Note: This article was originally posted on the Lyceum boards around April 2005.
I know what you're thinking: the scenario already comes with a large Intent.txt that talks at great length about the process, so why make a topic?
Well, the Statement of Intent is mostly to help explain how to understand LP. Here, I'll explain some of the things that I learned from the process.
PROCESS
The initial inspiration came from a bunch of thinking I did about stuff in my classes, mainly one about Roman civilization and one about the second half of Shakespeare's career. I explain a bit more about this in the Statement of Intent.
Unlike Bahs, which I designed chronologically, I outlined LP most of the way through before touching the editor. This was easy because I was working from source material. When I hit a place in which I wasn't sure how the details would work out, I summarized it for myself and skipped it, to come back later. The last part of the scenario that I made was the northeast corner of Under Putideum, where the ghost combats are.
This seemed to work much better than how I designed Bahs, as evidenced by the fact that it took me a few weeks to make LP, but almost a year to make Bahs. The skipping-and-coming-back part in particular worked quite well, and I'll continue to do this for future scenarios.
SOURCES
LP was my first experience working from source material, and I loved it. This is something that I will definitely do again. I know that Blades has had mixed experiences with scenarios based on stories in other media, but this worked for me.
But how, and why? I think the most important part of developing from source material for me was adaption. My story of Lucretia is quite different from Livy's, and it doesn't much resemble Shakespeare's, either. Yes, she's still married to Collatinus and still more or less raped (maybe), but lots of other things are different. I wasn't simply re-telling; I was changing, modifying, adapting.
It also helped, I think, that I was working from a sizable number of sources. If Putidus had just been Tarquin, I don't think this scenario would have worked. He has to be a vampire to seduce her out of her environment. So I was not just changing, but also combining.
One thing I'd like to do is work with a more extended study of sources; I only managed to throw in one paragraph of language borrowed out of I, Strahd, for instance, and only at a few moments was able to take language from epic poetry. I think that the next logical step is a longer scenario built like this.
PHILOSOPHY
I wanted to get at an issue here: the place of heroism in real life. What do you do in a situation where there is, as the god (who I think of as Jupiter) says, "no honor to be gained"?
One of the things that I think worked here is that I was dealing with issues that people might really talk about. I mean, my characters were Roman soldiers; it's not much of a stretch to say that they'd talk about the Roman ideas of honor, courage, and loyalty, things like fides and virtus. It's a lot harder when you're trying to explore the relationship between signifier and signified or something as specialized as that. I can't think of too many people who would really talk about that sort of thing casually.
I tried to give the party a genuine choice: you can lie to Faustulus and the guards, getting him killed and being responsible for the deaths of the guards' families (probably), or you can simply walk away. You have to feel a bit unresolved if you don't do it, but you can't feel entirely pleased if you do it, either. I'm not sure that this worked as well as I would've liked, but I don't think it was a total failure. In the future, I'd like to make the decision more central and more, well, effective.
GAMEPLAY
I think I took a step up here from Bahssikava. I worked pretty hard with the first few outdoor fights to try to get the balance right. (Originally the worgs were much harder, but I decided that they were killing on the first turn a bit too often.) What I think worked here is that I made javelins and first aid kits that were actually useful. I had completely scrap the built-in First Aid in order to do that, but still.
I was a bit anxious when I first chose to make it no-PC-magic. It seemed like I'd have to turn it into something like Areni, making potions central. One of the things that made me incapable of handling Areni was that the potions were limited, non-renewable, which is totally contrary to most game mechanics -- you go outside and heal and recharge. That was the inspiration for the gathering-potions skill.
I did nothing with custom creature scripts in this scenario, and I think they weren't particularly needed. In the future, I'd like to try a longer, more extended run at making combat interesting via creature scripts, though.
One thing I tried to do (as opposed to Bahs) was make everything small and interactive. Bahs consisted mostly of large towns with a few medium ones; LP has small towns with a couple medium ones. Bahs has gigantic, five-minute or seven-minute cut scenes with virtually no interaction; LP goes no more than thirty seconds without asking the player for a response. Bahs has huge areas with nothing but fighting, or huge areas with nothing but puzzles, or huge areas with nothing but dialogue; LP mixes them together a lot more.
The end result, I think, is that LP plays more smoothly and keeps the player's interest better.
WRITING
Because this scenario was so short and so minimal, I wanted to focus mostly on the writing. I got a lot of help from the source material: when I needed to describe a demon, I went straight to the first two books of Paradise Lost. When I needed to describe the journey to the underworld (i.e., Putidus's basement), I went to Paradise Lost and to Book 6 of the Aeneid. This worked because I rephrased and collected images from these places as well as imitating the style and manner with different ideas. (Incidentally, the idea to have Under Putideum be dark came directly out of a line in Paradise Lost, which I quoted almost verbatim.)
However, I felt that the writing was inconsistent. The style fluctuated from high (Lucretia's death scene) to common (the outdoor monster encounters). In the future, I want to try to pull off an entire scenario with "no middle flight," as Milton described it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This scenario seemed to go pretty well. People seem to like it, more or less. (Well, at least the people that I expected to like it do like it; the ones that I expected to hate it do in fact hate it.) It went quite quickly, which was nice after dragging out Bahs utterly to death.
Where do I go from here? Well, there's always the sequel to Bahs. That will be rather large. I may make another short scenario or two before I make that one. For the time being, I'm going to take a short break from designing, and maybe I'll finally get around to playing some of these other scenarios that have come out. I might even devote some time to, you know, homework or something.
Thank you to everyone who helped me with this scenario, including all the players who played Bahssikava and commented on it or played LP and commented on it. I make these scenarios so that people will play them, and just knowing that people enjoyed these scenarios is fun for me.
--Kel