The Songbird of Needle Mountain

Oops, I published a D&D adventure.

During the month of July 2022 I joined the Storytelling Collctive RPG Writer Course “Write Your First Adventure”.

Here’s the link to a bundle that contains other adventures from participants in the Workshop, please consider acquiring the bundle and supporting the work of all these folks! >> RPG Workshop Bundle

I’ve been playing D&D since 2016 and TTRPGs have slowly become my biggest interest outside my dayjob. When I started DMing in 2018 I didn’t really think that there’d be a moment where some of the stuff that I jot down as notes and ideas would be of use to anyone else but myself, but eventually I thought why not?.

So, after a month and a few days of biting more than I could chew, here it is…

This little adventure takes the characters (3 or 4 of about 2nd level) into a jungle to retrieve a treasure that’s not gold or magic items or anything like that, the treasure is a song.

The Storytelling Course was amazing and it was an incredible help in organizing the workload and structuring the process so that I could end up with a finished thing. I mean, there was calendars and schedules and to-do lists and everything.

I was of course way more comfortable thinking visually about a lot of the aspects of the adventure, like doing moodboards and concept sketches and stuff like that, so there was a lot of that going on besides the actual workshop content. Whenever I felt like I got stuck writing, which is definitely my weak point, I would just spend some time developing the visuals of the adventure instead.

It was refreshing to put so much work into something personal for a change, it’s definitely… been a while. Stuff like dusting off Sketchup to help me out in visualising the layout of a jungle chunk and then sketching over that, it’s like, completely unnecessary, but oh so much fun.

It’s also been ages since I touched anything in an ‘editorial-design’ kind of way, so this was HARD. Those were my two big challenges. The actual written content and the layout. Big shout out to Lloyd Harvey for helping me out with both of those by providing tons of feedback and proofreading. If the document makes any sense in the end it’s because of his help.

Anyways, you can find the current version of the adventure on the DM’s Guild following this link, and if you don’t want to pay for it the whole thing is up as a PDF preview for you to read and assess whether it’s something that’d be useful for you. Please let me know if you play it and I welcome all feedback about it! I would love to make more of this and knowing what I need to improve (other than just everything) would be great.

I can’t overstate the amazing experience that the Storytelling Collective Workshop was, and I’m definitely looking forward to participating in another one soon.

Also, I might make some more of this content, maybe a few monsters, some basic dungeons, some magic items, now that I made something that’s out there I’m kinda feeling a bit less nervous about sharing… At least now I know I can do it!

Watch this space for more of this content, maybe not regularly, but, yeah, now and then.

Thanks for reading!