The Walcoth Abbey was the center of religious significance for the Aisling Fief, and known further beyond throughout the Wöisaen Steppes. One day, a monk angered their patron god Veridos, and he made known the full fury of his forest. Now only wood and vines pray inside the abbey’s crumbling walls. Author unknown. Writings discovered by “Doc”, adventurous tinkerer.
Our upcoming Goodberry Adventure Zine covers the premise of an ever-expanding forest spreading from the ruins of a long-abandoned abbey. When we sat down to write these zines, we didn’t completely start from scratch. There was an older inspiration!
Ivo Hoying, a member of our Goodberry team, had dozens of old adventures he had written for fun. When we decided to start creating monthly one-shots, we started with converting his old adventure into one we could use for the zine. Titled The Encroaching Wood, it’s very similar to how it was when it was originally written. What we did was swap out the names of characters and places to match our setting, tinkered with the stat blocks to update them to the newest version of 5e, and cut out some of the “fluff”.
When cutting it’s important to find a middle ground: cut too much, and it looks bad, is confusing to the GM, and takes away from the experience of the adventure. Cut too little, and the zine becomes very, very long without needing to be, the content on pages bleed over confusingly, and descriptions go on needlessly for a long time. It took some days of editing and cutting and adding to find that perfect sweet spot, but after enough trial and error, we did find it.
Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to creating campaign (or in this case, one-shot) settings. If you’ve been playing the game a while, chances are you have some idea buried in your computer or in a scratched up notebook in the back of your closet. Take a look through that. Even if the language needs work, the idea will be there, and you can use that as the foundation for a great story. Even if you haven’t written anything for a TTRPG, take a look through that old journal of yours, or your sticky notes, or anything you use to jot down whatever’s in your head. More often than not, than can jumpstart an idea for an adventure faster than trying to come up with a brand new one.
We avoided writing around artwork. Rather than basing an adventure off of artwork we knew we one hundred percent had access to, we decided to create what we wanted to create, and worry about the accompanying art later. Trying to limit yourself based on your perceived ideas of what you do or don’t have access to can quickly suffocate your work, bleeding the creative juices out of it.
Our upcoming Goodberry Adventure Zine, The Encroaching Wood, is the result of our team’s dedicated effort to provide you with something special to play around the table. See you soon.
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