HI!

It’s been a crazy week. I wish I could talk all about it, but let’s face it: you’re not here to read about my adventures in machine learning, Linux infrastructure automation, and a little thing I call Project Eclipse (in which I blot out the Sun… servers in my datacenter). Instead, I have this sneaking suspicion that you want to hear some fresh-out-the-kitchen Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League news.

I mean, for real, my kitchen is *right there*, but I digress. ONWARDS TO GREATNESS!

Let’s take a few quick moments to talk about a couple things that are of great concern to pretty every one that has played an Adventurers League game: timeliness. By this I mean the following:

ensuring that adventures are turned in to the Content Managers on-time

ensuring that adventures have appropriate play test time

ensuring that adventures hit their “go-live” on dmsguild on time

and a couple other projects, but let’s tackle the above first!

Writing Adventures.

So yeah, adventure writing is something that many, many people aspire to do. It’s a pretty amazing opportunity, really, being able to share a story with hundreds of thousands of players… and yet some authors seem to spend more time considering the potentials and not a lot of time remembering that this is indeed a business as well. Deadlines need to be hit for SO MANY REASONS, and so let’s start here:

if you miss a deadline, there’s only a very small window of opportunity

to get your work to us and retain your role as an author for the D&D Adventurers League

Getting adventure content to us on-time ensures that we have enough time to appropriately review it, get it out for playtesting, get the playtesting feedback to the author for needed adjustments, and then to put our own final review on it before it “goes live” for the public. Honestly speaking, we’ve been really permissive about this in the past but… yeah, we’re just not going to do it any more. We want to put out awesome products, not just products that range from “what is this?” to “holy cow that was great!”

And you all deserve a higher-quality product. For real.

So what happens if someone misses a deadline? Well, we get it. We’re all human; we have families and jobs and friends and all the other stuff that a gamer’s life can include to various degrees. So, we’ll reach out to the author and check on their status. We want to be reasonable, but like I said: this is indeed a business and lateness will have repercussions as-noted in their contracts (yup, contracts; it’s all official and stuff). Extreme tardiness can result in additional repercussions up to and including replacing that author in the roster – and should this happen, the original author can still publish their work on dmsguild, but it won’t be Adventurers League-approved.

Playtesting Adventures.

We have a pretty robust playtest list that hits groups all around the world, but there are times when we review playtest performance. If we submit playtest copies to a group and find that the group never bothers to provide feedback or provides inappropriate feedback, those groups will be removed and replaced in time. We want to spend some time throughout season 8 reviewing our playtest group so that we know we have the right gamers (ie: active, professional, and responsible) empowered to provide playtest feedback as we march forward. This group largely falls under Travis and Claire, so if you get emails from them it would behoove you to open them; the goal is to work together to reach the destination, and again… we’re people, we get it; if you can’t respond to a playtest that’s fine but missing a bunch of them may be grounds to replace you in the list.

Other projects & timelines.

So, we have a couple REALLY cool things in the hopper. Lysa Chen and I will be doing a new show on the D&D Twitch channel called Adventurers Wanted. Spoiler, though: if you google for that name there’s a bunch of results that aren’t us. That’ll be coming. Like… next week. OH YEAH! We premiere on July 27th at 11am PST! Truth be told, this is Lysa’s brainchild (braaaaaaiiinnnss) and I’m just along for the ride. This is a monthly event that will be talking about the AL community and some other awesome things to boot!

But on Saturday, November 10th, I’m not just along for the ride – I’m the DM! If you’re going to be at Gamehole Con and want to participate in a really cool Extra Life event, come check us out. I’m going to be running one of the levels of Dungeon of the Mad Mage that I designed… and my players/victims/willing combatants are Lysa Chen, Travis Woodall, Bill Benham, Claire Hoffman, Greg Marks, and two as-yet-unannounced very special guests! I’ve got some really nifty plans for these yahoos, and yes, I’ll admit that I just said “nifty” with a totally straight face. We WILL be streaming this through the D&D Twitch channel because it’s an Extra Life thing, so be sure to stay tuned for the next couple months as more D&D Extra Life 2018 news trickles out!