Modules: Made to Read vs Made to Run?

[Micah Sweet]

I think that WOTC's house style just sucks, frankly? I'm assuming Pathfinder is similar. I think we should be able to expect better.

Maybe? I don't buy WotC anymore, and most of what I came for was the proprietary IP (the only thing they have going for them as far as I care, and even then I prefer when non-WotC people work with it).

 

[Arilyn]

I have to agree with @zakael19 here. I don't think the tradeoff you see is intrinsic or necessary. Modules can be both easy to run AND have that kind of complexity.

To me it's the difference between long paragraphs explaining a faction's backstory, versus a standard template that lists a faction's key characteristics, it's relationships with other factions, and its goals.

The richest gameplay we've been seeing is coming from the OSR scene like Shadowdark's Cursed Scrolls, Gavin Norman and Brad Kerr, to name a few. Of course, there are some dull adventures in the OSR space, but overall, there's a lot of very imaginative ideas.

I keep bringing this up, but we had many hours of deep, rewarding, fun gameplay from Kerr's Wyvern Songs. It's a small book with a starting village and a collection of adventure sites. Not much backstory or long history, but boy, did we get a lot of fun building alliances, exploring and building up our little "world. My favourite is the singing rocks. Kerr hints it may have been druids. It's full of quirky NPCs, dangerous critters and neat areas to explore and the Rocky terrain sings! We didn't need long explanations because the flavour hooked us in completely.

 

[zakael19]

I keep bringing this up, but we had many hours of deep, rewarding, fun gameplay from Kerr's Wyvern Songs. It's a small book with a starting village and a collection of adventure sites. Not much backstory or long history, but boy, did we get a lot of fun building alliances, exploring and building up our little "world. My favourite is the singing rocks. Kerr hints it may have been druids. It's full of quirky NPCs, dangerous critters and neat areas to explore and the Rocky terrain sings! We didn't need long explanations because the flavour hooked us in completely.

I'm reminded of opening up the generally solid Neverwinter Campaign Setting and trying to figure out why it starts with like 30k years of history that have 0 bearing on the actual game you're going to play, and doesn't even structure it in a way that helps tie directly to the situation and factions in play (there's stuff there but you need to extract it).

Edit: I hadn't read about Wyvern Songs but this snippet from tenfootpole says a lot:

"But not this. This collection is what you were hoping for. You open the pages and are delighted. You can tell what is going on. It’s interesting. You WANT to run it. This is what every adventure ever written aspires to be: not a disappointment to its line of forefathers stretching back to the beginning."

 

[Bill Zebub]

Again, it depends on why you're buying the adventure. If you're here for the lore and/or to pull elements for your own homebrew (as I am), more is better. More bang for your buck, more material for your reading enjoyment. If you're just there for an easy adventure to run, a lot of that will be unnecessary to you, but what you want may lack sufficient value for the prospective lore and homebrew buyer. As a publisher you have to decide what's the bigger audience, and if you want to dedicate your energies toward that audience. And also keep in mind (and I have a lot of personal experience with this) that audience may not be you, even if it used to be.

I think you're conflating quantity of content vs. presentation.

As an example of what I want, take that four page history of a setting and put it in a timeline, trimming each entry down to the bare facts. So that "Nobody knows for sure, but certain wise scholars believe that in the 145th year after the fall of the fall of the king and the ascension of the Council, a cabal of wizards created the Crystal McGuffin. That cabal later became known as the Circle of the Crystal" becomes:

F.A. 145: Circle of the Crystal founded. Crystal McGuffin created.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I'm reminded of opening up the generally solid Neverwinter Campaign Setting and trying to figure out why it starts with like 30k years of history that have 0 bearing on the actual game you're going to play, and doesn't even structure it in a way that helps tie directly to the situation and factions in play (there's stuff there but you need to extract it).

