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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6738622" data-attributes="member: 29398">Almost without exception they are nothing more than bloody annoying, and largely a waste of time and space.  Pathfinder adventures are usually the worst for this, as not only do they insist on putting in lots of backstory for the actual adventure they also have to fit it in to the adventure path it's part of which means yet more bleepin' backstory.They help add work.  When I'm running a canned adventure it's (almost) always being slotted into my ongoing story in some way or other, meaning I have to strip off all the pre-written backstory and replace it with my own.  I'd far rather they just ignore the backstory entirely (or maybe throw in a half-pager for someone who might be running it as a one-off) and use that space to answer some of the more obvious "what-if" questions that playing through the adventure will raise.Hypothetical example: I don't care a whit about Gragi the Giant King's life history or how he came to be King (I can make that up on the fly if needed) but I do care how the Giants might react if the party goes in through the roof instead of walking into the module's set-piece battle behind the front door, because I can't always make that up on the fly without stopping to read a bunch of room descriptions; and I don't prep adventures to that level of detail beforehand.  I care what the Giants might do if they manage to take a PC prisoner.  I care how long the Giants might wait if a patrol goes missing, and how they'll then react.  And so on.Actual example: the final set-piece battle in Keep on the Shadowfell - the write-up horribly fails to answer the most obvious of what-ifs, including but not limited to - what if the party attack the thing coming through the gate; what is its AC, how much damage will it take to convince it to go away, etc. (one PC in my game put about a dozen arrows into it) - what if the party fail to prevent it coming through or just don't get there in time, what happens then - what if the party want to close the gate, is there a mechanism to do so and if so, what is it - what if the party want to finish opening the gate (and one unwise PC in my game actually tried this!)Which meant that when I ran it I had to make all this stuff up on the fly, and I don't need a module for that. (what I did was insert an opening/closing mechanism that Kalarel's ceremony had triggered but that he was only part-way through using; a race then developed between two PCs with one trying to close the gate and one finish opening it, and the closer won by one segment!  As for the creature-thing I just dreamed up a very large number of hit points and a very poor AC (it's stuck in a gate, for crying out loud!) and let the archer have at 'er.)Lan-"one of the reasons the early 1e adventure modules still hold up today is that they really can, for the most part, be easily dropped in almost anywhere in a campaign"-efan</blockquote>

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