Lost City: Learning to Pitch

Last night I got wonderful news. My first ever RPG project, Lost City, is finally finished and out the door. This means quite a few things. People other than patrons can finally view it, comment on it, and hopefully play it. I also feel better about writing about it because I know that what I write about will be what everyone else sees.

So what is Lost City? It's a 4e adventure sourcebook for levels 14-17 published by Open Design. A crack team of designers and patrons (ok, I might be biased) took on the challenge, led by Logan Bonner. It centers on Kadralhu, a once-great city lost beneath the shifting sands. One of my favorite things about it is it's a sandbox adventure. We provide some structure if you want to use it, but PCs have a lot of choice in what they do and how they do it. In addition to providing a city and some locations within it, we provide some new creatures, some interesting twists on old ones, encounters, skill challenges, magic items and more. If you want more info, check out the Kobold Quarterly blog post, the store pages for the product (pdf, print), or the previews (The Forbidden Archive, Trignotarbs, Oklu Roles and Themes, Malsalix)

My main contribution to the project is the waterworks. It might seem like a strange thing to focus on in for a city buried under tons of sand in the middle of a desert. But, when we wrote our initial round of pitches, we didn't have a clear idea of what the city looked like, either currently or in its glory. In part, the pitches were meant to decide what shape the city would take.

I tend to work better when I can take a small nugget of something tangible and build out from there. So I had to figure out something that was tangible to me, gave some flavor to the city we built, while still being flexible to work with whatever everyone else brought to the table. After some brainstorming, the idea for the waterworks was born. Most cities, even in fantasy settings need water. Whatever carried the water around the city, whether it's pipes, channels or portals, could help the PCs get around a city overrun with sand, providing a practical benefit.

Next came the fun part, populating it with creepy crawlies. I spent hours pouring through the monster manuals I owned trying to find creatures of the right level that made sense in the city. I didn't see a ton there that struck me as perfect for this project. The two that I most liked were the Shambling Mound (mainly for the opulent bathhouse scene) and the Chuul (because they are just awesome), so I added them into the pitch.

Finally, I wanted to make the waterworks more important to the city. Much of the history of the city was still a blank canvas. I remembered the stories I had heard as a kid about people trying to put LSD in the NYC reservoirs. Knowing that we had the Oklu, a race who acted as servants for the original inhabitants of the city, I wondered what would happen if a few of them had poisoned the water supply to gain the upper hand on their masters. What if the waterworks master was blamed for the downfall and thrown into the waterworks, never to be seen again?

I worked on refining and expanding these ideas for two weekends. I asked trusted friends to give me feedback on it and I worked and reworked the language. For a first real pitch, I'm still pretty proud of it. And yes, I think it's hilarious that I was pitching a dungeon of sorts at the same time I wrote posts against some types of them on my blog.

So what did all of this teach me about ptiching?

• Rarely does the idea come all at once. Heck, some of the best stuff from the section had seeds in the pitch but it wasn't until I spent more time playing with the ideas that they became awesome.
• Getting a group of friends to brainstorm with helps a ton. It's great if you can find people who don't have the same exact tastes as you do but who understand that some things are a difference of style rather than being inherently good or bad. Not everyone in your group has to like every idea, but if most of them don't like it, you might want to rethink your idea.
• The scariest part is often the fear of rejection. If you let that get to you, you've lost the game from the start.