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I'm in the process of updating (to 2e & Lost Omens) & writing up an old (3.5/1e) campaign that never got finished in order to stick it online in case it would be of use/interest to anyone -- however one of the locations is a bit tricky as there are multiple different "versions" of it the party will interact with at different times and in different ways, so I'd be interested in hearing the community's thoughts on the various ways to write it up and their dis/advantages.
At its simplest it's a haunted house -- a long abandoned manor house overlooking a mining village in a mountain pass. However, planar boundaries are thin in the area and there are parallel versions of the house in the Shadow plane, Dreamlands, and First World -- each house has essentially the same layout, and variations of the same locations & NPCs.
The basic idea is that the PCs explore the main (prime material) house and discover what happened there, in part by exploring the alternate versions of it and interacting with the alternate versions of the various NPCs.
There are also two other "versions" of the house that the party are less likely to interact with but which still need some write-up -- (i) in the past before it "fell" & what happened when it did, and (ii) in the future when it is reclaimed and a new baroness takes up residence. I expect these to be separate, high-level descriptions that don't go into the same level of detail.
So I'm writing up 4 (ruined, shadow, dream, fey) versions that are broadly similar but with significant differences, and there are plenty of locations/encounters where it's useful to compare/contrast different versions of the same event.
How best to do this?
Broadly speaking I can see two straight-forward options -- at opposite extremes to one another. Either (i) write up each version separately, all the ruined locations grouped together, then all the shadow locations grouped together, then... or (ii) group each version of each location together, with the ruined & shadow & dream & fey versions of the dining room all discussed together, then the rsdf versions of the butler's pantry, then ...
I can see advantages & disadvantages to each, it was much simpler when it was just all in my head & sketch notes!
I'd love to hear anyones thoughts on good/bad ways to do this.
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Assuming one version is kind of the main or dominant version of the house, I'd go with using that as the main text, with sidebars or subsections for the other perspectives on the same room. That'll probably save you the most duplicated effort (and the viewer the most re-reading stuff they'd already know).
Also I'm a huge fan of starting new logical units ("the dining room") at the top of the page. It's fine if you don't entirely fill some pages, whitespace is NOT the enemy. A few pages more is not a problem in a digital format.
It can also be helpful to think carefully about which order you want to present the rooms in. It's a running joke that if the rooms in the adventure are described taking a clockwise tour through the building, the party will decide that the counterclockwise tour is clearly the obvious one based on everything they've seen. But if you can manage, you'll make the GM's life easier by putting the rooms in an order that makes sense for the players to explore them in.
I have something kind of similar. I've been slowly writing a campaign and at times I find myself needing to write the original/ancient version of a building/city first, and then the ruined/current version in order to make sure it 'makes sense'. For a couple of these I've been thinking of spinning them off from my full campaign to a 'Locations Across Time' or similarly named product line to get some feedback on style/etc, since otherwise the endeavor it too huge to get useful feedback on early enough.
Now my approach might work better since its not different planes, which I can easily imagine making things more complicated, but I have an intro section that had the primary map and all the 'constant' details -- corridor/room heights, wall materials/construction etc.
Then I go each age at a time, with its constant details (lighting/locks/etc), and then room by room within that time period with its full description and NPCs.
Of course in my case I only expect an individual party to interact with a single version. As a result I'll probably end up folding the 'across all times' constant details into each time's one as well since there's no reason to make a GM need to refer to both those areas separately.
I think that the problem with say, having 4 different versions of the dining room grouped together is that if the party is exploring the shadow version of the house, the GM has to flick past all of the pages for the non-shadow dining room and the non-shadow kitchen to get from the shadow dining room to the shadow kitchen.
I guess it depends on how detailed the variations are? If each version needs a full page of it's own for each room, then it might make more sense during gameplay for each version of the house to be it's own chapter.
If each version is just a sidebar added to the normal rooms template, that's better done room by room.
You also have the issue that if you have all of the different versions of the dining room clumped together, GMs might have a tough time quickly comprehending which elements are relevant at a given time - I have heard anecdotes of GMs using the wrong stats for a monster by looking at the monster across the page from the correct monster, or accidentally throwing both encounters at players when a location has two listed encounters that are supposed to happen at different times because they just glanced at the page and saw the two lists of monsters next to each other.
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Thanks everyone for your comments.
I've realised what it was that I was missing that meant I couldn't figure out why whichever way I structured it felt wrong -- although the main (ruin) version is location-oriented, the variants (shadow, dream, and fey) are all event-oriented -- they're neither sequential nor parallel, they're orthogonal