From a stand-alone dungeon isolated from any setting, a generic wilderness town that exists so characters can buy supplies and sell loot, and hex-crawling an unknown wilderness with the aid of random tables — to massive published settings with associated novels, today’s gamers have a huge amount of products they can buy for their role-playing games.
And yet, Dungeons and Dragons, the first published RPG, was presented as a collection of rules suggestions to use with your imagination. A tool kit, if you will. The general thought over at Tactical Studies Rules being that, why would you use someone else’s writings when you could just as easily use your own? (“Don’t tell gamers that they don’t actually need us at all!”)
How things changed.
Fast-forward to Ed Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms. So many products churned out on a regular basis that I sincerely doubt there were many game masters out there who absorbed all of the lore and could implement it on the spot, without error. Really.
And yet, doesn’t that game master have an obligation to his players to provide the Realms experience they sign up for?
What a burden!
Let’s take a poster-child for elaborate game settings, Chaosium’s Runequest Glorantha. Initially debuting as two board games, it was the release of the Runequest RPG that started the true setting bloat. The first slim volume contained a couple of pages of setting background, and a simple mapped area. A Bronze Age world shaped like a flat lozenge afloat on a mythical primal ocean. There was almost no setting detail other than what could be inferred from the bestiary section. It was pretty gonzo, with scorpion men and jack o’bears and riding animals like llamas and impalas.
Decades later there has been so much lore published for the thing that the new owners of the IP ruthlessly “de-canonize” chunks of material and forbid you to discuss it on the formerly fan-forum they’ve taken over, “so as to avoid confusing people.” Yeah. And yet there is so very much setting information that’s officially still in play that you can’t make an idle comment without being ganged-up on by gamers who will argue incessantly as to the veracity of your statement.
And to make things even more absurd, Glorantha has a published timeline of events and the expectation is that you will be following it! So, battles, wars, invasions, rebellions, tick-tick-tick like clockwork. Doesn’t matter what your gaming group does, the expectation is that you toe the line.
Dear sweet Spaghetti Monster, what the proverbial hell? That’s not a role-playing game, that’s choreography!
There are plenty of settings, plenty of series of adventures, and plenty of non-D&D RPGs out there that are burdened with this kind of overhead. Millenia of history, deities and demons, cosmic struggles, geography and politics, timelines of wars. Uncountable non-player characters to memorize.
Conversely, you could put your own brief concepts into words and sketches. Because if you buy a super-module, you’re going to be pausing the game constantly and looking things up. Cross-referencing so you can answer the party’s questions. Praying that you don’t slip up. Trying to implement the NPCs’ agenda and personality.
And yet if you write your own, you created the concept and it’s that much easier to remember. Plus, you can react to the efforts of your own players, which won’t align with whatever an official product’s author was expecting in any case.
So what takes more time? Memorizing someone else’s work? Or writing your own? I bet your own would consist of just what you need, exactly. Instead of all the bloat you’d have to wade through otherwise.
Let’s not even talk about the web-based products you can buy for use with D&D on Roll20.net and its competitors. That’s all pre-programmed so you might as well be playing a video game! The advantage to playing a pencil-and-paper tabletop role-playing game is that you and your players are completely autonomous, instead of wearing blinders and going where you’re led.
I admit that I’ve made some foolish purchases and have used published adventures in my games. And I’ve learned the hard way that it’s easier just to use my own creations, even though there are still plenty of those purchases I have yet to use. I just think the hobby could do with a lot fewer “module-lords” (as my old friend referred to them), and more GMs with pencils and notebooks.
The Michlin Guide 
I am currently running The Keep on the Borderlands for my online group. I read the section detailing all the NPCs and little plots of the keep and immediately decided I wouldn’t use that at all. I made the keep into a hilltop surrounded by a wooden palisade where caravans meet on the way to other places and where nameless men and women set up shops in tents to cater to their needs. A couple of detailed NPCs have come out of this, but most interactions are something like, “You find a merchant with a cargo of oil who is willing to sell a few flasks to you.” At three times the book price, of course! And he’s not a spy for the temple, not in love with his neighbour’s daughter, and doesn’t have any plans to rob the party on the road later.
I find most modules a bit overwhelming and difficult to keep straight in my head. But reading them helps with creating my own adventures. There are plenty of interesting ideas I can adapt for my own encounters and stories.
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