Writing’s Hard!
Hey, did you know writing’s hard? Yeah! And inspiration requires discipline!
I’ve found myself slacking on dungeon23. I’ll tell you I’m entirely behind by a whole month for “daily writing”. I sometimes make whole dungeons in one swoop, 7 rooms just fall out of my head, so I’m fine content-wise. But that’s not what I’m writing about today.
Writing’s hard. We write when we feel inspired, supposedly, but what happens when you’re not? Creativity’s like a furnace, I believe, and furnaces need fuel. Steal, read, play with everything through the lens of what you’re working on. See what sticks. Who cares if it’s a bad idea? You’ll have another in 10 seconds.
Most of my inaction was a lack of cohesive vision for who lives in this party. What’s the big bad guy we’re dealing with?
The best adventures, to me, had epic villains. Some adventures are their space, but my favorite campaigns had central antagonists. Curse of Strahd stands out here. Deep Carbon Observatory has The Crows. Hot Springs Island has a pantheon of NPCs to extol or villify. Maybe that’s why Ultraviolet Grasslands didn’t grab my attention - great convoy rules. No antagonist.
But some random prompt from a stray conversation on discord, wholly unrelated to Invisible Light, got me thinking about time loops and those stuck in them. And that gave me an antagonist I don’t think I’ve seen before.
Immortality’s weird. As your life approaches infinity, the odds of you getting stuck somewhere (falling into a star, for example), approach 1. Groundhog Day’s a good way out of that, but now you’re trapped in a time loop. Immortal, but still stuck. And that’s what got me thinking - what if our antagonist is trapped in a time loop? What if the whole festival crashed and froze to get OUT of the time loop?
Our antagonist had been able to Groundhog Day himself and lived the party countless times. When the festival ends, it all resets. And for a long time, he was the only one to retain memories of previous loops. But eventually, a few folks started to get the sense something was wrong. Magic, drugs, etc. And it became a war zone. Instead of resetting again, the resistance threw the station out of orbit, hoping to plunge them all into a sun or black hole, ending it all. But instead they crashed on the campaign world. suspended animation kicked in, and now they wait. Our antagonist is there too. He wants the party to end so it can begin again.
And the players are the only ones who can help him.