Previously we talked about the types of information that a key or GM provide, and then the types of info best provided in a written key, prepped by the GM, or improvised during play. That was all a little abstract, though, so let's take a look at existing modules and see what information they choose to include or omit.
We'll also start to look at how that information gets presented to the GM. There's been some fun discourse in recent days over if plain text is superior to formatted text, as well as some attempts to standardize NPC statblocks in non-numeric terms, so I figure it's a good time to take a close look at actual examples of module writing as see how different types of information get presented and how we feel about them. I've tried to pick examples that are memorable without being especially spoilery. I'm crediting writers since this is mostly a look at writing, although I'm sure an equally long post could be made about the relationship between keys and art.
I encourage readers to read the keys and take a moment to imagine running them with your regular group before moving on. How would you first describe this key as the players enter it? What questions would they likely ask you through the course of play? How would you answer those questions?
The Dark of Hot Spring Island by Jacob Hurst, Evan Peterson, Donnie Garcia
My interest in key design really started with my initial reading of Hot Spring Island--the sheer aggression of the formatting was an eye-opening moment for me. I've drifted away from the style in the years since, but I still want to start this process with a key from it.
The majority of the key is made up of a list of the objects in the room, with a brief bolded description being paired with additional details within brackets. I'd use the bolded words to describe the players' immediate sensory impression, and then draw on the details as the players start to interact with individual aspects of the room. The key's title summarizes the nook's appearance.
The second paragraph is a plain text description of the more interactive element of the room--the nereid trapped in the painting. It mostly describes her emotional state and history, without many concrete details about how to portray her in the moment, but her faction gets a much longer write-up describing her motivations elsewhere in the book.
The content of the key is mostly occupied with establishing a visual identity for the elves who used to live within the dungeon. The character description is something between lore and an implicit challenge to overcome. It's not especially actionable, although in fairness the module assumes you're adding monsters and treasure yourself; the crystal implicitly creates a great location for treasure to be placed.
A big advantage of this style is the density it allows; the page I copied it from had 10 keys and a detailed map. The bolding of the object names makes it fairly easy to navigate, and follows the natural flow of play (an initial quick description followed by details as players as questions). It's terse but unpackable, with any concepts that can't be summarized in 3-5 words getting their own paragraphs.
It does suffer a fair bit on initial reading, however, and the way that the objects are listed does not follow how speech works--a GM does not typically say "there is a wall, a desk, vases, books, sofas, and a painting in the room". The relationships of the objects in the room aren't clear from the description, requiring the GM to spend time imagining what the room actually looks like. If they've done so as prep this could be a smooth experience in play, but it does still make reading the book for the first time feel very choppy and a little annoying.
The nereid description leans heavy on backstory and generalities. There is no support on her initial reaction to being freed from the painting, but the faction entry on nereids later in the book more than makes up for that.
Holy Mountain Shaker by Luka Rejec
The HSI style has evolved into a more modern general OSE style. Holy Mountain Shaker isn't entirely standard within that style--it describes large locational nodes rather than rooms--but it showcases some of its design tech.
Similar to HSI, the key begins with a set of bolded descriptions paired with parenthetical details and followed by paragraph-based descriptions of concepts too complicated to summarize--in this case listed as bullet points. It follows a loose flow of bolded initial impressions to parenthetical details uncoverable through additional looking to details only discoverable via action below.
As much as the format looks similar, the type of information presented is wildly different. Those bolded descriptions up top are no longer a list of what you see as you first engage with the key, but are instead a list of sub-regions. The HSI style already struggles with items it describes feeling disjointed, but this feels much worse--I really struggle to visualize how these elements relate to each other or how to describe the players initial sensory impressions upon entering this key; descriptions are more evocative (fishy) than concrete. It can also come off as a bit sprawling--it's far less terse than HSI, mostly as a result of it covering much more ground.
The paragraphs serve both as additional details to the bolded items above and as explicit 'if/then' reactions to player actions. It frames the world in how it responds to the players first and foremost, with extra emphasis spent on how long elements take to interact with (this makes sense, the module is on a clock). This seems helpful to me when players perform the actions accounted for, but annoying when the players go 'off the rails'. There's good support for the most likely actions the players might take, but I feel like I'd struggle with all the moments where players poke around and ask questions.
