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1 July 2022
Bryce bought these adventures and reviewed them so we don't have to.
Seemingly, the tenfootpole author is a centrist. It's good. Many "oldschool" people in the hobby are, well, at the very least sexists, and a prominent obsession with the word "race" in the hobby, together with the word "demihuman" makes you question "is it even worse". No, really, humans die like flies, while elves prevail. Perhaps, humans are demielves? How are naga and some bird-human "monster races"? What's their species? "A monster"? Gladly, the tenfootpole author is a moderate guy, likely a punk. So we, woke people who see the difference between species and races, can read his stuff without cringing, despite a generational pit trap between us.
Either way, his blog is of great use for the hobbyists because he reads, reviews and runs more adventures than most. This means that his reviews are informed, balanced and pragmatic, respectively. So, in this post, while leaving matters of taste out of the scope, I'm going to try and list the things that he thinks are important to writing a good and practical module. I think that these things predict how good the adventure module is. If you're too lazy to read the whole review, here's a bullet list summary for you:
You can use this list as a drinking game while reading a new post at tenfootpole.
I find it very important that tenfootpole blog is big on _evocative language_. Consider a Referee prepping for a session or running it. If you have dull and generic descriptions in your module, or worse, a complete lack of features, the Referee has two ways to proceed.
Obviously, both options kind of suck. At least they leave a bitter taste in the mouth of the Referee who certainly didn't buy an adventure module to do creative writing. So, what sort of writing do adventure authors have to produce?.. Well, evocative. The kind of writing that make Referee easily understand the nature of an environment, an NPC, blah blah blah, and will make the players gasp in awe. It's hard to nail, but at the very least, adventure authors should write descriptions of stuff in such a way that the Referee is filling in the blanks without them knowing they're filling in the blanks. Evocative writing turns on the imagination of a Referee, and switches their brain into that story-telling mode, letting them improvise some amazing make-belief, while still providing rigid support and direction for the continued suspension of disbelief.
Another thing that I like about Bryce's reviews is the notion of interactivity. An interactive challenge or environment is one that facilitates the discovery of facts about the environment through interaction, rather than narration. I wrote down some examples that hopefully will deliver the point well.
Non-interactive:
You see arcane runes slotted into the wall. Make a DC 15 Intelligence check.
Interactive:
You remember these symbols from a book on pocket dimensions. Let's see if Mialee was a good student. Roll a DC 15 Intelligence check.
Then, when they pass, we'll give them some auxiliary information that will enable a character to side-step or hack the challenge. For example, by dropping the knowledge that the barriers like this are more of a safety measure against people accidentally wandering into dangerous pocket dimensions and thus, can be dispelled. But even if they don't succeed, we can and should have the secret door into a pocket dimension "react" to other interactions. Maybe they try to poke the runes out and reshuffle randomly? Maybe they try to press the runes as buttons? Maybe they destroy some runes? Let them and, most importantly, let the Referee figure out quickly what should happen, in general. There's a reason why something is a challenge, right? Nobody wants purposeless filler. I quit a campaign once because of purposeless filler and have no regrets.
Non-interactive:
Your character feels an eerie sensation as they enter the room.
Interactive:
As you pass through the doorway, you feel a tingling sensation in the palms of your hands.
Maybe the party is nearing a den of the lightning beast. Perhaps, there's a window with metallic bars that allows you to peer into a study of the perished beast keeper. Perhaps, the bars shock the character with static lightly. Let the players explore this condition, simulate symptoms of anxiety if you're into it, but let the player sort their character's emotions out. It's up to the Referee to ensure that the game has stakes, no adventure will make players connect with their characters; but if there are, the players will feel things on their own, and so will their characters. But the key to that is interactivity.
Non-interactive:
Roll DC 20 investigation to trace the chains and understand that releasing a jammed wheel will lower the floor in the previous room and tightening it will raise the floor there.
Interactive:
In Room A, discover hollowed floor.
Under the ceiling of the corridor leading to Room B, discover grooves.
Shine the light into the grooves to discover somewhat tense chains.
In Room B, discover a jammed wheel that will unwind if unjammed.
Now the party can lower the floor and go to the lower level, but also, by interacting, they can apply sufficient force to the wheel in the reverse direction to raise the floor and get the treasure! This may be obvious for some, this may be overlooked by others, but this is what makes what we do "a game, not an activity". Thoughtful play matters.
You get the idea. If something is non-interactive, then why is it there? Because AAA game design teaches us that providing rich backdrops is important? For pixel hunting? Fuck that.
