Show Me in the Module
- Malin Freeborn
- March 5, 2025
One beef I’ve had in games is a chonky source book which says ‘changelings do this’, and ‘always describe the traps, don’t just say 1D6 trap-damage’, and then expecting the reader to create the world in adherence to these principles.
“How about you do your job and write this into the adventure modules?”, I find myself thinking. “How about you stop telling me that every chronicle needs a theme and actually put one into the published chronicles, White Wolf?”1
About a year ago, I started thinking the same thing about BIND. I’ve written a world, but the two introduction modules don’t show much of it; all the guilds and the structure of the baileys is only in the main campaign, which seems like a massive buy-in for someone getting into the game. So I’ve begun the gradual process of writing new modules, and thinking of the easiest ways to introduce the principles I want to have.
And I’ve started to wonder how far I can stretch this principle of ‘show, don’t tell’. How far can I show the world and its history, only through modules? Long rules on ‘how to make magic items’ can feel tedious, but if every module with a magical item follows exactly the right conventions for creating items, then that can feel compelling at the right time - at the end of a campaign, when players start to piece the puzzle together for themselves.
The same definitely applies to my habit of writing with Side Quests . I find it practically impossible to explain what I’m doing without just showing people.
If I still had my copy of New York by Night , I would do a long dissection of that book and how it seems to show a world, without actually handing over enough concrete, gameable things to do. The material is all there, but it somehow expects you to just riff off of it, live, and jump through the pages to find statblocks (which aren’t blocks - each one is a page long). ↩︎