I am adding side quests also; one that's already in there is finding Elron Temper. I didn't do the whole dungeon to find him in the story, though -- it was just in, straight to where he was, grab the deck, slay the intervening monsters, and out. A lot of that quest involved dialogue. Also, the Arcomage deck is working a bit into my story. Mostly for the party to try to get their minds off of what's going on in the evenings.My stories tend to run long. Most of my fanfiction is about a guy who works as a board op at a radio station, so trying to keep ALL modern conveniences out of it has been a REAL challenge to me in itself. No radio, no TV; the only communication is either face to face, or by mail.
Also, upon entering dungeons, I do have one of the characters make their initial comments; "I have a bad feeling about this place!" when they entered the White Cliff Caves, or "Ewww. What's that smell?" upon entering Castle Harmondale, for instance. And, of course, I have them scream "CHARGE!" when they decided to explore the rest of Castle Harmondale, before all the monsters in there were slain. So, I am including some of the comments from the characters into my story. I only wish that I could figure out where the sound files are, so that I could hear ALL the comments...
I always got a chuckle out of the merchants' comments when the party leaves without buying or selling anything. I've found that that only triggers if the party has 10,000 gold or more on them. Anything less, and those comments don't trigger. My two favorite comments were both in Mount Nighon: "You can't take it with you, Tightwad!" from the armorsmith, and "WE DIDN'T NEED YOUR BUSINESS ANYWAY!" from the magic shop. I do plan to work those in, somehow, once they finally do get to Nighon.
Slowly but surely...
