Day One: My Scrabbly Design Process

I’m an organised person. Lists, processes and routines are my friends! However, when I design an adventure I’m a bit all over the place.

I like to work from a template (as for me constraints in design and having a framework are good things). Adventures are pretty much the only thing I design directly in Pages. Because adventure design can be format intensive I like to see what the pages look like as the adventure shapes up. I love iA Writer, but it is not somewhere I would write an adventure. (I’m writing this post in it, though).

In the early design phase I don’t start at the beginning of the adventure and work my way through it. Rather. I bounce around and write whatever occurs to me at the time. I let inspiration run its course.

If I have a problem location, background element or whatever I leave it and work around it. I’m a firm believer in the power of the subconscious. When I finish my daily design my brain is still chugging away at the problem. Often the answer to the problem will pop into my head at an opportune moment and then I work on the problem section.

For much of the design process, word count is a handy metric. If I start the day at 1,000 words and finish at 2,000 words it’s pretty obvious what I have achieved. I like that. I’ve picked 1,000 words a day as a doable goal. It’s a nice round number. If I was doing nothing else I could do far more, but the horrors of the day-to-day of Raging Swan Press do somewhat intrude on my design time.

Yesterday, then, I’ve been writing a bit of what I fancy. This comprised the following:

1. The names of all the encounter areas in the dungeon.
2. The details and descriptions of many of the features (such as pillars, tapestries and so on) of those areas.
3. The vampire spawn stat block.
4. The details of many of the dungeon’s generic features.
5. Most of location #1 (and begun to ponder the trap therein).

The above comprised 1,241 words.

Today, I plan to:

1. Continue work on the dungeon’s features.
2. Start to design the NPC bio for the dungeon’s main villain.
3. Design some NPC bios for the various vampire spawn. Most groups probably won’t stop to chat, but some might and as a moral dilemma is at this dungeon’s heart it makes sense to “humanise” the vampire spawn as much as possible.

But who knows what I’ll end up writing!