The Magician's House: a free DCC adventure by Edgewise!

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Edgewise

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Hey guys, I made an adventure! It's called The Magician's House, and naturally enough, it's for DCC. Here's the google doc link:


I would have uploaded it to resources, but it's just too long. It's probably the maps, since every room or significant location gets its own full-page graphic.

So let me tell you about The Magician's House...

What's it about?
The city is going to be destroyed unless someone reads the inscription from the Sealing Stone before the attack of the demon cultist army. Sure, people can translate the runes, but only one man knows how they sound: Mordant the Irregular, a mage of some renown.

But Mordant hasn't been seen in a few months. Last time he was spotted outside his home, he was staggering back from a drinking binge with his friend, Lutz, in tow. The cultists are five days away, so the party is hired to break into the eponymous residence and find either the owner or some key to pronouncing the runes of the Sealing Stone.

What's it like?
The House isn't huge, but it's one of those wizard deals where each room is in a different pocket universe or plane and the doors are actually seamless portals. That means that there's a huge variety of locations, and there's a lot going on in every one.

There's a prominent faerie theme to the whole affair and a lot of whimsy. The PCs can travel to the moon, to abandoned cities on the other side of the mirror, to the bottom of a deep sea coral bed and a library that covers an entire planet. There are children and ogres and aliens and magic rings with secret command words.

What are the specs?
The adventure is written as a one-off with pre-generated characters; I provide one second-level character of each DCC core class. Each character has two Win conditions and one Lose condition. If the Lose condition is fulfilled, the PC "loses." If it is not fulfilled and either or both of the Win conditions is met, then the PC "wins." Otherwise, he or she muddles through.

Of course, there is no need to play it as a one-off. This can easily be inserted into a campaign with a couple of minor considerations.

There are 18 numbered locations (with a few sub-locations), and each gets its own map. The nature of layout means that it doesn't really fit together in three dimensional space, so there's no map for the entire thing. There are plenty of loops, and all the "secret doors" require a lot more thinking that rolling.

Almost all the NPCs can be interacted with, and there are factions and cross-purposes aplenty. It is technically possible to complete the adventure without any combat, but most parties are going to be a bit more aggressive.

What else? In addition to wholly original magic items and mostly new monsters, there are five new arcane spells and three new patrons. Plus there are seven handouts for the players.

What's lacking?
Art. Layout. Editing.

As for the last of these, this thing is way too long at 121 pages! For 18 numbered locations, that's the sort of thing for which Bryce routinely crucifies designers. Now, in all fairness, when you take away the maps, handouts, pre-generated PCs, new spells, new patrons and rumor tables, you're left with about sixty pages. That's still too much for eighteen locations, of course.

Now in double fairness, some of these locations have sub-locations. One of them technically comprises an entire planet, while another takes place in an abandoned city. And there's a lot going on in those locations. I worked pretty hard to exclude unnecessary content.

But it still seems like way too much. There are probably multiple categories of things that I can omit or tighten up. If anyone has any suggestions along those lines, feel free to pass them on to me.

And of course I welcome any other feedback as well.

UPDATE 1/21/2019: It now has (public domain) art and layout (two-column, nice fonts), and has received a few revisions from self-editing. The length is down to 110 pages without art, 119 with. It could still benefit from a critical look from a new pair of eyes, some better (commissioned) art, and professional layout, but it's come a long way.

Availability
Consider this to be freely available to anyone who wants to read or even use it. Feel free to rip off ideas as you like. In the near future, I'd like to spiff it up just enough to put it on DriveThru as PWYW. If enough people seem to like it, I may look into putting together a more professional version in the longer term - something with art and actual layout, for instance.

Heck, it's probably not legal right now, because I have no idea where I got the images in a couple of the handouts. I'm planning to replace those with original art as soon as is feasible, even if it's a couple laughable scribbles in MS Paint.

If you grab this, I'd love to hear what you think in this thread. I'd be super interested if anyone wants to run it; I've already run it three times but it needs more of that. Let me know if that happens.

Enjoy!
 
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Cool! Looking forward to checking it out.
 
Hmm, new patrons and spells...
But I'll probably wait for the Fantasy Lark version:smile:.
 