I'll keep dropping examples because inertia exists. And also it's kinda appropriate to talk about specificity specifically, you know. In an upcoming adventure "The Hour of Unity", about a fantasy cease-fire conference I'm co-authoring with my friend ixahedron, there's a faction, which would rather keep the war going. The creative requirement for such a faction is dictated by the story itself. We want conflict and the lowest-hanging fruit while designing a cease-fire conference is to drop in a faction that doesn't want the fire to cease. So far so good, but it's kinda not fleshed out. We can't simply restate a creative requirement in the text of the adventure and call it a day. This is the first time we face specificity. If we simply say "the people of the Molten Spear are pro-war", it doesn't contribute anything to the Referee running the session. We need to be more specific! So we develop a backstory. I like to chain the question "why?" a bunch of times, just like the management mystics do, cargo-culting Taiichi Ohno. Oh no.
Anyway, as I answer the question "why?" a bunch, I flesh out that Molten Spear people are pretending to be neutral pacifist traders, but in reality, they sell weapons en masse in secrecy to all sides of the conflict, including special deliveries of alchemist's fire to the highest bidder. I flesh out the highest bidder and understand who in each faction has access to this "dark secret". I end up with a ton of information nobody cares about. Boo-hoo.
It doesn't matter how to achieve meaningful specificity, but you have to. Very often adventure authors come up with some smart plot twist or an interesting (to them) dynamic between NPCs or factions only to include nothing but its existence into the adventure. It leaves the Referee guessing how to implement that broad-stroke-of-genius.
But yeah, we probably have more information than needed in form of a draft of a backstory. Tenfootpole hates backstories. I love backstories. It's a matter of taste, but there is no doubt that they're useless for running an adventure. This is why the final step of specificity is to reduce the backstory to concrete interesting facts, preferably evocative. I call this procedure "folding a backstory onto itself". This is another criterion, called "terseness", which goes hand in hand with good formatting. A list of bullet points or an easy-to-read table would be a good medium. Before we talk about what the tenfootpole blog says about the presentation in more details, let's dissect what the tenfootpole says about the backstories.
So what's the nature of tenfootpole hatered of backstories? I think, he wants the players to understand facts about the world from interacting with it rather than listening to NPCs. Let's have a look at a quote from the blog.
Giant Worker Ants live in the big anthill. Everyone is terrified of the ants coming back like they did around 10 summers ago. That's a real encounter. The 10 summer shit is nonsense, there's no way to communicate that without a hint beforehand about it, but, also, very evocative if you COULD work it in. I'm down! Very old school!
I think when he says "very evocative if you could work it in", he has in mind more of an encounter where a peasant thinks that something is a Giant Worker Ant and gets scared shitless. (Whereas in reality, it was just a shadow of four halfling carrying a plate armour for their half-orc buddy). What he doesn't mean is some bullshit like the village elder complaining about the ants hitting their village 10 summers ago all of a sudden. Either way, that's very in line with my concept of "folding backstories".
But I'd argue that even a slightly wordy, unfolded backstory is better than some non-specific trash like this passage from a 3E module "Lord of the Iron Fortress":
Any chaotically aligned character on Acheron feels uneasy at all times, as if out of sync with the surroundings. This is due to the plane’s mild law alignment.
Alright, let's conclude by briefly discussing the formatting. It's rather obvious what tenfootpole blog considers to be important from the following excerpt:
The adventure got some **good specificity** in places and keeps things relatively **terse**, especially for a 5e adventure. And doubly especially for the first adventure the designer has written. A little more **attention to bolding** and a few other details would help shift in to a journeyman effort.
Why do you want terse, keyworded and specific items? Because, as I mentioned, a Referee, no matter what is their skill level, is running your adventure under stress. They need to be able to swiftly look up anything important for the story by just scanning your module, not reading it. As a matter of fact, I'll make sure to playtest all the stuff I'm making by giving a Referee the module 10 minutes before the session and asking them to run it. If the session is worse than an average 5E session (which is pretty bad), then the adventure's formatting is likely trash.
I guess that's it, I hope this review (or rather a survey) of the tenfootpole blog will be helpful for someone. I hope I was diligent enough in distilling Bryce's method of reviewing adventures, without talking or thinking about the preferences. I mostly dislike the sort of stuff Bryce seems to like, but here's what is great about tenfootpole:
You don't have to agree with the author to get value of the review.
Did I miss something? Am I wrong about stuff? Hit me up over E-Mail if you have some feedback at jm † memorici † de.