Modules and Adventures in Indie Design

[Ludovico_Alves]

This has been bouncing on my head since the last Fear the Black Dragon.

The Gauntlet is extremely industrious in terms of design, and has a substantial OSR crossover. OSR is responsible for some of the best modules and adventures of the last years and is very supportive of those.

Whoever, I am not familiar with many modules and adventures created within the Gauntlet spaces. I would love to hear if this is a perception bias, or a difference between how adventures and games are usually designed, or just that Gauntlet adventure/module creators funnel those towards Codex or other publications?

[shane]

There are definitely a number of adventures written by Gauntleteers published in Codex. There are ones for Into The Odd (or was it Black Hack?) , Macchiato Monsters, and Dungeon World.

[Dissonance]

I recently wrote a series of three Funnel modules for dungeon World and am just waiting on cover art to publish them to my itchio. They were a fun exercise to write and I’ve had a lot of fun running them at cons.

One issue that prevented me from doing them in the past: my artistic skills are minimal and the thing that often attracts me to a module is the art direction and layout.

[Jeremy_Strandberg]

I think that, historically, the “Indie Gaming”/Forge Diaspora scene has largely focused on making games that were super tightly designed, down to the level of “here’s the adventure that this game is designed to tell.” So, like, you don’t write a module for The Mountain Witch because the game is the module. If anything, you write a hack of The Mountain Witch set in (e.g.) the Wild West, and that’s less of a module and more a new game.

Plus, in games like Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts, so much of any given game is determined by the characters and their relationships and the contributions of the players in the moment of play that having a traditional module/adventure would chafe against the general nature of play.

Contrast that with the OSR scene, which has always been less focused less on the specific system and more on content than can be easily used with whatever OSR-ish system you want. That’s at least partly because the OSR ethos is about exploration and interaction with an environment, often a concretely defined environment (even if it’s concretely defined in play via random tables). Exploration requires interesting things to explore, so creating those things to explore is where the bulk of the creative impulse has been.

Which is not to say that Gauntlet folks haven’t been creating modules or adventures… as Shane points out, a lot of them are in Codex rather than published as individual modules.

[Julian]

A part of it is definitely about design culture. I agree with this:

Brandon Leon-Gambetta (bleongambetta)

[Thoobn]

Brandon’s advice is very good. I often struggle with PbtA games because there isn’t a game for every niche I want to fill. I think the best step in that direction is something like the Small Towns in Monsterhearts 2.

[Thoobn]

To me, modules are scenarios to play out, and in the case of Small Towns, I don’t think you need knowledge of Trad/OSR gaming to run one. It also helps that they’re in a single page.

[Mathias]

Yeah, I’m also struggling with when I wanted to use one… they are nice to read, at times. But most of the ones I’ve seen haven’t made me desperately want to play them.
Like, I’m thinking stuff like Small Towns, Dark Streets, November Metric… they are neat and potential inspiration mines but I’ve rarely been “I need to get this to the table”.
Unless it’s stuff that changes up major parts of the game… but that’s like supplement territory, like The Cold Ruins of Lastlife.

But maybe I’m still missing something?

[shane]

I think something to keep in mind is that different GMs and different tables are going to have different comfort levels when it comes to world/setting creation. This is both a general issue and something for newer GMs. As an example: I have never used Fronts. I would be super nervous about putting my own together. Having a set of fleshed out examples in an adventure/module/etc. would help me feel more comfortable if I were to run a game that needed them. (It’s a reason I really dig The Cold Ruins of Lastlife.)

I also want to followup on something @Jeremy_Strandberg noted astutely: Indie games are tightly coupled mechanics with very specific scenarios. I also think that part of the outcome of the whole Forge independent publishing idea was - everything was in one place - so you didn’t have to buy (and the publishers didn’t have to print) more stuff. (Note a lot of it was a reaction to big game companies putting out boatloads of stuff for people to buy - useful or not.)

On the other hand the OSR peeps had really slim bare bones pared down (likely home brewed) rule sets which they were likely using to run old (maybe out of print) modules or perhaps were designing their own modules and kicking out in zines.

PDF distribution and PoD publishing I think at this point mean we can DO ALL THE THINGS - we can have highly tuned systems and also have modules and people can freely choose how they want to make use of all the options.

[Jeremy_Strandberg]

I am not familiar with many modules and adventures created within the Gauntlet spaces.

Oh, man… I just remembered this treasure trove of Dungeon World Starters and OSR adventures written by Gauntleteers…

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByS4_7KbXro_RGxCZHpGakhUTG8

[Julian]

Yeah, I’m also struggling with when I wanted to use one… they are nice to read, at times. But most of the ones I’ve seen haven’t made me desperately want to play them.
Like, I’m thinking stuff like Small Towns, Dark Streets, November Metric … they are neat and potential inspiration mines but I’ve rarely been “I need to get this to the table”.

I think a part of that might be the way they’re presented/marketed. These collections (sometimes in the game itself like with The Veil: Cascade) feel tacked-on, the focus clearly isn’t on them, they’re not THE Gardens of Ynn, THE Dead Planet, THE Deep Carbon Observatory. My impression is that that also shows in the quality (or maybe it’s the other way around). For a recent campaign of Urban Shadows I insisted our GM use a city from Dark Streets and was surprised to see that it was basically just a map that they could’ve pulled from the web, very basic setting description stuff and little else. There’s some standout stuff in November Metric but it varies wildly and overall I was underwhelmed.

