There's more to Oz than the Yellow Brick Road

 Unfortunately, the new work situation prevented me from attending the monthly meetup for the first time in forever.

I'm currently thinking about trying to drum a session in the next two weeks to make up for it.

Which brings up the eternal question: What do I run?

I could run one of the adventures that I could have run at the meetup, either D20 Modern or Ashes Without Number which I have already written adventures for. But I've already run them at previous events. So I might feel comfortable running them in a pick-up environment like another meetup, but I think asking people to make the effort to come and game with me outside that schedule calls for something new.

But adventure writing is a slow process for me, especially if I'm trying to write something that doesn't suck. So on top of the usual challenge of coming up with inspirations, I've got to make steps to bullet-proof the adventure. (I'm realizing that I should spend some time writing about what makes a good adventure for me, whether I'm reading them or writing them, but I don't think this is that post.)

I did talk about my basic procedure for prep a while back, so I don't think I need to go over the steps again. But I think it would be useful to figure out how to speed up that process.

A lighter system might help, but it's going to have different demands. All Outta Bubblegum is super light, but it still took a while to figure out how to write an adventure for it. Another thing that took a lot of time was figuring out the backstory sufficiently to make it work. How do you kidnap Santa Claus, especially as we've granted him an increasing number of magical powers,

So maybe I'm looking for a stronger setting or at least set of setting assumptions so I don't have to do that level of work for every scenario.

Another possibility is to dig out a system with a lot of published adventures and run one of those. The big one here is D&D in all of its flavors and variations. But not all of those adventures are particularly good.

 No conclusions here. Just a progress report that's keeping me away from making actual progress. Though stay tuned for my thoughts on what makes a good published adventure.