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Finding Adventures in the Dark

Schedule for Adventure Site Contest III

7/11/2025

8 Comments

 
Picture
  I've been getting questions about the next Adventure Site Contest, and let me assure you, I have zero intention of ever stopping this thing, I love seeing the creativity and craft in these things. You've got a long while though, this is a winter contest. Just so you keep it in mind, the essential stats:
  Submissions are open from November 1 through January 1, with judging to immediately follow. 
The Basics:
  Submitted adventure sites must be:
*Small enough to stumble on in a hexcrawl or in a city, call it 5-25 keyed locations, ideally a single session's content.
*The location nonetheless has a story to it, with potential hooks/rumors, and would make a satisfying night's D&D session.
*Page limit of 2 pages excluding map(s). Fonts limited to “normal” (eg, Times New Roman, Arial, CalibrI), no smaller than 10-point…basically, aim for easily readable. Please note this is a maximum, not a minimum...if your site is complete at 1 page, submit at 1.
*At least one map; if using someone else's, must be legal to use in a publication.
*Must be compatible with TSR-era D&D So B/X, OD&D, AD&D or a very close retroclone (ACKS is close enough, Shadowdark is not, if that helps).
  The focus is for something that is usable at the table. A harried dungeon master needs to plausibly be able to seize your site and reasonably present it to his table of 3-6 over-caffeinated (or slightly drunk) murderous vagrants for all of them to have a great time.
  This isn't a long site by any means, so I certainly wouldn't start writing now for an adventure five months from now, but the way to prep is PLAY MORE GAMES. Be playing, be thinking about adventures, write down notes. I'd be horrified to hear about someone editing and messing with an adventure site from now until submission time...but if you write NINE, and submit the one that played best? That's great.
  If you want to see what's won in the past, they're still there for free, here and here.

8 Comments
chainsaw
7/12/2025 12:30:48 pm

Can't wait to see what this round produces! Maybe I will try to contribute too.

Reply
Ethan
7/12/2025 05:59:32 pm

I missed contest 2, I will enter contest 3.

Reply
Commodore
7/21/2025 06:37:02 pm

Absolutely man, looking forward to it.

Reply
Gábner Alves link
7/15/2025 06:45:27 am

That's great! Waiting for more of these tasty adventures.

Reply
Brynjar Már Pálsson
7/25/2025 10:37:46 am

I'd love to submit something for it this time around, but I usually write for Shadowdark and other OSR systems. Can you tell me more about it being excluded? Should I just add more treasure and reference different monsters?
Thanks! :)

Reply
Commodore
8/3/2025 07:00:56 pm

Just multiply treasure by x10 and call out the OSE monsters and you should be fairly good, your Shadowdark isn't all that different from B/X at all. Looking forward to the submission. ;-)

Reply
Jon
8/21/2025 07:06:58 pm

Just to clarify, not including the map page, it is two pages and not three. I was looking over the previous couple years and it seemed like one year was two pages and one year was three couple years

Reply
Commodore
9/17/2025 09:09:45 am

Correct, we're back down to two excluding maps.

Reply



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