The Last RPG Jam, 2020, Pre-Work Continued

Today I picked up a copy of Tyranny of Dragons for reference.  I'll begin reading for detail & taking notes tonight.  I did not get any practice in with CC3+ today -- hopefully I'll be able to make time for that tomorrow.

Continuing with team organization, I'm trying to keep rolling with writing the GDD.  The next decisions we need to make:

1.) Scale & Scope: Do we want to write an adventure for a party that failed ToD, levels 17~20+? Pro: easy set up, Con: I haven't done anything 5e at that level... might be harder to write. Or do we want to write a lower-level adventure (3~7ish?), hypothetically as part of a larger story?  Pro: easier to write, Cons: players "starting over" a campaign they've already played & it presumes that more would be developed beyond the one-month jam timeframe.

2.) Design Pillars: Three strong words or phrases that convey the feeling or emotion we want the player to experience. TTRPGs often use "the three pillars" of Explore, Socialize, Fight. I think we could keep versions of these, maybe transitioning across the adventure? Begin as Survive, Connect, Resist and move towards Rebel, Organize, Overthrow?

3.) Features: We have a unique setting for 5e -- Resistance & rebellion in a brutal world where evil dragons dominate all. I would like to work in several optional rules from the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG), Xanathar's Guide to Everything (XGtE), and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (TCoE).  I think versions of Reknown and Group Patrons would fit this adventure well. Any adventure worth it's salt should have original Magic Items and Monsters. If we go lower level, I'd like to emphasize Tool Proficiencies and Downtime but that might be a different conversation.

After that, we have Art Style, Music & Sound, and Development Roadmap left for the GDD.

For simplicities sake, I think the Art Style of the adventure will be whatever WotC or fan art we can grab that's legal to use. I can budget a bit if we find some low-cost assets that are really cool... but good art usually isn't inexpensive art.

Music & Sound for a TTRPG is generally limited to touchstones / influences / recommendations. I'm definitely not looking to have original music for this project but recommendations or a Spotify playlist might be cool if there's good stuff available and somebody want to put the list together.

Development Roadmap should be pretty simple this project: complete GDD, complete unique assets (appendices), complete adventure zones (chapters), polish, & publish/launch.

Finally for today, I'll touched on division of labor again. I started a rough Gantt chart (a project management chart for who is working on which project component on what timeframe.