Scene it!

Late blog post, I know. I'd bore you with the reasons, but let's get on to the good stuff.

Now that we've done our brainstorming, it's time to put things together. I'm going to do that by assembling the story into scenes.

Those in the gaming world might claim that in only preparing one path for the players to follow that I'm "railroading". I would argue with that by saying 1) as an experienced Game Master, I expect to be able to improvise should the players come up with any surprises and 2) a convention adventure needs to be focused and, yes, a little bit railroad-y. As I said in a previous post, you only get one chance to game with a convention group so you have to make it count.

Scene 1
The party

I'm going to retain the introductory scene from the original "Magic Belt" adventure. It's one of the few things I liked about that adventure and I think the most "Ozzy" bit.

Scene 2
Investigations

There will still be a scene with the Magic Picture, just because of it's obvious use as a detective tool. What they will see in the Magic Picture will be a Green Monkey running through town as the people literally go to pieces. Everyone may make Brains rolls to figure out what's going on. Tin Woodman and Scarecrow are more likely to recognize the final fate of Mrs. Yoop, while Dorothy is more likely to recognize Fuddlecumjig. If the players don't make their rolls, the Wizard will probably be the one to mention the Fuddles. This is the necessary piece of information. The bit about Mrs. Yoop will only become important later.

Scene 3
The Fuddles

For those who haven't read "The Emerald City of Oz", the Fuddles have a tendency to go to pieces at the slightest provocation. Puzzle pieces, specifically. So when the characters arrive there, they will find all of the citizens as piles of wooden jigsaw puzzle pieces. In order to find out where the Green Monkey went next, they will have to assemble the Fuddles. If I have the opportunity and the resources, I might just make some kind of puzzles for the players to assemble rather than just rolling dice on this one. Thank you, Escapist, for that one.

The Fuddles may not know her grand plan, but they do know that she was heading west, towards the Winkie Country.

Scene 4
The Dark Forest

When the characters arrive at the Dark Forest (right next to the China Country if you're looking on a map), they are stopped by a pack of animals just within the forest. Apparently, some Green Monkey just ran by screaming that Ozma was coming to enslave them or something. It will take some smart talking to get out of this one.

Scene 5
Yoops' Cave

The primary element of this scene is the realization that Mr. Yoop is missing. It also leads to a trail of destruction which brings the party to Mr. Yoop's current location.

Scene 6
Mr. Yoop

Defeating or placating Mr. Yoop is the focus here. As long as they succeed in one of those, he'll tell them about the Green Monkey claiming to be his wife and how she used a magical belt to make the bars of his cage disappear. He begged her to take him with her, but she refused. I may play this up for comedy with a sobbing giant and his marital problems, but we'll see.

Scene 7
Yoop Castle

Now for the big showdown. The main trick is to get the Belt off of Mrs. Yoop. Extra challenge being that she's now giant-sized again. She might even give the Belt up if properly persuaded; She does have her original shape and powers back, anyway. However, Ozma's pronouncement that there would always be a Green Monkey in Oz is quite correct. The Belt couldn't undo the transformation, merely suppress it. Once she loses the Belt, she reverts back to Green Monkey.

All in all, not a bad adventure. I've probably designed better, but I know I've designed worse. The bit about needing the Belt to maintain her shape was inserted mostly to give the adventure a "neat" ending, and it still needs to be neater. One thing that the original adventure had that I can't really come up with right off for this one is Friends List interactions. Nearly every scene had some method of calling on friends to help resolve the situation.

If all goes well, and I have time, I might just polish it up and put it on the site in the place of the old adventure.