Out of Luck is now LIVE on DMsGuild (Behind the Scenes and Caper Playlist)

Out of Luck is a 5e D&D caper, set in Umizu, for four 6th-level characters

Feb 16, 2023

I’ll be back to my Project Managing for TTRPGs series soon, but today, as hinted at a few weeks ago with my call for playtesters, I’ve published Out of Luck, a Radiant Citadel heist with hijinks and heart for four 6th-level characters:

Out of Luck on DMsGuild

Out of the fifteen civilizations presented in Journeys through the Radiant Citadel, two didn’t get adventures. This includes Umizu, a seedy coastal Japan-inspired steampunk city-state that features underwater fighting rings, gendered perfumes, and seasonal misfortune.

Out of Luck is my take on an Umizu one-shot that is compatible with the original thirteen Radiant Citadel adventures. What started as a portfolio project has turned into a labor of love. The plot is a twist on the classic heist - you play a group of skilled operatives covertly delivering an item to a crime boss’s stronghold. But there are two catches: first, the item is extremely cursed and causes the bearer bad luck. Second, the event you are infiltrating is a child’s birthday party – the guests of which are some of the most dangerous individuals in Umizu…and their families.

Behind the Scenes

Below are the reasons I’m excited to share what I’ve been working on. I’ve included a few sneak peek pictures and some behind-the-scenes information about my process, all presented in my favorite format, a bolded list:

A story with hijinx and heart: The story centers around helping local merchants dethrone a brutal crime boss. It touches on themes of familial loyalty, power dynamics, and the fickleness of luck. There’s action (fireworks steamboat battle!), intrigue (tricking a crime boss into revealing her favorite song), but also an emotional core (read to find out 😛).

Kiyoko posing for her birthday portrait.

Push your luck: My original concept (and one of the reasons this was so fun to write) centered around the Idol of Misfortune and its luck mechanics. While you’re trying to infiltrate a child’s birthday party filled with extremely dangerous individuals, you also have this ticking time bomb of a magic item that causes bad luck. The Idol is like an accursed hot potato that the characters must pass around. The bad luck it emanates is influenced by wild magic surges and runs from comical to deadly. This went through a few rounds of playtesting to get the mechanic right!

Playtested and reviewed: Speaking of playtesting, Out of Luck has been playtested and reviewed by over 30 players and DMs (including some of you who are probably reading this now 💖). I’ve run a bunch of homebrew games, and you don’t really get to “test” your material before it goes “live”. As someone who is now writing adventure content, one of the things I can do is run multiple playtests. So the game has been stress tested and went through two rounds of mechanics and narrative revisions.

Runs out of the box: I did as much as I could to minimize DM prep - this includes custom character and monster art, a four-story, full-color VTT-compatible map of a steamboat bathhouse, player intel handouts, a suspicion tracker, three new stat blocks and full-color tokens. All of the playtesting feedback went into making the pdf and resources as useful as possible to DMs. I worked hard to be concise and write something that runs within a 4-hour time limit.

Art: Art feels like the bane of low-budget D&D game design. I truly lucked out that my friend, the amazing Mehitabel Glenhaber, agreed to do a royalty split for the cover (I’ll talk about organizing this in the continuation of the TTRPG collaboration series). You can check out more of their work here: https://www.mehitabelglenhaberart.com/

I then summoned all of my former-highschool-anime-club-and-lit-mag-layout-editor-skills to draw eight custom pieces, presented throughout the adventure:

Mehitabel’s cover set the graphical tone of the adventure. The base is Nathaniel Roux’s awesome Affinity Publisher template, which I modified to have a “water-color”, nautical vibe, down to the page numbers and table coloring:

I took advantage of the fact Umizu is Japan-inspired to pull from public domain art, such as this tengu mask that I used as the basis for the magical mask of disguise in the adventure:

Explore Umizu: If you’re like me and running a Radiant Citadel campaign, Umizu was the fascinating steampunk city-state that never got an adventure - now it has one! I hope I’ve done the original content, written by Jane Miyuki Pinckard, proud. Now Honda (one of my player’s characters) can go to their hometown!

One-shot or Campaign: This adventure is inherently about the Radiant Citadel, thus I knew I’d be publishing on the DMsGuild. I leaned into the compatibility with WoTC products. What this means is that Out of Luck has hooks for running as:

A stand-alone 4-6 hour one-shot
An adventure as part of a Radiant Citadel campaign
Or an awesome Golden Vault-Radiant Citadel cross-over heist (all the WoTC IP!)

Playlist: Already jazzed about the adventure? As a “sonic mood board” I created a playlist to convey the vibe of Out of Luck. Mehitabel and I listened to this while working on the writing and art:

Support our work!

I truly hope you’ll pick up a copy. The irony of selling on DMsGuild is that it is almost entirely a 🐔 and 🥚 situation: you get more sales if you’re on the front page, and you’re on the front page if you get more sales.

If you’re excited or curious about my work, below is a 50% off coupon for newsletter readers, meaning you can pick the adventure up for a little under $2.50 if you buy it the first week it’s out:

Buy Out of Luck (Subscriber Discount)

Beyond that, any likes and retweets help spread the word; here’s the analogous Twitter post and you’d make my day if you retweeted it: