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So this is killing me. How do some of you come up with estimates on word counts for your proposals? I sit here and fiddle around with my ideas, but I have no clue how to guess the length in words. My biggest fear with a proposal is I end up way over my estimate and have to cut out some cool stuff. My second biggest fear is that I'm way under and have to find ways to fluff up the adventure, weakening it overall.

Any tips, or do most of you just guess?

In the guidelines for Dragon Magazine, it says that a full page of text is 750 words. Because of the stat blocks, it might be a bit longer for a Dungeon Magazine page, but I'm guessing it's close enough. I generally look at a Dungeon mag adventure that is similar in size and scope to my proposal, count the pages, multiply by 750, and presto, there's my word count.

Hey guys-

As I've been wading my way through the latest flood of Dungeon submissions, I've come up with a few new tips for contributors [rest of quote deleted]

-James Sutter
Dungeon Editorial...

Question for the Dungeon editors:

Could you post on the website a few proposals you liked? Preferably ones with very different writing styles! Along with other people in this thread, it seems to be there sometimes contradictory suggestions between the editors' comments in a couple of the messageboard threads and the DUNGEON Guidelines posted on the site. If there were a few finished proposals people could look at, it might clear up a lot of the confusion.

Hey All, I'm starting a new campaign with my group and I'm thinking of creating a cleric as my PC. The only thing is that I hate the whole..Healing....Love....Caring....Undead Smiting...aspect of them....I need a cleric with some power and some mystery...I was wondering if anyone has any good ideas regarding a non-healer cleric build (ie. domains, deities, PrC etc..). Also, if anyone wants to state their feelings on this matter, that'd be awesome!

Thanks TPO

I'd go for Boccob. Take the Knowledge and Trickery domains, and all of sudden you're a walking encyclopedia (all knowledge skills become class skills, which is fantastic) with some subterfuge skills as well. As a cleric, you don't have many skill points, unfortunately, but even 1 rank in each knowledge skill makes you a force to be reckoned with.

If your DM is running Eberron, you could play a changeling cleric of Boccob, and then with the changeling's disguise powers be even better at subterfuge.

Plus, now you belong to a mysterious priesthood dedicated to magic and knowledge. You could be charged with church-missions to uncover secrets, spread knowledge, decipher codes and so on.

And if your DM has Dungeon Issue #114, urge him to run Mad God's Key, which is not only an excellent adventure, but involves the Boccob priesthood to boot.