However! Just want to stab a placeholder in the internet with a couple thoughts. Today saw the arrival in my mailbox of a seriously big ass adventure: a print-on-demand extravaganza from DriveThru that clocks in at a whopping 144 pages (including 16 pages of maps).
The product? Well, it's not Patrick Stuart's Demon-Bone Sarcophagus (though that one is ALSO available on DriveThru and ALSO has a listed page count of 144). Nope, instead, I put my money into Wizards of the Coasts pockets for a new copy of the 1985 classic The Temple of Elemental Evil (Gygax/Mentzer).
[I own a copy, but it's falling apart (missing the back cover) and that tiny little map booklet is...ugh. Hate it. The new print-out is clear and lovely with full-size (full page) maps. Lovely]
The ToEE is...large. I've never run the thing in its entirety. I've run T1 a couple times (it was a late addition to my collection) but I never felt a burning desire to explore the rest of the thing. Or any desire really...it looks like a pretty boring slog of a thing, and if I (once upon a time) read the entirety of the text, I have since forgotten nearly everything about it.
But now...well, while the Greyhawk setting holds zero interest for me (oh my...really need to do THAT post), and I have no nostalgia associated with ToEE (having never ran/played it "back in the day")...I'm kind of relishing the challenge of making it work.
[*long pause*]
Mmm. Apologies. Kids are out trick-or-treating with the spouse while I'm waiting on dinner. Back to what I was saying....
This wasn't really going to be a post about The Temple of Elemental Evil. It's about the siren call of a "big campaign adventure." I have this sneaking suspicion that one of the reasons people get geeked up to run such a thing...a ToEE or Stonehaven or Barrowmaze or Dwimmermount is that it is SO HUGE that it can provide hours upon hours of game play. Game play that allows DMs to provide players with the experiential joy of D&D (fighting monsters, securing treasures, acquiring levels) while simultaneously putting off the real work of crafting a world fit for one's campaign.
That's perhaps a little cynical, but I don't think it's a conscious procrastination. However, the DM who only runs such things is, perhaps, stuck in 2nd gear.
ANYway...I mentioned "challenge" and, for me, part of the challenge would be finding a way to work ToEE into my own campaign (the main challenge I have with pre-made adventures these days); the other challenge I somewhat relish is the idea of editing the thing into a more practical, usable form, an idea that I was hipped to by reading Trent's posts on the subject and the impetus to make me buy the POD book. Thanks to Trent's stuff, I have a bit of a roadmap to butchering the thing in a way that works for me...a little holiday project for when I'm bored.
; )
But, of course, that's not where my madness ends. I find myself pulled in the direction of a completely idiotic idea that just...will...NOT...let...go! of my psyche. It's so stupid I'm embarrassed to even write about it. Although, that was the reason I even opened my laptop this morning in the first place. Sometimes you have to blog the demons out of the brain, just to regain processing power.
*sigh* Unfortunately, I really have run out of time now. Tomorrow the kids are in school the full day and the wife should be going into the office and Halloween festivities will be over (really need to stop stuffing my face with candy...). I'll embarrass myself writing about my stupid idea tomorrow. Good night!
I've twice tried to run my megadungeon as a campaign, and both times it sort of fizzled out due not to the players lacking interest but from ME lacking interest to keep running it. And I think a big part of the reason why is like you say, the megadungeon is fine, but what about the rest of the world? My West Marches game lasted quite a bit longer, but there was a similar lack of anything to the world beyond the immediate wilderness to be explored that eventually made me lose interest in the campaign (several players, too).
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say there's anything wrong with that sort of campaign per se, but as a DM there needs to be a bit more to keep things interesting, even if the players are fine with yet another expedition to map out a few more rooms and bring back another load of treasure. It's the Basic game, and there was definitely something smart about the Basic/Expert (and later Companion/Masters/Immortals) sets dividing the game up that way.
Oh, also, check your emails, per your comment on my blog the other day. :D
ReplyDeleteOh, I saw it...was just a little busy with the holiday festivities the last couple days.
Delete; )
Hope the Halloween was fun for the kiddos, wife and you. Funny about the candies!
