I’ve been reading tons of modules lately with wildly different approaches to page layout, visual design, and general presentation of information. This got me thinking about what the “ideal” module should do–for GMs during prep, for GMs during play, for players, etc. What is a module’s job, and how does it excel at it?
On one end of the spectrum, I’ve read a couple 5e and Trail of Cthulhu modules. They’re primarily interested in telling a complete story, with some flexibility of outcome and approach due to player actions. To use them, the GM needs to read them completely, internally digest them, and likely make lots of notes for running the thing in real-time. They exist to provide a big idea, story beats, and in 5e’s case, encounter design. They’re all-in-one narrative packages, but seem to require the same amount of GM effort and thought as creating an original adventure, just focused differently. They are functionally worthless at the table; what they provide, they provide during the prep stage.
On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve read the new bunch of official OSE adventures, which are laser-focused on at-table use. It feels like they’ve been platonically designed to shave milliseconds off the flipping and searching you’ll need to do between the moment a player announces an action and the moment you need to respond. Like most OSR stuff, they’re environment based, favoring player agency and creativity. There are pleasing bits of background narrative that can reveal themselves in play, or not, depending on what your players are interested in paying attention to.
So, the first kind of module, for me, is nigh unusable. They might have some clever ideas to glom onto, but the amount of work required to run them means I’d rather just come up with my own thing. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I could sit down at the table, crack an unread OSE module, and run it just fine. BUT, I think the table-focused, box-of-usable-tools approach that OSE seems to be a pure distillation of lacks something, which is the SPARK of inspiration and excitement that makes me want to run something in the first place. By condensing the module into its most usable form, things can feel dry and workmanlike.
For me, the platonic idea might be something less purely utilitarian, even if it requires a little more effort from me. For example, I’ve been reading Silent Titans, which is a bit of a mess from a visual presentation standpoint–it uses bullet points in such a way that I would prefer just regular paragraphs, which are usually the bane of module design for me. It’s weird, oddly organized, and requires a decent amount of buy-in ahead of time from the DM. But it’s massively interesting, and gives you information lots of other old school modules usually eschew–tone, desires, and useful table-techniques for NPCs. I’d rather struggle a little bit with an unwieldy beast that feels full of possibility rather than have a perfectly organized set of tools that fail to inspire. (Note: I really LIKE the OSE modules, I just am not sure the house style lends itself to inspiration and imagination.)
ANYHOO. This is a long-winded way of getting here–my list of module essentials, ranked by importance.
- A module should inspire wonder in the DM
- A module should give the DM useful tools to transmit this wonder to the players
- These tools should focus on the fictional world’s reactions to the players’ actions rather than the pre-defined narrative in the DM’s head
What is your “perfect” module? What should a module do?