Dear members of the Fraternity,
We are pleased to announce the launch of the third project of our serie of Gazetteer-like projects.
So after Souragne and the Zherisia cluster being formatted as we speak, we now embark for the Nocturnal Sea domains!
Those domains are listed below, with the FoS heading this domain:
Nocturnal Sea (incl Graben Island and Todstein) (darklord: Meredoth) (Rotipher)
Liffe (darklord: Baron Evensong) (David)
Vechor (darklord: Easan the Mad) (Dion)
L’île de la Tempête (darklord : Captain Monette) (Joël)
Isle of Ravens (darklord : the Lady of Raven) (Nathan)
The proposed layout of each domain should be close to the following:
Geographical survey Description of the land, its landmarks, with indigenous plants and animals. All the cities, including major landmarks, people worth noting for each place, and the like (incl. Sights and Sounds).
Sociological survey Who lives there, their lifestyles, etc. and a subsection on its known history and beliefs. Plus political and religion.
Religious survey, if a substantial population is found on the domain.
DM appendix darklord, and other DM info (monster, etc.)
Adv. Hook and dread possibilities are to be disseminated everywhere in the book.
Illustrators are of course more then welcome to submit drawings, either general atmospheric pictures, or on command for specific parts.
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How will it be written?
Each domain will be headed by a FOS, who will write most of it. This person is also responsible for editorial decisions about this domain.
However, as for previous Gaz, a large part is opened for fans. Fans willing to contribute can send us their ideas (whether it is an idea for a monster, a cool NPC, an adventure hook, or a detailed text on plant life or politics), we will try hard to include your ideas in the final document. In order to keep the quality at the highest possible level, we will have the final word on all submissions. In short, the Fraternity reserves itself the right to keep your text or not, or to edit it to blend it more smoothly with the rest of the netbook.
You have about 6 weeks to send us your ideas and / or texts. The deadline is December 17th. Please send your submissions at the FoS heading the domain, and for general Nocturnal Sea submissions or when in doubt, send it to joel@FraternityOfShadows.com
The details of each domains are still to be discussed, and we will threads where fans will write a few words about the idea they had, or the subject on which they are working, in order to avoid unnecessary duplications.
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Guidelines about copyrights.
We won’t accept anything plagiarizing any copyrighted material from 3e or 2e.
If you need to discuss something that is from 2e or 3e books, make a short summary in few words, and put the book as the reference to be consulted. For NPCs that were covered in length and fully “stated” in 3e, just put the book reference to it.
For the rest, we advise you to play with the same guidelines as any other fan article: if you get inspiration from any published text, expand it tenfold, or twist it and add your ideas, like many authors did for a BoS or QtR article.
For NPCs from 2nd edition, for the moment we can’t allow a full conversion of these NPC to 3e. However, you can convert him in short, i.e. just “stat” the basics: 2-3 lines, with basic class of this NPC, suggested hit points, AC and main abilities.
If you give this NPC a new ability never found before in the printed material, you can detail these abilities as these are your own ideas.
Other guidelines about writing
The how-to for submissions to the Fraternity’s various projects
1) Capitalization: Names are capitalized, races are not. Strahd is capitalized but vampire is not. Things like lycanthrope, doppelganger, marikith and caliban are similar to cat, dog and horse and do not need to be capitalized. Additionally, while phrases such as the Mists (when referring to the supernatural fog of the demiplane) and the Dark Powers are capitalized, darklords, demiplane and domain are not. Spells and similar abilities (fireball, sneak attack, favoured enemy) are also not capitalized (spells and ability names are in italic).
2) References: A good Gaz will reference past products, hint at what has come before. Familiar names and places will and should crop up. They do not need to have attention drawn to them, they do not need a large bracketed page reference and full description. Gazetteers should update when possible, revise when necessary allowing everything that is the domain to fit together, but their primary goal is to present new information not reprint the old.