Thanks! I should probably make a bigger deal of these things, but since it's a hobby, I don't want to shill too hard.

The funny thing is that everyone said 5e would do so much better. That's so wrong...I only sold two copies of it so far, and it's been out a week! Whereas I've sold a couple dozen of the DCC edition.

To be honest, I'm not shocked. I think anything in 5e has tons more potential, but you have to do the marketing or you'll get lost in the crowd. Plus, let's be honest, consumers of 5e products are used to a level of visual polish that I fall well short of. So it's not really the right market for my adventure and my lack of shilling.

I still have two editions to put out, so I'm going to be busy this weekend putting the finishing touches on the Lamentations edition. I think that could sell as well as the DCC edition because a couple of people told me they were waiting for that one.

The real wildcard will be the Lark edition. Since I put the rules out as PWYW, over 150 copies were downloaded. Still, I won't be surprised if not a single copy is sold. I might end up putting out the Lark edition for PWYW and see if that has any effect on the other editions. This whole thing is really mostly an experiment and learning experience.
Hmm, new patrons and spells...
But I'll probably wait for the Fantasy Lark version:smile:.
It will probably be out the Monday after next!
 
Well, I'm shilling the Fantasy Lark rules:smile:. Meaning, I sent them to the guy I mentioned in the Real Life thread.
It will probably be out the Monday after next!
Is that going to include Patron-like entities:wink:?
 
Is that going to include Patron-like entities:wink:?
Nah, I don't have the concept in Lark. But you knew that, you devil!

The funny thing is the DCC edition and the 5e edition tout different extra content. They both mention the patrons, although I doubt 5e players care about that. But while five new spells for DCC is a big deal, for 5e, players seem to get more excited about new monsters and magic items. So I blurbed 11 new monsters and 19 new magic items for the 5e product description.

Of course, as an old-school-minded guy, I wince at advertising "new magic items" because I think magic items are easy to come up with and should be unique. Same with monsters. But a 5e player I know mentioned how he likes to look the appendices of WotC supplements (which seems fine to me), so I broke them out at the last minute. That probably netted me 50% of my sales right there! Of course, that sale might have been the dude I talked to...
 
If it isn't too much I'd be interested in how you moved it between systems a bit.

What are the fundamental features of LotFP, 5E, Lark and DCC that affect conversions?
 
If it isn't too much I'd be interested in how you moved it between systems a bit.
Sure, gladly.
What are the fundamental features of LotFP, 5E, Lark and DCC that affect conversions?
Well, the adventure was initially created specifically to be for DCC 2nd level PCs, so that guided the first design in terms of challenges (designed for low-level DCC play), some of the rewards (patrons) and the general feel (high magic, nearly gonzo).

When I converted it to Lamentations, there were a few considerations. Of course, there wasn't much to be done with patrons in LotFP, so those were basically dropped and replaced with spells (which happened to be the patron-exclusive spells from the DCC version). Many of the skill-based DCs were replaced with Specialist skill rolls, which makes them harder. Also, I had to take a hard look at monetary rewards, since GP=XP in LotFP. I ended up reducing some of the treasure values as a result.

Lark was really easy to convert to - I ended up dropping patrons as for LotFP, and most of the other stuff translated over pretty easily. DCs became Difficulties, and I didn't have to tailor monetary rewards for experience.

In addition, for Lamentations and DCC, you have the same set of classes, with race-as-class, so the pre-generated PCs were very straightforward to convert. For Lark, character design is much more open-ended, and since I adapted it specifically to host a large group of players (8), I ended up adding three more pre-gens. I was very happy with these because at least two of them (the Adviser and the Cursed Unicorn) would have been tricky to design for other systems, but they were very simple in Lark.

5e was a whole other beast. For that one, I got a co-author who had actually run 5e for multiple groups. I offered him a nice percentage of the 5e "profits," but we both knew that this was mainly a hobby experiment. My co-author had a lot of useful feedback, some of which ended up percolating into the other editions. I gave him a lot of license to change things, and he did, but for any significant change, we discussed it at length. It was a fun process, and I enjoyed his alterations.

