My first published adventure: The Tiger Coast

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It took me a while to get around to posting this. But I've published a an adventure: The Tiger Coast.

It's a hex crawl, it's free and it's part of the incredible Antarctic Adventure Jam by Idraluna Archives. 

Writing this was huge for me. I spent a long time studying what people want from an OSR/Adventure game, listening to reviews, reading about dungeon design etc. and then I wrote this thing and honestly a lot of it went out of the window. It was just about writing something and pushing my imagination and output to a new level. Two things really contributed to that: it's a hexcrawl rather than a dungeon, and it's set in the campaign world of Antarctica 

Antarctica is a map that Idraluna created which is essentially a hex-ified map of real world antarctica if it wasn't frozen over. Before the jam started, Idraluna had already begun populating the map with his campaign world Zurth, and by the time I got into it, a bunch of other creators had also started building their worlds. These creators then in turn started riffing off of each other and linking each others' little worlds through shared factions, NPCs, monsters, spells and items. Generally speaking the majority of folks were using OD&D as their shared system (although the Jam isn't limited to that). I'd describe the world as a sort of anachronistic weird fantasy sword and sorcery thing with heavy doses of estrangement, wonder and anti-cannon baked in. And on top of that, everyone has their own ideas and spin that they're bringing to the table.

So for me to just try and write straight down the line door D&D that would get the approval of the BrOSR didn't really feel right. So I just let my shit be weird and in some cases hard to work with. I just went for it. 

I think I have a bit of a different style of design than most folks taking part in the Jam. For one, I use OSE rather than OD&D. Also my personal taste leans more towards functionality over vibe. I like things to be gameable and fucntional. I like to create stuff that someone else can pick up and run with easily. I say this without malice: I don't think that's what most of the AAJ folks value in their games. They lean into wonder, weirdness, and interpreting things in play. It's been really cool because I think that stuff was missing from how I think about game design.

I've just started up a solo adventure where I'm sort of hex crawling through other people's territories and also creating more of my own stuff. So we'll see how that goes. 

But anyway, back to the Tiger Coast. I want to write more about it but I'm also out of steam. So for now I'll just say, go check it out here! If anyone plays it, or even just borrows bits and pieces from it, please reach out and let me know :)

Also you can check out my interview with Idraluna here. There's plans to launch the whole thing as a physical book that will be sold at cost. I really hope people get around it because I think there's nothing else like it.

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