Off-the-Rack Adventuring
Long-time readers know that I love me some modules. Whether you call them adventure paths, premades, scenarios, or canned adventures, it’s all the same gaming goodness. They can range from single-page mini-dungeons to whole campaigns, and I’ve played (and written) more than a few. Unfortunately, there’s a certain perception that tends to accompany these products. The introductory explanation from 1d4chan serves as a good example. There we learn that modules are, “An accessory to games that companies sell for a gamemaster without the time or creativity to make their own adventure.” That attitude is typical in the broader community. At its worst it comes paired with a scoff, a voice vaguely reminiscent of Comic Book Guy, and a heavy dose of condescension: “No, I write my own campaigns. You know. Like a real game master.”
You guys already know that gatekeeping is force for evil. That bit isn’t news. What’s more worrying to me is the next line in the 1d4chan entry: “A module contains a premade adventure the GM should be able to run for his group with minimal modifications.” More than the condescension, it’s this fundamental misunderstanding that needs to be addressed.
Let me be clear: you absolutely can run a module “with minimal modifications.” You can also read quest text at your players verbatim using your best Ben Stein impression. These practices are how you wind up with a community that thinks of modules as GMing for dummies.
If you’re really giving it your all though, and if you’re embellishing and tailoring the adventure to your players, then you’re operating at a level of creativity every bit as valid as a homebrewed game. Rather than devoting your energy to worldbuilding or plot-crafting, those hours go toward fleshing out NPCs, incorporating player-specific subplots, or adding side-quests to the mix. If I wanted to run a save-the-princess adventure for Jeremy’s group, you can bet that I’d turn their draconic heritage into a plot point rather than ignoring it. Modifying a game world to accommodate player antics is essential for a collaborative experience. That level of agency is exactly how you bring players into a game world, and it’s just as easy to do in modules as in homebrew.
Question of the day then! Have you ever run or played in a module? Was it a by-the-numbers experience, or was it modified to fit the group? Let’s hear all about your adventures with canned adventures down in the comments!
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I ran Rise of the Runelords for my group, which I’ve mentioned a few times here, and I’ve run a few other modules over my career as a GM. I won’t lie, I stress a lot less over the details when the module has all the hard work done for me. At the same time, I often find that I worry about the threat level I see in a lot of modules. Runelords in particular has a few encounters that made me worry it was going to turn into a meat grinder (I’m looking at you, Fort Rannick.) I ran a Mutants and Masterminds module that had a villain so tough I could see the moment my Players just punched out and pulled out their phones. It was incredibly disheartening both for them and for me. So to any GMs out there planning to use modules, there is no shame in it, Quest writing is hard work. But careful attention must be paid to match player type to module and know when you need to modify an encounter.
On the other hand, I have played in a module from a GM who was “phoning it in.” He would show up and read the module in front of us for an hour, then start running. He would blandly read the “for the GM” sections instead of actually roleplaying conversations when we asked questions. It was an awkward experience that eventually turned into a “kick in the door and kill the monsters” simulator until we were all killed by a flying invisible wizard hitting us with Circle of Death.
There’s this great quote from Troy Lavallee from the Glass Cannon Podcast. He explains how he can take the pre-written adventure, “And add all this other stuff… I can take a skeleton that has got muscles and skin and hair all over it, and then I can add all the clothing on top of it I want, or change the hairstyle as it were and make it my own.” That skeleton is valuable, but it’s no more ‘the adventure’ than the core rules are.
New GMs can get a lot of mileage out of learning a system’s ropes by running modules, but there’s a lot to be said for allowing veteran GMs to concentrate on other elements of the craft as well.
Regarding Fort Rannick, I don’t know how the book actually intends for the players to deal with it, but when I played it, it turned into a several battle siege as the party slowly ground down the ogre forces before retreating. Which wasn’t exactly our grand plan, but we were generally smart enough to retreat when the enemy numbers became overwhelming. Our multiple battles with the fort’s two ogre bosses (the Barbarian and the Sorceress) also set up some good rivalries, as we actually got the Barbarian into die-if-he-stops-raging territory in our first battle before the Sorceress arrived and Stinking Cloud’d our back line, forcing a retreat. Several rematches and our only ever successful infiltration plan later (the plan, as it happened, depended on us making as much noise as possible, which is why it worked), we ended up in a sort of “You have fallen into our trap” “No, you have fallen into ours!” situation, with a brutal 17-round combat where the middle section featured all the combatants taking a break until the piles of disabling status effects and battlefield control spells wore off.
