This Is An Artifact

Or, how I learned to hate 1d6 Cargo Cultists

I have been reading, a terrible sin, I know. In the bloody aftermath of reading through about two dozen adventure modules¹ in a desperate search for a sparse handful that would be good for new players, I was left with a question. If the adventure module is not for new players, then who the hell is it for?

I have thoughts, answers, and more questions, but before I delve into them, I want to address some things that I think are very important. First, I want the record to show that I am not a stranger to running modules, having run a large variety, including the big-name iconic ones in several systems,² so this isn’t a lack of knowledge tangent.

What Is an Adventure?

This is where we start, because I think this alone could cause a schism in the community. How do you define an adventure? Is it any book with a self-contained story? Does it require a through-line of plot? Is it meant to be played one time and sealed away, or run multiple times? Do you need new enemy stat blocks for it to count?

This is already a problem because a lot of the classic adventure modules (White Plume Mountain, Tomb of Horrors, Against The Giants, Snakepipe Hollow) have paper thin, or even no explanation of why your characters are there, and as I say that, there are already people beginning to cheer “That is what an adventure is! Something I can slot into any game, where a narrative can emerge!” ³

However, the other half of the notable early modules in the hobby (Keep on The Borderlands, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, The Great Traveller Campaign, The Great Pendragon Campaign) are full of NPC’s, built-in plot and plot hooks, and reasons for the party to cling together and work on something other than the promise of sweet loot.

I could have spent weeks gnawing on this and trying to figure it out, but instead, I decided to rule the same way my previous work on this did, an Adventure is “A collection of narrative beats, combat encounters and events, organized and linked together by plot and/or meta-textual understanding that this is what we are going to do.”

This means that city books aren’t adventures; it means that things like City of Lies aren’t included, nor are things like Bug City or Renraku Arcology for Shadowrun, I also removed any games like Triangle Agency, or Mutant Year Zero which are kind of system modules. Some of these were hard-case eliminations, but I did what I had to.

Adventures and Usability.

I then sat down and read as many of them as I could, topping out at close to one hundred and fifty adventures, across every variation and concept. I have run as many of them as reasonably possible, and I am confident when I say this, most Modules don’t help the game, its designers, or its players in any way other than to get paid.

Now, I am going to go even further here and define Usability, because the reason I think most adventures fail to be good is that they are not Usable at the table. What Does Usability mean in this context?

Well, it’s a well-accepted thought in this hobby that there are three use cases for adventure, GM’s who do not have the time to build a whole campaign on their own, GM’s who are new to the system, or The Adventure is so stunningly written everyone must play it to truly understand the game.

So, therefore, we will define Usability in these three criteria: Is the Adventure efficient to run, can it be run out of the box with little modifications and transformation, ready to go into the average group, and without much extra homework to bring to the table? Is The Module good to teach the game to new Gamemasters, does it show how the basic mechanics, tone, and themes of the game in play and help educate new players as well? Is The Module a stunning example of the game? Does it leave me shocked and in awe at how wonderful it is? ⁴

The sad truth is? About ten percent of modules scored a perfect 3 yes's on this. This means that most modules were not easy to run, not good at teaching the game, or not well edited or even successful in bringing about the vibes of the game. A stunning number only got one out of three, and that was almost always either Efficient To Run or Good for Teaching.

We have been writing adventures since 1976, and you are telling me that’s an acceptable fail rate. That isn’t an acceptable fail rate in any other art form why should we not only let it stand but argue that a game shouldn’t be run unless there are numerous failures like this in the line?

This is an inflammatory statement, one that is making you reach for your keyboard as we speak to decry it, but hold on and walk with me for a moment, cause I think I have an explanation for why a little under 1 in 10 modules passed the usability test

The Cargo Cult of Adventure Design

Let’s go back to 1976 and look at where modules emerged, and where we began designing them in a way that is still relevant in the minds of large groups of people. The first widely distributed module by TSR⁵, was in the A-Series, famously starting with Slave Pits of The Undercity and an adventure that opens with that most loathsome of plot hooks, you wake up without any gear, kidnapped by slavers.⁶

But, you know what was interesting about this module? You were running it in a tournament, groups of player characters and gamemasters keeping track of who could cash out the most loot, do it as efficiently as possible, and flex over the other dudes playing against you. This is a fascinating environment, one that didn’t even exist in the oft-celebrated and seldom-examined home games of Gygax and Arneson, a place that continued to bridge the rapidly eroding gap between the war game that created The Dragon Game, and the thing it was becoming. There was even a secret scoring system, designed to keep players on their toes, and to try to encourage some sort of playing the game not the system.