Edit: I hadn't read about Wyvern Songs but this snippet from tenfootpole says a lot:

"But not this. This collection is what you were hoping for. You open the pages and are delighted. You can tell what is going on. It’s interesting. You WANT to run it. This is what every adventure ever written aspires to be: not a disappointment to its line of forefathers stretching back to the beginning."

Color me intrigued....

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm reminded of opening up the generally solid Neverwinter Campaign Setting and trying to figure out why it starts with like 30k years of history that have 0 bearing on the actual game you're going to play, and doesn't even structure it in a way that helps tie directly to the situation and factions in play (there's stuff there but you need to extract it).

Edit: I hadn't read about Wyvern Songs but this snippet from tenfootpole says a lot:

"But not this. This collection is what you were hoping for. You open the pages and are delighted. You can tell what is going on. It’s interesting. You WANT to run it. This is what every adventure ever written aspires to be: not a disappointment to its line of forefathers stretching back to the beginning."

I'm sure it starts with that history because it's interesting to the writer and they hope it's interesting to the reader. You are assuming adventure playability at the table is obviously the highest priority, and that's just not a universal truth.

 

[BruceWright]

As an example of what I want, take that four page history of a setting and put it in a timeline, trimming each entry down to the bare facts. So that "Nobody knows for sure, but certain wise scholars believe that in the 145th year after the fall of the fall of the king and the ascension of the Council, a cabal of wizards created the Crystal McGuffin. That cabal later became known as the Circle of the Crystal" becomes:

F.A. 145: Circle of the Crystal founded. Crystal McGuffin created.

a reminder that many game designers wish they were Tolkien. And the lesson they learned from reading Tolkien is that his books used a lot of words.

 

[BruceWright]

I think we’re looking at a bit of a pendulum here. Back in the days of early D&D, descriptions were brief and mostly mechanical. Size of the room. Monsters and traps within. Maybe a short description of cobwebs or a bad smell.

Then Ravenloft put the flavor into box text. Icy water drops cling with cold tenacity etc etc. And it modeled for DMs how to bring some style and atmosphere to an adventure.

But the modern style is often not to read exactly the flavor text, but to paraphrase it in a more organic or conversational way, or go Matt Mercer and spin your descriptive yarn.

And for that modern style to work, we need to extricate the information from the box-text’s purple prose. And the more florid that is, the harder for the DM to run it at table.

 

[Micah Sweet]

a reminder that many game designers wish they were Tolkien. And the lesson they learned from reading Tolkien is that his books used a lot of words.

That reads as rather unkind, if you're unaware, and makes assumptions that your feelings in this area are objectively superior to others.

 

[Arilyn]

I'm reminded of opening up the generally solid Neverwinter Campaign Setting and trying to figure out why it starts with like 30k years of history that have 0 bearing on the actual game you're going to play, and doesn't even structure it in a way that helps tie directly to the situation and factions in play (there's stuff there but you need to extract it).

Edit: I hadn't read about Wyvern Songs but this snippet from tenfootpole says a lot:

"But not this. This collection is what you were hoping for. You open the pages and are delighted. You can tell what is going on. It’s interesting. You WANT to run it. This is what every adventure ever written aspires to be: not a disappointment to its line of forefathers stretching back to the beginning."

Yes! I couldn't wait to bring Wyvern Songs to the table. It does delight and no sense of being weighed down.

Hole in the Oak from Gavin Norman was the very first time a dungeon crawl excited me. I read it and was shocked that I couldn't wait to run it.

I never liked Dungeon Crawls. Picked up OSE for the silly reason that little books in a box appealed to me. At the same time Questing Beast was showcasing a side to the OSR I didn't know existed.

I played in a Shadowdark campaign that started with a dungeon crawl and ended up being a long sprawling campaign with some deep character development, epic moments and a dash of tragedy. None of it was planned or directed by the GM. It just grew up around our choices and our starting area growing outward as we explored and made connections, good and bad.

We've had fun in the past with PF1 adventure paths, but we've become enamoured of minimal but flavourful prose.