The point is, the mission as it was in the AP was a lot more fun than if the ogres were weak enough and spread out enough that we could just clear them out room-by-room like an ordinary dungeon. Even if it took forever in real-life terms.
I suspect the trick is to help the players grock what the situation “wants them to do.” That’s not about the module setting up a tough encounter; it’s about the GM finding a way to telegraph the new rules of engagement.
That’s valid. There is a lot of “tonal shift” in Rise of the Runelords in particular. Another point at which my particular party had trouble was the beginning of Chapter 3, just after it’s first event. Up until that point, the module has kind of held the player’s hands and been very linear in the way it wants you to progress for the most part. Then, suddenly the Module says “You’re powerful enough, the monsters are over there. How do you do it?” and my players were just lost like puppies. It was a large tonal shift that I believe was supposed to accompany the shift in power dynamic of the party, as it is right when spells like Teleport start coming online for the wizard and pure casters. But it caught them by surprise.
And Rannick is a dangerous situation no matter how your players approach it, but turning it into a siege is also pretty dangerous. The Sorceress has enough battlefield control you do not want to get locked into a long engagement, and I can actually see it turning into a series of guerilla attacks by the PCs. My main worry is the Improved Critical and Ogre Hooks. If your dice hate your PCs, it can turn into a graveyard quick.
Do you watch the Glass Cannon? When the player get to the ice giant camp in that one, I seem to recall the GM handing them the full color map as they watch from a distance.
“You know it would be suicide to go in there straight. It’s your goal to demoralize the camp and get them to break up. How do you go about infiltrating and sabotaging?”
It may seem ham-fisted, but that shift in approach is sometimes necessary.
Any time I’ve run a module, I reckon I’ve written at least as many pages of support material and modifications as the modules page count. And this even goes for the Enemy Within campaign, and I reckon that is as near to the best adventure series I have ever read.
I don’t know if its a function of age (I’ve ran so many adventures, I have sort of seen everything, done everything), but I have found myself distinctly unimpressed with the quality of modern modules.
The most recent ones I have tried running were the Dark Heresy Haarlock Legacy trilogy, and it suffered from being disjointed, shoddy maps (on the second part of the trilogy, the description of one building didn’t match either the map or the picture of the building accompanying the description), and a desperate desire by the author to avoid explaining anything at all costs.
I do love a module (and I consider the extensive extra writing to be part of the enjoyment, not a detriment), but I have struggled of late to find one that inspires me enough to make the effort.
What makes a “good module” for you? Strong narrative throughline? Well-though-out sandbox…?
For me, the important things are:
Explain the damn plot. I get an air of mystery is sometimes desirable, but there is never really any good explanation for withholding the answer to the mystery from the DM. Even if the answer of the mystery is tangential to the plot, so not likely to be revealed to the players ever, the truth behind it will inform the actions of the various NPCs, so it is vital for the DM to know so he can portray these characters correctly. Often writers fall back on the lazy “you decide what the real answer is” which makes me wonder whether the original author even had an a specific answer in mind when he created the mystery. And if he didn’t, I begin to wonder whether there is any coherence to the plot.
Show some attention to detail. The reason I mentioned my map gripe above is it shows a lack of basic attention to detail by whoever is collating the adventure and proof-reading the thing, and that raises concerns that there may be more fundamental disconnects in other elements of the adventure.
One hand on the tiller. Of late, I have run across adventures that have clearly been written by multiple authors, with little or no consultation between them. The WFRP Thousand Thrones adventure is an utter abomination because each chapter has barely any connection between them, veers widely in tone, with some characters core motivation seemingly changing arbitrarily between chapters.
Softer rails. In the modern day, there is little excuse for some of the heavy-handed railroading that occurs in some modules. I get in a limited page count you cant account for the weirder players antics, and with a fixed goal there has to be some way of keeping the players moving in the right direction, but sometimes it seems there isn’t even the slightest room to manouever in the plots rigid straightjacket.
I could go on, but I am nearing rant-level as it is 😉
My latest campaign ended just after the hype over the Waterdeep modules began, so our group was thinking of playing Dragon Heist. Additionally, this year is our groups last year of high school, so we were worried that whoever DM’ed would have difficulty studying and creating an adventure at the same time. We put two and two together, and it was decided that I would run a Dragon Heist+Undermountain campaign.
