I've been looking through my draft folder. This 'draft' was something that I'd left as just a title in 2013! Over 5 years ago. So I'm not sure what I was planning to write here, but it sounds like the gaming was good - we were in the middle of the Crown of Kings adventure for Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e, so I'm guessing I was planning to write about the Heroes' exploration of the fortress of Mampang.
It does, however, give me an excuse to recommend a couple of posts on adventure design and communicating information to players through the games master.
The first is actually a series of posts by Courtney Campbell of Hack and Slash on 'Gygax Design'. Actually, it doesn't hurt to start with 'On Gygax Design IV' which discusses the concision of early modules and compares this to the increasingly wordy adventures that came after. I'll let Courtney speak for himself - go and read his blog:
As I was saying the other day, one of the things that the OSR has done well is recover the idea that the purpose of RPG books is that they are useful.
The second post I'd like to recommend is on David McGrogan's Monsters and Manuals, and discusses the infodump, the fourth wall, and immersion in story and setting. It is related to Courtney's post, of course, in that it implies that as GMs (and, as adventure designers, even if only for ourselves) we need to think properly about the way in which we communicate. McGrogan is, of course, the creator of Yoon-Suin, an OSR setting which I think is a good example of a way in which information can be presented in a gameable way.
Oh god, seriously, the quotes kill me a bit on the inside. I feel like a lot of rpg material is thinly disguised fan fiction for games where the players are expected to act out the gm's movie plot. If there isn't a sandbox for the players to run off into if an adventure doesn't capture their interest some railroading might be occuring.
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