Friday 22 April 2016

Thinking more about locations and mysteries

As I've mentioned before, over the last little while I've been thinking about how to present my mystery/location-based scenario The Magonium Mine Murders. I've made no secret of how much I like the One Page Dungeons, and while I think the scenario is a little too long for that format (and I want to include more stats and stuff) I do think it could be done in four or eight pages. I roughed out an A3 map with some notes on it:


Now, obviously, this is not what a finished product would look like, but as you can see each plot is colour-coded: green text relates to the crooked prizefighting ring, blue text relates to the murder mystery, black text relates to the disappearances in the mine, and red text relates to the dangers in the area that come from magonium poisoning.

Now, there's a second map, which is basically the dungeon map -- well, three dungeon maps, actually. So perhaps what we have is three A3 pages -- one spread of the area map, one spread of the dungeon maps and one spread explaining the plot and giving NPC and monster statistics.

Heck, maybe it's just two double-sided A3 pages, or eight A4 pages. That would give room for a cover, which would be cool, I guess. And eight pages sounds like something I could actually do, and the short length would be a valuable challenge of writing discipline. I might put it up for sale, but that's really a secondary objective to the practice of doing it.

I'm not sure how good an idea it is to make it colour-dependent, since if it's a digital product people who print it out are going to be printing it in B&W, probably.

No comments:

Post a Comment