Descriptions also contain significantly more 'tech'--roll tables within paragraphs, additional parentheticals, etc. Sometimes when a player takes an action in response to bullet point information it's accounted for in its own bullet point (search lesser halls->decipher glyphs), but sometimes it's handled within the bullet point itself (touching the mummy).
For such a large space, there is not a lot of 'general information' provided. It specifies that it contains 'bas-relief illustrated scenes', but does not specify what of, and does not give much context as to the history of the space for the GM to draw from while improvising. Concrete and immediate details are better than lore and history when describing a space, but lacking either can create a space that feels empty and non-interactive.
A series of paragraphs, each of which describes one element of the room. Once each element is described, the more complicated elements of the room are described in more detail.
This has a fair bit in common with the above keys in form. A list of bolded words give you an initial sensory impression, paired with quick descriptions to be drawn for when the players look more closely, and paragraphs below for when they start touching things.
Descriptions follow a flow of starting with a sensory impression, then following that up with a description of what it "is". The first bit gives immediate help to the GM in describing the room, the second gives support in adjudicating player experimentation. The content leans concrete, with lots of explicit clues and a few limitations (non-forceable door) listed to facilitate running the room as a puzzle.
Some reference to other keys is made, including a specific key reference. This information serves as a reminder, and is not actually relevant to this key (there is no way within this key to be told about the fountain).
Some mechanics are described, but are generally described in natural language and are not emphasized. There is a fair bit of leeway in how to mechanically adjudicate setting off the room's trap--are characters within the room caught automatically? Do they have time to run out upon hearing the noise? Does the spray hit characters hiding within the doorframe?
I really like this setup! It's easy to read and easy to reference--following clear rules in its layout that the reader can learn without sacrificing readability. There is some minor formatting (bold text, two bullet points), but it is the exception rather than the rule. Bolding the phrase that best summarizes the paragraph and nothing else feels much more useful for quick referencing than bolding every keyword.
Paragraphs of text describe a location, but then quickly transition to describing the NPC who resides within. The NPC starts with a terse statblock, then a list of 'skills', then a list of things he might do or say. A picture of the NPC sits next to the text.
The paragraphs are non-mechanical other than page references and some bolding, but are extremely economical in their word usage to the point of becoming sentence fragments. The paragraphs are also, above all, concrete but evocative; every description feels like it cuts to the heart of what it's describing with details that the GM can directly repeat to the players while also supporting improvisation. It's also gripping to read as a GM engaged in prep; I have to pause and think for a second after each line, to really let what's written sink in--not because it's confusing, but because it's compelling and rich-feeling.
This is by far the best written key we'll be covering in this post, both from a literary and an information presentation perspective. It provides a mix of concrete initial sensory impressions and examples of NPC action that respond to the most likely questions of the players while also implying a lot of detail about the character, all in an extremely small space.
It does benefit greatly from being a familiar space--unlike the piscine temple above, this is a place where the reader will generally immediately be able to visualize it based on their own prior lived experiences.
I also love the list of 'skills' the NPC has. It's three words that work as a great fall-back if the GM ever needs to decide how the NPC will respond to a situation or how they might treat the players. I wish more NPC statblocks included sections like this.
The bolding can feel a little random, though. It doesn't really correspond to information that would otherwise be hard to browse for.
Deep Carbon Observatory by Patrick Stuart
Paragraphs describe a situation in plain text, preceded by a statblock.
This is notable for being almost nothing but sensory information, presented in order of how visible it would be as the players approach. There is no description of how it responds to the players, what will happen if the players ignore it, or explicit NPC motivations or backstory.
Nevertheless, it provides everything the GM needs to easily prep or improvise most of the above. It provides a great unanswered question (how do you overcome 100 crabs?) and leaves it up to the players to answer. This would require decent improvisational adjudication skills from the GM, but honestly this is the type of problem that's really fun for a GM to solve. It does a great job of making the reader excited to put it into action and see how it unfolds.
It mostly accomplishes this through good scenario design and good writing. The concept is inherently fun, and the writing does a great job of slowly escalating the tension of the scene as the GM reads through it (and by extension as the players approach it physically).
Silent Titans by Patrick Stuart
Bullet-points sprawl erratically through a description in what appears to be a stream of consciousness. The module that exemplifies bullet point discourse.
The key is broken into three large categories--the statue, the justicars, and the scaffold. Each then is filled with smaller bullet-points that provide an unsorted mix of sensory details, advice, and responses to player actions.
