START Week Two: Roundabout

 

Our kickstarter for START launched last week (as I’m sure anyone even paying a bit of attention to this blog would know) and it took us a bit of time to get to it. In this entry, I talk about the twists and turns we took to get here.

Beacon: The original starting adventure cut from the core rules

Work on what would eventually become START began in the core rulebook. I had originally wanted to have a small adventure in the back so I thought up an abandoned old facility to show off the history of the setting and filled it with Skelemen since they were the first Adversaries I came up with for the game. Eventually it was decided that a collection of shorter examples would be more broadly helpful than something fleshed out but pretty simplistic, so the idea was shelved. Looking back, I’m glad we did because honestly, I don’t think a spooky basement full of skeletons with no real context was a great introduction to Outer World.

The idea of making a beginner’s adventure for the game came shortly after we wrapped up the first kickstarter. Grey and I had a back and forth about what we wanted to do next. I wanted to jump right into new rules (specifically, we had taken out a whole set of Callings from the main book that I wanted to publish) but he quite wisely suggested that a small thing for people just starting out might be good to go with. My original idea was for a 30-ish page adventure, though as per usual the page count exploded from there. Sorry Grey!

Sprocket: A Playtest

While I was working on BREAK!! I devised a little scenario alongside it called “Trouble in Sprocket”. I am still quite fond of this one, I worked backwards from stuff like wanting to reverse some of the assumptions of adventures like “Keep on the Borderlands” as well as the desire to include a giant robot. It gave me a lot of chances to stress test the combat and negotiation system as well and I learned a lot running it. I still want to publish this one someday, but I’d need to tighten it up and apply some of the knowledge I’ve learned in the time since I first wrote it. Sadly, it just wouldn’t have worked as a good introductory adventure.

Mellica: An adventure too complex for newbies?

My original concept for START’s scenario involved a town in the Twilight Meridian suffering from an outbreak of Arcane Contamination Syndrome (otherwise known as Odditis by laymen - something readers of the blog will be familiar with). I liked this one a lot, as it involved exploration, a bit of mystery solving, and went into the issues of magical pollution that permeate throughout the setting. I sent the finished version off to Grey and…well, he thought it was too complicated for a beginner adventure. D’oh!

Back to Beacon: Reviving the original adventure

Funny enough, Grey wanted to go back to my original concept of the magitech facility that had been taken over by Skelemen combined with some other ideas I’d written out: a training course run by the Knights of the Lantern and a “lantern town” in the Shadowed Lands called Beacon. He figured the three could be a combined set, a low-stakes scenario where players could easily learn the rules and a more traditional, dangerous endeavor where the adventure team would help out the people of the town. We just needed some more connective tissue.

Once we had finally decided what the adventure would be, I started expanding on some of Grey’s ideas. The facility had housed some magical plants, so he suggested putting a garden above it. I came up with a monster inspired by my wife’s houseplant, a seemingly unkillable mess of vines we’ve had for many years now. The garden grew into a park, and eventually we thought it and the area around it could represent the project of one particular Mage Knight. That guy doesn’t feature heavily in the main adventure, but it helped me get an idea of how we could expand on things.

With the main two scenarios drafted, we decided that the third section would actually be an entire locale, a map with a variety of adventure sites and settlements written in brief that Game Masters could use as a jumping off point if they wanted to run more adventures in the Shadowed Lands. Since START was no longer just an intro adventure, I thought it was best if we included a customizable and expandable section. Many of these places had their origins in the failed ambitions of that aforementioned mage knight, and I ended up getting a lot of new ideas for them from watching documentaries on the youtube channel Defunctland. Outer World bears a lot of scars from the follies of the previous aeons, and it was fun to show off a bit of that here.

So what else made it in there, then?

There are some things we wanted to add to START that didn’t quite fit into the main three sections. Special rules for starting Social Bonds, Adventure Team types, Saga Hubs, stuff on customizing species and callings as well as a few additional thoughts on the core rules. While they don’t have a direct connection to the setting or adventures in the book, we felt like they applied well to the core principles of START: mainly, to make a supplement that made things easier on new groups while providing experienced players with additional material to customize their games. Some of these things have been on devblog as freebies for a while now, but having them here helps contextualize them and also makes them readily available for a potentially larger audience.

These just happen to be some of my favorite things to write. I have an obvious fondness for big projects, but these little bits and bobs are something that I can finish and test out relatively quickly and they really help keep my creative energy up for things that take far more time and planning. 

I do want to end on that thought. One reason I hope this kickstarter makes it big is so I can use that momentum to work on a bunch of new books, but I’ll be writing these little bits and bobs (and blogs!) no matter what happens.