ReplyDeleteIt's all fun and games till I have to fasten my belt!
Delete; )
Can't remember if I mentioned it in those blog posts or if it's something I settled on later, but I've come to feel that T1-4 is, ironically, a better pedagogical tool for DMs by being kind of crappy and undercooked than if it had actually been good and done what it set out to do.
ReplyDeleteT1-4 purports to be a "complete ready-to-run campaign" that the DM can just read and run and not have to do any creative heavy lifting or serious planning or prepwork (other than reading) and it kind of starts out that way with the Hommlett section, but by the time you get to Nulb it's already obvious that this thing is woefully incomplete and will require the DM to fill in a lot of gaps, and the temple dungeons (not even to mention the barely-sketched-out Nodes) multiply that by being such a boring slog that in order to keep the game interesting and the players engaged the DM is pretty much forced to go beyond the text and start adding and changing stuff. And, sure enough, by the time the DM has done all that and play concludes after a year or so, the DM will almost certainly have picked up a fair amount of adventure-design (and adventure-evaluation) experience that will serve them well into the future, even if that's not what they set out to do.
It's not as obvious as something like B1 or B2 that specifically says "this part has been left blank - you fill it in" but the effect is pretty much the same. I'm also confident it wasn't intentional - that neither Mentzer or Gygax felt they were deliberately creating something bad or incomplete that would trick/force DMs into doing the sort of creative work they thought they were avoiding by buying a big-ass module. I'm also sure there are plenty of DMs out there who didn't step up to fill in the blanks or fix the problems and doggedly ran the module "as is" and had a bad time with it and maybe they or their players got turned off of the hobby from that experience, which would be a shame. But thinking back on my own experiences running this, and many of the accounts and journals I've read from other people doing the same (despite being a big mess it's always been one of the most popular modules, and is still riding high on the DriveThruRPG bestseller list) I really feel like, unintentionally, the work novice and journeyman DMs have to put into fixing and completing this mess makes them better as DMs in the long run in a way that probably wouldn't have happened if the adventure actually could be effectively run right out of the box.
Which makes me wonder about some of the other campaign-in-a-box products (both classics like Griffin Mountain and Masks of Nyarlathotep and The Enemy Within, and newer stuff like all those Paizo and WotC Adventure Paths or the new revised edition of T1-4 Goodman Games just released for 5E that supposedly expands and fixes the original, or for that matter the thing I'm still working on that you've read a partial draft of, and whether that's good or bad for those novice and journeyman DMs - are they learning as many valuable lessons running something good as they did when they had to fix something that had an appealing premise but was all jacked up in actual practice? What is the best pedagogical method for bring new DMs up to speed and really teaching them? Hmm...
It's an interesting thought, but my gut instinct is one of doubt (regarding the quality of other campaigns as teaching tools). I mean, sure: anything has SOMEthing to teach, but the quality of what that thing is varies widely.
DeleteSince receiving my copy of ToEE in the mail I have done nothing besides a quick flip through its pages (mostly due to distractions). However, I can remember...from the time I last ran Hommlet out of this "supermodule"...that I thought quite highly of the T1 section and, perhaps strangely, the town of Nulb...and then almost nothing about anything that followed. Like NONE of it sticks in my memory.
I have some pretty specific ideas these days about how to run a D&D campaign, and most of those ideas fall well outside the parameters of published "box campaigns" (which are, generally, adventure serials connected by railroads of varying strength/effectiveness). There ARE things to learn from T1, but mainly (I think) they are about *world building.* For the DM to learn how to run a campaign? They must run a campaign (AND effective world building is an aid to this).
I have the first 3-4 Enemy Within books...lot of good world building there. But the campaign is crap...just a series of adventures. I can arrange TSR modules in a linear progressive fashion easily enough (pretty sure most "journeyman" DMs can!). Ain't the same thing. Few people are teaching the art of running a campaign these days. And most folks are too lazy to look for something outside the commercially produced box.
Sorry, Trent: you've struck a nerve. Probably need to write a long post on the subject (and probably titled "why I hate Greyhawk").
; )