Tegel Manor - a preface

I invited a whole bunch of friends over to play (what I consider to be) a classic Judge's Guild adventure, Tegel Manor.

We're using Microlite20 and everybody gets to roll up two characters (prepare for character death!).

I proposed this event as a memorial to Gary, Dave and Bob who left us all too soon.

Right now, I'm spending a lot of time digesting the module and sprucing it up with some old-school goodness.

I plan to write a post on how Tegel Manor holds up as an adventure and then a recap or two on the play itself.  Maybe I'll get around to scanning some char sheets or taking some digital pics of the adventure table as the scenario unfolds.

I'm looking forward to it and I hope it will make for some interesting posts!

Creativity is HARD!

I use the Google A LOT. At work, at home, for fun, for necessity -- I use it all the time. I can scarcely remember a time when it wasn't available for use.

Well, I was looking for stuff - game stuff - and I stumbled upon Microlite74, which I wrote about in a previous post.

At the same time, I stumbled upon "One Page Dungeons." Fantastic!

I have said to my colleagues at work that any idea, that's any good, can be expressed on a single page of paper. One side of that paper is best (8.5"x11"), but I'll settle for both sides in a pinch.

Suffice to say that this concept of a "One Page Dungeon" resonates with me. I wasn't always this way, but when I run an RPG, I like to improvise. A 1PD (my new abbreviation) is a great shorthand for me. It's a framework and (I believe) it's all I'll need to write up to prepare for an adventure. Here's one of many links you can find. Here's another.

So, this weekend I took on the task of building a 1PD for myself.

The first part of my experience was creating an "old school" blue dungeon map for my document. I used GIMP to pull it together and this great tutorial. It took a long time, but that was mostly due to my rusty skills using GIMP. After awhile, I had it down.

Next, I exported the map as a .jpg and dragged it into a 1PD Word template.

That's when things really got challenging.

How can you have writers block when all you need to write is one page?

I slogged through creating this 1PD for a good part of Saturday and even in to Sunday morning. After a brief nap on Sunday, I got up with some fresh ideas and I finished the thing off.

No, you can't see it. Yet. I need to unleash it on my grandson during spring break.

Mwah ah ahhhhh. :)