Rifts / NanoWriMo

NanoWriMo is almost here. In case you don’t know:

NaNoWriMo is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that believes in the transformational power of creativity. We provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.

November is National Novel Writing Month. The idea behind NanoWriMo is that you write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. I have a couple of very good friends wh participate in this every year. There’s no prize, just a sense of accomplishment and perhaps some bragging rights.

I am not a writer. I’ve been writing adventure modules and uploading them to my site here. But these are modules, not novels. I’m taking adventures that I’ve run and put it down in writing in an organized manner. Don’t get me wrong - I’m adding a lot of material beyond its original vision. More exposition, better-defined NPCs, etc… It’s work, but it’s not “I’m writing a novel” kind of work.

That said, I’m sorta participating in NanoWriMo this year, but with a module. Instead, I will write my next module. Which module should I write? I have a campaign idea in mind and even put a good amount of work into it already. It’s called “The Trade Route” and makes heavy use of the Titan Robotics sourcebook. Unfortunately, that book has not been published yet; I’ve been relying on the Raw Preview Edition. (I can’t wait for this book, btw.) Until Titan Robotics is released, I’ve put that campaign idea on the shelf.

Instead, I’m going to write “The Vampires,” based on my “Vampires ’R Us” Rifts one-shot I ran at GenCon in 2019. The premise is that a small town in Mexico has been overrun by vampires. Most of the humans in the town are merely cattle to supply the vampires with blood. Things are going great for the vampires until a group of powerful vampire hunters shows up to liberate the town. Sounds like a simple plot, but there’s a twist: the players are the vampires. The vampire hunters are NPCs.

The players seemed to have a blast playing this. They got into their vampire characters and did a great job playing them, with a lot of laughs along the way. The adventure isn’t meant to be a comedy, but it’s hard to avoid when you’re playing a group of vampires.

So I’m going to write that up but expand on it significantly. I want to flesh out the town a lot more, have a good map, and redo the encounters. For some reason, I get the urge to define the town like Hommlet, but that seems like a waste for a one-shot. Maybe I’ll do “Hommlet-light.” If you don’t know what Hommlet is, it’s a village from the classic D&D module “The Temple of Elemental Evil” campaign.

We’ll see. My Madhaven module “The Charging Bull” (see Downloads & Resources) was supposed to be short and ended up over 30 pages in length.

“The Vampires” will be available for download once it’s finished - hopefully by the end of NanoWriMo!