Tours and Guides
December 26th, 2011
Hello everyone. Today I’d like to talk to you about the most recent Necromancers of the Northwest release, Intrepid Expeditions: The Island of Life. If you’re wondering what on earth I mean, because clearly the most recent Necromancers of the Northwest release was Advanced Arcana II, and it was a great success, and led to universal peace and harmony amongst all mankind, and how I could I possibly forget that, because it’s the most important thing ever, the answer is that while that may be true in your time (and I certainly hope it is), in my time it’s quite early November, and Intrepid Expeditions: The Island of Life was released only a few short days ago.
So, now that that’s settled, I wanted to talk about why The Island of Life is what it is, and isn’t, for example, something else. In specific, I want to explain why it was made as a sort of mini-campaign setting, rather than, for example, an adventure. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t have as much interest in current campaign settings as I did back in “the day,” but it seems to me that these days, wholesale adventures are much more prevalent in D&D and Pathfinder than are campaign setting books. This might make a campaign setting book (especially one that stands alone, and doesn’t have a larger campaign setting on whose coattails to ride) seem like an odd decision.
The reason, ultimately, is that I think that “setting books” are more exciting, ultimately, than pre-made adventures, and that they lead to better things. This doesn’t mean that I don’t like pre-mades. I certainly had enough nice things to say about them back when we made The War of the Goblin King. It just means that, of the two, I think that a good “setting book” is going to do more good than a good pre-made.
The difference, I think, comes down to why someone would buy one product or the other. Why would someone buy a pre-made adventure? There are a lot of potential reasons: for example, it might be a really famous adventure that “everyone should play once,” such as The Tomb of Horrors. Alternatively, it could be that you’re a novice DM (or even just an amateur one), and you think, rightly or wrongly, that someone’s professionally-published adventure is probably going to be more fun and more cool than something you came up with. At the end of the day, though, there’s no question what the number one reason for picking up a pre-made is: not wanting (or being able) to take the time and effort necessary to build an adventure from the ground up.
In this way, a pre-made adventure requires a lot of trust from the DM who’s running it. First of all, he has to assume that the writer actually is going to come up with something better than (or at least as good as) he would have on his own. In this case, it’s certainly true that a lot of professional adventures are really polished and creative in ways that the average DM isn’t likely to manage, but, at the same time, it’s also true that sometimes pre-made adventures have glaring plot holes, are missing crucial information, or present wildly inappropriate challenges without a single word of warning.
In fact, in my experience, even the best of pre-made adventures is still a bit lacking, though in the best cases it’s simply because the authors neglected to provide support or options for things that feel like they should have been included, but weren’t. Placing the adventure’s focus on “the wrong thing” is something I can easily forgive, because, well, maybe I’m the only one who thinks it’s wrong. But it seems like it’s far more often than not that whenever I crack open a pre-made adventure, unless I’ve spent a lot of time expanding on and customizing it, I find myself apologizing to the players that “yeah, it really sucks that the DC is that high,” or “Yeah, seems to me like he should probably be willing to listen, too, but it says here that he absolutely will not accept Diplomacy no matter what,” or “I just don’t understand this…it’s just annoying, not challenging. Skip it.”
I guess what I’m getting at here is that while a pre-made adventure is better than not playing, and is a useful guideline for new DMs, and, if used as a starting point and properly customized, is excellent fun for DMs of any skill level, and can still be a great time-saver and game-improver for even professional DMs by letting you spend the same amount of DM time as usual (or less) on only having to expand and improve upon an existing, (hopefully) solid base, running unaltered pre-mades is a gamble I’m rarely keen on, given other options.
And what is a campaign setting book, anyway? Well, it’s a bit like half an adventure, really. It gives you background: places, people, things. It tells you stories about what’s where and who’s who. It depicts fantastic and interesting places, dripping with flavor potential, and just lets you soak them in and savor them. It gives you plot hooks by the score, and, usually, will provide a number of different suggestions for most of them, where “the beast of black road” might be a wizard’s escaped experiment, or a rampaging hellhound, or three bandits in a dog suit, presenting “rumors” of each and then letting the DM decide what’s real to him.
I remember when I first got my 3rd edition Manual of the Planes, early in my D&D career. I pored over that book for days, reading it from beginning to end, the first (and possibly last) time I ever did anything like that with a 3rd edition sourcebook. I had never seen anything like it. All that flavorful information! All those ideas! Imagine my joy when I discovered that that book was a watered-down distillation of an entire series of books about a campaign setting called Planescape. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed anything about Dungeons and Dragons as much as I enjoyed reading through old AD&D Planescape sourcebooks.
And as you read through them (and other books like them: the Forgotten Realms and Eberron and Dark Sun campaign settings work in the same way, with varying weight for varying people), you can’t help but be filled to the brim with ideas for adventures. It’s almost an involuntary response: they provide plot hooks, ideas, starting points, and you just can’t help but start filling in the answers. And then, because you’re a DM, and therefore you love to entertain, you can’t help but think about how much you want to share this great campaign setting with your friends and players, and how you can go about showing them all the wonders of the rich and fantastic multiverse.
Campaign settings, then, work like the best aspects of pre-made adventures: they provide good DMs a solid starting point. Further, a good campaign setting can energize DMs and get them going in ways that few adventures are likely to. And the best distinction is that because the campaign setting provides little more than a starting point (and a background, which can be more important than it sounds), the DM puts a lot more of himself into the adventures he runs as a result of it, making an adventure that is more an expression of the DM, and better-suited for his particular group.
That’s it for this week. Join me next week for APOCALYPSE! Week, where we’ll be welcoming in 2012, saying goodbye to the old, and welcoming in the new. In the meantime, thanks for reading.