My gaming group consists of roughly 10 adults, each able to commit to any given gaming session only when the vagaries of their schedule allows. We run two campaigns at a time, taking into account the availability of two GMs and whichever player has a character who is a ‘hinge’ to the upcoming session. Sometimes, we cannot get a session of either campaign together but still have 3 or 4 players. In the last year or so, I’ve finally acknowledged that the only effective way to pull out some quick gaming when such an attendance squeeze arises is to pick a backup system and pull out a module.

Back in late 2021 I wrote about my first time running a module, something noteworthy only because it meant I had gone 20 years of gaming without ever running one. Now this wasn’t entirely true; I had run the Tomb of Horrors once during a gaming weekend but as I was a) running it for laughs and b) dispensed of much of the mechanics and ran the whole thing in Dungeon World, I think I have plenty of reasons for it to not really count.

Now, though, in the last two years I’ve run modules in multiple systems and had fun doing so. Good modules are both fun and easy to run and stand as master classes in how to run the system for which they’re written; they do things you didn’t think of and can even encourage improv that aligns with the module instead of working against it. Bad modules, of course, create more work for you, necessitating that you overwrite bad encounters and scratch out invisible walls that you just know your players will run up against. Of course, the existence of bad modules doesn’t invalidate the utility of good ones.

There are a lot of good modules out there, ranging from single session adventures to full-length campaigns. No matter my experience, though, I can’t shake my personal prejudice that running strictly from modules isn’t going to stack up against writing your own campaign, tailored to your players and their characters. Even if you run a campaign which is just back-to-back modules (much like Seamus did in our run of Star Trek Adventures), to really GM to your fullest, you need to go off-book and tailor to the group (…much like Seamus did in our run of Star Trek Adventures). I can’t deny the benefits of modules as part of your RPG diet, but at the same time I can’t present them as either necessary or sufficient for good GMing.

The Benefits of Modules

When modules work for you, it’s because of one of two reasons. First, they do the work for you, enabling you to run a session or several sessions with much less prep. Second, they inspire you, providing ideas and guidance on environments, encounters, and storylines you would have never thought of yourself. If the module is good enough, it can stand as an example of how to run the game it’s written for, which helps you as a GM in every subsequent session of the game you run, pre-written or not.

Unfortunately, there are multiple ways for modules to fail. Subjectively a module could just not suit your GMing style. Functionally they could be difficult to use, failing to copy stat blocks or adequately key maps and just generally being a pain. The module could just be boring, though it’s rare that you’ll accidentally get one of these. Finally, and most insidiously, the module could end up being un-fun in play, and unless you know the system inside and out, you won’t know until you’re running.

Back when I ran The Forest Primordia, my two-session jaunt ended with a thud for reasons I didn’t mention in the original review. I didn’t discuss this mostly because it was a consequence of how we ran through the module and what random characters were being played, and given that I didn’t necessarily think that what happened was directly a fault of the designer, at least at the time. That said, even if this encounter doesn’t make the whole module bad, it is a great example of a poorly written encounter (this example does contain mild spoilers for The Forest Primordia). When the party enters the Ziggurat, the main dungeon of the game, the first encounter they will have (it is not randomly rolled) is with d3+2 ‘Knights Automatic’. The stat block for the knights is in the adventure, and they are described as having grown weary of being the guardians of authority and order over the millennia. This is good. There is some depth to these creatures and multiple ways to approach them. However, the writing in the dungeon describes that the knights will automatically attack when characters enter the chamber. This is bad. Not only does it short-circuit the other mechanics Troika provides for expanding the encounter (like Mien), the only context given of the ‘Knights Automatic’ makes it highly unclear if this attack can be or should be reversed. And what happens if your characters actually stand and fight? They get housed. Especially if you roll high on the knight count, straight-up fighting the Knights Automatic is almost certainly a TPK, barring some very lucky rolls at character creation. The issue here is the writing and framing of this specific encounter; I first chalked it up to bad luck and the occasional extreme fatality in old-school style modules, but as I played more of them, in systems also known for being capricious and/or lethal (Mork Borg and Mothership), it became more clear that no, this particular encounter just wasn’t written well; it was a flat encounter against overpowerful enemies in literally a large featureless chamber. In rereading the module I can kind of see what the designer was going for, but also that modules I’ve run since are simply clearer and more generous with information for the GM and that I don’t need to give this encounter a pass. Even within The Forest Primordia most of the encounters were better, but broadly the module could have used more word count for everything (and given its linearity, probably could have been longer overall).

In contrast, when I recently ran ‘1000 Jumps Too Far’ out of the Hull Breach collection, I was very impressed. Without giving spoilers (or at least giving as few as possible), I can say that 1000 Jumps Too Far takes place on a starship and is structured around a timeline in which there are roughly half a dozen events of increasing severity. If the PCs do nothing, there is an extremely high chance that at the end of this timeline they will all die. What really impressed me about the module, though, is the large amount of thought and consideration given to the many different ways the characters can act against the predetermined set of events and change what is going to happen. It’s a delicious contrast between having many options and having all of them be difficult. There’s nothing particularly ‘easy’ in 1000 Jumps; the one time my PCs got into combat, someone lost a limb. They didn’t win the combat either; the doctor in the party put himself between the enemy and the (now downed) character and screamed that a doctor was more useful alive than dead. It worked.

In a way, this contrast shows the benefits of modules that I personally derive. The setting and characters of The Forest Primordia were interesting, and I still credit the module with giving me a better vibe for Troika than the core book did. That said, the setpieces (the hexcrawl and the dungeon) were not executed mechanically in a particularly inspiring or interesting way; if I had a small splatbook with just some setting material I probably could have produced the same result. 1000 Jumps provided a nicely structured clock-based adventure (even if it wasn’t literally structured as such) with a lot of flexibility and a lot of guidance when thinking about consequences. If I really had to boil it down to one difference, it would be that 1000 Jumps is a great example of what running a good Mothership adventure looks like, while The Forest Primordia had the vibes of Troika but didn’t use the mechanics to elevate it above any other OSR dungeon crawl. If you were to say that is more a criticism of Troika (being more vibes than mechanics, specifically) than of the module I would not disagree, but I personally think both readings are valid.

To reiterate, The Forest Primordia is not bad. 1000 Jumps is better, yes, but both of these modules work. Both enabled me to get gaming sessions to the table with systems I had nominal experience with in little time. And ultimately, that’s the standard in my view. If a module saves you prep time (it’s easy to run and doesn’t require any rework on your part), it’s ‘good’. Why, then, are there entire movements in tabletop roleplaying that give so much credit to their premade adventures? Is there any secret sauce of these designers that you can’t replicate at home?

Secret Sauce or Lack Thereof

I’m going to answer my above question immediately: No. As far as game design is concerned, the skills required to write good modules are the same as the skills required to run great sessions of any type. There are great designers who are producing great singular experiences in the form of modules, as well as great GMs doing exactly the same without publication. There are also great designers who are producing expansive, repeatable experiences in the form of complete games, and as a person who enjoys engaging with systems experience-driven games will always trump experience-driven modules for me. To continue using Mothership as an example, Mothership’s excellent GM advice and campaign structuring tools are way more interesting to me than any one of the modules in the game’s back catalog. As I’ve been saying, the modules I’ve played and read for Mothership have been great, this is not a criticism of their design. It’s more a statement that for the experiences I want, which are persistent and long-form campaigns with multi-faceted stories and characters, a game which lets you build and expand your own stories is infinitely more valuable than a single well-realized story. To add to that, I simply don’t believe that good adventures are out of reach of a good GM. If you run games well enough that your group wants you to come back and run again, you can write an adventure as good as at least 85% of designers out there. To the degree that adventure designers truly are capable of more than most home GMs, it’s going to be in writing and layout more so than narrative or encounter design.

This gets to one of the big problems with module catalogs as a whole. When I use Mothership as an example, I’m picking a game which has a fairly large library of superlative modules which have been identified and endorsed by the designers. If you buy Hull Breach or Gradient Descent or A Pound of Flesh, you have every reason to believe you’re buying something really good. If you Kickstart a random Mothership adventure, I do not know what you will get, and even with Mothership it’s still 50/50 that it will be unplayably bad. Mothership arguably has a very strong reputation regarding its third-party library, but it is still subject to Sturgeon’s Law. If you’re playing Fifth Edition D&D, it is that much more subject to Sturgeon’s Law. Even many of the first-party 5e adventures are painful to run, requiring extensive rework to get you away from unavoidable railroading, nonsensical quest triggers, and dead ends should your players show a modicum of creativity not presupposed in the book. And while not even all D&D players would be willing to claim the 5e adventure library is a high point in RPG module writing, that library still represents the exposure that the majority of roleplayers will get to pre-written adventures.

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Ultimately, I don’t have anything against pre-written modules. I’m actually really glad I’ve been using more of them, especially as much of the writing in newer module libraries like that of Mothership is very, very good. I’ve learned more about the OSR through running modules than any other way, though I’m sure some grog will tell me that Troika, Mothership, and Mork Borg ‘aren’t OSR’. What I will always be wary of, though, is holding up even great modules as some sort of unreachable standard. Running games is really not that hard, and the only reason it appears to be is because writing good documentation is a lot harder and many (if not most) games have poor GMing documentation. From that angle, I respect the good module writers; they are writing some of the documentation which lets all of us learn how best to use these games. When it comes to the adventure design itself, though, that’s just a part of GMing. A good module will give you ideas, a new perspective, and yes, a low effort few sessions of gaming. But being a good GM means writing your own adventures, for your own group, and your own story. Hopefully that’s not too old-school of a perspective.

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