Third-Party Book Club: How To Write Adventure Modules That Don't Suck

0:21 Hello, Egg podcast for role players and gms to help level up your game. We are Dungeon Masters. I am Jason Portiso, I'm Joe McCall, and I am Jim Crocker. So today we are going to continue a series we started last month. This is the Third Party book Club, you know, kind of behind the scenes here. We relocated to my office to record for today, and I'm staring right at my my my personal library and a lot of third party stuff in here. Yeah, so this is this is this is a fun one. This is I think where you can really a branch out. We're gonna do that episode on like what to buy and when and like how to how to flesh out your library. We'll do that one really really soon to be books that are just not published by Watts exactly. Yeah, sore. There's some really common third party publishers like Coobol Press is probably the biggest one, the most prolific for sure, definitely. Yeah, I mean seeing the Game Masters books and the actually really popular two. Yeah.

1:12 Took a took a little trip around Target yesterday. Yeah, you know, just a little bit of a lap around Target with a coffee and four later and we were under one hundred. I mean, we were very close to one hundred, but we were under one hundred, right, right. But I saw the game Master's book, saw a couple of them. Which ones did I see villains? Is that a newer one? I think that's the newest. Yeah, so I almost picked it up. It was thirty percent off of target. So I saw the book of Villains and yeah, with the other one, I might have been random encounters. The random account was one was really good. It was a Dungeons. I thought, I thought you had the Traps one too. I have traps at home, but this is what I saw at Target. Okay, gotcha, And so I almost picked up the villain Villain one. I thought that was really neat.

1:56 We'll cover some of those books on more. Tho. I love that you're the six about it, because then maybe you can lead one. But yeah, but we can. We can go ahead and do a book report on that one soon. Today though, we're doing a little bit different book and I wanted to get this one done because last time we did this, we did the Lazy DMS Guide and that was one that's like, you know, it's like a must have for DMS too to have in their collection. This one is a little more optional in my opinion, and we'll kind of get into what it is and why I think that. But today we are talking about how do The book is called how to Write Adventure Modules that Don't Suck. I think we all want to do that. I mean, it's yeah, this is the concept that we all want to have with us. This is published by by Goodman Games, and it is it is twenty five authors in there, so I'm not going to list them all, so we're just going to say it is good. I guess the thing we should the thing we should say about Goodman Games is that they publish kind of a like a D and D adjacent game called Dungeon Crawl Classics that has literally hundreds of dungeon modules associated with it that are like that you could convert to five E without too much difficulty. I mean, technically, it's its own system that's kind of like sort of a you know, like I mean, it's like a very traditional F twenty sort of thing. That's the game that uses all those weird like seven sided dice and sixteen sided dice smallest kind of stuff, and that's a lot of fun and it has a very kind of pulp you know, like like appendix En sort of sort of feel to it. But this, even though like it's it's published with their game, their dungeon crawl classes

3:29 game, in mind, everything that's in there is applicable to you know, your your ongoing five weeks. This book in particular. Yes, and this is just role playing in general. This is going to be the least dm D centric book that we're probably ever going to cover. And that's because it is not a textbook. It's not a playbook. This is not a book full of mechanics and tables and like things are specific to any module. Is this the one that's kind of a collection of essays? That's exactly what it is. Yes. So there's twenty five authors and in here's like articles, essays, whatever you want to call it. You know, there are anywhere between a page and the three four pages. They're quick reads, all of them. So this is the Federalist Papers of Dungeons and Dragons, Yes, except palatable. Yeah, and I didn't our IPMPS Hamilton. And if this was a SIGNI me in history class, I would actually read it. Yeah.

4:18 Ok. Yeah, So uh so let's get into the categories that we judge these books on so number one, we've got subject matter and author credibility. So, as Jim just said, this is by Goodman Games. They do publish their own system, and each of these authors have you know, multiple credits in multiple modules, most of which you can find on Dungeon Master's Guild or draft the REPG. But what this is is a, like I said, a collection of articles or essays that cover either very specific or very broad areas of game design and explore kind of like intangible concepts that are meant to more inspire the re Yeah. I think that's right, And I think the thing that's really cool about it is that because of the nature of that essay collection, they have people writing about the stuff that they're genuinely interested in, you know, and passionate about, which is really kind of cool.

5:15 It's not you know, like, you know, if somebody has like a page and a half of really interesting stuff about how you can work interesting traps into you know, an environment, but that's all they got is a page and a half. You know, the book says, yeah, this is what we got for you as a page and a half of this, But this person really knows their stuff. You know, the kind of the that they've done, like the editing and this is is real good. That's one of the things I think the best. I think the best books is RPG books. The RPG books specifically when it comes to design, right, I think the best parts of those design parts, if you will, are going to just are really their job is to kind of get the old noodle working.

6:00 Yeah, yep, you know. I don't want to your point, Jim, I don't want a playbook, right, I want something that's going to inspire me to think up my own things. Well, have you both in your collection? Is important? No? Absolutely, And like I said, we're going to cover a lot of examples. Yeah, or you are going to cover exactly that in a very soon upcoming episode that we're going to record it today, so it's definitely coming. But I give an idea of what kind of things that they're talking about. I'm just going to read off just the titles of some of these articles. There's twenty five of them in here, so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna pick at random, so make your players world go around. Listen. Do you smell something? Is the names of the article logical first Contact inviting, inventing intelligent science fiction aliens, making a villain, how to write encounters that don't suck, keeping your encounters within the capabilities of your players. So it is like it is kind of fairly to a point. It's not as abstract as I may have made it sound. But is this isn't like, okay in five E use these stat blocks. It's not that kind of thing, right, It's it's meant to kind of teach an educated audience. Yeah, Like, because I love the I love that one that says designing encounters that are within the capabilities of your players, because that's a very different thing than you know, did I get the challenge ratings? Right? Sure, you know. Like, but but like, if you design an encounter that requires them to approach it in a particular way, that like is just a play style that they never use and has never shown any interest in. Even if it's technically a you know,

7:31 air quotes balanced encounter, it's not a good encounter to bring to the table. And and the book is really good about, like you say, those kind of kind of bigger picture sorts of things. Yeah, And what is very cool is at the end of most, if not all, of these essays. They end it with an encounter that kind of highlights the point that they're trying to make. Right, it's not a full flag one shot, but it's like it's it's a one little part and you probably even string a bunch of these together and squeeze one shot out of it. Yeah, you're trying to get you twenty nine. That's where like the game Master's guides, like they they are just all example, you know what I mean? Yeah, And that's that's how I think the point I was trying to make was just that this is a little a little more abstract. It's not, as I mean, a lot more abstract. Yeah, right, right, but they're not just giving you They're they're giving you homework. They're not just giving you the answers. Yeah, exactly. And like like I said, this is this is meant to be inspiration, right, I'm going to give you inspiration. This is the truest form of inspiration. It's also very much one of those books where there's absolutely no requirement to read it in order you can totally pop it open and go. You know, I could use some I could use a little nudge on this particular thing this week read that essay, you know, and and give yourself some you know, like you say, some inspiration and you don't go cover to cover on it. They're not in any particular. Each one is like three to five pages, and that includes the encounter like this is like the lightest of light reading. If this came

9:01 in a paperback you it was in my bathroom probably ye. So that's a subject matter of author credibility. Individually. I'm not going to go through in each of these authors you know bios, but they are all part of Goodman Games and that should be enough to know that they know what they're talking about. Next, we go through a complexity level and depth of analysis. So while the articles themselves are all easy to read and follow, and the book is itself is pretty much devoid of all technical game mechanics. So the only reason I'm not going to call this low complexity is because everything it takes a little bit of interpretation to apply to your games is a little more a little more abstract inspiration than it is a game guide. So it is a very easy read, but getting the most out of it is no just you just have to go into it with with intention to be more and more inspired than learned. Yeah, those, I mean they do. They do have the like like you say, like sample encounters and stuff like that. But like specifically, if you're if you're looking this with an eye towards five E, you're gonna need to do a little bit of Okay, well they say there's five goblins in this room. But you know, like I said, if you want to set the you know, the challenge ratings or whatever, that's going to require a little bit of work on the back end. It's definitely something that presumes you've got some chops as a d M before you're popping the cover hunt. I almost see that as an advantage too, though, because then you can apply it if you play And I think, Jim, maybe you are guilty of this. Uh you don't just play one system of tt

10:37 RPG like you. Oh yeah, I don't think that's guilty. Well yeah, that stuff black, right, And so I have friends that exact same way over the pandemic. Like one day I'd be playing in the Alien, playing the Alien tt RPG. Next day I'd be playing an OSR game and then a five game. And that's how we got through the pandemic. The pandemic, Yeah, the game I was playing just before I joined you guys, we're at the end of it. I'm like, okay, we got to wrap it. I gotta go record a podcast. And it was like nothing like D and D completely separate, you know, one of these like indie story game things that I was playing in the morning. So yeah, yeah, but I do like that aspect of this that you can apply it to anything. Yeah, yep. And and it's books like this, and it's concepts like this that like, I know, even in our little speech at the beginning of the episodes, I specifically do say game masters and not specifically dungeon masters. While and while this podcast is mostly D and D centric, and you know, we're just kind of playing the numbers on that one.

11:37 But it's you know, we we do hope that this show is educational for people who just want to be or you know, DND players that want to branch out. Even I think it's probably the most the most fair demographic for this. Yeah, but that then that requires finding like like six friends. We know, we need more friends than I'm a couple that I played Dungeons and Dragons with almost on I'm not getting new friends ball I barely the ones I have. So as far as complexity level and depth analysis, it's not a super deep, divy type of book that there's no charts, there's no grassters or anything like that. Uh, there's no stat blocks. This is you know, kind of I don't want to say surface level. This is like it's meant to be a simple read of complex ideas that come from you know, combined decades and decades of experience and kind of all just put into a nice little stack of papers that you can peruse at your leisure and complexity level, you know, easy to read. But then like you know, I wouldn't blast this book in a day. I would read you know, one or two essays even a week and just kind of like really process and really learn from them. GMing is a fairly abstract concept as it is, and like you know, being able to shape like your your version of doing that, it's a it takes a little introspection. This is an introspective kind of book. Hello Adventurers, Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy the show, the absolute best thing you can do to support us

13:09 is to subscribe so you'll be notified when new episodes are released. You can also leave us a review five stars. Of course, that will help us get seen by more D and D players, and more than anything else, just tell your friends about us. If you like what we're doing here, then there's a good chance that your DM or your players will enjoy it too. And you don't need to loop gold to do any of that. We appreciate your listening. Now back to the show. Next is innovation, and I said, this is maybe not a fair category for this book because we're not introducing anything like mechanics. Wise, there's nothing in this book that you can't find in the Dutch Master's Guide. And you know, as far as like learning from others experiences, you know you can eventually learn from experience yourself.

13:50 So with this kind of fast tracking the years of experience that it would take to you know, kind of even consider a lot of these concepts in your normal games. So innovation is not it's not breaking any mold, it's not any it's not any new information that's out there. It's just kind of like putting things that you may not have tangibly put ideas took yeah, or or that you would normally only figure out through trial and error exactly, like like you do things wrong a few times and you settle on some best practices. I mean, and I like I like that word that that phrase best practices, because there's a lot of that kind of thing going on throughout this book, you know, like like philosophical approaches and you know things that people have tried that you know that they found work that might work for you kind of thing going on with it. Yeah. Yeah, So being in non a non game book, it's hard for me to call this particularly innovative.

