All I Ask is a Tall Ship ...

Though I have written long and viciously about the proliferation of pre-written modules for DMs, and why it weakens the game, I have written a module myself and I have put it up for sale.  Does that make me a hypocrite?  My critics would argue yes.  Most of my supporters would admit, yeah, it's a fair call.  And still ...

I could write another for-purchase module.

Here's how I could justify it.

We hear a lot of reasons why DMs buy modules.  It's easier than making an adventure.  It saves time.  The modules are good.  They're better than I could make.  They give me good ideas.  There are so many, they depict things I would never have thought of.  I love the floor plans.  The players prefer modules.  Modules create a shared culture inside the role-playing community.

On the surface, I don't have any problem with any of these reasons.  We buy many things for the sake of convenience and to save time.  For the most part the modules probably are as good or better than most adventures a DM could make for themselves without a few years of practice.  Anyone, including me, can get a good idea from a module ~ though in truth, a good idea can be gotten from anywhere.  The floor plans are pretty nifty.  Players raised on modules, familiar with modules, do prefer them ... the same way you prefer the ice cream from that shop you knew when you were just a little kid.  There's no question that the shared community is alive and strong; if I say Bree-Yark, just about every reader on this blog knows the reference perfectly.

Apart from the brief smile that passes, I'm not sure what that accomplishes, but I accept it.  Even better, you can search for the module of your choice on Reddit (or elsewhere) and feel instantly at home sharing your experience.

On a deeper level, however, I have doubts.  I see why players might prefer them viscerally, but why would a DM?  Yes, we have the benefit of time saved, but once we've read through the module in preparation to run it, where's the satisfaction?  We get the pleasure of watching the players go through it, but that's a second-hand experience; and what of it?  We didn't make the module, so when they get to the end and they've had a great time, what exactly does that say about us?

There's an original series Star Trek episode, The Ultimate Computer.  The M-5 Multitronic computer system is installed in the Enterprise to see if a computer can run a star ship, and after an initial test in which the computer wins a battle simulation against opponents, Star Fleet sends Captain Kirk a message: "Our compliments to the M-5 unit and regards to Captain Dunsel."  That message is annoyingly cut out of this clip, but the answer to the message is included.  McCoy asks, "Dunsel?  Who the blazes is Captain Dunsel?"  Kirk, affected, leaves the bridge and Spock explains after he's gone, "Dunsel, Doctor, is a term used by midshipmen of the Star Fleet Academy.  It refers to a part that serves no useful purpose."

Okay, now, calm down.  I get it.  As a DM, we are not just tapping out the module code for the players to react to.  We're adding our own flavor to the module, we're changing and adjusting the module to fit our game world or the specifics of the campaign, even the specific needs of the characters.  We're definitely serving a useful purpose.  We are not a dunsel!

I agree.  But ... then what is the module, precisely?  Training wheels?

See, if you find pride in the use of the module from you're take on the material, the way you spin the adventure, the changes you make ... and you bristle at the notion that reading off a description of a room word-for-word makes you a dunsel ... then aren't you a little mixed up?  Why not make all of the module?  Why not enjoy the pride for having written every single word?  Otherwise, why not just coast and read the module as is, and enjoy that being a dunsel took less work and ended up satisfying your players anyway?  Hey ... they like pre-written modules.

And so do you.

See, I think this argument is at the core of the issue, but I don't think that it IS the issue.  Whether you think of yourself as a dunsel or not, whether you reacted viscerally to the metaphor, thinking that I was going to chastise you for being a dunsel if you bought a module (I'm not) ... none of that is the point.  The point is that as a DM, you like the module just as much as the player does.  It is your greedy little fingers flipping the pages at the game store, or after you've bought it, as the module DMs you with its dazzling cleverness and marvelous floor plans.  The module is your chance to be a player, an opportunity that is constantly stolen from you every time you have to gather your group together and be a DM.