I did heavily modify it to fit the player’s backstories. This was helped by the fact that one of the players gave me a backstory that consisted only of what the character knew (leaving me to fill in the blanks) and hindered by the fact that the other two players gave me their backstories a few sessions after the campaign had started, leaving me desperately trying to come up with a campaign tied around their backstories without having to retcon anything.
Now two of the players, a drow and aasimar, are fighting their father, a 13,000 year old angel-aberration-thing, and his wife, a 200 year old human archmage. The drow and aasimar are aided by their immortal fighter and a small army of dark elves. Oh, and their tavern now has three T-rex shaped holes in it, from two different dinosaurs.
Because that’s what happens when I modify a module to fit backstories.
Well done that man!
I find that the real trick is making the backstory relevant to the dungeon delve. if you can bring hints of angel-aberration thing down into Undermountain, then you’ve got it made.
My girlfriend is running Curse of Strahd for our other girlfriend and two of our friends, and we’re having a great time. She’s definitely not running it straight from the book, though. Notable modifications include:
Barovia is a more functional state. Castle Ravenloft isn’t run-down and half-abandoned, because it’s the seat of government, and people are always coming and going so they can, y’know, run the country.
Much more racial diversity in the population. We took a look at the “Barovia is mostly humans and non-humans are mistrusted” thing and decided that that’s not what we play D&D for.
Oh, and it’s Curse of Susannah.
There’s a lot of great stuff in Curse of Strahd, but there are ways to change it to suit our own group better. And that’s fine, and not a slight against its writers, who honestly did a fantastic job.
I’ve heard quite a bit about FemStrahd from other groups. Was there some podcast that did it first or something, or is it just one of those cool ideas that seems to have permeated the community?
Any dang way, I think my GM must have seen the Catlevania anime or played Bloodbourne, because our Ravenloft was a distinctly Victorian place. Lots of steam and engines and electric lights.
Mostly it was because “dude gets friendzoned, turns evil and murders the woman he wanted” is a story she feels is played out and doesn’t need to show up at our table. Also she wanted to create a female vampire villain who wasn’t eternally young and sexy, but instead, eternally middle-aged and badass. Countess Susannah is also a fighter, not a necromancer (she has her vampiric powers, but has ditched spellcasting in favour of martial prowess), because that makes sense for her background.
She also wanted to avoid the usual “damsel in distress” routine for Irina. Our Irina is a rogue (an assassin, in fact), and is very determined not to fall into Susannah’s clutches.
Curse of Strahd is written to stand alone, but a lot of GMs will run it as part of the old Ravenloft setting, so that might account for a lot of setting changes people make for it. In the Ravenloft setting, I believe Barovia is pretty firmly medieval Romania, but there are other realms in the Land of Mists which are at a Victorian level of technology.
I’ve played in two modules before. One was a shortened version of Tomb of Annhilation, which didn’t have much modifications to it, save for the removal of some content. I must give thanks to the DM; he cut down the adventure to I think five sessions without us even noticing. The only time that we were aware that we had skipped something was when he asked us whether we wanted to run a certain section of the adventure, or skip it.
The other was the Lost Mines of Phandelver, which I played in during an interim between the end and beginning of two of my campaigns. It was a largely by-the-numbers experiences on the DM’s part, but whenever us players made a decision to deviate from the module, he simply played it by the ear and went with it, no attempts to put us back on the rails.
Great experience both times.
Did you guys just ignore the hex crawl and go straight to the tomb?
GJ on that Phandelver GM’s part. I have a feeling that it’s so well-loved because it makes a great jumping-off point for “whatever we want our adventure to become.”
My old dm mostly ran modules for 5e with the exception of his city campaign, and the evil campaign for the elemental evil module after that went too far off the rails to properly salvage. He often made changes as things went to make things a better fit for the party, or just funnier like with the sexy daniel radcliffe naga. The most changes he ever had to make was to the hoard of the dragon queen module, as they clearly did not balance things right for that. Most of the module itself would have gone well if things were better balanced, but he had to change so many things to make challenges possible, or to give story reasons to how we can avoid them.
It’s always a negotiation between a number of different masters. Module and GM and game rules and players are all vying for a ‘voice’ at the table. Half the time I think that negotiation is itself the game.
Oh yeah definitely, talking with the dm and the dm doing the same with his players is vitally important. Negotiation is crucial to any longrunning campaign in particular.
