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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9799123" data-attributes="member: 6785785">One man’s trash is another’s treasure. It’s all a matter of preference, really. But for me… I grew up running modules. I did plenty of homebrew stuff, but we played every module we could find. The further back you go, the smaller they were (generally speaking). They were also less complex. They could be skimmed by the GM and then run. Even if the GM decided to read the whole thing in full, they were 16 or 32 pages, most often. As time passed, they got bigger and more complex and more plot heavy. They weren’t just location based type scenarios… they were ongoing series of events and so on. And I continued to buy and run them.So it was a kind of gradual thing that happened over time and editions. A few years ago, I found myself running Tomb of Annihilation. The first part… the hexcrawl through Chult… went well and was pretty straightforward. Pretty classic wilderness type adventure. But once we moved into the tomb proper, our game started to suffer. It just became a kind of meticulous dungeon crawl. Lots of the things in the dungeon were very complex without needing to be or without justifying the workload. You had to really study it to run it as written. I struggled to do it. And I realized I was being way too faithful to the text. And on top of that, it was going for a kind of play that D&D in general and my group in particular has shifted away from, and for which it’s not best suited. Once I realized what was happening, I stopped worrying about the text. I shifted the focus and improvised more, and things improved. The players were happier, I was happier, the game was more fun. Ultimately, if I want to read for pleasure, there are many options I can go with. What I want out of a game book of any kind is utility at the table. To contrast with ToA, the Mothership module A Pound of Flesh is 64 pages long on digest size pages. It presents a space station for use as a “home base” type location for a campaign. It’s packed with NPCs and factions and locations, and tables to generate more. It has three ongoing situations that can develop on their own if the PCs don’t get involved, with stages for each so that the station is a dynamic place. And it’s all laid out with the expectation that a GM will be referencing this book in play… so it’s organized accordingly. All the locations are on either one page or a two page spread, with all the info you’ll need for that location, including NPCs. Everything is presented in small, easy to reference lists or bullet points.  So yeah… when it comes to modules, I vastly prefer utility over volume. My group got easily as much out of A Pound of Flesh as we did Tomb of Annihilation. And at about 20% of the cost and with maybe 20% of the effort to read and run it. I ran RHoD during my group’s 3e days! The one that springs to mind most immediately is The Dracula Dossier for Night’s Black Agents (though I’d use a different system because I am no fan of Gumshoe, probably use Against the Dark Conspiracy). The campaign just appeals to me because I’m a huge fan of the novel Dracula and because it’s so ambitious. It takes the premise that the novel is actually an after action report of a British intelligence attempt to recruit Dracula as an asset. The novel as we know it is a redacted version, published in an attempt to cast the events off as fiction. In the modern day, the PCs are given an Unredacted copy, with marginal notes from agents through the years. They actually published Dracula Unredacted which you can hand to your players. They can then use the marginal notes as prompts for investigation and so on. Dracula is of course, still alive and out there. It’s highly improvisational, with multiple takes on the novel’s original characters and their legacies through the modern day. I just am impressed by it and think it could be a lot of fun with the right group, so I want to give it a try.</blockquote>

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