The SDC and Me
Every year Kapcon runs a Scenario Design Competition or SDC, in which it encourages gamers to submit their written adventures. The con takes this competition pretty seriously and offers pretty much the pick of the con prizes to the winner.
After a bit of investigation, I discovered that the SDC was started as a way of creating a selection of adventures for potential GMs to run at the con, on the fly, if the need arises (if say there was too many walk up gamers to accommodate in one session, etc.. While I know that most of the writers have a tendency to run the adventures they submit, I’m unsure how often this has been called upon.
In general I’m in favour of the concept, although in the past it has never really interested me to submit anything for a few (selfish) reasons:
Pretty poor excuses aren’t they!
So this year, I’ve decided to submit something - my Serpents by Gaslight game for Call of Cthulhu. Originally coming out of an extra session of a Masks of Nyarlothotep campaign I ran for the Auckland group (in fact it was the first campaign my wife played with us I believe), I expanded it to be run as a stand-alone game at Kapcon in 2005 (during which I met so many of the locals I now get along with for the first time - Sam, James, Norman - to name a few!). My plan is to track my progress on this blog and hopefully have something to submit by the end of the end.
Wish me luck and watch this space!
After a bit of investigation, I discovered that the SDC was started as a way of creating a selection of adventures for potential GMs to run at the con, on the fly, if the need arises (if say there was too many walk up gamers to accommodate in one session, etc.. While I know that most of the writers have a tendency to run the adventures they submit, I’m unsure how often this has been called upon.
In general I’m in favour of the concept, although in the past it has never really interested me to submit anything for a few (selfish) reasons:
- Writing a decent adventure is a lot of hard work, and if I’m going that far I might as well give it to the owners of the RPG I’m writing for!
- It seems to attract the same authors every year and as such feels a bit stale (yes, yes, I know, if I submitted then at least we’d have one new author!)
- It is limiting in that the adventures can’t be published elsewhere (actually with that in mind - how did Luke win this year? His Cthulhutech adventures were already available up on the web?!? :P)
- The deadline is in December - the worse time of the year for me!
- I prefer to write and run loose adventures with lots of space for gamer ‘wriggle’, this isn’t conducive to an SDC adventure.
- I never focus long enough to get an entire adventure written (witnessed by the fact that I have about half-a-dozen half written Cthulhu adventures sitting on my Hard drive, plus one for Mazes & Minotaurs that just needs a simple edit, as well as my Esoterrorist game needing a fix up before sending it to Simon!)
Pretty poor excuses aren’t they!
So this year, I’ve decided to submit something - my Serpents by Gaslight game for Call of Cthulhu. Originally coming out of an extra session of a Masks of Nyarlothotep campaign I ran for the Auckland group (in fact it was the first campaign my wife played with us I believe), I expanded it to be run as a stand-alone game at Kapcon in 2005 (during which I met so many of the locals I now get along with for the first time - Sam, James, Norman - to name a few!). My plan is to track my progress on this blog and hopefully have something to submit by the end of the end.
Wish me luck and watch this space!