Regarding a similar situation to the dragon party there: I was running a module once where the bad guys go after the PCs because they hate humans, (and were none too fond of the rest of the core races for living so close with humans either).
So much pre-written dialogue had bad guys calling the PCs out as stuff like “You damned humans!”
…Which led to my party of a kobold, an orc, a tengu, and gathlain (a faerie with a symbiotic relationship with a plant, basically), coughing awkwardly when I read out one or two of those lines, due to my mouth apparently working faster than my brain
My process is always to read the module through once for pleasure, then go back through making notes, then go back through one more time for the “parts most likely to come up tonight.” My PDFs have A LOT of sticky notes, but it does help to make things go a little more smoothly.
I usually do. Of course this happens the time I was a bit rushed to run a module that I had never gotten a chance to carefully read
Nearly every time that I gm a module or adventure path, I end up tailoring the equipment found to suit the party, just so that there is something for everyone.
However, ever since Spheres of Power / Might (SoMP) was released, I now modify each of the monsters and NPCs to also utilize those systems in any Pathfinder game I run.
I suspect you of owning stock in SoP. 😛
But yeah, that is exactly the sort of change I’m talking about. When you add rules on the PC side, it feels weird and unnatural if they’re the only ones that use those subsystems.
The only remark I want to make is deeply inappropriate, and thus it is times like these that I regret not being a patreon supporter. Snarky comment, but inappropriate nonetheless.
On an unrelated and more innocent topic, every time I see that Naruto headband it cracks me up.
I need to go back and look up what we named Naruto-headband dragon. I think we’d settled on “Draguto Yowgichi” or something similarly absurd. And on a related note, I really need to update the cast page.
In Elf Princess’s defense, she said “this loathsome dragon”, which directs the word “loathsome” specifically towards that one, singular, princess-kidnapping dragon, and not all dragons. Necessarily.
…Walks away before “Everyone in D&D World is racist”/”Yeah, but they’re also right” debate starts up.
I would point out that Jeremy is a dracolich.
My GM learned early in Tomb of Annihilation that I was allergic to subtlety and subterfuge, and I would smash my way through anything. She also put a lot of custom stuff into it. The first example of me standing my ground and smashing was when she added an Indiana Jones style rolling boulder with a suped-up Ghaleb Dhur. (For those not familiar it’s an Earth Elemental that is fond of rolling into people.) I turned a corner so it would lose its’ momentum, stood my ground, and braced for impact. Then the party just went ham on it.
Lesson learned: You’ll only see a Dwarf Paladin’s back when they’re dead, and you’re gonna die first.
*Indiana Jones theme plays*
When someone tried the whole “Nothing you can possess which I cannot take away” schtick I came back, killed all his lieutenants, got his troops to defect, and got his own bodyguard to cut him in half.
Our current ‘eternal DM’ runs exclusively APs, as they’re easier to plan around and let him not stress out between sessions. We’ve actually managed to go through the entire Rise of the Runelords AP, and are well on our way to finish Return of the Runelords. We’ve also played Kingmaker, Shattered Star, Crimson Throne, but those games had drama or troubles that lead to them being hiatus’d.
We’ve run things mostly by the book, but the DM did work in story RP and creatively ran NPCs. Issue was that challenging the PCs frustrated him, and before we finished the first AP with a stable group, we had two ‘resets’ so to speak of due to player and/or DM meltdowns.
Overall, the games are good and well written… Usually. It does get problematic at times when rules and combat is involved. Nowadays he has another DM-experienced player co-DM. But there’s quite some fun to discover an APs story as a player.
Of course, I wouldn’t mind homebrew games that lead to Acq Inc. or Dragon Friends nonsense…
There’s something to be said for knowing that “this part is official.” My Ravenloft buddy’s Ravenloft game was so heavily modified that I’m still not sure how much of it was “part of the module.” It made for a great experience at the table, but I regret not being able to talk with fellow versers about the experience.
Indeed. It’s interesting when a DM weaves their elements into the official story or changes stuff too, making it seem seamless. Though in our case it’s often been as a ‘hotfix’ or an AP problem (e.g. lack of downtime, or a challenge we can’t handle due to our party composition), or we’ve had moments where we couldn’t believe how badly some parts were written, or what the PCs were expected to do for success.
Examples include monsters that are wholly beyond their CR in difficulty or are set up to be horrifically deadly. It says something when a solo fight with a book end boss is harder than the fight with his ‘dragon’, who had minions and instant-death-no-prevention-available spells. Or when the party is expected to hoard 6k+ worth of gold to get a special treasure later, with no warning or hints unless the DM intervenes in meta. Or traps that are wholly unavoidable gauntlets of pain.
