I have been hammering away at Desert Hold of the Dawn Fish and realized I was all over the place. I was going astray, making no sense, and just creating a disconnected adventure forgetting from one writing session to the next what I was doing. WHY????
I forgot, in my eagerness to just hammer out fun encounters, to write an outline. To be fair, that’s what Desert Hold was and started out to be – a free-writing exercise. As it’s grown though, it needs a story arc and an outline to keep it cohesive, like any adventure.
Desert Hold started out as a Randomly generated one-page dungeon. I didn’t hold a high bar for it. I needed to make SOMETHING, and that was it. You can get a look at the beginnings of it here. The free post I did a while back is just the start point. it’s moving on to level three now and the story is still loose and a little sloppy. Well, by level three it needs to be tighter.
I encourage everyone to write with an outline. it’s essential to keep you on track, to make your adventures make sense and to have a sense of purpose. Otherwise you just have a collection of encounters and heroes have no reason to pursue them.
I am quite pleased with the quest progress even without the outline, so stay tuned. I think a short print will happen with this by the time it’s wrapped up.