One thing we went back and forth on was stat blocks. At first, he convinced me we should go with the WotC approach: stat blocks for new monsters in an appendix and MM references for the rest. I wasn't really happy with this, but the page count was already quite high, so I initially agreed. After a while, I was just like fuck it, why don't I paste the stat blocks from the appendix into the encounter sections? You know, so it would be usable. The page count jumped, but so did usability, so my co-author decided to go all the way and copy the SRD stat blocks into the adventure as well.

An interesting thing that happened late in the game is that Bryce Lynch sent me an early copy of his review one weekend, and even though it was positive, I agreed with his criticisms. One of the big ones he had was that some of the encounter locations went on for more than two pages, and in those cases, sometimes there was important stuff after the flip. He mentioned that it would have been worth futzing around with margins and fonts to make this work, and I decided that he was 100% correct.

So I ended up spending that weekend tweaking all the font sizes, margins and line spacing, shuffling around sections, and resizing tables. At the end of it, only a couple locations sprawled past two pages, and I made sure that I broke up the content in those sections so it wasn't confusing (e.g. putting the stat blocks on the flip). Finally, I inserted a few full-page images to make sure that the first two pages of every locations were facing each other. It took a weekend, but it made the whole thing much more usable. Ironically, the net effect was a very slight decrease in page count (something like 2 out of 130) - the full page images almost matched the text reduction.

That was great, but since I had already converted the text to three other systems, I've had to manually perform the same changes on every edition. It's a helluva pain. One thing I'd say to anyone who wants to put out something like this for multiple systems: try to get as close as you can to the final copy before performing the conversion. The different editions will all involve layout adjustments, but you really want to minimize the number of times that you have to manually apply a change across multiple copies of a text.

I still have to put out the Lark version; that's due for publication in the next couple of days. Unfortunately, I think my trial ran out on the Acrobat bookmark generator plug-in I was using - it's super-powerful, but it costs something like 200 just for the plug-in! I don't really want to buy it for something that might literally not sell a single copy, but I also don't want to manually create 100+ bookmarks in the final PDF. Ah, joyous dilemma.

Anyway, I hope that wasn't too dull. It was an interesting and entirely unprofitable experience (in terms of hours of effort, at least). If I did something like this again, I'd have much more of an idea about how to market and promote, but I can see that's a huge amount of work in this newfangled social media age. Honestly, there are much easier ways to make a buck in this world, so you gotta reaaaaaaally love gaming to do this professionally.
 
Sure, gladly.

Well, the adventure was initially created specifically to be for DCC 2nd level PCs, so that guided the first design in terms of challenges (designed for low-level DCC play), some of the rewards (patrons) and the general feel (high magic, nearly gonzo).

When I converted it to Lamentations, there were a few considerations. Of course, there wasn't much to be done with patrons in LotFP, so those were basically dropped and replaced with spells (which happened to be the patron-exclusive spells from the DCC version). Many of the skill-based DCs were replaced with Specialist skill rolls, which makes them harder. Also, I had to take a hard look at monetary rewards, since GP=XP in LotFP. I ended up reducing some of the treasure values as a result.

Lark was really easy to convert to - I ended up dropping patrons as for LotFP, and most of the other stuff translated over pretty easily. DCs became Difficulties, and I didn't have to tailor monetary rewards for experience.

In addition, for Lamentations and DCC, you have the same set of classes, with race-as-class, so the pre-generated PCs were very straightforward to convert. For Lark, character design is much more open-ended, and since I adapted it specifically to host a large group of players (8), I ended up adding three more pre-gens. I was very happy with these because at least two of them (the Adviser and the Cursed Unicorn) would have been tricky to design for other systems, but they were very simple in Lark.

5e was a whole other beast. For that one, I got a co-author who had actually run 5e for multiple groups. I offered him a nice percentage of the 5e "profits," but we both knew that this was mainly a hobby experiment. My co-author had a lot of useful feedback, some of which ended up percolating into the other editions. I gave him a lot of license to change things, and he did, but for any significant change, we discussed it at length. It was a fun process, and I enjoyed his alterations.