And yes, spoilers are something that can limit an AP enjoyment, especially when one considers metagaming… But it can also be excellent to build a desired story – knowing the ending or challenges ahead helps you craft the heroes journey and desired climax, or lets you fuse yourself into the story and build towards an effective role in both combat, challenges and RP (e.g. knowing that an AP has tons of X monster type, or only a few books have a theme the player handbook suggests, or that a certain class gets more specific treasure than others – usually wizards). I’ve had gone through ROTR both undpoiled and partially spoiled.
Every time I have ever run a mod, I killed my party. WotC is real bad at balancing them, and it looks like half of that went over to Pathfinder. I generally am that guy who swears by making my own story, and often setting. However that’s not to say there aren’t settings and mods that really get me going, like Ebberon and Ravenloft for DnD, Exalted’s Creation is quite probably my favorite setting of all time.
As for mods, my personal favorite, and not really a mod, is Return of the Scarlet Empress, also from Exalted. I was also greatly amused by the companion module from the Wheel of Time d20 game that took the PC’s adjacent to the main plot. I also enjoyed reading over that 1-20 Saga Edition module path, but never got the chance to actually run it.
Wait… You kill your players in WotC dungeons, but NOT in the insta-death laser traps of the corrupted Imperial Manse!?
Most of our big changes that came in Tomb of Annihilation came after the DM let a player keep playing his character after they became a wereboar. Oddly a lot of monsters started having silver or magical attacks…
So how many of you guys were gored?
Oddly, only the barbarian became a wereboar. Hell, my necromancer was gored and succeeded on the save, so things were just silly on those con saves.
I’ve had a pretty bland experience with modules. My DM at the time would read directly from the books and nix anything that wasn’t in the module – there wasn’t any pretense at immersion or making it his own. (Well, except the recurring NPCs he had follow us around, but they were more hindrance than help.) Enemies we tried to capture died without cause; foes we’d killed would reappear with no explanation. At one point we swapped modules without resolving the story, so I couldn’t even get invested in what was happening.
It was fun, despite it all. Getting together with friends to roll dice is still a good time. But I’d look to the left and right and see groups having intense RP moments and coming up with complex plans, and I envied the freedom they seemed to have. That’s why I run homebrew, for that feeling of utter freedom, knowing that my players are able to take the story in any direction they choose.
I’d encourage you to try a module before giving them up for dead. They don’t have to be run like that, and it’s a great way to gobble up ideas out of other designers’ heads.
„canned adventures“ fits pretty well for a catch phrase for modules and APs
because they are to gaming what canned food is to a freshly cooked dinner: With a lot of work and extra ingredients they can be turned into something resembling what’s shown on the tin.
What I resent mostly is that it feels pretty obvious sometimes that each of the six parts in a Paizo AP is written by a different author.
Is there an AP that’s particularly guilty of this?
Kingmaker and Carrion Crown felt very guilty of this.
Rise of the Runelords next runner up.
Kingmaker may be excused for the different stages of kingdom building.
Whats funny is that Kingmaker feels like the authors entirely forgot teleport magic.
„good luck getting into Drelev Keep“ ?… Dimension Door?
and
„they‘ll have to make their own way home from Pitax“ … yeah? trouble at home… let’s teleport and skipp all the encounters on the way.
different gamers in Rise of the Runelords on the other hand and we go shopping for scrollls because we got tired of walking(or riding)
Return of the Runelords also forgets that teleportation is a thing, when you have a few time-sensitive events that require travel between cities.
And the Jade Regent player guide actively begs players not to use teleportation or similar magical fast-travel to not spoil or ruin the ‘caravan travel’ theme of the adventure. Since the whole module is a big gay (literally, depending on what kind of campaign trait-enforced bond/relationship you have with the caravan waifus/NPCs) road trip.
I have both played and run several modules with varying degrees of modification (which can be very rewarding and beneficial).
I do feel however compelled to give you a bit of push-back. A good module really should be able to be played with minimal modification (at least for whatever passes for standard groups in the relevant system/setting) in addition to being suitable as a springboard for your own modifications.
The implication that if you try to run the scenario you brought the way it was designed to run instead of altering it heavily you are a bad GM that deserves to be compared to a famously boring speaker, is very much too gatekeepy for my taste.
