Quick Update on Hope Cross and a little whining...

I've added factions to the adventure Darkness at Hope Cross. I'll leave the draft here on the blog, but in the end I think I'll have added another five or six pages (not just factions, I'm also working on expanding Seven Stone Creek, Seeley's Glen, making the Temple of Darkness a little more dangerous and putting in a rumor table and a handful of side quests). I don't think I'll post any more updates of Hope Cross here, though. I'll put it together as a pdf soon and get some more widespread feedback from folks at Dragonsfoot and the like.

One of the most challenging things I'm trying to do is limit the scope of the adventure. The Jacob's Well Hundred is full of ancient ruins (well, the whole of the Midlands are) and lost magic and hidden monsters (it's a borderland - on the edge of civilization - but still somewhat tamed). Maybe I just put together the whole Jacob's Well Hundred as a mega adventure/sourcebook. I've got Goblin House and Grave Robbers outlined and I have a sketch for Jacob's Well itself. The Archmage's tower and dungeons are going to be a huge undertaking all on their own, so I'll leave that for a separate book, but there's like a hundred square miles to fill (hence the term, Hundred) with hidden gems...

Here's the thing - I have hundreds of published adventures (if you count all the adventures in the individual issues of Dungeon Magazine and the old Dragon Mag adventures and White Dwarf, as well as the free stuff I've downloaded over the past several years, it could be over a thousand) - and a lot of them are really good, and I want to run some of them...why create my own? I can easily adapt these for what want to do... Jacob's Well? Keep on the Borderland with a small town tacked on the side (if I can find it, Little Keep on the Border - the Hackmaster adventure - might be even better). Hope Cross? Homlett. Temple of Darkness? "Valley of the Earth Mother" from Dragon 102. And the possibilities are limited only in my ability to adapt what has been published to what I want (I used the ruins in DL1 for the shattered ancient elven city ruins years ago - players loved it, though one realized what I did years later when he read one of the Dragonlance novels - mabye Riverwind, was that his name? the "barbarian" guy). And some of the stuff I just really WANT to use - like the GDQ1 and Temple of Elemental Evil (though I heavily modified it last time I used it).

Oh well...