Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bill Zebub" data-source="post: 9805580" data-attributes="member: 7031982">I just pre-ordered "Hands of the White Wizard," the latest TOR supplement from Free League.  I don't actually play TOR anymore, so I guess it's the exception to my "I don't buy RPG supplements just to enjoy long-form prose" rule.But I still read it as if I were going to GM it, so it has me thinking about how I would like it presented differently.  I have two observations/suggestions:A brief summary is presented at the beginning of each of the six adventures in the book.  However, even though this is a book for GMs (LMs, or Loremasters, in TOR parlance), these summaries are written as if they teasers on the back of a book jacket.  Here's the teaser from the 5th adventure: [SPOILER="The Quest of Rhymes with Gloria"]In this adventure, the Player-heroes are sent in search of strange tidings out of Fangorn Forest. They discover some desperate, starving Dwarves, the survivors of Balin’s Expedition. Saruman sends the Player-heroes north to Moria, to learn what can be known about the remaining Dwarves and the lost Ring-lore of the city…[/SPOILER]That's cute and all, but is barely of any use.  So my first suggestion would have been to summarize more explicitly, including the major conflicts that are going to be resolved, so that I have a more clear context while reading the next 18 pages of text.Secondly, a big theme in TOR (and in Middle Earth) is how the the Shadow corrupts, and so adventures are designed with lots of morally complex decision points.  Which means there's a lot of text along the lines of "...if the PCs previously chose option A, then the NPC will do X, but if they chose option B, then the NPC will do either Y or Z, depending on..."  So what I would have loved is some kind of flow-chart/diagram that mapped all this out.  That flowchart could be overlaid on horizontal bands representing the six sub-divisions of the adventure, so I could see, "Oh, they will have to make this decision in Part I, and that affects these choices in Part III." I want this less because it would help me make decisions while running the adventure, and more because studying it at the beginning would (again) give me a better framework for understanding everything I was about to read.  Kind of like how in some academic books the introduction lays out the structure of the arguments in the following chapters.</blockquote>

Verification