Look at Nonagon’s experience a few comments up. That’s the kind of experience I’m talking about. It doesn’t have to be much, but I do think you have to breathe some kind of life into the work. And that involves interacting with the players at least as much as the page.
Do people eat? Yes, they eat many things, corn by example. Sometimes is good to eat corn just out of the can, sometimes you prepare and eat it with meat or vegetables or corn. People can eat the same thing in different ways and in different times. That is why a module is like driving a car, you can follow the road the GPS yells to you or take the scenic route, or maybe you crash heads on a train driving at 120Km/H, 74,5M/H for the US 🙂
In my group we are not specially fond of modules, not that we don’t play them, but we do prefer to find our own path. Hell’s Vengeance, Strange Aeons, Carrion Crown, Iron Gods to name a few, together with Return of the Scarlet Empress to name a non-PF name. Both Strange Aeons, Carrion Crown we have play them without modifications and with modifications, in fact i name this two because we have invert hem, you know we take the Adventure Path as base but we play as the bad guys. In fact i don’t know if this count as heavy modified or what but once took that 4E campaign from Keep on the Shadowfell to Prince of Undeath and make a complete campaign with parts of it and changing a lot of things. We have got some fun with modules 🙂
Still when we play modules an they are fun, we prefer what we do, it’s tailored for us, made for us and if its made for us is easy to blame someone for things you like and punch that person on the face 🙂
When I first started GM’ing for a new group, I wasn’t confident enough to build my own campaign and asked my usual GM for module suggestions. He recommended Sunless Citadel — at the time I was running 3.5e, so there was some slight conversion from 3e needed.
Once we got to the citadel proper I ran the module fairly straight and used pretty much all the content, but the first third of the campaign had the party searching around the starting town for clues, so I did end up inventing new content. Among this was a mini-dungeon inside of an abandoned farmhouse between the town and the citadel, where an orc had taken over as a place to breed dire rats.
I also ran the 5e version of Sunless Citadel for my usual GM’s group, to introduce the system. I also ran that straight, but this group did a lot less exploring and went right for whatever objectives the NPCs pointed them to.
There’s a lot less improvisation necessary in a highly-constructed dungeon environment. When the architecture of the space constrains player choice (let’s go left or right vs. let’s go anywhere in town) it becomes much easier to play it straight. It’s all part of the dance where the module “wants” you to do things its way, while you as GM want to wedge a few ideas of your own in there.
I run almost all of my games in custom settings. It’s just how I started gaming and how I’ll probably continue.
But I’ve used modules twice. The first time is my longest running game to date at five years and counting. It sticks pretty close to the module as written, but I’ve tweaked things here and there and the two players who have been there the whole time have put more thought into their characters than in almost any other game I’ve run.
The second time I ran module bits in between other custom bits as it was more of a sandbox. It was not quite as successful, but it’s still led to some great character interactions and it’s still going so we’ll see how it turns out.
In both cases though I have to admit that just being able to flip to the appropriate page and grab the necessary description of the scene or next plot hook is just so much easier than writing it all myself.
I guess that “pick it apart for my own sandbox” is the extreme end of using modules. At that point is stops being a “canned adventure” and becomes a useful resource, just like a bestiary or a spell list.
I helped playtest an adventure path. And for the person that created it, oh boy…
He and I did not get along.
We fought over things.
Things like bad design from my pov, player agency, and how you can and would anger players by playing against the way of things are expected in an adventure path. (Like having to be expected to play and memorize a super niche spell based on obtuse and bad wording. Confusion effects at super lower level that did not leave. Stat Drain, Mutations you could not fix.) and
how players, rather than the module being at fault..
Well, they’d take it out on the gm, and try to break the game, go off the rails, or ignore the plot.
I finally stepped out of trying to fight, it was to the point that feedback was a chance to savagely attack him and his vision, and little else. I was only doing my current gm who offered this a disservice in trying, and I respected him enough to not but things between that.
So I walked, thanked the gm for offering, and wished the rest well. I hope the module did well.
Oh man… I don’t know that I’d want to playtest my own stuff. The old ego gets in the way something fierce. I think that asking a friend to run and then report back with notes / a film of the playthrough would be much more useful. After all, you want to see how other people run with the words you’ve written, not how you imagine it’ll go in your own designer-head.
I’ve played (mostly just the beginning parts) of most of the 5e modules. In pretty much every case it was by the book. But still I could tell the difference between the GMs who were putting in effort and the ones that weren’t.