One thing we went back and forth on was stat blocks. At first, he convinced me we should go with the WotC approach: stat blocks for new monsters in an appendix and MM references for the rest. I wasn't really happy with this, but the page count was already quite high, so I initially agreed. After a while, I was just like fuck it, why don't I paste the stat blocks from the appendix into the encounter sections? You know, so it would be usable. The page count jumped, but so did usability, so my co-author decided to go all the way and copy the SRD stat blocks into the adventure as well.

An interesting thing that happened late in the game is that Bryce Lynch sent me an early copy of his review one weekend, and even though it was positive, I agreed with his criticisms. One of the big ones he had was that some of the encounter locations went on for more than two pages, and in those cases, sometimes there was important stuff after the flip. He mentioned that it would have been worth futzing around with margins and fonts to make this work, and I decided that he was 100% correct.

So I ended up spending that weekend tweaking all the font sizes, margins and line spacing, shuffling around sections, and resizing tables. At the end of it, only a couple locations sprawled past two pages, and I made sure that I broke up the content in those sections so it wasn't confusing (e.g. putting the stat blocks on the flip). Finally, I inserted a few full-page images to make sure that the first two pages of every locations were facing each other. It took a weekend, but it made the whole thing much more usable. Ironically, the net effect was a very slight decrease in page count (something like 2 out of 130) - the full page images almost matched the text reduction.

That was great, but since I had already converted the text to three other systems, I've had to manually perform the same changes on every edition. It's a helluva pain. One thing I'd say to anyone who wants to put out something like this for multiple systems: try to get as close as you can to the final copy before performing the conversion. The different editions will all involve layout adjustments, but you really want to minimize the number of times that you have to manually apply a change across multiple copies of a text.

I still have to put out the Lark version; that's due for publication in the next couple of days. Unfortunately, I think my trial ran out on the Acrobat bookmark generator plug-in I was using - it's super-powerful, but it costs something like 200 just for the plug-in! I don't really want to buy it for something that might literally not sell a single copy, but I also don't want to manually create 100+ bookmarks in the final PDF. Ah, joyous dilemma.

Anyway, I hope that wasn't too dull. It was an interesting and entirely unprofitable experience (in terms of hours of effort, at least). If I did something like this again, I'd have much more of an idea about how to market and promote, but I can see that's a huge amount of work in this newfangled social media age. Honestly, there are much easier ways to make a buck in this world, so you gotta reaaaaaaally love gaming to do this professionally.
I'm pretty sure that FoxIt creates bookmarks, and is free:smile:.

I think I'm going to wait for the bundles, though:tongue:!
 
I'm pretty sure that FoxIt creates bookmarks, and is free:smile:.
Thanks...I'll check it out, see if it meets my needs. Acrobat certainly lets you create bookmarks out of the box, one-by-one, but the plug-in I've been using is able to rely on font information to automatically create nest bookmarks. I was actually disappointed that it doesn't come with Acrobat, which is otherwise actually a pretty good tool for my needs; plus, it now works on a subscription basis, which is also perfect for my needs.
 
Thanks...I'll check it out, see if it meets my needs. Acrobat certainly lets you create bookmarks out of the box, one-by-one, but the plug-in I've been using is able to rely on font information to automatically create nest bookmarks. I was actually disappointed that it doesn't come with Acrobat, which is otherwise actually a pretty good tool for my needs; plus, it now works on a subscription basis, which is also perfect for my needs.
So how did it go between you and FoxIt:smile:?
 
So how did it go between you and FoxIt:smile:?
Unfortunately, it lacked the bookmark autogeneration feature that the Adobe plugin was giving me, although I'll be keeping it in mind for other forms of PDF editing. Thanks for the tip!

Incidentally, I did just release the Lark version of The Magician's House. For anyone here who wants a copy at half-off ($3), I have a discount link:

The Magician's House (Lark edition) discount
 
Unfortunately, it lacked the bookmark autogeneration feature that the Adobe plugin was giving me, although I'll be keeping it in mind for other forms of PDF editing. Thanks for the tip!

Incidentally, I did just release the Lark version of The Magician's House. For anyone here who wants a copy at half-off ($3), I have a discount link:

The Magician's House (Lark edition) discount
And you got your first sale with the Lark Edition:smile:!
 
