OSR Modules with the best layout & presentation

[guachi]

I6 Ravenloft is still in many ways the gold standard, a height of combining aesthetics and usability to which we have not regularly (or ever) achieved since. I have a few quibbles with the module, most notably that the recommended levels on the module are about 2 lower than they should be for the challenge, but in terms of presentation of encounter blocks and the maps and the overall layout of the module, nothing has ever done better.

My choice was I3 Pharaoh. I don't think it's a coincidence that both were written by Tracey and Laura Hickman.

As to boxed text mentioning monsters last - it was standard TSR procedure to do that in more or less every module they ever published.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Remember that in old school DnD, the environment was important. What the area looked like and what was in it often had an impact to how you survived the encounter. So many times beating an encounter was done through clever use of the terrain and objects. So by putting that info first, the players didn’t hear “vampire” first and miss all of the detail because they got hung up on the big baddie.

 

[Celebrim]

My choice was I3 Pharaoh. I don't think it's a coincidence that both were written by Tracey and Laura Hickman.

I3 is also really good, though I do think I6 is the more sophisticated of the two. I think the big problem with I3 is it's not intended as standalone and I4 and I5 while ambitious are very flawed.

As to boxed text mentioning monsters last - it was standard TSR procedure to do that in more or less every module they ever published.

If you mention monsters first, you're going to have people immediately declaring actions (on the theory that if they say it fast enough they win surprise or something) and all sorts of other chaos and you might as well stop talking and deal with the chaos, because no one is going to hear anything else you say. Room. Exits. Important Furnishings. Sounds and odors. Monsters. It's the opposite order that someone would probably see a room, but it's the correct order for explaining one.

 

[Black Dougal]

Did someone say lay out?

I'm also going to bring up Necrotic Gnome which many have mentioned.

 

[Sausages]

I think burying the lede is ok as long as the GM lets the players then act as if their character had absorbed the information in a logical order.

The real sin is box text telling players what the characters feel, or even worse, do.

 

[aco175]

Agreed. But it's also precisely how you describe a room that you try to present the most obvious features last. Why? First, because that's the part the players will remember the most. And secondly, if you describe the most important parts first, the players will be so distracted by that part they won't be listening when you tell them anything else, and then invariably you'll have to describe everything at least a second time.

What you are complaining about here is counter-intuitive I agree, but it is absolutely the right order to do the description.

I was thinking this when reading some of the other posts. I have players that are now focused on the monsters and not listening when I tell them about the high ceiling with the shadowy alcoves. Then when spiders jump down, they are all- what the heck, you never told us that.

 

[Celebrim]

The real sin is box text telling players what the characters feel, or even worse, do.

I really hate that. It appears often enough in published works I have to rewrite it.

And I will also say that boxed text is awesome when you can generally expect from what entrance players will enter a room, but becomes increasingly useless as the number of possible entrances increases and the dungeon linearity decreases. In the case of a room with four different entrances each equally likely, a bullet point presentation is probably better. However, I'm not a huge fan of bullet point in general.

In general, the hardest thing about any description is conveying space and direction. Often this forces you to break out a battle map in the case of rooms of realistically complex shape.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I think the DCC RPG module house format works really well for their shorter adventures. For the longer works, it breaks down somewhat in my opinion. If someone said I had to run a sight unseen module with only 10 minutes to read and prepare, I'd grab one of those.

I just ran this last year and I really disagree. Maybe great for that era, but just really not very usable by modern standards. If the players take a staircase you aren't expecting, you're paging through numbered entries to figure out which room they're in.

Good luck with the table-readiness of the trap at K31, which appears on 4 different floors of the castle which the players can access from K61, K31b, K47, K31a and K39, and actually (I think?) slams down on an unkeyed portion of Map 11.

K31a tells you that the stone compartment of this trap will raise through a trap door to K47. But there's no mention of a trap door in the entry for K47. There's no mention of WHAT SPRINGS THIS TRAP or which way it's intended to harm people who haven't moved into its shaft out of pure investigation.

Would co-sign. Those isometric maps were very difficult to parse and match up the floors. The Hickmans are on record as saying that the map of the castle is supposed to be disorienting. The problem is that the DM should not be disoriented when running the module.

 

[Celebrim]

Would co-sign. Those isometric maps were very difficult to parse and match up the floors. The Hickmans are on record as saying that the map of the castle is supposed to be disorienting. The problem is that the DM should not be disoriented when running the module.

I find them beautiful and elegant. I can't think of another map that better gives me the DM the shape of something, especially something as complex as the Ravenloft castle. It's a 3D map of a 3D structure and its disorientation comes not from the documentation of the map, but from the extreme non-linearity of the castle with its multiple connections between levels. The castle is a 3D maze, and the map deals with that complexity extremely well. If the map is hard to understand it's because the castle is hard to understand.

And for the most part, the map documents itself really well despite having multiple staircases on every level, it points out where you end up if you go up or down a spiral staircase with a landing on a particular floor and how far you have to go to get there, and if the landing on the other floor has a different numbered entry what that entry is. And if the staircase isn't numbered, you can generally work out exactly which one it is by pairing - "Up 40' to map 3" with "Down 40' to map 11".

I'm sorry. This is the best dungeon geography ever made, and the map documents it like the masterpiece that it is.

 

[zakael19]

I'm sorry. This is the best dungeon geography ever made, and the map documents it like the masterpiece that it is.

"I think this is teh best dungeon geography ever made" & etc.

Clearly many disagree. Their opinion is no less valid. I enjoyed the Iso maps in the 5e Curse of Strahd for trying to give an idea of the sweep and scale, but they were useless to run off of; the standard top down maps were more helpful there. The combination was superior than either alone (and honestly the whole thing is kinda just confusing and probably worked better in previous editions of D&D).