County of Urnst Writer's Page

Suggestions on writing scenarios from Circle Member Steven Conforti

1. You should be writing to the average party, not the min-maxed overpowered one. For some reason, we cyclically hear that the campaign is geared to the min-maxed players. That is not the intent of the campaign. When I review adventures in my Meta-Region, I am always looking at them with an eye towards them being a challenge (but not insanely so) to the average party of adventurers. I am fairly certain my fellow Circle members do the same.

2. You don't have to award XP for combat ELs with no means of  avoiding the combat. We changed the rules on this more than a year ago, and I know many Triads have taken advantage of this change to allow more flexibility in their adventures. You can give diplomatic alternatives, etc., to your combats, as long as the alternatives are challenging as well (no DC 5 Diplomacy check to avoid the EL = APL + 3 combat at APL 12). You can allow such alternatives to reduce the danger of a combat or give the PCs an advantage in a combat. Or they can avoid the combat entirely if they are particularly successful in their actions ... the key thing is that the combat has to exist and it can't be easy to avoid it.

PCs who roleplay smart and uses their skills and wiles can learn lots of the details of the upcoming combats in the adventure, allowing them to prepare intelligently and in advance for what they face. I wholeheartedly support putting roleplaying on equal footing with combat in the adventure, just remember that the game is still a combat = XP based system at heart. This is true for the game as a whole, not just LG.

3. The campaign is designed to continually bring new people into it. If you see things which discourage that, we always want to hear about it. If we don't keep introducing fresh blood in, the campaign will wither eventually. However, we also can't do things that drive huge numbers of old players away either. We have to find the happy medium where players coming in outweigh players leaving. The Circle makes decisions based on that premise, even if it sometimes looks to you folks like we're not.

4. The main reasons why we allow as much non-Core material into the campaign as we can is that most players want to be able to do stuff outside of the standard books. And WotC wants people to be able to use all of the books they buy from them. So we try to carefully allow enough stuff into the campaign to keep people excited without overloading the campaign with too much stuff. It's a fine line, and I'm sure we step over it from time to time.

Below you will find information on how to write scenarios for the County of Urnst. Currently, we are looking to fill our quota of modules not only for this year, but next. If you are interested in doing so, the following files should be helpful to you.

IMPORTANT!

All authors in the County of Urnst should know the following about submitting a module.

1. Once an author submits an item for editing, he/she agrees to allow it to be edited for triad use - and that such changes do not need to be reviewed by the author prior to submission for circle sanctioning.

2. If the author wishes for his/her work not to be used, or if he/she reviews the scenario (even after it has already been run) and wishes for it not to be used, then the scenario will be pulled and not used again.