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Wednesday, May 10

First Professional Writing Gig Now Available: Treasure Island!

Night Owl Workshop has just released the PDF version of Treasure Island Adventure for your old-school roleplaying game. Ostensibly written for their game Freebooters!, the adventure is compatible with all the usual suspects.

What do you get? The Admiral Benbow, breakdowns on all the principle characters found in the novel, city crawling rules and tables for the busy shipping port of Bristol, England, and the complete environs of the island itself. Best of all, you get a solid structure in which to work the novel as a true ttrpg adventure opportunity!  

This is my first "professional" writing gig and I acquired the contract from Thomas Denmark because I responded to his open call for a writer for this project. That's how it rolls in the ttrpg industry. Just force yourself in the room and say you want at it! I'm glad he took a chance on an unknown person because the subject matter is one I hold a great fondness for. I have read Treasure Island numerous times since a kid, so the material I was to write about was very familiar. I have also held up the novel as a master class in pace. The story moves with such a heart-pounding pace I find it a true marvel of excellent adventure writing. I chuckled the first time I learned Robert Louis Stevenson was fond of cocaine. I wonder how much this influenced the "pace" of his writing?

Any-who, I think I nailed it. If you are looking for an old-school adventure on the Spanish Main you may not do better than this obscure output from the Vanishing Tower Press! 

Full disclosure; I tried to complete a second writing assignment for Night Owl and failed miserably. So, first important freelance writing tip I can offer is don't take an assignment that you can't immediately see a "great" idea forming up worthy of a published adventure. I tried to force myself just to "produce" and I don't have it in me. I need to write on something I am passionate about achieving, or I won't get very far. Fortunately, the public is only going to see this output,  buy a great adventure book, and when compared to my other adventure and gaming products find I can consistently put out fun, and useable stuff.

And not all I wrote for Night Owl Workshop made it into this book. I wrote up two cool-ass adventures based on my Renaissance campaign I ran in the Clockwork & Chivalry  setting from Cakebread & Walton. The cartography needed for these two adventures was holding up release of the book so it will be released as a separate adventure package. I'm okay with that. It actually creates two more products I can list to the accomplishments of the Vanishing Tower Press.

2 comments:

  1. Congratulations, the book is really nicely done and gives you plenty of information to adventure in the world of Long John Silver and company. It was cool to have the island and town options in one book. Will look out for the two adventures as it will be interesting seeing everything come together.

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    Replies
    1. I’m looking forward to clarifying whether or not the royalty deal applies as well to the adventures being released separately!

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