The bullet-points are more of a vibe than an information presentation aide. The lack of structure means that they actively obfuscate clarity, featuring the drawbacks of the HSI style (lack of a visualizable space) with none of its economy of space. I have a very hard time visualizing what's going on in this key--I have absolutely no idea what the Scaffold of Memory even is. It feels like I'd have to design this key from the ground up to run it, using the visuals and loose ideas within the key as inspiration.
For all its chaos, though, I actually like the bullet point style as a sort of boxed text. I can imagine myself reading the description of the statue verbatim to my players, using the indents and line breaks the same way I would use them while reading a poem.
Gradient Descent by Luke Gearing
A name, an icon denoting that the space is industrial sized, a title, a terse plain text description, followed by themed bullet points describing individual room elements. The background color denotes that the room is not lit.
Despite being all bullet points and indents, this key feels extremely organized and readable. The initial description and the outermost layer of bullet points create a quick and easy initial sensory description of the space, while the indents section off information that only becomes relevant as the players engage with specific room elements. Information that is hazardous to the players (that the GM needs to not play fast and loose with) is red and has its own special icon.
The writing contains a bare minimum of information that a GM might need to run the key, generally as a string of sentence fragments. It contains limited mechanical information, but is mostly plain language paired with iconography. The information is not especially from a player perspective, and is instead emphasizing points of danger or leverage within the key--there's a lot of dramatic potential energy within the key but not a lot of "this is what the players will do".
The weakness of this approach is that the 'why' of it is not especially apparent. It lists '50 androids', but it is not apparent from this key or others why they are in the crate or even what type of androids they are--Forgotten Androids (deformed factory rejects)? Infiltrator androids (human-appearing spies)? Just bog standard industrial androids (not really appearing anywhere else in the module)? Who put them there? If the players manage to tackle one before they run away, what are their motivations? The economy of information gives the GM exactly what they probably need, but it's easy to imagine situations where the players take the game in directions it actively gives you nothing for--questions it raises that it does not give you the tools to answer.
Wolves Upon the Coast by Luke Gearing
The first line describes what the players initially see, while the rest describes the larger situation in plaintext paragraph form.
Emphasis is placed on the motivations and default actions of each of the NPCs, along with mundane but necessary details (weapons used, treasure hoarded, etc). It also provided a strong point of uncertainty--what should the players do in response to this situation? It contains a danger, a moral outrage, an opportunity for pillage, and insight into the location's history all at the same time.
The writing is also deeply enjoyable to read. Everything feels very evocative, with a lot of inspiration given to the GM in terms of scene-setting and character motivations without ever being spelled out.
The purity of the text does create some annoyances, however. It refers to 'The Ringfort', which is described many pages later and which it gives no clues in how to find. A page reference, or even just a "to the south-west" would have helped me a lot.
A lot of the context is also implied rather than stated, over the course of many keys. The crosses seem to be from Norse invaders who then converted to Christianity, but the Ringfort is Norse descendants not yet converted to Christianity, so it seems it probably wasn't them that did this? A GM can probably just make a call based on this information and not contradict anything else in the book, but the evocative writing definitely asks GMs to nail down their mental model of the key as active prep rather than passive memorization. I think this might be a good thing?
13 long paragraphs and 6 statblocks that contain a huge number of the concepts listen in previous post. I can't even bring myself to break this one down because it's simply too big.
This room played a major and repeated part of 3D6 Down The Line's Arden Vul actual play. It is simply a small part of the level, and demonstrates one facet of a semi-major NPC's personality; the rest of his mindset can be discovered via other keys spread among a total of three levels.
The primary quality of this text is size. Anyone who internalizes all of it is well prepared to run a dynamic and deeply internally consistent megadungeon campaign. But it sure doesn't do much to help you internalize it easily.
Keep on the Borderland by Gary Gygax
An extremely early module, written in classic style. One unbroken paragraph, unorganized.
The description starts out with some quick sensory description, then spends the majority of its wordcount describing the tactics the monsters within will use against player characters, ending with some if/then responses to anticipated player actions.
It's amazing how hard to penetrate this is, despite its relatively short wordcount. The lack of line breaks is exacerbated by the lack of informational ordering--parentheticals mention that one ooze may not be present early on, then the same concept is elaborated on at the paragraph's end. A statblock is stuck dead in the center of the paragraph. Significant wordcount is spent explaining the effect of player characters wearing boots on the monster's mechanical effectiveness. It's a rough read.
