I spent most of today half-working on a leaping tower "module." I put module in quotes because it isn't very old school or moduly, mostly puzzles in a tower that you climb linearly.
I think it might interest people as a location, though. Thus I kept working on it. I was going for lean and managed to fit the 8 room key on one page. I wonder if I've still got too much detail even in that.
It made me think more directly about something that's been floating around in my brain for a while: layered modules. I mean the same location, with different levels of detail; 1 page gets you all the details necessary to know how the rooms function, but maybe 3 pages gives you suggested treasure and a little backstory, and 6 gets you ideas for using the location in a campaign and illustrations to show players.
Have you ever seen a product like that? I wonder if you can escape the detail once its there, I mean if you knew there was a "fat" version wouldn't you want to download it to see the details that the "lean" one left out? And having seen them, could you forget them?
Life got in the way of both the session I'm a player in and my own game. Sort of a bummer, but it let me work on this. If I had the map done I'd put up the lean version right now. Unfortunately it involves regular polygons which were causing me problems. I was basically making them in Inkscape, exporting and then importing into Gimp to work with my map. I wish someone would make a nice open source dungeon mapping program for Linux.
I recently scanned a hand drawn map and then imported it into GIMP, seems the best of both worlds so far. Maybe you could do something similar with your regular polygons?
ReplyDeleteRe: a product with progressive details - that makes some sense. Several versions of the same product could be offered: one with the nice maps and brief descriptions, one with slightly more, and one with everything inc. background, art, and how it fits into a larger campaign setting. Half the stuff I buy, I only use half of anyways, if at all! It'd be great to have the option, esp. if you could buy some, then a little more, and then a little more again if you liked it, rather than having to buy the whole thing over again. A la carte adventure purchasing, if you will. I mean, we don’t have to buy the whole album anymore, do we?
Thanks for the thoughts, Bulette. Unfortunately I don't have a scanner, I need to rectify that.
ReplyDeleteIn the spirit of open source, I think I'm going to "release early," i.e. with less detail and get feedback.
I should clarify, while this might actually be a good marketing strategy, I'm just wondering if "products" would be more helpful to people with less detail, sort of counter-intuitive, I know. Whatever happens I hope to let people download these things free.