14:48 So our next rubric is relevance. And you know, we're huge fans of the lessons that are in this book. I can totally see this as being a very optional in your collection. But as far as like the the concepts being taught are just super relevant to DMING, and it's this is it's it's years of experience condensed into a book, right and specifically DMING if you're making content, like if you're doing like I don't like the word homeword to describe people, you know, making their own adventure, making their own adventures and building their own encounters and stuff like that. But but this is particularly useful if you have taken that step from exclusively running out of you know, published modules, and you are, like the title says, writing adventure modules.

15:43 They use that that phrase modules to describe the you know, like kind of the old school you know, in a cardboard cover stapled on the side, you know adventures that Yeah, the way that they used to publish them before they were all you know, big like hardcover mega dungeons and stuff like that. But but it's it's like most particularly useful, especially if you're relatively new to just sitting down and going all right, I'm going to write the dungeon tonight. But you know, if you're kind of in that stage of GMing where you're starting to do your own content, or if you're you know, picking and choosing, doing a little bit of a you know, kind of a buffet style thing and picking from other modules to kind of k bash your own stuff that's more relevant to your own campaign, that's really the sweet spot for it. I think, Yeah, players don't need to read this, it's not There may be some interesting stuff in there, but it's very much aimed at people that are that are creating content for their players. Yeah, and like you said, like creating content if you're just running out buying the Crisis Straw book, you know, curs. The stradbook tells you everything you need to know about how to run that campaign and make it not suck.

16:52 Yep. But if you wanted to run your own campaigns in what's it? No, yes, Brovia, If you want to run your own campaign in Brovia, then this would really start handy. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's probably the way that I like to do things, Like I want the world established. Yeah, I want to tell my own story, right. Word building is hard. World building is very difficult, So I don't want to do that part. Yeah. And Joe, you started to you, I mean you started to say strix Haven, but there are some more sandbox y kind of settings for five, the strix Haven aberon, you know, the the Ravnika book for the you know that like spins off from the Magic Thing.

17:37 Wild is pretty much that book. Yeah, what is the Explorers Guide to Wild Explorer's Guide to Wild Mount? I was like myself, Explorer's Guy to Wild Mount is really just the setting, Like they give you some stuff to do and they're like, yeah, here's this, but a lot of it is just like this just the world, thankfully. Yeah, and and this book interacts with those, like I say, kind of sandboxy sort of D and D books really really well definitely, you know, tells you how to drill down and you know, run that run that alley way, set up that alleyway, encountering Sharn for your ebon game. You know, but but it relieves you of the burden of like who what are all these factions and nations and all that kind of stuff. But it does that for you, like, yeah, so you can drill down into the you know, the you know, the individual countersun parts, right, the actual fun parts.

18:34 So that kind of brings us to the last section here, which is to me the most important one. Who is this for and when is the right time to buy it? Yep, and this and we kind of just covered this. This book is specifically for experienced DMS. I would not get this for a new DM, and I definitely want to get this for a player. Yes, this is specifically for experienced d MS. Kind of the opposite of the last book we covered where we kind of would recommend this for a newer DM new where newer or maybe not brand new? Yeah, so this I would get this after So you, in my opinion, you would you would get, you know, get your DMG stuff once you kind of learn the concepts from that, then get lazy Dungeon Master, and then once you've kind of internalized that stuff, this is going to kind of get you to that next level. Yeah. And I would get this after like years of dming not a whole not a whole lot if you wanted to. Yeah, I think it depends too if if if you're playing three four times a week, yeah, for a few months, like you could probably and you're ready, Yeah, sure, you could probably do this. Back in my retail days, this book this was the go to to the question that I would get asked relatively frequently, which is very specifically like, hey, you know, we just finished out of the Abyss and like, with that experience that I've gotten under my belt, my next campaign, I really want to do my own stuff, Like is there a guidebook to help me do that?

