Post Mortem & Results

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
From what Instragram would allow me to see as a guest, he's got style and a good range. Definitely knows what he's doing. What's his background (art student, pro., etc.)?
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
From what Instragram would allow me to see as a guest, he's got style and a good range. Definitely knows what he's doing. What's his background (art student, pro., etc.)?
We went to animation school together. He used to be a concept artist at a game studio.
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
Thanks @squeen for reminding me; there's an updated and hopefully more readily readable/printable version of the Summer Palace now too!

I'm taking a break from reformatting these adventures to playtest Irradiated Paradox (which may be an unpleasant collision with reality for me) but I've started mapping out the 'final' megadungeon in the slow-crawling Mountain of Change. Given what I've seen of other peoples' megadungeons, I'm guessing this is the rock I finally founder on (or invent some disappointing workarounds for).

@Grützi , if you're out there, I'm looking for permission to flesh out the last little bits of your awesome Arnlaug's Carcass settlement and use your map artwork as a base for the Bull's Run. I know you're a pretty busy guy...
 

Grützi

Should be playing D&D instead
@The1True
You rang? :p

No Problem man. Take it and make it your own. I'm glad if that stuff ever sees publication in any form ;)
And If you have questions or such just shot me a PN... or sic Malrex on me :p
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
I read the Tower of Minotaur last night (instead of Conan!) and enjoyed it. I think it's a nice side-adventure. I have a bunch of thoughts on how to possibly improve it that I'd like to share, not because what you have isn't sufficient, but just because I'd like to open it up for some general adventure writing discussion (because I'm all puffed up and full of myself...the person that has published nothing!)

It's going to take me awhile (probably end-of-month) before I can collect my suggestions. Is there anything in particular you'd like addressed?
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
It's going to take me awhile (probably end-of-month) before I can collect my suggestions. Is there anything in particular you'd like addressed?
Go to town, that's why we're here! I think Tower was pretty straight forward. Some of the others I was concerned if I was successfully communicating the weird stuff I was trying to map or that could be interacted with. I think the only crazy thing here is the 'maze' trap. I guess since I went to the effort of reformatting everything, issues of format are officially on the table now ;)
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
I had an 'aha' moment right before bed last night: you should consider renaming Tower of the Minotaur to Demon's Womb.

(Gets the gears turning, eh?)
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
you should consider renaming Tower of the Minotaur to Demon's Womb
That is pretty awesome, but the mini-campaign sort of centers around finding this lost minotaur. Not that the players are ever going to see the title I guess...
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
I've been playtesting Irradiated Paradox. I gave the players the local area map which usually motivates them to explore, but they've been hewing to the Pointcrawl railroads so far. Maybe they'll start looking around once they've exhausted all the major quest threads? I'm afraid that our takeaway from the overload that was the Ptolus campaign is that it's best to look for and stick to the central plotline.
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
In the meantime, I've been slowly building the megadungeon inside the trundling demon endjinn called the Mountain of Change in the Bulls Run:
MountainChange1.jpg

I've made life hard for myself by building these soaring three-dimensional spaces. I've collapsed it down into a HUGE 2D map, but it's a real mess:

Mountain02.jpg
That's 21 levels piled one on top of the other. I added a filter layer between each to give it some depth. As you can see, some of these rooms are the size of a regular sheet of graph paper and contain buildings which will now require interior mapping.
A lot of this can be solved by turning the larger rooms into 3/4-view battle spaces and map the building interiors in 2D off to the side, but that's not very VTT-friendly.
 

Two orcs

Officially better than you, according to PoN
Holy shit.

Did you repurpose a bunch of 3D assets or take everything from your own mind?
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
Did you repurpose a bunch of 3D assets

All from scratch. It seemed like a time saver when I started, but now... Sometimes you just make the project more complicated for yourself rather than do the difficult thing you know you should do right from the outset, eh?
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
All from scratch. It seemed like a time saver when I started, but now... Sometimes you just make the project more complicated for yourself rather than do the difficult thing you know you should do right from the outset, eh?
That's the whole joy of a hobby.
 

The1True

8, 8, I forget what is for
This stupid thing. That's 20 levels piled on top of each other. All I did was build the framework and resolve to fill in all those little buildings and spaces with rooms in 2D. ... Almost immediately it became clear that it was going to be slow going in 2D, so I went back to build the rooms in 3D.

That took months.

Then when I started rendering the new more detailed levels out and bringing them into 2D, I found that the resolution of the camera needed to be changed and now everything had to be resized before it could be brought into the original file. Bla bla bla. So much grunt work added to the process. Anyway, I got that done and started cleaning everything up again at which point I started to encounter render artifacts; missing linework, weirdly tapered lines that made whole rooms disappear, little bits of geometry poking through from the level above etc. I had to go back in to 3D and clean up a ton of geometry and rerender it. Gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair out the whole time.

A sane man would have realized how fucking pointless this is ages ago and binned the whole stupid thing. Honestly this was just supposed to be a bonus boss-monster fight with a mountain-sized bio-construct, with a little bit of running around inside the thing to get it to power down or something. I pictured a couple of key set-pieces inside and thought I'd mock them up real quick in 3D. Here I am almost exactly ONE YEAR later. If I quit now, it's all meaningless!

Oh how I cackled while writing that last sentence!

Here's a couple of the new levels to give you an idea of the detail of the undertaking:
Mountain03.jpg

All those large blank areas needed filling in don't you see-yeeeheeheeheeee gneeeeeeee
 
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