Thinking about it, I believe this is perhaps the real reason for the module's popularity.  My experience has been that the players just don't care.  I've run a couple hundred players of every kind through all sorts of adventures, none of which came out of a module and I never had a player complain that the adventure wasn't up to snuff ~ even back at the beginning when I was really bad at making adventures.  When I used to play a lot, and the DM had invented something, no one complained.  Look around the internet ~ do you hear a lot of players complaining, "Wow, the DM made his own adventure and it was really shit.  I'm never playing with that DM again!"

I'm sure it happens.  But I don't see long pages on Reddit expounding on the experience.  Yes, if you need to, feel free to link one; that doesn't make it common.  I've been hunting on the internet for D&D crap for 20 years and I have stumbled across it, so even if you have, it's still damn rare.

On the other hand, I'm sure I could find an example of DMs gabbling about the "great modules" and what modules we ought to buy pretty easily.  It is a major source of amusement.

How could I justify writing a module for coin, even though I spit on modules?  I'm a DM.  I run games.  And if you're a DM buying a module from me, from my perspective, that is just me running you.  What you do with the module afterwards, whether you ever use it in a campaign, doesn't matter.  We've had our DM-player moment and my conscience is clear.

Would I respect you if you bought my module?  Hm.  That's tricky.  I tell you honestly, I would respect you a helluva a lot more if your bought my module and wrote to me to say you will never run players through it.  If you wrote to tell me you used the module ro run players, and told me the players liked it, I'd be pleased. I like when players enjoy a game that I've DMed.

But in that second case ... sorry to admit it, but ... my regards to Captain Dunsel.

I'm not a hypocrite.  I just see the whole board.

I suppose that what I need to do is figure out how to write a game module that a DM can play, that can't be used to run players.  That way, I get to stick it to those people who call me a hypocrite and I could still run the game through the medium of writing.

Might be a way.

I'm Broken

The website reads,

"Thanks to the hard work of our 2015 D&D Extra Life team and the generous donations of fans, we’ve made available a detailed, high resolution of the northwest corner of Faerün."

There's a map on the website, but it's not a good resolution, so I found one:

Just in case, here's a link.

I came across this while looking up stuff on the previous post ... and I just have to say.  What the hell?

Oh, it's pretty and all, nice artwork, not the kind I can do.  Then again, I wouldn't have room for art having decided to put information on the map instead!

I wonder if there are more than a thousand words on the whole thing.

But then, the gentle readers are all familiar with the two hundred modules represented by this thing, so that's enough.  And it is basically a poster.

I love maps.  I've spent my whole life studying them, drawing them, researching them, living by them.  I can kill an hour travelling with a road map from a gas station.  But this ... this bores me.

I must be broken.

Wooden-Headed Design

The following is content from the 5th edition adventure, Rise of Tiamat:

"The Order of the Guantlet shares the Harpers' dedication to justice and equality, but their methods and attitude are quite different.  Bearers of the gauntlet are holy warriors on a righteous quest to crush evil and promote justice, and they never hide in the shadows.  Evil must be opposed openly and vanquished in the light of day, so that all can see and be emboldened by its destruction.

"Members of the order are driven by religious fervor and by devotion to the principle of justice for all.  Whether a member places more emphasis on one or the other of those ideals is an individual choice.  Camaraderie and esprit de corps run high within the order, and an individual member will risk anything to save a fellow member or to complete an important mission.

"The Order of the Guantlet is a young organization, and it is eager and restless for action.  It does not take orders from any government or temple, although the opinions of holy figures are greatly esteemed within the order.  When evil threatens, the gauntlet strikes."

 So ... many ... cliches.

Believe me, the whole adventure is written like this, at least as much of it as I could stomach.  I haven't read a splatbook in a long, long time ... but I can see from this example that they have gotten, oh gawd, so much worse.  This is the level of writing they once reserved for 5-cent pulp novels in the 1940s.

Yet let's put aside the rather hilarious over-the-top dramatics of the piece.  And let's put aside the four or five actual discontinuities in the text (they're righteous, but with fervor, that is based on principles, that are open to individual choice, while the opinions of holy figures are only "esteemed" and not necessarily obeyed - oh yeah, bring it on!).

