My last post (‘Write Adventures Like Cookbooks’) seemed to get a bit of interest, and a few of the comments asked if I could provide an example of its principles in action, perhaps using The Wild Beyond the Witchlight as a case study.
While I’d love to create a full sample, copyright limitations mean I’ll have to take a ‘light touch’ approach. Hopefully it still works.
Let’s go through the 15 principles in turn. Warning: there may be spoilers (hopefully minor ones).
1. Shorter adventures.Whomp, we’ve failed at the first hurdle. Even if you skip the appendices, Witchlight is over 200 pages. That said, I reckon if we trimmed the fat and made it more cookbook-style, we could probably halve it at the very least. See what you think by the end of the post.
2. The adventure site model. Could we ‘deconstruct’ Witchlight into a series of more manageable blocks? Easily! It’s already partially there; it just needs better signposting. For example, Chapter 2, ‘Hither,’ is really just the five key sites labelled on the map: the Queen’s Way, Slanty Tower, Telemy Hill, and so on. And with the exception of Bavlorna’s hut and Downfall, each of these sites could probably be reduced to a single page.
3. Situations, not outcomes. Witchlight is full of ‘if-statements.’ Here’s a sample from Chapter 1:
- Characters can encounter Kettlesteam in more than one location; if they corner her, she . . .
- If the character runs away from the Witchlight hands, the hands don’t bother giving chase, but . . .
- If one or more characters seem intent on disrupting the carnival, Nikolas . . .
There’s so much of this, and part of me wonders: could we live without it? Take the last bullet point. If one or more characters seems intent on disrupting the carnival, do we, as the DMs, need the adventure to script what happens for us? Or do these contingency plans take up valuable space?
Then there’s the railroading:
If the characters haven’t found a way to Prismeer by the end of the evening, Ellywick Tumblestrum comes to their aid. The gnome bard appears next to the characters, exclaiming that it’s ‘high time you folks were elsewhere,’ and leads them quickly to the Hall of Illusions.
Instead of allowing players to make meaningful choices, this forces them onto a set path, undermining what makes RPGs so fun and open-ended in the first place.
4. Leave gaps. By cutting back on the railroading and the ‘what if’ statements, we are already doing this. But we could do more. Take the lore dump for Witch and Light, for example: backstory the players will almost certainly never learn, which has next to zero impact on how we roleplay the NPCs at the table. Cut it. The pay and absence policy of the Witchlight hands (I kid you not). Cut it. A gnome bard and Magic: the Gathering tie-in who exists only for emergency railroading. Cut it.
5. Cheat sheets. Such an obvious missed opportunity! A table of carnival locations would have been super handy, and a list of NPCs with roleplaying notes essential. It really frustrates me that the roleplaying cards at the back of the book. That information should be where you need it.
6. Annotated maps. No complaints here: the map of the Witchlight Carnival is perfect. Top-tier stuff. Stacey Allan and Will Doyle did a phenomenal job. In fact, I’d say it’s probably the best bit of the entire adventure.
7. Better typography. It wouldn’t take much. The body text uses Bookmania, a fine font—reliable, warm, nostalgic—but its obliques look ugly and out of character, particularly when combined with bold text. I don’t love the subheadings, either, which use Mrs Eaves, a variant of Baskerville. Matthew Butterick recommends Kingfisher and Ingeborg as Baskerville alternatives, and both have more character in my view. And let’s lose the small caps—they make text harder to read.
8. More bullet points. Totally doable. I took about 500 words on page 31 and reduced it to six bullet points:
- Visitors buy tickets: 8 sp for adults, 3 sp for children, or barter with Nikolas Midnight, a goblin.
- There’s a box with prepaid tickets (from Ellywick Tumblestrum, but Nikolas claims they’re from an ‘anonymous benefactor’).
- After tickets, visitors receive a map and butterfly wings, which must be worn as proof of entry.
- Tickets allow access to 8 carnival attractions; another ticket is needed for more.
- Sneaking in requires a DC 15 Stealth check. Failure leads to being caught, escorted to the booth, and the carnival mood worsening.
