Story time.
My old DM and long-time friend, Joel Clapp, let me know several months ago that Nord Games was looking for submissions for new D&D adventures, so I wrote up a pitch and sent it in, all excited.
The adventure was a dark re-imagining of a masquerade party, where a troupe of elves descends upon a small town and replaces all of its citizens with their own “actors,” who look and act just like the townspeople. Only one real person is left: a beautiful damsel who ends up telling any stranger who’ll listen that everyone in her town has been replaced by impostors. Mind games ensue, and the adventure culminates in the party entering the Fey realm to face the insidious, cruel elf Queen, the not-so-subtly-named Titania.
Rejected.
The next pitch was a Lovecraftian horror adventure at sea, where the players are shipwrecked on a sprawling ancient city carried on the back of a giant, soul-eating crab.
Rejected.
Finally, I had a long talk with the Lore Master and Editor, Andrew Geertsen, who was patient and kind enough to write me an essay-length email telling me the same thing a lot of fiction editors say to writers: I’m buried underneath a mountain of generic, run-of-the-mill submissions. If you’re submitting something, make it unique. Make it something that forces me to sit up and say “Wow.” And make sure it’s a story that needs to be told.
He also gave me an idea of the kind of submission he was looking for: high adventure, something epic, with memorable characters. After several months of brainstorming, revisions, and fastidious attention to the submission guidelines, I submitted the pitch for “The Scuttling City,” an adventure on the high seas that saddled the players with a wizard sailing a flying ship and turned my Lovecraftian crab-city into Bathyala, the holy city of the merfolk (which is still carried on the back of a giant crab).
I’ve already turned in the first draft (which is 65 pages long), and now Andrew and I are working on the revisions. It’s my first professional game-writing gig, and I’m super excited to bring it all the way to publication!
Cheers!