GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by Graham

Yet described with well-chosen words that make the layout and architecture easy to visualise. I gave the description a mental thumbs up as I read it.

Yes, I think the same about the town.

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by Athanbeli

Art: an issue related to the one above. A couple of good illustrations are there, but in the whole, art is almost completely unrelated to the content. No Mirror, no Fire, no Demon are depicted…weird!

The art issue: certainly that is a drawback, albeit it isn't Matt's fault; rather is the way SJG-GURPS seems to behave regarding most e23 releases.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Beoferret

Why not actively recruit a number of the experienced GMs who are on this board to convert some of the material they've used in their campaigns into a few published adventures (at least they'd be partially through the playtest process)?

Yeah, see that is the kind of thing that gave adventures a bad name. See earlier posts in this thread for a few examples.
Many game companies pushed a lot of adventures out the door with low quality.
Quality costs time and money and qualified people to edit and proof the work.
So in the interest of quality it is unlikely to see too many adventurers done.
And the other thing is they have to sell, unless your profit margins are wonderful you cant afford to lose money on projects, even for advertising unless your pretty confident it will bring in more business. Its worse if you want to maintain your rep for quality and thus have to take your editors off other higher demand products.

[Beoferret]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Yeah, see that is the kind of thing that gave adventures a bad name. See earlier posts in this thread for a few examples.
Many game companies pushed a lot of adventures out the door with low quality.
Quality costs time and money and qualified people to edit and proof the work.
So in the interest of quality it is unlikely to see too many adventurers done.

This does make a lot of sense, though there are several regular authors who have run campaigns in a number of settings who I'd hope are trustworthy enough to produce some good material with only a small amount of oversight. But, like you and Doug said, then there's the whole profit thing (dang you money!). I still: a) would like to see more active promotion of GURPS overall, and b) think that adventures (and other supplements, like the locations series) could be very useful in attracting and keeping interest in the game - and ideally leading to increased revenues from an increased audience purchasing more books/pdf's. I don't believe that published adventures would ever become as important for GURPS as say for Pathfinder - not by a long shot - but again couldn't they be a means of wooing new players/GMs (either by their simple existence and/or as a part of attempts at marketing world books/settings or the genre campaign building books, like Fantasy and Space)?

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Beoferret

This does make a lot of sense, though there are several regular authors who have run campaigns in a number of settings who I'd hope are trustworthy enough to produce some good material with only a small amount of oversight. But, like you and Doug said, then there's the whole profit thing (dang you money!). I still: a) would like to see more active promotion of GURPS overall, and b) think that adventures (and other supplements, like the locations series) could be very useful in attracting and keeping interest in the game - and ideally leading to increased revenues from an increased audience purchasing more books/pdf's. I don't believe that published adventures would ever become as important for GURPS as say for Pathfinder - not by a long shot - but again couldn't they be a means of wooing new players/GMs (either by their simple existence and/or as a part of attempts at marketing world books/settings or the genre campaign building books, like Fantasy and Space)?

Well those authors would likely make more money per time spent on other projects. But this experiment may help there.
However as far as little oversight goes, I am pretty sure even Kromm would have someone edit his work.

But I also would like to see more promotion.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Beoferret

This does make a lot of sense, though there are several regular authors who have run campaigns in a number of settings who I'd hope are trustworthy enough to produce some good material with only a small amount of oversight.

I'm going to give an example of what happens when a old GURPS player but a new e23 author does something. Say, submits a proposal for a book on grappling. Or an adventure. I've done both, one rather more successfully than the other.

First, one comes up with an idea. This might be for an adventure or a rules supplement. Doesn't matter. Well, it does. You want to consult the Wish List and make sure you're writing something they want.

You MUST come up with a properly formatted outline, plus a writing sample of that particular work. That usually means you've done some serious writing on the project already. Fine, no problem . . . that's your dime.

Then, you submit a proposal. It will get looked at (my response time from SJG has been quite good on my most recent stuff; but an old proposal - before Steven's time - for an actual adventure got lost in the works over a period of YEARS, so YMMV). A quick way to get in the doghouse is to call Steven Steve, or some other variation that isn't Steven. Just sayin'. :-)

If it's liked, it goes to writing sample, and then review, and then to contract stage; the SJG contract is short, sweet, to the point, and totally non-onerous.

From there, you write to a deadline. The hardest part of this for a new author is SJG house style. For newer writers, and these days, that includes Pyramid submissions, this can be a non-trivial barrier to success.

Then you write (probably for months), submit, and wait for someone to give you first-draft feedback. This can be days, weeks, or longer, depending on what's in the queue . . . remember that the GURPS staff numbers two!

