Step back several months, to the lovely snow-filled month of April.  I was working for a client out in Montreal, and had been off/on living in a hotel for about 3 months at this point.  The client I was working for had gone so far as to supply me a desk at their office and I was starting to feel like one of the locals, despite not actually working for the company (God bless consulting).

The morning was going well enough, and during my lunch hour I decided to pop over to Paizo.com and see what was new in the lovely land of Pathfinder.  As always, I checked the blogs, lurked on the boards, and then noticed that my PFS module “Infernal Vault” had just received another good review. 

Hooray, life was grand!

Only a few hours later, an email popped up in my personal inbox after running some errands around the office.  The email read – “possible PFS assignment?”

Without going into maddening detail, the email was from Mark Moreland at Paizo, someone whom I had only briefly chatted with in the old Paizo chatroom, and saw posting on the boards.  It seems Mark wanted me to work on a new Society module, and he had a pretty sinister concept in mind.

I had just completed a draft of a new setting book for Interaction Point Games (hopefully that will be released soon), and only started to get involved with Zeitgeist, so I could not refuse Mark’s offer.  Within a few days I was already hard at work conceptualizing the module, and working from the excellent material that Mark had provided me.

Real development started when I got back home and could work with my local group.  Having completed much of the adventure during mad writing sessions, I knew that the module would need to undergo a good testing before I could release it into the wild.  My local players were great and had no qualms about picking up some slack and putting my work-in-progress module through the ringer.  Having a group of five players, everyone picked up one of the pre-gen characters and we proceeded to try out “Song of the Sea Witch” Version 1.00.

Things I learned from the playtest:

• Unholy Blight in a confined area is bad mmmmkay.
• The original adventure required a lot of linguistics to succeed (Aquan / Azlanti).
• Everyone recognizes the dreaded Water Temple (despite not having the necessary linguistics to overcome it).
• Most players understand that tentacles are bad mmmmkay.
• Any encounter that ends in diplomacy can easily be reversed.  “… but sadly we’re here on a mission of playtesting.  Fireball”

So that’s the quick 2 minute post on where Song of the Sea Witch came from.  I hope you all enjoyed this brief little blurb I wanted to post on my latest module, and the tentacle-filled origin story.

If you’re interested in actually reading the latest deformed tentacle filled monstrosity that came from my mind, go and buy it HERE.