It’s very easy for example to tell a GM doing Hoard of the Dragon Queen straight out of the book with no adjustment. You can tell because they start you at level 1 like the module suggests and PCs die several times before you finish the first chapter. (You’d really think people designing their new system to make low CR monsters still relevant even at the high levels would realize throwing an actual entire army of them AND AN ADULT DRAGON at 1st level characters in their first module might not end well. shrug)
On the other hand was the person who ran CoS for a group I was in for over a year. They would frequently explain to us when the module was intentionally making a point of giving us a bad time, rather than let our morale drop because we were failing to make any progress on certain things without any clear reason why. And they let us do silly things like throw a holy relic around like a football so we could score a goal of protecting the town from vampires. I’m pretty sure that is not an intended experience in the module no matter how many variant paths its said to include. 😉
I have this crystal-clear mental image of the barbarian spiking the holy relic after a “touchdown” while the Cleric looks on in horror.
Thankfully that didn’t actually occur. Mainly because getting it to the priests was the touchdown. Also maybe because there wasn’t a barbarian in the party. =P
My group started with the 5e Starter Set adventure. Most of it was fairly by the book, though I did leave out some NPCs that the characters never interacted with, and they took a couple things a different direction than the writers probably intended. (Let’s make friends with the nothic, a goblin, and the
doppelgangernice drow lady!) I also wrote in an encounter, since they wanted to deal more decisively with the slaver network that was being established in the area.Now that we’ve finished the module, I’ve started taking the stuff that happened and branching out with it. They left some plot hooks that I can follow up on (a wizard, a flameskull, and a dragon have all successfully escaped them thus far), and there’s some plot hooks that arose from other stuff like character backstory/growth that should provide plenty of material (I believe I mentioned our barbarian wanting to make Gruumsh stop being a jerk in an earlier comment — should be a little trickier now that they’re currently dead and in Mechanus, but the rest of the group is working on that). Plus, there’s also just cool adventure ideas that I’ve wanted to run, and now that the campaign’s a little more free-form, it’s the perfect time to throw them in.
This right here. This is good GMing. You saw what your players were interested in, and you worked to make it interesting. That’s exactly how you go about expanding on a module. It’s also one of the reasons why oldschool crawls feature empty rooms.
YES! That’s exactly how those starter-modules are intended to be used. If you ever run a long-form AP, you can use that same kind of additive thinking as well, chucking your own ideas in between the pre-written stuff, or even replacing the pre-written stuff entirely.
My group just decided to skip level 16 of my megadungeon, and I’ve been having great fun scrambling to fill in a level’s worth of content.
I’m pretty fortunate, I think. My GM/roommate and my previous GM from before I moved are both great at running modules but also improvising additions that feel so setting-appropriate that a lot of the time we players don’t even realize what parts weren’t in the module.
As for me, I’m looking to amass some standalone modules to try and smoosh together into a story for an online group.
Godspeed! Sounds like you’ve got some great examples to emulate.
This seems like as good a time as any to mention a one-shot Pathfinder module that’s always puzzled me – The House on Hook Street. It has a neat aesthetic, with a combination of urban sprawl and the occult spirituism/psychic magic. It has a fairly convoluted backstory of different evil factions screwing each other over, and its Part 1 and Part 3 are both very good. But the weird thing is, it really feels like there was supposed to be a Part 4, but it didn’t get made. The villain who was manipulating the party the whole time stays hidden, achieves his objectives and acquires the artifact he was after. Part 3 has a bit where the party might notice the guy’s minions dredging the artifact out of the river, which seemed like it was setting up a showdown that didn’t end up happening. And there’s no sequel to the book or anything. I guess the GM could always make up stuff for a Part 4 using the materials in the book regarding the city and the characters, but it just felt a little obnoxious to force them to do that just to complete the story of this supposedly self-contained module. Anyways, that always bothered me.
I’m not familiar with that one, but it does sound like the module “wants” you to continue the adventure. I wonder if other GMs feel like that useful rather than frustrating?
I know that I’ve utilized that style at least once myself:
https://nerdtrek.com/mini-dungeon-the-broken-river/
That one ends with a “tunnels leading further into darkness,” and is very much a starter adventure. I wonder if it works better in short-form vs. long-form modules?
I’m just a smidge dense (as stone according to my friends) but what about the scene would be changed to fit the party? The dialogue? The antagonist’s race?
