Patronage projects look like they could be the next wave, (following the mini pdf ventures) I have launched one myself.

Personally though I find the old school formula lacking, as modular does not have to be generic. By using the tropes of fantasy you could easily make a very detailed adventure modular without running the risk that it becaomes so generiic as to leave a bland taste in my mouth.

I will be following this and await the time to be able to sign up.

@Rafe: As Dan says, I’ll see how I can include setting (or trope) elements in the ‘game table’ elements of the adventure.

We’ve done a lot of work on pitching at Wolfgang’s latest Open Design, and a lot of it dovetails neatly with adventure introduction. An introduction is really a promise to the DM that they’ve picked up the right adventure: It says this is D&D (or whatever system), and I’m going to do X cool thing with it, with Y atmosphere and Z tone – all within few enough words that you can grasp it while flicking through the book in a shop.

Thinking about it your question, I find that I love fluff but I’m completely in the corner of old school design – for a published adventure. The relevance of any background information should be directly related to its exposure at the gaming table – be that via dialogue, NPC tactics, events, or whatever. Everything else really is ‘fluff’ in the non-gaming sense (a thing of relatively little consequence, however nice it is for the DM to know). Its also part of the 4th edition design ethos, which constantly asks a designer “but what does this actually mean around the game table?”

While I love background information and lavish far too much time on it when preparing my own stuff, a published adventure is different. All DMs tweak (or hack great lumps out of) published material and so if it’s not easily memorable and relevant to the plot, it can go. In fact that’s exactly the sort of fluff that DMs like to add to a scenario themselves. I think that most of us don’t need or really want that (or am I wrong?) and we appreciate it when designers leave it for us to do – or let us just get on with the chandelier swinging and Princess saving, if that’s what we’d prefer.

The best adventures (for me), are those which do exactly what you’re proposing: Plenty of relevant information without crowding out the ‘wiggle room’ for DM’s to mess with it. I’m totally behind the old school approach.

For the record, I’m partial to the old school fluff anyways. Inter-world portability just isn’t there in most modules

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Not that you needed my approval. You’re the rock star after all. I’m just the schmuck following you off a cliff

Tomcat1066s last blog post..What Your Character Knows That You Don’t