“They don’t make them like they used to.”
“You can’t live in the past.”
Two expressions that seem to contradict each other. Many people would say the first expression sounds like an old person letting nostalgia cloud their judgement. These same people would tell you the second expression is a pragmatic, dynamic person who cuts loose the baggage of years past to embrace a bold, new direction. I would say it’s not that simple.
I’ve been looking over my 2 volumes of Original Adventures Reincarnated by Goodman Games. Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread were very popular adventures. Like many others, I wonder what made them so popular. Were they just really good or was it the fact that they were included with the 2 boxed sets of Basic D&D?
A person could say it was the distribution. More people got their hands on them because they were included in the boxed sets for Basic and Expert D&D in the early 1980s. Not only that, but B/X D&D got into book stores in malls like Walden Books and lots of people bought them. Not only that, but lots of the owners of B/X D&D were younger children who, being impressionable, latched onto them in a way that older people don’t.
I can see the points in this argument but, as I said above, it’s not that simple. I came back to fantasy roleplaying in my 40s after avoiding it from the age of twelve. Reading over these and other early D&D modules with a perspective different from long-time RPG games makes it interesting for me to then go online and read what the long-timers have to say. I would assume that these old grognards are speaking from nostalgia and little else. Yet, I agree with so many of them when they say the old modules are well written.
I compare the newer modules, say Storm King’s Thunder and Mines of Phandelver, with the older ones and I see real differences. The Cirsova blog talked about how too many people, those in the industry and fans, are approaching adventure design like novel writing. The older modules didn’t make that mistake because they had a different set of assumptions in mind. Gary Gygax, Lawrence Schick, Tom Moldvay, David Cook, etc. thought the best adventures were the ones the game master created. Keep on the Borderlands, Isle of Dread and other early modules were loose frameworks that the game master was supposed to whip into shape. Vessels waiting to be filled. Later published adventures lean more towards a complete, finished story with fully fleshed out NPCs.
You could say the early days had this idea that RPGs were for creative people while the current thinking is the easier RPGs are, the more people will enjoy them. Perhaps I’m oversimplifying things but it’s possible I have a point. At any rate, I’m going to look for opportunities to run Keep on the Borderlands and then see if I can segue into Isle of Dread. I like the idea of putting my own story into those modules but making it loose and open-ended. The players can pursue it or ignore it as their whims determine during play. They can even pick it up or drop it multiple times; a loosely coupled plot line.
0 Comments