Eamon Micro-Adventure Contest

The March 2013 Newsletter has been completed and will be posted soon. In the meantime, enjoy another preview of its contents: an Eamon micro-adventure writing contest!

If you've read through the old NEUC and EAG newsletters, you've undoubtedly run across one of the contests held years ago. (This is why there are about a billion Eamons mentioning a "Life Orb.") They tended to produce some pretty solid adventures. Of course, actually sitting down to write an Eamon is a pretty daunting task. While it's certainly a lot of fun, to write an entire adventure requires some investment of time. So here's the compromise:

Consider a large Eamon dungeon in the shape of a tower. The challenge is to write in approximately ten rooms a miniature dungeon making up one floor of the tower using either Apple II Eamon or Eamon Deluxe. You can add monsters, treasures, secret doors, and weapons... whatever your mind can generate, so be it. Frank and I will string them together into a (dis)continuous whole and judge on the basis of pure awesomeness.

The winner will receive a plaque on the glorious Wall of Fame (in Frank Black's Waiting Room micro-adventure) to be memorialized for all eternity. (We'll throw in a free subscription to the newsletter as well.)

You, reader, are afforded the opportunity to make your mark on the Wonderful World of Eamon without taking three months of spare time to do so. Grab a few beers and a pencil, fire up the Adventure Designer, and in an evening you too can be part of Eamon history.

Here are the rules:

1. The target is around ten rooms. If you want to dip your toes in, we'll accept fewer. If you're an old hat, we'll accept more.
2. Dungeons must include a staircase leading up and a staircase leading down at some point in the dungeon so that we can weave the entries together.
3. No special programming. Frank has equipped Eamon Deluxe with enough built-in functionality that you can produce a number of effects without hassle.
4. If you want to go all House of Ill Repute on us... well, please don't. A few salty allusions are one thing but bear in mind that there may be children writing entries. For some reason, I'd feel awkward leaving Sesame Street and climbing the stairs to Return to the Cat House. 
5. Submissions must be written in either Eamon 7.x or 8.x for the Apple II or Eamon Deluxe 5.0 for other platforms.
6. As a special feature, entering a value of 1 in the User #1 value of a monster will ensure both that the monster's friendliness doesn't change and that the monster is invincible.

And that's all. If you want to keep in a medieval motif, feel free. If you want to go all high-tech, feel free. If you want to recreate your local Starbucks Coffee, replete with that cute barista who hooks you up with free mochachinos, go ahead (just bear Rule 4 in mind).

If you would like to participate but want assistance, you can write me at tfeamon [at] gmail.com or Frank at eamondeluxe [at] gmail.com. We'll be glad to help.

Submissions may be sent as disk images (for Apple II entries) or compressed folders (for EDX entries) to the above addresses by June 1st, 2013 to be considered. While the competition has closed, we still welcome any additional contributions while the entries are combined.