Some advice for Round 4
This year’s round 4 is similar to last year’s, so here is some advice from someone who has been through the process. (I’m hoping that you can learn from some of my missteps in this round.)
- Make it an awesome location, a location that PCs would want to tell tales of having been to.
- Make it a Golarion location, give it the style and flavor of the part of the world it is set in.
- Make it an awesome encounter, an encounter that is unusual and memorable for the PCs.
- Make sure the villain gets the chance to show his/her style both in the location and in the encounter.
- Make the map interesting, it doesn’t have to be super pretty in the artistic sense, but it does need to be clear and have to give the GM everything they would need to run the encounter.
- Lastly, tie it all together so that it fits together, feels real, and has Superstar quality.
Hope that helps,
Matt Goodall
Thanks for the advise. :)
Make sure the villain gets the chance to show his/her style both in the location and in the encounter.
I'd like to super-duper-quadruple-echo this point.
Writing under constraints can be maddening - but it also gives you amazing tools. In this case, you must use one of the villains.
If you tack the villain on where he doesn't naturally fit very well, or give him a role that any other villain could have played, then you are passing up the opportunity to do something unique; something tailored to the elements that you are using. Your entry will be weaker for it.
Your villain is your constraint; don't start somewhere random and wait for it to fence you in. Start from the villain; and construct your encounter around him. Where might he be? What scene would showcase conflict between him and the PCs? Where and how can he show off what's special about him? What scenes can you place him in, that will be perfectly suited to him, yet entirely different from what the voting public might expect from that villain?
Ask these questions not once, but many times, until you've passed the obvious and cliche answers and come up with something truly unusual. Always consider: if I swapped this villain for another one, would this encounter still work well? If it would, maybe you're not taking full advantage of your villain choice yet.
The same goes for your other big constraint - the multiple tiering, though this is trickier and less intuitive. You can take it simply as an issue of balance - in which case, strive to demonstrate with your choices how cleanly, concisely and accurately you manage to adapt one tier for the other. Alternatively, consider long and hard how your encounter might be different for the different tiers. Design them to begin with so that difference can be clear, recognized, interesting - and your addressing of each option will be appropriately more impressive.
I'm really not one to speak here; I don't have any experience writing this kind of thing. I'm certainly less-qualified than anybody who's in the contest and already dealing with real entries and criticism. But I do know a thing or two about writing under constraints, and I've always found it to be an exhilarating exercise in creativity. I'm sure it doesn't work for everybody, but if you can make it work for you - then creatively, for a constrained assignment, you're golden.
Good luck to you all :) I'm looking forward to this...
Thanks for the advice guys! Hopefully I'll be able to blow your minds if I make it to the next round.