I only want the reader to consider the actual usefulness of the text.  Apart from depicting some clearly confused fanatics who are certain to listen to nothing the party tells them, what flesh has the writer added to the bones of these wooden soldiers?

The actual purpose of the Order is made clear in the next paragraph, which explains to the DM how to use them.  It is written,

"Before the final battle, members of the order make interesting NPCs for roleplaying encounters because of their outgoing ways and strong opinions.  Sharing a roadside inn with twenty paladins from the Order of the Gauntlet, or joining their march for a few days when headed in the same direction, should be a memorable experience."

Oh, I'm sure.

Our purpose, then, is to describe the Order as an entity that cannot be reasoned with, that in turn permits the DM to be a profoundly unreasonable asshole while role-playing.  Fun for the whole family.

I'm sure a lot of content-starved players have enjoyed their happy experience with the Order.  I would find it contrived, flat and two-dimensional.  I would see within a second, perhaps two, that I was being jerked around by the DM and the adventure.  These are real people, with real thoughts and feelings.  They're not dynamic because there's no possibility of change.

Unless, of course, half the details painstakingly given in the text are just ignored.  They're not suffering from religious fervor; they are willing to admit that "crushing evil" and "justice for all" are somewhat inconsistent policies.  Evil might possibly outlast the Order, despite all the Order's efforts.

Because, see, if it is possible the Order won't succeed, and an individual of that Order is kept awake at night thinking about it, that's very interesting.  It is much, much more interesting to have a conversation with a member of the Order who is having a crisis of faith, who doesn't know for certain what the right action is, who could conceivably reason and plan with the party in a meaningful sense, instead of a lot of shouting dull, absolutist fanatic phrasing that, let's admit, we can hear at any Klan rally.

I wouldn't expect the WOTC to get that ~ it is fairly clear that their "Sword Coast" agenda is systematically geared to destroy creativity and replace it with bland, mindless mediocrity.  I was somewhat repulsed to open the Store link on the website where it read, "Greetings Citizens of Eberron."  Not, for example, "Players of D&D."  Um, no.  Last week I called us a cult and, apparently, we are.

One Step Closer

I am steadily outlining the interior of Ternketh, the harpy keep, as a proper module.  I will be making this project available in a short time.

UPDATE:

As promised, I've taken down the teaser that was in this space.  I will be making the announcement on the blog in the afternoon.  I am tidying up details.  I will keep the reader posted.

Cruel, But Most Entertaining for the DM

The title of this post is a quote from Gary Gygax, talking about the famous module pictured on the right.  And while I have the author's words to describe this sort of adventure, let me quote them:

"Another nadir of Dungeon Mastering is the 'killer-dungeon' concept.  These campaigns are a travesty of the role-playing adventure, for there is no development and identification with carefully nurtured player personae.  In such campaigns, the sadistic referee takes unholy delight in slaughtering endless hoards of hapless player characters with unavoidable death traps and horrific monsters set to ambush participants as soon as they set foot outside the door of their safe house.  Only a few of these 'killer dungeons' survive to become infamous, however, as their participants usually tire of the idiocy after a few attempts at enjoyable gaming.  Some lucky ones manage to find another, more reasonable, campaign; but others, not realizing the perversion of the DM's campaign, give up adventure gaming and go back to whatever pursuits they followed in their leisure time before they tried D&D."

Gary Gygax, Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 92 

Well.  If this were any other individual - a politician, say, or the teacher of children . . . or a television evangelist caught fucking three virgin boys in an Alabama motel room - there'd be no hesitation for the reader to shout epithets about the person's hypocrisy, willingness to prostitute themselves, obvious collapse of moral virtue or value and so on.  But this is a game designer - so of course there are really good reasons for both these opinions to stand side by side without the reader's head exploding.  Gygax was just having fun when he perpetrated the sadistic perversion (his words) on the right; alternately, he was just paying lip service to the establishment when he wrote the stick-up-his-ass sermon on the left.

