Some of the adventures feature pages of giant-paragraph exposition at the beginning; take a cue from Mela/Gabor Lux folks, brevity is indeed the soul of wit.
The Empire of the Petal Throne adventures (the main offenders of the aforementioned quibble) are pretty dang rail-roady as well.
Also, the Tekumel adventures are the primary offenders of horrible parkinson's patient/ 7th grade fat girl manga art. Not the writer's faults there, but...ugh.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletelast comment was me under the GF's name....
ReplyDeletemy take on adventures/dungeons is that you really don't need any explanation other than "There was a dungeon...the dungeon was there." or "there's treasure/bad dudes to fight." Really, do the players give a shit about any intricate plot? They wanna loot and murder.
I think there is an advantage to an intriguing premise. I like dungeons where the focus is on gold and glory, but you can have that and an interesting conflict, or a feeling of gloom, or a sinister undercurrent, or whatever.
ReplyDeleteFor example, Caverns of Thracia is fairly simple to run, but it has all sorts of things going on beneath the surface without spending several pages on the exposition (the Necromancer version is guilty of this, although the ideas it adds to the picture are cool and appropriate).
All in all, I believe it is mainly an issue of presentation, not content.