By Geoffrey McKinney
Most modules are too wordy.
In my experience, modules tend to be more trouble than they are worth. One of the reasons for modules is to save the referee's time, but if the referee has to spend hours studying a module, what's the point? He could have spent those hours designing his own dungeons for free.
The so-wordy-that-it-needs-to-be-studied module has been the norm since TSR started publishing in 1978 what has come to be the “standard” module format of prolix descriptions and ever-increasing page counts. Fortunately, though, a different path of historical development goes all the way back to the beginnings of the hobby:
1970-1971: Dave Arneson designed the very first dungeon. The ten levels of the Blackmoor Dungeons (published in Judges Guild’s The First Fantasy Campaign) consist of fewer than 5 pages of text, and the maps are printed on 6 pages. Thus, this 10-level dungeon was presented on a little fewer than 11 pages. A typical room description reads as follows: “1 Ochre Jelly: AC 8, 5/22 HTK”. It’s the original One Page Dungeon!
1972: Gary Gygax created the dungeons underneath Castle Greyhawk. Here is a photograph of the first level of the dungeon:
http://www.philotomy.com/images/GenCon07_GygaxGame_dungeon.jpg
Here is a close-up of the map and its key:
http://www.philotomy.com/images/Gygax_Greyhawk_Level_1_Detail.jpg
One page is the map of the dungeon level, the facing page consists of a mere 18 lines of written text. It’s the original Two Page Dungeon!
1974: The original Dungeons & Dragons rules include a sample dungeon level that fits on a single sheet of 8 ½” by 11” paper.
1976: The very first module ever published, Palace of the Vampire Queen, consists of five dungeon levels, each one mapped on a single page and accompanied by 2 pages of very brief text (with a lot of white space).
1977: Judges Guild published Bob Bledsaw’s Tegel Manor, which consists of a beautiful dungeon map with hundreds of rooms, each with a terse description such as “Screaming woman runs across room every fourth turn. Cobwebs cover a silver cross on east wall.”
2008: The One Page Dungeon format leap-frogs over 30 years of reams of purple prose to return to the original tradition started by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax in 1970-72. A referee can spend 5 minutes glancing over a One Page Dungeon, and he will be ready to go.
Dihercen