferred five-dollar-sandwich restaurant. I’m not picky.).
Since Dark Designs is supposedly a column about our game design process, I thought maybe it might be a good idea to talk about some of the aspects of designing The War of the Goblin King. Some of you may remember that, a few weeks back, The War of the Goblin King’s other author, Joshua Zaback, stole my column to talk to you about the adventure (for those who missed it, I returned the favor by stealing Grave Plots for a week to talk about…well…the same thing, really). One of the things that he talked about was fleshing out Springdale, the town that the adventure is set out of. Today, I’d like to take a little time to talk about that process.
For the first stages of The War of the Goblin King’s development, Joshua more or less was the project. He took on the responsibility of writing up the initial skeleton for the adventure and running the first round of playtests, all in addition to his normal duties as a columnist and designer. As an aside, that’s not how we do our adventures anymore (as an aside within an aside, for those of you wondering how we could have already changed our adventure writing policy when the book was only released a couple of weeks ago, the answer is that The War of the Goblin King actually pre-dates The Book of Beginnings and The Song of Fodin. In fact, we had already started on The War of the Goblin King before our website even went live, all the way back in March), not through any fault of Joshua’s, but just because having everyone on the team from day one helps ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal, genre- and design-wise. Now, before any adventure (mini or otherwise) is started, we at the very least have a design meeting where we talk about the goals we have for that adventure (something which might make an interesting article for another day).
Now, for all of you who want to get into the gaming industry someday, let me tell you a little secret: it’s hard work. It’s fun, and rewarding, and a labor of love, but it’s a lot of man-hours and it can be very draining at times. So, writing an adventure on top of one’s normal design duties is not the sort of thing that leaves a person with a lot of spare time. As a result, the original The War of the Goblin King was submitted with one minor omission, due simply to the fact that Joshua was so rushed to get it in on time that he kind of forgot about it. The omission? The town of Springdale, the one that the PCs were supposed to save, and all of that.
We joked with him a bit at the time, asking if Springdale had super-mega-teleporters which magically whisked the PCs off to the governor’s manor as soon as they arrived, and then whisked them away again later when they weren’t needed, but the fact of the matter is that, technically speaking, the adventure probably would have been fine as it was.
To my regular readers, I apologize if I made you spit your coffee out all over your monitor. Depending on how expensive that coffee was, you might have been better served by picking up The War of the Goblin King. Just sayin’. Anyway, for those that don’t know me that well, I’m not the kind of person who would usually say that including virtually no information about any place the PCs would go is an acceptable thing to do in your adventure—whether as a DM or a professional adventure writer.
That said, it all comes down to your group (or target audience)’s play-style. One or more of my past articles may have given away the fact that my personal play-style tends not to lean in the hack-n’-slash direction, but something I don’t think I ever got around to saying in that article is that the entire situation of the “Deserts and Oases” could also happen in reverse: kick-in-the-door types forced to sit through hours and hours of wandering around town and talking to Generic Peasant # 42 (or, to poke a little friendly fun at my dungeon-crawl-favoring readers, just another meatbag lacking the xp or gold to be worth killing) and only occasionally getting a refreshing breeze of action and excitement in the form of combat.
If The War of the Goblin King were designed as a kick-in-the-door, kill-things-and-take-their-stuff style adventure, there wouldn’t need to be that much information about Springdale. In fact, the quicker that we got the PCs out of Springdale and into the real action, the better.
Unfortunately, we here at Necromancers of the Northwest don’t have the kind of market research that, say, Wizards of the Coast does. Unlike my one-sided rival Mark Rosewater, I have no godbooks to reference (this, by the way, is one of the major reasons I love to hear from readers, so, please, drop me an e-mail and let me know what you think about something. Anything really. My inbox is always open.), but I’m going to hazard a guess that most of you aren’t the hack-n’-slash type.
As such, one of the biggest things I did in The War of the Goblin King was to build the town of Springdale, and the 20-odd NPCs that come with it. It wasn’t precisely a blank canvas or anything—Joshua did have enough notes to set out the general tone and feel of Springdale (which I feel was pretty unique and interesting, while still being refreshingly familiar and easy enough to relate with), and I simply filled in the blanks (though, if I may say so, I filled in a lot of blanks—as I said, there are over 20 unique NPCs with histories and personalities and, of course, stat-blocks, plus a score or so locations of interest which PCs can visit and interact with, some simply for flavor and others with more tangible plot hooks associated with them). At the end of the day, I’m confident that PCs will be able to find lots of things to do in Springdale, and that it can provide several hours of entertainment for any gaming group—except perhaps the hack-n’-slash variety.
Speaking of which, door-kickers needn’t shy away from The War of the Goblin King just because it has all that information on the town of Springdale. Your time in Springdale can be as much or as little as you want, and so the beauty of the system is that groups interested in combat can get straight to the killing (in under 5 minutes, tops), while groups that would rather explore Springdale for two or three sessions first (or perhaps turn it into a base of operations, living out of The Sleeping Coin and making regular visits to The Rough and Tumble, possibly doing work for Jack the Eye, Captain Virgel Maldon, or any number of other NPCs) can do that as well.
Join me next week, when the theme of the week will be character creation. Until then, may you always get the best of both worlds.