Adventures in adventuring

I hit a dubious milestone during my time in Cape Cod. You may recall way back in January, when I submitted my first pitch to Paizo. A few weeks ago I finally heard back that it was rejected. I was confident enough in my vision for the adventure that I think it's the worse for them if they don't buy it, but I'm exercising my prerogative and they theirs in that. Rejection does mean that I have the rights to the pitch, which makes me wonder if I want to go into adventure publishing for myself.

I wanted to try my hand at a Pathfinder adventure but I didn't want to beat my head against that door; if they didn't like what I had, I would take my ideas elsewhere. I didn't want to go out of my way to have new ideas amenable to their pitch format, and I certainly didn't want to wait seven months to hear back from them if I could help it. So this probably would have been the last I thought of pitching anything to Paizo, except that I stumbled back to their submission blog in a clicktrance the other day and found this.

At the beginning of August, just before I got my rejection, they changed the submission process. (Note, I'm not saying they changed the process out from under me; this isn't health insurance.) In fact, they changed it to something that made a lot more sense. In Mike Moreland's own words:

We found that asking for a few hundred words of prose didn’t give us a good sense of how an author would actually perform when tasked with writing encounters, designing stat blocks, and mapping, all of which are vital skills any freelancer needs to possess...

Which is kind of what I was thinking as I wrote my pitch. So what they're looking for now is actual miniature adventures instead of prose summaries. I didn't think I would, but ideas came to me. I think I actually might.

My regular (or erstwhile) players would hate me if I sprung what I'm planning on them. Mostly because spiders. It's basically an exercise in seeing how many spiders I can fit in an encounter. My desire to experiment with spiders may be the result of reading It. Something about tapping into visceral horror. Maybe also something about living with a lot of people who can't stand spiders.

RPGs aren't just about inflicting pain on your friends/acquaintances. They're about facing terrible things and beating them. GMs and adventure writers should be purveyors of high-quality victory. That's what I'd like to do.