Wednesday, March 27, 2013

My A to Z Blogging Challenge Concept
(or "I know I'm going to regret this.")



If you want the details of why blog won't be officially registered with this years A-to-Z Blogging Challenge, you can read about that here. If you want to know why I'm going to regret this, keep reading...

Long story short, I'm going to be creating an introductory level adventure titled The Lost Catacombs of Kadmos, themed around the hero/god Cadmus/Kadmos, credited by the ancient Greeks for introducing the alphabet. The idea came to me while teaching my History of Communication Graphics class earlier this semester (during the class where I discuss the origin of the Latin alphabet via the Greeks via the Phoenicians). However, instead of using the English alphabet, I will be using the Greek alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) for my room names. As usual, it will be statted in such a way to adapt easily between Oe/1e/BX.

I'm also going to apologize in advance for the fact you will most likely be getting the text descriptions only, and not the maps and supporting illustrations (a la Tomb of Horrors) that are really required for players to best understand the sort of "thinking" dungeon (ahem... catcombs) I have planned.

I will be traveling the first week of April, and my work/teaching schedule shows no signs of lightening up until mid-May. It's bad enough that I'm way behind on finishing The Valley of the Five Fires and editing d30 Sandbox Companion. In addition to my "life load" reaching critical mass, Welbo recently started a new job which is sort of doing the same thing for his "life load." And I promise that the Community Geomorph Project is not dead; a couple of tough re-draws "daunted" me temporarily, then that "life load" kicked in.

So now, I'm going and doing something idiotic like jumping into the blogging challenge. Like I said, I'll be traveling next week, and I'm hoping that I'll have some Starbucks time (while my wife is at her conference) to knock out the month's worth of posts (minus the maps/drawings). The room concepts are all there, and many of them are already written (I tend to have time to kill on campus between my arriving early to beat traffic/parking and the time class begins), so I've gotten a bit of a head start.

I'll start on Sunday (March 31st) with the catacomb exterior, and launch on April 1 with the "alpha" room. If all goes as planned, the 24-letter alphabet will work nicely for four consecutive weeks of M/Tu/W/Th/F/Sa postings (with Sunday a day off). At least I have to do two less posts than the regular A-to-Z'ers, and while I have to do zeta and xi, I don't have to do Q (that one sort of "went around" Greek alphabet developments before working its way into the Latin alphabet).

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