It depends on what sort of bullshit we want to defend.  For example, that Gygax was something other than a strutting, self-important demagogue who chanced into a good thing he didn't actually invent.  Or we could argue that he wasn't a vindictive bloated narcissist who realized after the release of the DMG that he answered to no one and "Fuck you, I'm writing this."

Sometimes I think a particular kind of success encourages the emergence of a particular kind of "do-it-my-way" braggart, whether or not that braggart deserves any of the notoriety he has.  Would Roddenberry have been anyone without D.C. Fontana and a host of other great writers?   Are we really sure the first Star Wars wasn't saved because there were those around him who had the power to make Lucas stop and listen?  It's clear what happens when those people don't exist.

So we come to the other argument: that Gygax didn't write either the left hand thing or the right hand thing - he just slapped his name on one or the other, explaining away either the sanctimonious prattling or the fucking piece of shit module.

Yes, yes, yes . . . yes, I know you like the module, but even you know you can't love both Gygaxes here.  If someone likes what's on the left, that's pretty much going to make the right-side shit, nyet?  After all, for those of you who love the Tomb of Horrors, the left side is pretty much shit, isn't it?  You have to try to see this thing from more than just your side.

Then there's the possibility that Gygax wrote neither.  In which case, why does anyone give a fuck about him?

Let's try to embrace a little reality.  Either he's a liar, he took credit for other people's work, he invented whatever shit he wanted to fall off his pen or out of his mouth from moment to moment or he was a complete DICK.  There are no other choices that fit the evidence.

Even if you really, really, really, really want there to be.

Let's Talk About Semantics & Other Things

Many, many times I have slammed modules on this blog, and the people that use them.  Yet, of course, I understand that most people do not 'use' them ... they steal rooms, notions, maps, monsters, etc.  What's more, I'll confess right here and now that I did the same thing for many years.

I do not believe that I ever ran any party I've had through a module start to finish.  The closest would have been the Keep on the Borderlands, which I bought along with everyone else back in the very beginning of my playing days.  Even then, running the party through as far as they got (long time ago, I don't know when that was, but they never made it past the lower monsters, goblins, orcs and so on, before we got bored and moved onto other things), I had to adjust treasure.  Treasure was ridiculous on that thing.  You'd kill seven orcs and there'd be a +1 sword, as well as 1,000 g.p. worth of jewelry and gems ... and then the next room would have twice as much.  And this was a module associated with the same guy who in the DM's Guide wrote against 'Monty Haul' games.

For those gentle readers who do not remember the 70's, Monty Hall was a sleazy looking game show host for a long running show called "Let's Make a Deal" - also famous for the Monty Hall problem (which, I admit, I still can't make sense of in my head - someday I'll kidnap a mathematician and keep him locked in a cell until he explains it in a way I can understand).  The game show was very big for its time, and famous for giving a lot of stuff to people that were, basically, extraordinarily dumb folks who didn't deserve shit.  At the time Gygax coined the term, Monty Haul, it would have also incorporated the idea that the party getting all that treasure loot had not earned it.

But I digress.

Suppose we try to break down the module into that which is stolen, and that which can be ignored.  Images are always compelling, both for showing the party and also for inspiring the imagination.  A particular magic item, or something ornate, as well as a wide host of things that fall under the heading of 'toys' can be used in any personally-created adventure.  Traps are good.  Puzzles too.  The arrangement of rooms, as well as any kind of floorplan, can be used more than once.  The motivations behind an NPC's action is good, that can be translated elsewhere.  In fact, virtually any element of the module can be stripped and reused, like tearing a building empty of its guts in wire and other metal pieces until all that's left is broken concrete, plasterboard and old wood.

The real wasted part of the module comes down to two things: the railroad, where A must be done before B is found that makes C work, opening the door to D and monster E with treasure F; and the 'mood.'  The mood, of course, would be the module's author trying their own distinctive emotional perspective of the tone or attitude that the module is supposed to be run with.  The mastubatory part, if the reader will, that the writer really likes, and virtually everyone else ignores.

