Lately I’ve read a bunch of modules that feel like they weren’t fully baked. The scope story they were trying to tell was greater than their page count. I was left wishing there was more, despite and often because what was there was already pretty cool. I get the sense that the authors didn’t realise there was a problem, though. How, as an author, do you know the cake is baked?

This is a really hard question to answer, when I’m not talking about a specific cake. But I’m going to try to talk about this generally, based on what I look for in a module. While I’m trying to be broad, baked here doesn’t mean things like “your travel procedure isn’t to my taste”, but rather about the themes of your module and how the text completes itself, both as a whole but also in its individual elements.

Posing questions

You can think of a module as a bunch of questions you’re asking about the individual elements — people, places, tools, etc. This isn’t the entirety of what a module is, obviously: It’s a lens through which you can view your or someone else’s module, that’s useful for this particular purpose.

Look at your dungeon (or town, or desert, or whatever) and think about what questions it poses: Perhaps, does the elemental deserve to be freed from bondage? Is the werewolf redeemable? Do the kobolds deserve to be slaughtered for bowing to the dragon? And you can do the same with an NPC, or with a swamp, or with an important artifact.

Basically every element should pose a question. If you look at your swamp, and you can’t think of any questions it poses, the cake isn’t baked. Can you provide this swamp with a question? If so, expand your module to accommodate your answer. If there is no compelling question to be found, remove the swamp altogether and rearrange the module to not need the swamp.

Answers just as compelling

Sometimes you have framed some really compelling questions — at the beginning of the module you and five other characters with dark secrets are snowed into an in for the night, stewing in suspicion and lies. But then, once all of these characters are in the wilderness you’re all there to explore, that potential for intrigue and shocking twists is not realised. 

You may even have used the elements — placed them in a random encounter, or placed one dead, betrayed, at a crossroads. But you accidentally posed the question “What will come of these five villains being trapped together by fate alone?” And it turns out “You see them again, once.” Isn’t satisfying compared to what your players answered in their head. The issue there is that the answer you’ve come up with isn’t as compelling as the question you posed. If you’re in this situation, don’t change the question! Figure out how to squeeze the drama out of the answer! Often your first inclination isn’t the best creative decision!

Many, difficult and conflicting answers 

Questions with difficult or conflicting answers are usually the best. These introduce dilemmas — the elemental does deserve to be freed from bondage, but it will wreak havoc on the local village because they’ve used it for heating for generations, unbeknownst to them. The other thing to look for is multiple answers or methods to reach those answers — you can free the elemental using the rod of elemental freeing the evil wizard has, sure, but also plunging it into a bath of ice will break the curse and it will regenerate in 101 days, or you could use the transmogrifying gaze of the poly-basilisk to turn it into a creature the curse does not affect, until it’s out of the wizard’s purview.

If you frame interesting questions and provide interesting and conflicting answers, you create an “unstable equilibrium”, with no single solution, and a bunch of potential tools that could be used at different consequence to the PCs or the world around them.

Unanswered questions

There is a place for unanswered questions, but in my experience most of the time the unanswered question is due to a misunderstanding of the adage “prep situations not plots”. Prepping a situation well involves framing questions with many conflicting and compelling answers, not with none. For me, the way to identify whether leaving something unanswered is a mistake or not, is to ask: Does the anything else in this module depend on the answer to the question? If it does, you shouldn’t leave it unanswered.

Checking how well the cake is baked

If you view a module as a collection of questions that are posed by individual elements, which mix together just so to create an explosive or compelling situation, you have a better chance of judging whether your cake is baked. But I think that for the most part, authors of modules just don’t check if the cake is baked before taking it out of the oven! We’re too quick to publish our ideas, and that means we don’t get a sense of what our art wants to say and we don’t make sure it says it before we publish it. 

Here are some symptoms the cake isn’t baked:

• Your hexes or dungeon rooms are mostly empty (or non-sequiter). 
• You have different sections that are out of proportion to each other — your town is 5 pages, your wilderness only 1, and your dungeon 10. 
• Your NPCs or faction agendas don’t conflict with each other, or your PCs aren’t placing themselves in the middle of those conflicts.
• When the players sniff around for clues and leads, the referee is left scrambling to improvise.
• Your players aren’t coming across solutions to the problems that are presenting themselves.
• There’s no “what’s going on” section or referee advice, leaving the referee scrambling to figure out how things connect together.
• Concrete elements aren’t provided for major interactions, but rather random generators are provided to fill the gaps, in a way that leaves elements facts disconnected from the broader world.

If you want examples of these symptoms, Keep on the Borderlands and the Village of Hommlet provide it, and they’re mimicked this day still — an earlier draft of this included a reworking of the Village Of Hommlet. These are just some symptoms of a lack of coherent questions and answers; you fix it by being sure you’ve framed compelling questions with many conflicting or compelling answers, not by “adding referee advice” of whatever else is here.

The cake is done

I think that’s the core of it; The cake is done when its questions are answered. The finishing touches — proofing and editing and illustrating and laying out — that’s akin to icing and decorating and boxing the cake. You shouldn’t do any of that until it’s fully baked, and your skewer? Checking that the all of questions you’ve posed are answered. 

Idle Cartulary

P.S. Thanks to Gus L, Amanda P, Derek B. and other excellent authors and editors who helped me think this all through.

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