Design Diary - 1 month

Here was what I was thinking about a year ago ... I've got a private blog to journal my notes on the campaign.

So what has happened in a month?

• The Word doc is up to 140 pages of detail
• The map has been re-done to use the hex numbers. What a mistake that was. 8 hours re-do it, including re-doing the Word doc.
• Wandering monster tables by terrain. Then re-done wandering monster tables by specific terrain. So the Fey Wood is different from the forest in the Awin Rivery Valley.
• Lots of integration of Tome of Horrors monsters, animals and plants, especially those wandering monster tables.
• Increased addition of over-powered challenges, always with some built in advanced warning. 
• Character background sheets for the two people who submitted them. Lots of hooks and even additional content was created from those. Can't wait for the other two.
• Some skeletal creation of the competing folks "out there." Mostly competing goblin tribes, giants, the remnants of the cyclops civilization showing up, and the BBEG linked to these folks. I made a EL13 encounter, so I figured I've gone far enough in THAT direction. I now see how we could be playing at high levels. 
• Need to make regional map of the whole island now. I think I've gone roughly half way across it, so I need to know what it looks like.
• Discarded a lot of the advice from before: competing adventurers are mostly dead (or captured). Don't really need to advance the NPC story arcs. Not starting out with any sort of hook or adventure. The handouts have hooks. They just have to prioritize. 
• Starting to worry about the details: the look and feel, not forgetting to describe the weather and the sounds, and having the tactical stuff like battlemats and random encounters ready to go. It's probably about done then.
• Starting to worry about the older stuff I've written not being as good as the new, which shows how I've advanced in my sandbox thinking but also how I can lose interest in things.
• Worried that 1st level characters could get creamed. Thinking that having backup characters is not such a bad thing.