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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hastur_nz" data-source="post: 7260262" data-attributes="member: 40592">Most of the truly old-school i.e. pre-2E days, adventures had so little plot detail, that they could indeed be run "out of the box" with minimal if any prep... as long as the DM was prepared to ad-lib as necessary.  Descriptions of everything were very small, little if any read-aloud text, and so it was up to the DM to flesh out the smaller details as and when required.  The level of "plot" achieved, often depended heavily not just on the DM but also on the Players.For example, Against the Giants (G1) contained a very small preamble, about how the PC's have been send to "do or die" vs the Hill Giant Steading, then it's off into describing the Steading, Dungeon etc.  It's not especially important for the DM to understand the larger plot immediately, in fact the meta-plot only slowly reveals itself as you go along in G1-3.  If the PC's get themselves in trouble and alert the whole complex, then some level of preparedness is useful, but to be honest even that could be ad-libed as required.  I've skimmed the version in Tales from the Awning Portal, and it's pretty much the same - I reckon is could be run with minimal prep, as long as you are an experienced ad-lib type of DM.  Nb: i was a long time back when I ran it (using 3.5 rules), so my memory might be murky.Similarly, this year I ran an old Basic adventure, B5 (c. 1983), and while it had a couple of pages of exposition at the beginning, that was pretty much rubbish and I discarded it.  It was a pretty big wilderness and multi-level dungeon adventure, but on the whole the level of "plot" was minimal, so the amount of pre-reading required wasn't too big.  That said, I did spend some time trying to enhance its verisimilitude, so it made more logical sense in places rather than a hodge-podge of monsters waiting for PC's to arrive.  Most of that was done as we went along, however, the main prep I did in advance was simply skimming through and making notes on what 5e monsters to use in various places where conversion wasn't obvious.</blockquote>

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