Adventure Site Contest II: Purpose and Standards

  Get hyped, my friends. In a mere seventeen days, Adventure Site Contest II will open for submissions. Similar to the first, we’ll have a set of standards that are similar but slightly different per judge; the top eight of the adventure sites (selected by averaging the ranked-choice voting of the judges) will be selected for inclusion in this year’s compilation, with the top two gaining further glory and accolades. 
 
The Basics:
  Submitted adventure sites must be:
*Small enough to stumble on in a hexcrawl or in a city, call it 5-25 keyed locations.
*The location nonetheless has a story to it, with potential hooks/rumors, and would make a satisfying night's D&D session.
*Page limit of 3 pages excluding map(s). Fonts limited to “normal” (eg, Times New Roman, Arial, CalibrI), no smaller than 10-point…basically, aim for easily readable. Please note this is a maximum, not a minimum...if your site is complete at 1.5 pages, submit at 1.5 pages.
*At least one map; if using someone else's, must be legal to use in a publication.
*Must be compatible with TSR-era D&D (So B/X, OD&D, AD&D or a very close retroclone) or old-school sci-fi like Traveler or Stars Without Number.
  The focus is for something that is usable at the table. A harried dungeon master needs to plausibly be able to seize your site and reasonably present it to his table of 3-6 over-caffeinated (or slightly drunk) murderous vagrants for all of them to have a great time.
 
  These submissions would be judged and most importantly reviewed with at least a solid page of reviewing, like Bryce or Prince or Melan manage. A pool of interested volunteer judge reviewers are engaged, notably myself, Owen Edwards, Grützi, JB, and Scott M. Judges are welcome to submit to the contest as well, but they obviously can't rank their own work. Selection of the top 8 adventures will be ranked choice, which then get bundled into a free product on DriveThru, published under a creative commons attribution license (so it can be shared, but credit to writers). This is similar to how the One Page Dungeon did it.
 
My Own Standards:
  I’ve certainly reviewed enough with my Crapshoot Monday series to give contestants my kindly standards for that; I will still be looking to highlight what I liked in submissions, give some ideas about what might be improved, and the use case evaluation is what I’ve outlined in my article. I won’t be giving direct ratings as I go, but I will release my ranked choice evaluation in the end. Perusing the previous contest’s reviews should help. Generally, here are the things I’ll be looking at:

• Adventure Structure.

  I will be looking to see that the adventure(s) in the site flows well as written, enabling a wide spectrum of gameplay and interest. Ideally, PCs should be able to solve challenges with a wide array of solutions, leading to “boy that was a fun night of D&D”. This means narrative satisfaction and engaging gameplay both.

• Site Geometry.

  The physical geography of the site needs to be fun and provide interest, and actually matter. Now this is not an art contest…nobody is getting dinged for a map in MS Paint, nor elevated for full-color 3D modeling. As long as the map is clear and understandable, it can be ugly…but there needs to be a good site to explore, something that’s cool and gives some choices in the act of play. Personally, some well-integrated verticality is usually worth bonus points. Note that the top two last time used a linear affair and a procgen, just make sure the map fits to concept.

• Descriptive Power.

  The writing should be strong and efficient (remember, only three 8.5x11 pages at max), conveying the situations, monsters, and challenges evocatively and in a way that sparks the imagination. This is not an English assignment, please do run some basic copyedits by your text but grammar and spelling errors won’t be held against you. As an aside, do try to give some thought to how the information is formatted/conveyed, things like bolding, underlining, italics, map labels…all can definitely help, but just know it can be overdone as well.

• Nifty Stuff.

  Creativity is a plus, cleverness is a must. This isn’t No-Artpunk, if you want to make new monsters, items, spells, etc that’s fine, but everything new is going to push against the strict page limit here. Better to use some orcs and a pit trap cleverly than to stat up a new Living Mobile Orcish Pit Monster. Nasty traps that are well-telegraphed? Great. Secret doors with subtle clues? Wonderful. Focusing on using the elements already available can lead to very engaging, impressive moments. Neat personalities for the NPCs help too.

• Plugability.

  Some thought to how the adventure site fits into the broader context of the game is warranted. Hooks, rumors, how the PCs find the site are good. Tagging the environment, like “forested hills” or “seedy vice district” where the site gets placed is a good exercise. If someone wants to run your adventure site as a one-shot, great, but putting thought into how it integrates into a campaign world will do wonders for the verisimilitude of your submission.
  I’ll also have a few little things I personally look for to give bonus points. Crediting playtesters is good practice, I give a bonus nod for playtesting. I’ll be looking favorably at higher-level sites, just for sheer value-add compared to the trillions of “level 1-2” content already. Original cartography is also going to be a bonus over repurposed Matt Jackson or Dyson Logos map. None of this is to say that an unplaytested level 1 Dyson map adventure site will dinged for all that, just like to see the stretching.
 
To the Victors Go The Spoils:
  Malerex of the Merciless Merchants, will once again offer Merciless Merchants adventures for the prize pool. Josh/Gus from the Classic Adventure Gaming podcast have advertised this, and anyone involved should definitely blog about it. And you should get involved too…submit, read, or at the very least give us a shout-out…I’d love for as many contestants as possible to hear about this.
 
  Submissions will open starting October 1st through January 1st, with judging aiming to be done by the end of February. It’s been organized via the CAG podcast’s Discord, but submissions can be made to my own email here. If you have a blog and a desire to join in the judges, drop me a line; feedback is the value that every contestant will be getting out of this.