This is not the modern TTRPG environment at all, and the adventure module takes shape here. Suddenly the usability index hits two out of three every single time, you are going to be running out of the box because you have to run it out of the box otherwise it is brutally unfair to the other teams competing, and if you don’t think something makes sense? You can walk to the next table over in between games and ask someone for advice, maybe even the actual factual writer.

This is the environment the first generation of Modules are born into, an environment that will die off within a decade or two, but a significant portion of module design takes from this era. You can see the design that doesn’t mention how to adjust an encounter for difficulty, a set of encounters that intentionally doesn’t have a ton of plot to hang on it because you need to cram a certain amount of play into a session, merciless and brutal because it has to be.

That was the top dog of module design from 1978-1984 and then we see the other half emerge. In 1984 we see Dragons of Despair, the first Dragonlance adventure get published and released, and this is a much more plot-focused style of module. We get main characters, unique exceptions to otherwise ironclad setting rules, and adventures that are sequential and heavily linked. This is the other half of module design, build a fun plot and cut in encounters to make sure your characters level up to deal with future encounters, maybe adjust x or y if your party is lacking z.

These are the two wellsprings for Module design, the first lungfish of the hobby, not necessarily the best, but definitely the largest and most successful and this is where I think we see module design’s downfall.

This Screwdriver Means I’m King!

Most module designs to come after this are informed by one of these two schools of thought, design brutal encounters with little plot so that you can hang your ideas on it, or design a whole-ass setting and build your adventures around that to make things happen. This is also where the idea stops, don’t innovate or mess with these ideas because they worked forever, and don’t need to be altered or grown because why would you? There are whole movements dedicated to recreating the vibes of these early adventures… Except that they really can’t.

You can’t recreate what worked about these early tournament modules because we don’t play that way anymore! That game state no longer exists! You can approximate it with a rich social network to discuss what fails and works with the module, but that isn’t the same thing! You can see desperate attempts to reinvigorate and revive this style with things like the Living Adventures, and the rise of re-releases of modules! You see designers realize an adventure is too hard and they redo it to make it better for the nebulous average group they hear from!

Instead, you develop a more brutal and unforgiving culture “git gud” applied to a collaborative storytelling game, or you cruise boards hoping to sort out all the landmine encounters that will lead to a game-over state.

“Oh! But I am a practitioner of the other path!” you grin “I am a story first module user.” Cool, your school is still flawed. You have to hope that your players are willing to invest in whatever nonsense this game is trying to pitch you about the setting. What if it isn’t even connected to the normal setting the game is in, say a gothic horror adventure in a heroic fantasy game? Can the new player enjoy this change of flavour or are they likely to expect every game to be like this? You are doing the same work as your sibling above but in the opposite direction!

Conclusion

I don’t know how to conclude this. I have been marinating on this article for months, but how the fuck do I talk about this? I can tell you that the principles behind designing modules need to change⁷, I can beg you to think of the health of this art form I love so dearly, but you gotta look inside yourself and ask some questions. You could build support and make this the social hobby it is, forming circles to discuss what works and doesn’t work. Maybe some sort of living document of an adventure, altered and edited as time goes on? I dunno, really, but I do know this if people left 9 in 10 movies complaining about how they didn’t get it, I don’t think they’d keep making movies that way.

1. I will be using Adventure and Module and Adventure Module interchangeably throughout this article.

2. I have in fact run, Pirates Of Drinax, Blood Drive, Red Hand of Doom, God’s Teeth, Keep on The Borderlands, and Ladybug Ladybug Fly Away Home multiple times.

3. Also, check out the next article in this series “Why Bother?” for how I feel about this.

4. You may notice that I did not include “Scavenge this product for useful material for my home game.” that is covered in “Why Bother?”

5. This is the original dragon-game holders, predating Wizards of The Coast

6. RIP to a great number of wizards who didn’t memorize the right spells to survive.

7. I know a fair number of you are thinking “Nuh Uh”