Blue Mountain Retrospective
Introduction
So yesterday I put out a finished(?) version of Blue Mountain! In the interest of documenting my hobby participation, I want to outline and explain my thought process before and while writing, how I worked on the project, and what I want to focus on in the future with my next few things.
The Reflections
Theming
One thing I thought a lot about while writing this module was grief. A lot of the factions is in part a manifestation of the things that certain events have on people. The Grem are meant to invoke that feeling of rage at the loss of what you remember. The Animated Men represent withdrawing into yourself. The Quochay feel like outsiders in a place they’ve lived for generations, mirroring feelings of alienation and loneliness in the wake of grief.
The seed for the whole module was the Animated Men, actually.
Maya archaeologists have discovered burials in Maya ruins dated way after the initial construction and records of habitation at these sites. The working theory goes that people living on the north part of the Yucatán made pilgrimages to the south to bury important leaders and leave offerings. The abandonment of these sites corresponds with the collapse of the royal institution of the Maya King; As the Maya kings and the noble institution writ large fell out of use, so too did their cities and communities.
The Animated Men sprang out of these people, who made a journey that took weeks to bury their loved ones in the ruins of cities built at the behest of a fraudulent God-King. How would you react if the hands that molded you and your city withered away and died while espousing their own immortality?
Idea Synthesis and Putting Words to Paper
There are a lot of tools out there for making hexcrawls of varying degrees of complexity. I’ve written my own procedures for this, but for every hexcrawl you’ll probably find two or three methods for generating the things.
Generally, this was the easiest part of the process for me; rambling on about certain features or factions in a markdown document is essentially just transcribing the stuff I would normally be dumping into a Discord channel. Lots of ideas, lots of fun putting things out into the world.
The hardest part of this whole process for me is writing dungeons. A lot of the traditional dungeon advice for OSR stuff (have lots of factions, empty rooms, etc.) just didn’t make sense in the context of what I wanted to do. Instead, I opted for a handful of small, shorter (more linear?) dungeons that fit the goals of what I was trying to accomplish. I’m happy with some of them but others still nag at me.
Organization
For my own games, I use an Obsidian vault with folders for each region of the world (you can read more about my world here, which might make this make a bit more sense) and Markdown files for every hex. This lets me fill out and easily reference/find/link to the content in different hexes and keep track of what changes over time in response to players mucking about.
I copied this format initially when writing and playtesting Blue Mountain and it works for me. For dungeons, I use flowcharts instead of the maps present in the module. I don’t find calculating the distance traveled in the dungeon (or even the physical layout more generally) is very important to how my players interact with the world and what brings us the most joy, but I know that’s a big part of other people’s games and I had pretty strong mental images of what they looked like, so I went and drew them up myself.
As the project neared its completion, I started collapsing the files into one another to get a better idea of what it would look like in a more finished form (and to fix the header sizes for everything). This was probably something I should’ve saved for the very end, since it made a few final changes a hassle to go through and implement.
Revision and Editing
The editing and revising is where your work kicks you in the teeth. There are two principles I’ve picked up from this project and the conversations I’ve had around it that I want to expand upon here, as they’re elements of my writing that I want to enunciate and improve upon in future projects.
- Brevity: 500 words can be 250. 250 can be 100. 100 can be 50. While I don’t care much for bullet points, there is a serious necessity for brevity when writing RPG materials. Skimming paragraphs in my own games has led to mistakes and errors that would’ve been avoided had the material been written better (or if I had put more time into prepping, but who does that?). Layout cannot be a crutch for bad and/or uninspiring writing.
- Gameability: In what world is anyone going to read a 300-word spiel on what a gift economy is like in this region? In what world is that going to be usable for 90% of tables? There are 24 hours in a day and spending any of them on writing things people can’t use with as little hassle as possible is a waste of time.
I’m pretty interested in writing as a craft in itself and I find adventures and modules to be a particularly challenging mode to write in for a few reasons, so expect more stuff! I’ve got to get the hang of this.
Formatting
This was probably the worst part of the project for me, simultaneously because of my own scatterbrained workflow but also because of my lack of vision for what I wanted the project to be put out as. Is it going to be a single pdf, multiple? What about art, layout? Maps or no maps? I think going forward I’m going to spend more time thinking through these sorts of parameters beforehand. Thankfully, since this was my first foray into that world, I expect the next few things will be a lot easier to manage since I have a reference point.
Playtesting
I need more of it with more people.
Wrap-up
That’s about it! I’m really grateful for the reception so far. This community of creators has been insanely supportive and welcoming in every way. Make sure to let me know if anything I wrote makes it to your table :)