If your draft can be salvaged (Sean had something like 30 pages of commentary and critique on my draft - and he still basically liked it) then you incorporate that into a revision and go for playtest. There's lots of time in between, etc.

This entire process can take quite a while, and usually, unless your grip on rules is iron-clad, requires input and interaction with Sean and/or RPK and/or Steven.

I guess the point of all this is two-fold: There really isn't THAT much "oversight" in terms of people telling you what to do, iterating on complete drafts, etc. There are a few huge checkpoints where you get comprehensive feedback: The proposal, the first draft comments, any second draft comments (there really shouldn't be a second draft, if your first is good enough), a playtest or peer review revision, and when you check out final copy. But in between those points, you're pretty much on your own if you want to be. And yet, I don't feel like they've kept me at arms length; quite the opposite - I get my questions answered very rapidly given the number of staff and projects.

Still . . . you can imagine that with months of time and many checkpoints, plus all the formatting and editing that goes into projects even after submission, there's not really, in my own estimation, much of a "quick and dirty" version of this. And adventures probably have maps, handouts, tables, more maps, and other stuff that ain't just text.

Oh, I'm sure Sean's self-written works are much more streamlined. He's the rules expert, a great writer, and knows exactly how this stuff works. He has to be efficient at this because it's his job, and he's good at it. I also imagine that certain others, such as Bill S, Phil M, Matt R, Hans, Peter, and other prolific GURPS authors have the method down-pat. But the SJG way of writing is technically precise and very high quality. There really aren't short-cuts to be had for most.

So, that's really long. But I wanted to highlight why the "just write stuff" meme just doesn't fly. Any project is treated with a high degree of scrutiny. Not hostile scrutiny, but the standards are what they are. Each work has to be profitable on its own; there are no loss-leaders in GURPS-land.

tl;dr: The longest distance between two points is a short-cut, and SJG doesn't take 'em.

[Graham]

I've now finished reading MOTFD, and while reading is not the same as playing I think it's worth giving some feedback. As always, preface everything below with "in my own opinion"; your mileage, of course, may vary.

As a Dungeon Fantasy resource, this is worth every cent. The Henchthing stats alone make this a great buy, let alone the fully-fledged rival PCs, new monsters and treasure table. There's lots here that you can re-use in other fantasy sessions.

However, the adventure itself is a bit thin. In order to thwart a horde (that you don't see) led by a named baddie (who you don't meet), you have to destroy an item (which has no utility in the time frame of the adventure), before other people do it for you. There are no real twists, jaw-dropping cinematic moments, or sub-plots.

The real meat of the scenario comes from the interaction between the PCs and the rival groups of adventurers, and this is where I have my concerns.

The SJG adventure format sets out to cover all the bases, making suggestions at each stage for how to handle parties that wander off the main course of the story. This is great for novice GMs, but at best handy for experienced ones.

However, the increased word count required to do this bulks out the text, reducing the impact of the material as you read it. Again, reading is not the same as playing, but before a GM decides to commit the time to running a scenario he or she must be inspired to play it - and that comes from the 'wow factor' while reading it.

And if this additional hand-holding is for novice GMs then it may be misplaced with this adventure. The rival adventurers, tough or clever, are complex characters, and the spell-casters in particular would be tricky for a novice to handle. Encountered with their henchmen, they'd give me pause, and I've been refereeing GURPS for nearly twenty years.

I think, though, that this one really needs to be run to get a real sense of how good the actual adventure is (and the way it's written you could run it several times for different groups with a fresh feel by changing which groups of rivals you use). I'll try to get a group together for it, and I look forward to hearing reports of actual play from others.

Regardless, every DF GM should buy this: it's elegantly written and packed full of useful material.

Graham

[sunstone]

just wanted to say: instant buy. My Dollar vote for adventures is in.

Cheers from germany.

[Greg 1]

An excellent adventure well suited for a party of dungeon fantasy adventurers!

I was expecting something a lot more traditional, especially for the first DF adventure. The adventure is relatively low on set-piece encounters and indeed, the dungeon itself, while dungeonarific, is quite brief. However, there is lots of opportunity for fun combat and for roleplaying, which is so often overlooked as as option for characters in dungeon fantasy.

I'm very pleased with the adventure and do hope that we will be seeing more.

[Rasputin]

Question, page 46, Flame Servant Demon: Shouldn't the gear be plus sized? This would add one to broadsword damage ("What a big sword you have!" "All the better to kill you with, my dear!"), and make it worth $1,000 and weigh 6 lbs.; the shield would weigh 32 lbs. and cost $800; the whip would have one more point in damage, weigh 16 lbs. and cost $160.