Just as I was looking for a place to post this, I realized that I should probably update my sig!

Anyway, The Magician's House got a great review today from the Prince of Nothing! I'd say it was even more positive than Bryce's, which surprised me by categorizing it as "The Best." So now I think I can technically say that The Magician's House is a critical smash in the OSR community :wink:
 
So now I think I can technically say that The Magician's House is a critical smash in the OSR community :wink:
Technically? Too modest man. You need to go full John Romero and slap on a tagline like "This module will make you its bitch" or "If you liked Death Frost Doom then get ready to blow your load"

Whenever we have a gap in our Runequest game for variety's sake, I've The Magician's House DCC version ready to go.
 
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Technically? Too modest man. You need to go full John Romero and slap on a tagline like "This module will make you its bitch" or "If you liked Death Frost Doom then get ready to blow your load"
And you know I'd do that:tongue:!

Also, I'm struggling through the Lark version* of it, but when I'm done, you can expect another review.

*"Reading modules, or what Asen sucks at" is an underrated low-budget indie movie:shade:!
 
Also, I'm struggling through the Lark version* of it, but when I'm done, you can expect another review.
Wow, that's awesome - a review for the Lark version, no less! I'm guessing you'll have some things to say about the system, as well. It got a two-star review on DTRPG but no comments, so I'm wondering what the lone reviewer didn't like.

I actually felt a little bad about Prince of Nothing's review because I know (through correspondence) that he sank a massive amount of time into really understanding it. Bryce's review, no less accurate, took him a couple of days. The reason for this disparity is because Bryce focused on the structure while PoN got into the content. They're actually pretty complimentary in what they cover. I was very glad for Prince's review because I'm extremely proud of some of that content.
*"Reading modules, or what Asen sucks at" is an underrated low-budget indie movie:shade:!
I'm trying to get better at my read-to-buy ratio. I've gotten better about digging out things I bought a while back without reading. It's a rewarding struggle. One of my problems with reading a lot of adventures is the need to constantly reference the map.
 
Wow, that's awesome - a review for the Lark version, no less! I'm guessing you'll have some things to say about the system, as well.
Not much. I consider it "the Maelstrom equivalent of 2d6 systems", if that helps. (Attributes replacing skills, while skills only provide bonuses is something that exists in d100 games as well:smile:).

I actually felt a little bad about Prince of Nothing's review because I know (through correspondence) that he sank a massive amount of time into really understanding it. Bryce's review, no less accurate, took him a couple of days.
Yeah...you pretty much know when I bought the Lark version, because I was one of the first (if not the first:wink:). But the thing is, I usually read modules s-l-o-w-l-y, depending on how much free time I've got.

I'm trying to get better at my read-to-buy ratio. I've gotten better about digging out things I bought a while back without reading. It's a rewarding struggle. One of my problems with reading a lot of adventures is the need to constantly reference the map.
Most of my modules are due to Bundle of Holding or coming with the corebook, I think. Magician's house, robertsconley's Demon Wolf, the Knight's and Miller's Tales for Dragon Warriors, and the Blue Medusa are the notable exceptions, I think...even DFD was part of some bundle:grin:!
 
Inevitable drivethru question, but were you thinking of making it POD?
 
Inevitable drivethru question, but were you thinking of making it POD?
It wasn't my intent just because I have no idea how to do that and I didn't figure that I have enough sales to justify it. Looking at my sales stats just now (something I haven't done in a month or two), I've sold precisely 100 copies across all formats. I don't know if enough interest is there to justify it, and I'd want to do another editing pass or two if I was going to commit to ink and paper.
 
I bought the 5e version a while back and have been going through it. If I ever get around to doing a dream plane campaign (multiple mini planes), this is going to fit in perfectly.

It has a ton of great ideas that will save me hours of prep.
 
I learned two Czech groups are playing this and really enjoying it.

Long play report here (in Czech, but Google Translate handles it well):
 
I learned two Czech groups are playing this and really enjoying it.

Long play report here (in Czech, but Google Translate handles it well):
"Murderhobos in the Magician's house", seriously:grin:?
 
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