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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 8495992" data-attributes="member: 50987">Note the language and tone that the authors used, in the examples that I shared.It is always "the DM can" or "the DM should."It's never "the DM must" or "the DM will."Moldvay and Cook weren't delivering edicts from on high when they wrote this, and they weren't mandating (or even advocating) for a certain way that the game must be played.  They were simply trying to give new DMs some helpful advice for running their games, to help keep the game fun and exciting.  This advice shouldn't be equated with rules (or religious zeal.)Also, this is kinda fun:In the "<a href="https://goodman-games.com/store/product/original-adventures-reincarnated-2-the-isle-of-dread/" target="_blank">Original Games Reincarnated: The Isle of Dread</a>" by Goodman Games, Zeb Cook writes at length about how he and Tom created The Isle of Dread.  "We didn't set out to create a classic," he writes on page 5.  "I'm not sure you can ever intentionally do that, and for Tom and me, that thought didn't even cross our minds.  We were focused on the mundane business of filling up a box.  The Basic Set had an adventure therefore we needed one in the Expert Set.  More importantly we needed an adventure that could teach novice DMs how to create and run a wilderness game.  Something self-contained (an island) with lots to explore (hexes!) filled with random encounters (tables!) and a simply storyline that could work with almost any campaign (dinosaurs and lost worlds!).  Plus, we needed to write it fast."He goes on to mention that "in hindsight the design should never have worked, what with two hands and brains creating one adventure at their typewriters at the same time.  Since we were still creating our jobs while we were doing them, nobody told us you shouldn't design an adventure that way, so we did.  And we got it done in time.""Most of all, we didn't know that we were sowing the seeds for the whole of Mystara.  The island needed to be somewhere and we had to show DMs what a simple world setting looked like.  Tom mined places and bits from his shared campaign and we forged that into the proto-Known World."Yup, my favorite adventure module and favorite campaign setting of all time were accidents.</blockquote>

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