3) Teasing: Dread Possibilities and Adventure Hooks are a MUST, but these are best used as teasing hints and mysteries. Whole plots should not be spelt out and there should be some wiggle room for DMs to customize these for their own campaign. A good dread possibility, adventure hook or even throw-away line is one that excites the imagination and starts the reader thinking.
4) Infanticide: When writing you must kill your babies (alternatively, darlings); inevitably there will be fun phrases, bits of trivia and lovely passages that simply slow down the reader and add nothing to the work. Sentences must be trimmed, paragraphs excised, and the work courageously concise and seamlessly svelte. While writing a net product with no page-limit and publisher screaming about size it is tempting to let the word count blossom, this must be avoided to prevent a bloated and unreadable mass of a netbook. (Hint: if this were a real netbook we'd probably cut the line "...and the work courageously concise and seamlessly svelte" in favour of "...and the work conservative" or "...and the work concise.")
5) Focus: Attention should be paid to the ordinary and mundane: the average person, the regular people, the general populace. This should be the focus of the Gaz and more paragraphs should not be devoted to the exceptions and minority than to the overall people. While vampires are an interesting and vital part of Barovia, there should be more on the Barovians than their predators. Of course, the reverse is also true. One should not completely ignore the vampires; we should still learn their social organization with a brief note on their mindset and politics.
6) Plausible Deniability: As most book are being written in the first-person be careful of using game-terms such as: class, level, ___-check, demiplane, Grand Conjunction, domain, darklord, etc. Find substitutes such as land for domain, world or Land of the Mists in place of Ravenloft or Land of Dread (to the inhabitants, is it really dreadful?).
7) Personality: Similar to the above, the Gaz should capture the feeling of character. The narrator should occasionally break from description for occasional anecdotes or explanations of how information was discovered. This should be done in moderation though (keep in mind 4), as too much is a needless distraction. Done properly this can establish the mood of the land and make the Gaz a fun read.
8 ) Formatting: Please keep formatting as simple as possible: try to only use bold and italic. If you feel there might be some confusion (due to a number of separate sub and sub-sub-headings or for a complicated table) feel free to add an eye-catching, erasable note (highlighter or different coloured font works good for this) offering explanation. This applies to font, colour, borders, spacing, bullets, boxed text, indents margins and the like. Submissions should look like they were sent from WordPad.
9) Rules: Know them! Read the PHB, DMG and MM or flip through the SRD. Base your style (formatting, arrangement) on the Fraternity's netbooks and the various 3.5 Ravenloft and D&D products. While the Fraternity accepts all editions for QtR articles we are attempting to only use 3.5 for our Reports for a cohesive feel. It looks sloppy and amateurish to alternate between wilderness lore and survival or pick pockets and sleight of hand. If you do not feel you know the rules well enough then ask for help (the Fraternity is more than willing to make good ideas work) or stick to fluff.
10) The Reason: The Fraternity is not sending out its brothers in a motiveless search. The Reports exist in-game for a twofold purpose. Firstly, the Fraternity is hunting down its rogue brother, Erik van Rijn. They are seeking the motive for his recent actions and hints at his future plans. Most writers will not need to concern themselves much with this, but the occasional reference to van Rijn is a nice reminder. Secondly, the Reports feed information on the land for the Fraternity; they know what resources nations have and what is exploitable. When you feel a person, place or group would be of interest to an evil organization of scholars you should say so. Have the speaker recommend in-character how the resource should be exploited or what sounds promising.
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Please react to this news and post your questions here in this thread!
Sincerely,
The Fraternity of Shadows,
Souragne
I don't anticipate major changes in the Lady of Ravens' history and curse, but I intend to be pretty flexible about everything else. (There's a 3.5 update of the BoS article in Quoth the Raven 13, if you're interested.)
) Plus, at least one of those links wasn't part of a netbook, web-published for everyone to use as they see fit: it's from a mailing-list discussion that wasn't necessarily meant for public consumption, other than the list-members in question. The material from the Vaults of Pandius is almost certainly okay, but mailing-lists tend to be a bit more "possessive" than open-access archives like the Vaults, IME.