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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 7513518" data-attributes="member: 20323">Uff, that's pretty egregious. I could see 2 pages for a 100+ page adventure perhaps (e.g. Tomb of Annihilation has about 1-and-1/2 pages backstory). But 4 pages is just too much.That style of long-form adventure writing has been around since Dungeon magazine and possibly some of the older modules. I recently re-read "Umbra" (Dungeon #55), one of Chris Perkins earlier adventures that I adore, and there's about 3 pages of backstory (which amounts to a planar custody battle between a warlord & succubus over their child of prophecy) compared to 25 pages of adventure. Much too long. And a lot of adventure writers were doing this.I think DMs read modules in a way that's similar to how players absorb lore during a game session. Players mostly are interested in (and remember) things that they ask the DM about – it's that in the moment, need to know, question & answer dynamic where players pay most attention IME. Similarly, DMs need a module to work like a well-indexed/tabbed/notated reference book... I skim read before the session, take my notes, but there's lots I won't remember until something comes up during play, then BAM!, I need that information quickly. It's kind of an argument for decentralizing backstory and sprinkling it throughout the adventure.The drawback of that is it's really easy to confound a DM when presenting a decentralized backstory. For example, you take off 2 weeks from the game, come back and you can't remember the page # for a specific bit of lore that's relevant for your upcoming session. And in print format you don't want to repeat yourself a lot because that cuts into your page count.So it's a balancing act.If there's one thing I wish more adventure modules did it would be include an index.</blockquote>

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