Last year I competed in the Paizo's RPG Superstar contest, and earlier this week I saw my complete winning adventure. It was humbling to see my first design work become reality. Roleplaying games are an integral part of my daily and family life. I play Pathfinder at least once a week, sometimes with friends, my children, complete strangers—I love to game! I love the social aspects of gathering around a table to share in the group storytelling experience. We explore, we laugh, we fight, we are a party, and we are together. As gamers we experience things outside our everyday lives, see places that exist in our collective imaginations. We get to be "not ourselves."
Winning RPG Superstar introduced me to a new aspect of my favorite hobby. I created a space for gamers to explore Nar-Voth and discover new things about themselves (should gamers follow those threads). One of the most important parts of the design process was finding places to include roleplaying solutions in addition to combat solutions. Creating believable NPCs was both fun and challenging. My favorite characters to create were the three "big bad" encounters. The personalities and relationships between Zohir and her underlings were crucial to giving options to players for dealing with the encounters. For each NPC, I created files of real and fictional people and relationships, created musical soundtracks, and for a few, I had specific perfumes that I wore when I wrote their scenes to help me focus and round out NPCs that could have ended up moustache twirling villains. Even now when I wear some of them I'm put in the frame of mind of Zohir and Delbera. (Editor's Note: Apparently Lady Delbera is Vétiver Fatal. We leave it up to you, dear readers, to convince Monica to share the rest!)
Illustrations by Sally Gottschalk and Vicky Yarova
Thank you Paizo, Lisa Stevens, Crystal Frasier, Amanda Hamon Kunz, and RPG Superstar voters and judges! Without this supportive gaming community we would still be searching for like-minded friends to share our dreams. Thank you for sharing my dream of an axe wielding dwarven cleric. Thank you Andrew for believing in me and for your endless support. This module is for all of you!
Monica Marlowe
Contributing Author