Now, defined, the word "adventure" is a bold, usually risky undertaking, a hazardous action of uncertain success and outcome.  This is something I see being totally and absolutely under the control of the DM.  The DM ought to know the world being run, ought to know precisely what sort of adventure that world needs, and ought to be able to invent the adventure that is needed.  To keep with the building analogy, the materials that are stolen from the module serve to create a space in which business can be performed - but the actual business itself is not created by the builder, but by the business owner.  The builder can take instructions and shape the space for the owner, but the builder shouldn't tell the owner the owner's business.

Trying to incorporate a railroad or mood into a host of source material that is going to be demolished and reworked to suit the owner operator - the DM - is a waste of time.  Or more to the point, it is a self-indulgent waste of time, for the module builder that wants you, the buyer, to get really excited about the builder's building, rather than in the actual business that is being run there.  Builders have always wanted this.  Most of the time, people just don't care.  The only reason they ever go to that building is because the place they want to buy from happens to be there.  The owner relates to the building, but if the builder was more concern with being showy and impressive than in actually just providing a well-designed, organized space, what the owner thinks of the building is, "I goddamn hate this place, and I look forward to the day when moving is practical."

I have been both building my own buildings and running my own businesses inside them for a long time now, and getting my source material not from other fantasy module creators but from deeper, more compelling sources, like religious studies, fiction of every stripe, modern events, human nature and my own twisted take on virtually everything.  If I really need source material, there's always time to investigate into some core works like Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, Spenser's the Fairy Queen, anything by Shakespeare, Coleridge or Alexander Pope, some great source books I have for general trends in world history, Herodotus, Thucydides, Suetonius and Plutarch, Barbara Walker's great fictional sourcebook, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, any encyclopedia, Google Books, the internet and an ordinary newspaper.  The idea that ideas are scarce and hard to find is really just evidence of an imagination that needs a kick in the ass.  Appendix N?  More like, Appendix Life.

I don't want to co-opt the word 'adventure' and use it to describe organized source material.  The 'adventure' is the business part, and should be left in the hands of the DM running their own business.  I'd prefer to keep my nose out of that.  However, there is an issue with all the source material in the world, in that it's really cluttered and scattered, and therefore not particularly cohesive.  Cohesion is a process, and one that is worth being paid for.  So where I think of creating some kind of source material for a campaign, what I am thinking of is the cohesion of a lot of source material so that it is juxtaposed conveniently for the business' use.  The building of the building, with a lot of empty space, good hookups, terrific lighting and convenience to local services, transport and suppliers.

Personally, I'd love to do that sans imagery.  I'm not an artist, and that means the choke point for any book containing fantasy/fictional source material is going to be finding an artist that a) has my work ethic; b) has my perspective on how work is first created and THEN sold; and c) is able to produce in any style that's needed.  That's not always easy.  Artists typically want money up front for work they haven't done yet (often all the money), which only makes them the most annoying unregulated contractors in the universe.  At least if I give money up front to the cabinet maker who's going to rebuild my kitchen, I know that someone is looking over the contractor's shoulder, and that licences have been obtained and fees paid.  But an artist ... artists don't answer to anyone, they don't respect anyone (unless they're a better artist, in which case they are silently hateful, also), and most really don't believe that there's another knowledge in the world that matches their own special snowflake derived mind-sets.

I can work with musicians, sound techs, printers, designers, actors, costumers, writers, editors, poets and dancers ... but artists are a whole different mind-set.

If the reader tells me that I can produce a book of source material without the need to suck up to an artist, I will be deliriously happy.  Unfortunately, that's probably not the case.  I have engaged an artist recently to do the front cover, and we get along great ... and I pitched the idea of working on a series of sourcebooks together, but ... I don't have an answer on that.  I can't afford to pay up front for 10 or 11 pieces per source books, so I need an artist that is willing to work for the possibility of profit - like every other craftsworker, including myself.  We'll just have to see.