FunkBGR said:
The film major in me says that the 'author' of the module is . . . the author. Unlike films, which have a lot of people besides the director working to complete the film, the module has a singular entity that one can point to for the majority of the text.
The other person in me really likes this thought though, and really wants Ari Marmell to appear and comment on how it works when he writes a module. I'm guessing it's not as simple as above. You have a person who contracts out the freelance work, giving a bit on what exactly they're looking for in the module. You have the cartographer, creating a visual map of some kind - but does the map get created before the module text, or vice versa? Do the author and the cartographer work together? You've got an editor, what sort of role do they play in it?
*poof*
You rang?
The simplest (and most accurate) answer is, of course, "it depends." The process of creating a module differs somewhat between, say, Necromancer and WotC.
I wrote two modules for MonkeyGod, and one for Necromancer. In all three cases, the content of the module--the meat, if you will--is mine. I proposed the plotline, I wrote the text, I created the very (
very) rough drafts of the maps that the cartographer than worked from. In the case of the Necromancer module, I even provided art notes for the artists to work from.
Bill Webb asked me to make a few tweaks and additions, but none of these were major enough to impact the overall nature of the module. It was things like adding a few extra encounters here and there, altering some of the treasure rewards, that sort of thing.
The editors on those modules did nothing but correct errors, check for consistency, maybe rephrase the occasional line here and there.
However, that's not always the case. Some modules arrived at MonkeyGod, for instance, that required a lot more work on the part of the developers. So I can't swear that this holds true for every 3rd-party module, but I know that,
in most cases, a module from a smaller company is almost entirely the product of the credited author(s).
This is somewhat less the case with modules for larger companies, such as WotC or (back when they were doing Sword & Sorcery) White Wolf. In these cases, the design and development teams often have a strong idea of what it is they're looking for. While many/most of the specifics may still belong to the credited author, the basic concepts of the module were likely assigned from above. These concepts may include details like certain plot elements, the type of environment, and/or at least certain adversaries, allies, or items that must appear. Most of the time, the author is still responsible for things like rough maps, but in some cases (such as the
Fantastic Locations series), the map is created first, and the author is responsible for working with it. And of course, when there's both a mandated purpose and a much larger development/editing team, things are far more likely to change after the author turns in his text. (For instance, several of my encounters in
The Sinister Spire were tweaked or reworked, and my system of "disruption points" in
Fortress of the Yuan-Ti was replaced with the action point system given therein.) That's just the nature of the beast.
Bottom line: While there are absolutely exceptions in both cases, my experience suggests that the
general rule of thumb is that the larger the company, the more hands manipulated the module; the smaller the company, the fewer. (That may seem like a no-brainer, but there it is.)
