An e-mail I got woke me from my slumber. It informed me of the fact, that Johnn Four’s Adventure Workshop (I already talked about that) goes into its next incarnation, meaning that Johnn rearranged the old videos and put them together in a new format accessible to new and old participants alike (I have no idea if it costs anything for newcomers, as a participant of the original workshop I had immediate access, then we paid a small fee I still consider to be well-spent money).

Well. That e-mail also reminded me of the fact that I had wasted to much time with not doing anything creative, so I’d just give it a new try, the blog as well as the workshop. And as I started it from anew, I came upon my first task, namely doing my First Move. This term describes the first step you take into the design process and Johnn suggests, you try to find something what works for you and start the process with excactly this thing everytime. For adventure writing, things that automatically come to mind are the heroes‘ home base or a map of the location the adventure plays in. Could also be the adventure’s villain or anything which gets your creative juice flowing (which is what the First Move actually is supposed to do).

Now in my case this is a bit more complicated, because I don’t only intend to write an adventure, but also to design the setting in which this adventure plays. This setting is based on a lot of ideas I had in the last 15 to 20 years that I never got penned down on paper. And some of the ideas may require tinkering with the system (or, to be honest, rewrite it in a way that fits my vision) but I’ll leave that aside for now. Which means that I’ll probably start with a more generic version of the adventure and change it later according to my needs.

At first I just wanted to tackle the ideas I had through the first workshop. Without going into too much detail, the adventure was planned to start in a city which would only serve as location for this single module (I already planned for a bigger campaign arc which would mostly play at another continent). In the meantime, I think that would have actually been a waste of opportunity to explore said city and thereby explore one of the base premises of my whole setting. So I decided just to stay in this city for a while. Meaning that my First Move would be to think about this city with the intension to flesh it out at a later time.

And while I already had some ideas of my own, I still like to add a random aspect to my creations to challenge myself thinking in new directions, so I decided to roll the dice to create a Stat Block for my city using the Pathfinder settlement rules from Pathfinder’s Game Mastery Guide. Just to have more material, I added stuff from a thread in the Paizo forums which made it into Nairbs Settlement Creator. I did the same with Otherverse Games‘ “Cityscapes – New Settlement Options for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game”. And then I let the dice decide.

Here’s what I came up with for a start:

Settlement Type: Metropolis

Population: 67315

Alignment: Lawful Good

Government: Council

Qualities: Defensible, Eldritch, Good Roads, Pocket Universe, Unaging, Hardened

Next time, I’ll tell you a bit what I intend to do with this stats and how it fits into my larger vision of my setting.