I was recruited to produce an adventure for my local library’s teenage D&D event that will be running tomorrow, and while it’s taken more time than I thought, I’ve had the opportunity to learn to use a half dozen new pieces of software and brush up a bit on my writing, editing, sketching, painting and cartography. Some of the need to learn new tricks is due to the midstream switch to using the Roll20 website for remote play instead of just meeting at the library in person. I like learning new things and finding ways to make old tools do new things, so this has been a good experience. It does wind up taking longer than just using old, mastered tools, but I like to think that the ability to learn new things is a healthy one, even if it hasn’t led to more employment opportunities.
This “module” of sorts is offered as a free download. It was done for the Orem Public Library, using some of my own art, a bit from my daughter, and free assets from other sites, noted in the text. It’s designed as a toolkit; a setting, maps, an adventure, a handful of monsters and some NPC “seeds” to spur adventures. You can play through the adventure or just noodle around in some of the maps, fighting monsters. It’s an introductory sort of thing, meant to engage teens who may never have played an RPG before. I haven’t yet produced the “printer friendly” version of the file, since making the Roll20-ready assets was the priority, but I’ll see about getting those optimized monochrome assets done in the next week or so, time allowing.
If you do poke around in these files, I’d welcome feedback of any sort. I believe it will serve its stated purpose, even as I admit that I’m new to the 5th Edition of D&D, as well as the production software, so this isn’t going to be as polished as some of those glossy minibooks that the Pathfinder or D&D people produce. I may also note that I’m not attached to any particular RPG, and this production was meant to be flexible; it could be tweaked fairly easily for use in other systems.
Please feel free to download these files and reproduce them for personal or nonprofit use. Tangentially, I also modeled a sculpture of the “Gyro Golem” for use on the library’s 3D printers, but that sort of fell by the wayside. It’s also available as a free download on Thingiverse or Pinshape.
Thank you, and hopefully these are of some use to you!
(Link above is to the master PDF, the following are supplemental images for Roll20 usage)