However, there is something to be said for the amount of thought it puts into the types of actions the players are likely to take. It is clearly designed, but not in the "do this to proceed" mode so much as the "here's a nasty situation and I'm going to make sure you can't easily negate it" one. Of all the keys analyzed here, it's by far the most interested in supporting the GM in their moment to moment unpacking of what would otherwise be vague challenge.
Who included what?
What elements are more or less commonly provided in these module keys? Let's revisit the list from the first post.
Immediate Sensory Impression: Extremely common, with two main strategies; some modules give plain text that can almost be read as boxed text, while others provide raw data on room elements and ask the GM to describe it in their own words. This makes sense, it's the one thing that will definitely need to be handled by every GM every session of play.
Uncoverable Details: Also extremely common, and usually split off from the immediate impressions through some means of formatting. In some cases that split is implicit (sentence one is immediate, two is uncoverable) but in many it's explicit (parentheticals and bullet points). I found that the implicit ones worked better for me, but that modules like Keep on the Borderlands that didn't split it at all were incredibly hard to read.
Immediate Response to Players: Actually fairly rare! Most of these spaces feel like place that exist independent of the players, with NPC reactions to intruders left to the GM's interpretation. This makes sense--you never know what sort of entrance the players are going to make or how they'll look. I feel like this became much more common with the rise of boxed text in 2e and on trad play.
Conditional Response to Players: Somewhat more common, although again with a range from implicit (Wolves and 'those who would come are torn apart') to explicit (Holy Mountain Shaker and its 'when the players do this. . .' prompts). I like the implicit framing quite a bit more--how the key responds to the players can be used as much to tell about the key in general as to resolve a singular situation.
General Concept: Many keys had titles, some of which revealed information that was not otherwise presented in the key. This felt a little like a crutch, but I did appreciate Lair of the Lamb and how it used names to make other rooms easier to remember/find rather than attempting to summarize them.
Temporary/Indefinite/Possible/Reactive Situation: Almost all of the keys leaned heavily on the Indefinite situation over all others, with the exception of Deep Carbon Observatory, who provided an extremely temporary situation and little else, and Arden Vul, which does a little of all four. This makes sense, given that most of these keys are meant to be revisited potentially multiple times but possible and reactive situations are often not worth the word count.
NPC Presence/Motivation/Instincts/Backstory: This one isn't that fair to compare, since simply not all rooms had NPCs. I will say that A Perfect Wife is the clear champ of this category, though, with all four categories fully provided in just a few short and captivating sentences.
Lore & Backstory: Rare but not entirely absent. The most lore-ful was probably Hot Spring Island, but even that information had some immediate relevance. Non-actionable information was, thankfully, omitted.
Other Keys: Some keys referred to other keys and some didn't. I very much appreciated it when they provided a page number whenever they did. I mostly tried to look at keys that made sense relatively stand-alone, so there's not a lot of this.
Authorial Intent: Absent! Although some of the modules do provide it in other sections. I wonder if I should have included Tomb of the Serpent Kings to get a few examples to show.
Kickers & Quests/Potential Player Actions/Unanswered Questions/Exciting Possibilities: This felt like one of the big differences between the keys I liked and the ones that were more forgettable (although this is already selecting for keys that I remembered being interesting from prior read-throughs). The really fun keys weren't simply things you explore because they're there so much as situations that both demand a response but fail to provide an obvious solution. These elements were generally implicit in the key's concept, though.
Mechanical Details: These were often present, always needed, and usually a liability. Attempts to include mechanics mid-paragraph were almost always a significant hit to legibility. The best keys simply listed their statblocks in their own section or explained mechanics in plain language.
Cool Words: Nobody listed here included box text, but many did include segments that could reasonably be read verbatim (or close to it) to players. This actually felt like a major strength of the just-paragraphs keys over the more structured ones--HSI and OSE style thwart this to a significant degree.
The Script: Almost completely absent, but that's probably because I actively avoid modules that do this.
IRL Props: A few of these came with art that you might reasonably show players (while covering up the text next to it). This is a place that Call of Cthulhu really shines, in my experience.
I have no idea if doing an audit like this was fun for you, but it was extremely helpful to me in helping me identify what I actually do or don't enjoy in the modules I use. Next time I'll take a shot at establishing my own house style for what information to present vs omit and how to structure it.
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