20:03 And I would be like you, you know, you, sir madam, you want this book right here how to write a venture modules that don't suck. And one of the cool things about it is that title is just so great because people look at it, they chuckle a little bit, and like it's a title that says, look, you can do this. It's not that big a deal, sure, which is one of the things that I really like about it, and kind of consistently throughout the book, the tone is not, you know, like like somber, like this is a huge responsibility and you don't want to get it wrong. It's like, this is super fun and it's really easy. Let me let us show you how we do it. It's such a really good book book in that regard. Yeah, and I like too that it's like not how to write perfect adventure minds, it's great exactly. It's just just ones that don't suck. And that's really listen, that's the bar, friends, that's the bar of suck in dming, like just just don't let it, don't let people have a bad time. You know, you don't have to be you don't have to be Matthew Mercer. You don't have to be my man, Joe Manjanello from a Dealer No Deal Island. You know, you you can just be you can be Joe the or just be the person that like you're as having fun with your group of friends, yeah, and making that fun. So I got this book at Jim's recommendation. Actually, when I actually said that, I asked the community. I put it in the Facebook group, I even put it out on Reddit, and the question I said was, you know, my bookshelf was looking pretty full, what else could I possibly add?

21:33 Hey, guys, how do I write adventure modules that just don't? And that's that's all. That's the other question too, But that's the question Jim got. And like, no, for me, my collection felt fairly complete because I had tons of resource books and I was looking for things that were like beyond that, and this was this is the perfect first book to reach beyond the resource books. Yeah, and for me, like when I when I said to myself, what else could I possibly get? Was the perfect time for me to get this? Yes, And I'll also say that this is this might be because it's not game mechanics. It's because there's not resource stuff in there, there's no spoilers. This makes probably the best gift out of everything on my shelf for your d M. Yeah, I think this is a isn't a must buy. No, I think this is a This is a It depends on your circumstance exactly, but I think I think this is an excellent addition to an already complete collection. Yeah, what do you buy the DM that has everything? Yeah, you know, and but and and they don't have this book this book, yeah, and and and more so and and because like I said, there's no game mechanicsts in here, so like it's not like the I would say, hey DM, here's a straw book. And then I was like, okay, I guess that they're on straw now cool. It's like, hey DM, here's a book on just how to just my mother was killed by a vampire. Thanks. It's like, here's a book that just is just general concepts in dming. Yeah.

22:52 Yeah, and you and you get to imply that the reventure modules suck without really implying it, and the straight their face Yeah, actually that's not auctually might be kind of I mean, no perfect gift, perfect gifts, so what they call it backhanded? So hey, I saw this book and it made me think of you. There's also breath strips end. Yeah, your mom letting you know you well every Christmas made me think of you. Oh because my adventure modules don't suck. Yeah yeah, but still read the book, yeah, yeah, the whole thing. Yeah, but read it though, Yeah, listeners can't see that you just did the slow, slow, slow slide across the table as long as you just like two little pats on the top of it. I actually feel really good. None of my players have bought me this book, so I have encouraged you to borrow my copy though, So yeah, but I think that's can cover for today.

23:49 I do like this book a lot, and I know I kind of like, you know, spend a lot of time in the episode saying like this is not an absolutely must have, but I am very glad that I do have it. I think that's that's the fairest way to makes what makes break your figure DM. And if you want to get into D, I mean this should be on your list of things to eventually get. We'll get to where it fits exactly on the list. I'm a very assumed forthcoming episode. So we'll put a link in the show notes below where you can find the book. Looking for a hardcover copy right now, they may be in between print runs at the time of this recording, but you can get the PDF off of drive through our PG so we'll have a link to that at least, and if we find a good link for a hardcover copy. We'll throw that download too. I did a bunch of researcher this episode, but not that much, so missed that one. But that's going to wrap it up for today. Thank you for listening to Hello Adventures. We're your host Jason Portiso, Jim Crocker and Joe McCall, producer, editor and engineer Jason Portiso.

24:45 Music by Nick Spurrier, artwork by Kristin Roderick and you can reach out to us with any feedback, ard suggestions by emailing Hello Adventures podcast at gmail dot com. Hello Adventures is a JTP audio production. Goodbye Adventures, The l