Natural 7

Designing Tongues of Verdant Fire

In July I published my submission to the Appendix N Jam 2026, titled Tongues of Verdant Fire. In this post we'll look at what inspired me, how my design process worked for the adventure, and what went into the final product.

Preliminary Inspiration

The Appendix N Jam is awesome. I highly recommend you check it out and submit your own entries every summer. I had the most fun with this submission than any other game jam I've participated in so far (granted, my experience is still minimal).

At the start of the jam you receive a unique science-fantasy title of a book which doesn't exist. Using this title, you are intended to design something which, if it was an actual book way-back-when, could have inspired the creation of treasure-grabbing, monster-punching games like Dungeons and Dragons. Hence the name Appendix N, which is the Appendix of inspirational content for such games.

Okay, so we want to write an adventure or supplement that inspires treasure-grabbing, monster-punching, fantasy things, and weird science-magic - but what the heck do I do with my title?

My title was, quite graciously, very useful and cool! Tongues of Verdant Fire instantly got me inspired to create something with A) weird tongue references, B) something with lots of overgrowth, and C) something with a cool fire. Inevitably this translated to snake/dragon cultists and a spore-breathing dragon. It couldn't be helped.

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"dragon" probably should be bolded in the room description. Oops.

The Cover

Most of the jam entries try to emulate old book covers in their design. We want this to feel like something from way-back-when, so this makes sense. As someone who did not exist way-back-when, I mostly just copied the themes from other people's work.

I was really inspired by the cover of Dancing with Danger by Ibir Publishing to include some green fire on my own cover, and then I followed Chaoclypse's photobashing tutorials on YouTube to learn about different filters I could apply to my images in Affinity.

Because I knew right away that I was going to use snake cultists and a dragon, I decided that a snake breathing fire in front of a statue of medusa would be my cover. I think the resulting design is both awful and wonderful, and was an enormous amount of fun.

Cover

It's glorious, is it not?

Adventure Design

After I made the cover it was time I actually got working on the adventure itself. Originally, I had planned to write a D&D module similar to my previous adventures Quest for the Vorpal Sword and Escape from the Shadow Realm, but something about those formats nags at me, and it's probably the colossal amount of words I use in all my descriptions.

Spacing Issues

When I write stuff for D&D, I find it really challenging to cut down on words. I also really wanted to include an interesting combat encounter, since so much of D&D's rules are oriented towards fighting monsters. When I looked at the space on my page and tried matching draft to layout, things just weren't working out.

Note: The jam allows up to four A5 pages of space for your submission. For me, this meant I used two A4 pages of space, which is a little bit less than I'm used to (US Letter is my standard page size).

So... if I couldn't cut down the space to fit an interesting combat encounter (with Cicerine the Forked Tongue), I would either need to make the adventure really interesting for D&D characters (more skills checks, maybe?) or change my choice of system to something where combat being interesting is less important. This is where DURF comes in.

The DURF Solution

The first roleplaying game I ever learned how to play was D&D 2014. The second was FIST (I mention this game so much, I hope you do take the time to check it out), and the third was DURF (yes, it's getting an expanded edition). DURF is a game about brave adventurers going into dungeons and yadda yadda. It's an old school style game so your characters are motivated by treasure and solve problems with equipment (and spells) rather than explicit character abilities. Because DURF was the first old school game I played, using it feels like an homage to my own Appendix N of inspirations.

With a simpler system, I felt better about shrinking the showpiece encounter to something that still felt thematically appropriate while not occupying so much space. As you can see in the final PDF, Cicerine's entry takes only 8 lines to generate a moderately interesting medusa-legionnaire cult leader.

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Hmm, where are her medusa powers? Good question (I forgot to add any!)

Changing Formats

Regardless, now that I had space I started taking my draft rooms and putting them in layout. My old format of room description and bullet points felt weird for the adventure, so I tried just using formatted paragraphs. Italics for stuff that could be read aloud, bold for monsters and names. I think this worked out pretty well, since the room descriptions are compact but detailed enough to give players something to interact with and do everywhere.

Something I'll note about the lack of detail for some things is this: when I, as a GM, run a published adventure and I come across a blank space in the writing, it gives me permission to put my own personal spin on the adventure. I like this in play, though I admit it can be frightening to know you may have to improvise it during the session.

The Introduction

The first page went through the most revisions of the whole adventure. It took a while for the Summary paragraph to feel genuine and connected (and for it to take up the appropriate amount of space), but eventually I got it where it is now. The final lines: "[They] believe the flame is a symbol of their [goddess'] pride. They are wrong. It is a dragon," are definitely my favorite in the whole adventure.

The Hook section utilizes the advice from one of Sly Flourish's articles on player motivation: Greed, Heroism, and Wonder. Some players want treasure, others want to save the day, and others still are just curious about seeing cool new things.

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I really needed a spot to say the module was for DURF.

Having a paragraph on Conclusions for the adventure felt important. The adventure itself has a reasonably solid ending with the players potentially freeing prisoners, fighting Cicerine, meeting a dragon, etc. but I wanted something concrete that could be described in a vignette at the end of the game night (or in future sessions if this is run as part of a campaign).

What does Cicerine do if you mess with her temple but don't kill her? She follows you! Maybe you allied with her and she wants to give you a quest? Maybe you killed her cultists/imps and she wants to sacrifice you for vengeance?

What does the dragon do if it's still hungry? It goes to get some food! What if the PCs get all the cultists to jump into the Verdant Fire to feed the dragon? Then the dragon is happy! For a little while, at least...

What reward do the players get for being heroes and saving the prisoners? They get to go meet the lord or lady of a nearby keep and receive shelter (a valuable resource in old school games)! Not that they should need a reward for doing the right thing...

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Dyson Logos had the perfect map for a temple of snake cultists.

Final Thoughts

I'm really happy with how this adventure came out. It's not perfect and that's OK. I wanted to write something about cultists and a dragon (perhaps, a DUNGEON and a DRAGON?!) and I firmly believe that I succeeded. I had an absolute blast figuring out how to change my formatting and layout and writing style to get all the bits fit in place.

I would really appreciate it if you head to the Appendix N Jam page and rate my adventure (voting is active throughout August and September). If you do, it would be even awesomer if you rated one or two other folks' submissions. They are all really cool and talented writers, artists, and designers.

Thank you so much for reading! See you next week!

Things on my radar: