Module Inspirations

[Bumblepig]

I like gazetteers and really fell in love with the D&D Mystara gazetteers when they came out (I have all of them). However, on closer analysis I think I like to read them as literature (I like world building stuff) and for inspiration (be it characters, locations, plots or cultures).
...
On a related note I also have some of the same feeling with the newer 5E adventures. I have bought some of the newer adventure books but I suspect I will never run them. They are just way to large for me to manage. I highly prefer the shorter (which are still not necessarily that short) adventures where I can actually manage to remember most characters and locations during play.

I love the old Mystara setting, but most of my "knowledge" of it was from the pre-Gazetteer era. A couple good maps and a couple pages in X1 (and I think the Expert Set) was all I needed.
I still like setting books, but find they're only useful for maps and evocative NPC descriptions.

As for 5e adventures... yeah, have a few of those as well. They're beautiful books, with excellent production quality and art. But I ran into the same thing, I couldn't make use of them. It's not that they're too long, it's that the content is just kinda bland. The sole exception is The Curse of Strahd... that's a really well done adventure.

For an adventure book to be truly good it should be dirt cheap so you don't feel about marking it up with your notes, hp deductions, etc.

[rredmond]

I hate gazetteers with the passion of a million exploding stars.

I kind of feel the same way. I've been DMing my HS friends (first time we've all played together in over two decades) over Skype and I've been making the background story up as they explore and their adventures create the background goings on.

But I don't hate on folks who do like this sort of stuff. It's interesting as a player, as long as it doesn't become a TL:DR/L DM Read Aloud. Allan "grodog" Grohe I think does a good mix of that with his love, and expertise of Greyhawk. I like talking to experts on their/others' worlds, very interesting. Thus I totally agree with this.

BTW, very few of my players have been even half as interested in the setting details as I am. It is mostly a handicap for me that I would like to have a fairly well defined and consistent setting. When I make adventures I tend to force myself to keep this to a minimum.

--Ron--

[rredmond]

PS: Since my players are so key (though they think I'm a big bad world builder ) in the creation of what's going on and what's spurring their "missions", they actually tend to remember what's going on in the background moreso than I.
I've been trying to write stuff down so that I can remember when they pull stuff out like "But the wizardess Alcastra said that the undead Master of the House on Hangman's Hill was the source of the evil aura!" Um, yeah, sure that's right she did.

[Seven]

I don't remember ever seeing any Gazetteer stuff.
I started with the Basic set and moved to the Advanced rules skipping the Expert set.
I still bought some X modules. One can always use more modules.
Castle Ember wasn't too bad. The players don't have anywhere to go.
However, I found the Curse of Xanathon hard to transpose, but no almanac would have helped with that.

On the other side, things moved to the Forgotten Realms and yes, there was more background material than things to play. For a while, anyway.

In the BFRPG world, modules that are related, like the Greyhawk giant saga, tend to merge into a single document.