[Mathias]

That might be right. The way these games do their setup also discourages such strongly voiced/focused modules for them.

It’s almost like you can find that more in particular (sets of) playbooks. US and AW come to mind with playbooks that have huge repercussions on how a game will be. And I get the itch there, let’s play Apocalypse World with the Landfall Marine is a clear pitch for a game for me (or the Dragon in Urban Shadows, etc).

I feel like Forged in the Dark games might be a way better fit if you were to set out to write a module?
One of the weaknesses (and strengths) is finding that initial pitch as a group in Blades. “Yeah, a group of Bravos but what kind of Bravos?”, etc. and my best games have been when there was a strong vision for the crew present.
FitD games are still malleable enough and will always leave room for individual interests through the Downtime mechanics anyway.

[Haladir]

I’m still pretty new to indie and story games, coming from decades of play with rules-heavy RPGs like Pathfinder, which focus heavily on published modules. I’m really finding the openness and lightness of PbtA games to be liberating.

Others have already said this: Many narrative-focused games are about a very specific sub-genre, designed to tell a very particular story. I think it would be very hard to write a “module” for a game like Night Witches or Bluebeard’s Bride.

Module design is a very different animal for indie and story games. Usually, all you need are a page or two of notes, as opposed to a 32-page detailed step-by-step adventure. Modules for traditional RPGs tend to be very much on rails, and don’t really allow for the open exploration aspect of indie or story games.

I’ve managed to adapt the gist of traditional D&D/PFRPG modules to Dungeon World, for example, by re-contextualizing the plot of the modules as one or more Fronts, designing DW versions of monsters for the PCs to encounter, and pulling out two or three very important encounters from the module as set-pieces that I know the PCs will encounter at some point. Modules for the D&D family of games tend to have a lot of encounters that are there just to deliver XP, and aren’t related to the plot. These are very easy to cut. Basically, I translate a 32-page module into 3-4 pages of notes, then run the game.

[Ludovico_Alves]

It is the worst kept secret of the world that your average “Trad” module only has 10-20% of interesting, memorable content and it is the best thing ever to tear it apart and liberate those delicious juicy bits.

[SinisterBeard]

I wrote this, which is basically a module for Dungeon World: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/229121

I think a lot of it is because the railroady nature of a lot of old modules rubs up wrong against modern design, but man I miss supplements. I want my Dungeon World equivalent of Ravenloft, Eberron, Dark Sun. Those books were so inspiring.

[Bill_White]

The Patreon-supported Fate Worlds and Adventures line tries to apply the logic of module design to the sorts of bespoke game settings that indie games have favored. They’re not modules, exactly, in that they can’t be plugged into an existing generic fantasy campaign–they’re each their own unique thing. But they’re intended to be able to let you sit down and start playing with a minimum of GM preparation in the same way as a D&D dungeon module.

[Svalander]

I have put a lot of thought into this the last few years, mostly because I’m quite new to story games and spend most of (what’s left of) my spare time designing stuff. I have tried to work out a framework inspired by fronts and dungeon starters that fit into a narrative structure without removing the improv nature of story gaming and the character-centric player agency driving it. This because I do think that structure and improvisation and co-exist, and even create synergies.

While it is possible to write modules to story games, there is a trade-off; if you make pre-defined content (prep?) and aim for a larger audience, you risk making stuff that will never be used. And a module can’t, of course, cover everything. As a person who invests time in a game module to run it for friends, you risk finding yourself in a situation that you haven’t prepared for, regardless if you have a module in your lap or not. Is it worth the time to try to find out?

A few questions that come to mind when digging deeper into this is;

• What is the purpose of creating/using pre-defined content in a story game?

• Which way do you intend to use it? As inspiration, as a guide, or as perfect directions as written?

• How much of the content will be unexplored or unused?

• Do you have time and motivation to adapt or improvise outside the content when you find yourself in a situation you haven’t prepped for?

I the end I guess that what matters the most is how you work and how you approach ‘a thing.’ We have all different styles and ways to deal with content, context, and the unknown, and there are so many other personal aspects and preferences that affect your judgment and experience from it. Personally, I’ve always been something of an improviser, never using stuff precisely as written, as I like to tinker with things. When I see a thing, like a module, I almost always start to imagine what I could do with it on my own. So to me, a module is never a box I can’t go outside, or a perfect direction I must follow, but rather the basis of my own story.

My own project I’m designing uses a simplified narrative structure similar to that of a hero’s journey (impact/complication/respite/climax/epilogue) but is described and meant to be used as a smorgasbord the Gamemaster can pick anything from. I use the similar setup when I run a game; I want outline what I want to happen, but allow for any type of player interaction to turn that around if the fiction dictates it. Just because an event is planned, doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be executed in the fiction. I’m not sure it will work for the broad mass, but my hypothesis is it will support both linear and more open and improvisational play. I would love to hear what your opinion on this is.

[Jmstar]

440 Fiasco playsets and counting.

[ErikTheBearik]

A bit of salt here, but I’ve noticed some people get mad if you try to write a module for a game that purports to be low-prep, and since many Indie games insist that they’re low-prep… you get the idea.

[jesseross]

Trophy’s Incursions were designed to fill the same role as modules in D&D and OSR games: drop-in settings and stories for the GM who needs to fill a gap or who wants a framework for the session. And like modules, they’re also meant to be simple and standardized enough that GMs can easily make their own without having to invent a new game.