- Bartering involves making a one-night fey pact with Nikolas. Fulfilling the pact can make the character eligible for Witchlight Monarch, but breaking it causes ticket loss and mood reduction.
Much clearer, no? And about a fifth of the word count.
9. Use symbols. For Chapter 1, the Witchlight Carnival, I would definitely have liked an icon in the margin for tracking mood. Obviously I wouldn’t use actual emojis if I had WotC’s resources, but something like the 😀 and 😟 faces. For the timed events, I might use an hourglass: ⏳ For background lore: 📖 For important clues: 🔍
10. Or colour. Let’s apply this to an extract from the adventure:
I’ve used orange for the NPCs, green for the skill check,and blue for a key location. (Of course, that is the only thing I have done to it. If I was being more ruthless, I would bullet-point it, cut it down, and probably use some symbols too, as above.)
11. The inverted pyramid. In fairness, Chapter 1 isn’t awful for this, but it could be better. For example, it opens with a description of what the carnival is all about—good—but then distracts us with a paragraph about the ‘mysterious benefactor,’ as if she’s the most important NPC (she isn’t). Then we get ‘tracking time’ and ‘tracking mood’—again, good—but why, oh why, are the carnival events at the end of the chapter? This seems bizarre to me.
12. Let names and art do the work. The NPCs in Witchlight have great names and great art! But too often they get buried under unnecessary verbiage. Take this art for Mister Witch:
What have we got: dapper, perhaps a little ostentatiously so; authoritative (the cane, the formal dress, the title ‘Mister’); deeply concerned with time; stern; mysterious (because that watch is clearly magical, and because he is Mister Witch). All that from an image. So why do we need 200-plus words on backstory that we are never, ever going to learn? (Personally, I think it’s a travesty that such an interesting character will only appear in one, maybe two sessions and then will never appear again. What a waste.)
13. ‘Lite’ stat blocks. What I meant by this point was embedded stat blocks like this:
Sowpig: AC 12, Init 12, 17 hp. Bite +2 (9 piercing) or claws +4 (7 piercing, DC 10 Con save or paralysed for 1 min; can repeat save end of each turn). Immune to poison damage. Can’t be charmed, exhausted, poisoned.
But in Witchlight, I would go further and question why most of these creatures have stat blocks at all. I think many DMs would find it unnecessary to include stats for minor NPCs. For example, why do I need to know that the philosophizing giant swan ‘has the statistics of a giant eagle except that it has no talons, can attack twice with its beak as an action, and speaks Common and Auran’? Honestly, if you need that kind of information to hand as a DM, this might not be the right adventure for your group. It’s more Monkey Island than Call of Duty.
14. Rosters and modularity. Less applicable here as most characters are tied to a specific location. But good for other parts of the adventure, like the Brigands’ Tollway or Downfall in Chapter 2.
15. Stop overwriting. At the risk of labouring the point: it’s a constant problem. Take this:
And:
Man, this was painful. How about this?
- The ride costs one ticket punch.
- The eccentric dwarf, Zephixo, invites characters to gaze into the clockwork eye.
- Players write down their character’s name and worst fear. Not participating results in a less exciting ride.
- When riding the mine cart, the characters enter an illusion-filled demiplane with shifting landscapes.
- Illusory forms of each character’s fear appear during the ride. Each character faces their fear once. DC 12 Wisdom save, with disadvantage if it’s the character’s own fear. Success: they laugh it off. Failure: they scream in terror.
- End of the ride, success on all saves: character gains advantage on Cha-based checks for the rest of the carnival (until the Witchlight Monarch is crowned).
- End of the ride, three or more failed saves: character is haunted by nightmares for 1d8 days. Daily Wis save required after long rests to avoid gaining 1d3 levels of exhaustion. Nightmares can be removed by any spell that ends a curse, but exhaustion from the nightmares remains.
- Record all relevant details on the Story Tracker.
I know which one I would rather have at the table.
But what about you? Am I overcooking this approach (hehe), or do you think Witchlight would have been better for it? Which published adventures do a better job, would you say? Let me know in the comments below.
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