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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5443050" data-attributes="member: 42582">I posted a couple of weeks ago about running <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/299440-exploration-scenarios-my-experiment-last-sunday.html" target="_blank">an exploratory scenario in 4e</a>.What I want from a site-based module is a good map, and some evocative ideas for what's in the rooms - either stuff that I can easily tie into the ongoing thematic elements of my campaign, or some backstory that is relevant to the play of the module itself, and hence is likely to come out in the course of play.I don't particular care whether or not it is combat heavy, provided it fits the desiderata above. And I don't particularly care about details - if there aren't many details (eg how high is the cieling? what picture is on the tapestry?), I can work them out on the fly; if there are details, I can "translate" from the module writer's ideas to my own campaign on the fly.I would also prefer one or two compelling ideas than a whole lot of non-compelling detail. In the scenario I discussed in the above-referenced thread, the site in question is a manor house, and the most important thing about it is that it belonged to a powerful wizard who went mad and killed his apprentices. The stuff that made the module useful for me, in addition to this initial idea, was that (i) it talked about the culture/religion of these people, (ii) it had a map of the manor, (iii) it located some culturally/religiously relevant items on that map, (iv) it described where the bodies of the apprentices were to be found and what sort of condition they were in, and (v) it had a cool encounter with some spiders trapped inside a skull by gems. It also had other stuff - like personal effects on the bodies, additional contents of a laboratory besides the skull, etc - but this other stuff was much less important, and in play a lot of it ended up being glossed over. It also had a couple of monsters in addition to the spiders in the skull, which I used, but could easily have ad libbed if they weren't there and I wanted them.And even with the spiders, that what was more important than the why - I can't remember if the module gives a reason why their are spiders in the skull, but I was able to work out one on the fly that fit with my campaign, and my tweaking of the culural/religious stuff to fit my campaign.It's those things I can't easily work out on the fly - clever situations, clever tricks like spiders in skulls, nice maps - that I look for in a module.</blockquote>

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