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<blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2944592" data-attributes="member: 26473">A well-designed adventure module sets the stage, and that's all.One of my favorite modules for any genre is Lost Abbey of Calthonwey. It is a classic site-based adventure, a (seemingly) abandoned abbey and an associated dungeon. There is a brief adventure background for the dungeon master, and a room by room description of the abbey and its inhabitants, including the monks who escaped the massacre that befell their brothers and the lich and its minions that caused it.And that's it.No description of what the different NPCs will do when the adventurers arrive, no flowchart of relations between the NPCs, no series of events building to a final encounter with the lich in its lair, no plot or story at all beyond the initial set-up. All of that is left to the dungeon master to create. The adventure presents the inhabitants and their environs, and the dungeon master supplies the rest. The beauty of it lies in the fact that the game master has so much to work with - the orcs living in the abandoned abbey, the lich and his minions, the monks who are sworn to destroy him (and have been granted immortality for that purpose), various monsters living in different portions of the abbey and its underchambers in a reasonable fantasy ecology, other adventurers who visited the abbey before the player characters arrive. It's brilliant, and it's exactly what I look for in an adventure as a referee: it inspires my imagination to discover what happens next, instead of laying it out for me.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="The Shaman, post: 2944592, member: 26473"] A well-designed adventure module sets the stage, and that's all. One of my favorite modules for any genre is [i]Lost Abbey of Calthonwey[/i]. It is a classic site-based adventure, a (seemingly) abandoned abbey and an associated dungeon. There is a brief adventure background for the dungeon master, and a room by room description of the abbey and its inhabitants, including the monks who escaped the massacre that befell their brothers and the lich and its minions that caused it. And that's it. No description of what the different NPCs will do when the adventurers arrive, no flowchart of relations between the NPCs, no series of events building to a final encounter with the lich in its lair, no plot or story at all beyond the initial set-up. All of that is left to the dungeon master to create. The adventure presents the inhabitants and their environs, and the dungeon master supplies the rest. The beauty of it lies in the fact that the game master has so much to work with - the orcs living in the abandoned abbey, the lich and his minions, the monks who are sworn to destroy him (and have been granted immortality for that purpose), various monsters living in different portions of the abbey and its underchambers in a reasonable fantasy ecology, other adventurers who visited the abbey before the player characters arrive. It's brilliant, and it's exactly what I look for in an adventure as a referee: it inspires my imagination to [U]discover[/U] what happens next, instead of laying it out for me. [/QUOTE]

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