Elf Princess’s dialogue. It’s weird that she’s calling out “loathsome dragons” when the dragon party are the ones rescuing her.
Now, roll Diplomacy!
That aside, my usual group first started with only homebrew campaigns and it took quite a while until we picked up the first Pathfinder AP. While I insert a lot of new stuff into the campaign, sidequests and twist the action to fit the characters, I’ve never really try to stray from the core plot, since the group has specifically chosen the AP to experience said plot and setting of the AP.
I do like the freedom of full homebrew, but it is very heavy duty work. Argh, the workload on my Starfinder campaign…
Weirdly, I’ve used the freedom offered by the Dead Suns AP to play more Starfinders APs. I used “The Commencement” and “The First Mandate” to flesh out their connection to the Society itself.
Of course, this may be specific to my own interests. Since I write these sorts of things, I find it useful to have an excuse to study them.
The alt-text for this comic reminded me of something….
I had an idea a while back, which never came to anything, for an NPC dragon who is “the Ed Gein of dragons” and has all sorts of dragonhide stuff and dragoncraft items and would buy and sell such things
Well then. There’s the disturbing Google of the day. :/
Had you not heard of him? That murder case was the inspiration for just about every horror movie villain ever: Norman Bates from “Psycho”, Buffalo Bill from “The Silence of the Lambs”, Leatherface from “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, etc.
I’ve played and ran several modules.
My older brother ran me through X2 Castle Amber. He loved that module because it told him exactly what to say in each room. Needless to say, it was not the best experience.
I ran B2 (Keep on the Borderland), X2, and X1 (Isle of Dread) for my little brother. They were mostly by-the-numbers, but Isle of Dread got kinda weird when the party decided to start collecting dinosaur hides.
I have since run my children through B2, adding a kidnapping plot and some rituals in the chaos shrine. X2 I ran mostly by the numbers, but I adapted the descriptions to the party’s actions, and they got up to some wacky high-jinks. I expanded a lot on the Averoigne stuff too. X1 I added a zombie uprising and greatly expanded the “plot” of the central volcano. Plus my son’s paladin found his Sabre-toothed Tiger mount near the tar pits. >:-)
Modules work great when a little effort is made to adapt them to the party
To be blunt, up until this year, I have NEVER been involved directly in a module, except at the 4th ed launch celebration.
I think a lot of the stigma comes from really REALLY new GM’s running a module for their first venture out and not having a strong grasp on what it takes to run a campaign in general. In addition to all the rules knowledge (and will to put your foot down), a GM has to also socially finesse situations as the head of the table. The modules end up getting the bad wrap because the people at the table of the level 1 GM are probably not having fun and basically suffering through rookie blunders because they want to play.
I know that doesn’t sound nice, but when I think of my early GMing, it was a train wreck. If people are honest, I doubt anyone can say any different of their OWN early GMing.
I buy this argument.
Haha I’m actually playing in a module at the moment – Curse of Stradhm which I’ve never done before. We’re doing it as a filler between two campaigns while the DM works on her new setting.
It’s a lot of fun, provided the unending storm of clichéd tropes are properly lampshaded (my character, a woman plucked from modern times, makes a point of referencing a lot of pop culture horror/fantasy and is convinced the alternate plane she is stuck in is bound by laws of tropeyness).
But yes… Our dear dm has fallen to the laziness of running a module some times. She’s a great DM, but having all this set out makes it easy to not even try, and there’s a lot of “I have a text for this”. I’ve been acting up a bit. Last session we came upon a building – an old winery. I asked what it looked like, and the DM, a pittle embarasssed, said “There isn’t actually a description of it.”
No. No. NO. I immediately put on my DM hat and described off the top of my head – going on for a good minute – the weathered half-timber building with fading oaint in the plaster, sagging in on itself as it slowly succumbed to the damp that pervaded Barovia. I think the DM took it all in good humour, though I remain conflicted over whether I was helping out with scene setting, making a valid point that modules shouldn’t mean the DM slacka off, or just being rude…
My DM insists a criminal group from Dragon Heist is not supposed to be led by a teenage tiefling hunked out by some sorcery and an elven magic user donning a dress made of coins. Like some thug life poster couple.
She has also skipped some minor elements she feels disrupt the flow of the game, and changed other details and backgroungs. I feel like it’s a given, if a GM isn’t a total newbie and can interact well with the players. Premade modules are made by strangers, after all; they are bound not to fit every group’s tastes as is.