In Praise of Brevity

This last weekend I had the chance to attend GaryCon, where I ran my Legends of Greyhawk (LoG) author only (AO) adventure that is more written out than any other AO that I have done, as well as several of sessions of Tower of Gygax, a D&D 1e crawl that celebrates that old school style that emphasizes creative quick thinking, where each encounter is less than a page. Running both back-to-back made something click.

I reflected on those times GMs spend hours preparing extensively written out adventures until they know the material cold, and then while running them the players do something unexpected and they freeze. Not because the GM doesn't know the adventure, but because they know it too well. Someone else's fully-formed story is sitting in the GM’s head, and there's no room for theirs. They flip through page after page looking for something to use, something that gives them permission to improvise, and they don’t find it. Why does this happen, and is the adventure itself partly responsible?

Long writing in tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) isn’t always the problem. Sourcebooks, setting guides, lore supplements, these are meant to be read and absorbed and making them enjoyable to read makes a lot of sense. No argument there. But adventure writing, especially for public play, has a different purpose. Designer Shawn Merwin has often described these adventures as instruction manuals for a fun game, but I think I’d add another metaphor. Consider a recipe versus a food memoir. Both are about food. Both can be beautifully written. But one is for doing and one is for experiencing. If you're standing at the stove, you need the recipe. When adventure writing prioritizes storytelling over instruction, it optimizes for the wrong moment. The adventure is prepared in private but lived in public.

I overwriting adventures myself. Shattered Reflections of a Frozen Twilight (IUZ04-08), an eight-hour adventure for 10th-16th level characters for the Living Greyhawk 3.5e OP campaign was famously 128 pages; over half of it stat blocks. While many loved the story and the epic fights. No one was excited to prepare it!

Two things are happening when an adventure is overwritten. First it overloads the GM’s cognitive load. When an author has done all the imaginative work fully and completely by describing every detail in a room like a novelist, giving every NPC a rich interior life, or writing every scene with a tone and a shape, well that vision takes up space. At the table, improvising around that fully-formed vision requires active resistance, not just creativity. Second, overwriting creates implicit signaling about the right way to run it. Excessive narrative prose carries instructions that the author never wrote explicitly: “this is how it goes.” When an adventure reads like a story already told, deviation starts to feel like the GM is doing it wrong. The GM isn't just navigating the adventure, they're navigating their relationship to someone else's authorial intent. These two things together create lock-in. It's not that GMs can't improvise. It's that the writing is quietly working against them when they try.

Running LoG - Ruins of Sulm at GaryCon 2026

What gets lost is presence: the GM's ability to be alive and responsive in the moment, with these specific players, at this specific table. Preparation happens at home, alone, with the book. Presence happens in the room, live, with people. Over-specified prose is very good at filling up the first, and can actively undermine the second. RPGs are a collaborative storytelling exercise. An adventure module is not the story. It's the conditions under which a story can happen. The story gets made at the table, by the players and the GM together. An overwritten adventure forgets this. It has already told the story, and now you as the GM are just delivering it.

There’s a lot of abbreviated writing that gives the needed instructions for a great story: early TSR modules, one-page dungeons, or the sparse functional clarity of indie designs like Shadowdark. LoG adventures have a 8,000 word count maximum, which is a significant change from previous campaigns. These aren't thin because their authors were putting in less effort, they're sparse because they understand what the document is for.

Consider these two passages:

The bartender Datok fought in the Dragongate Wars and enjoys telling old stories to his patrons. He knows about the old ruins, but only tells those who trusts about them.

versus

The bartender Datok bares the physique of an aging warrior, with scars on the left side of face and a left arm that never quite healed correctly. He bought the inn with spoils he captured during the Dragongate Wars, and hung his longsword over they bar. As the night moves on, he launches into one tale after another about the Sack of Trintali where he earned his scars saving the Baroness Aerella and her maid from a fire set by the Greenscale Kobolds. Indeed, he’ll even wax poetic about the beauty of the maid, one Cindae, who tenderly looked after him while he healed. If a character chooses to toast the heroes of Trintali, Datok brings out a bottle of Old Unc’ Butters Brandy and gets choked up trying to say a few words. Such a character will earn Datok’s trust and can find out what he knows about the old ruins nearby.  

The first paragraph tells the GM who Datok is, and what he knows, then gets out of the way. The second paragraph is rich in details with some genuinely good world building but likely won’t matter for a three-hour public play OP adventure. It quietly implies that the only way path to Datok’s trust runs through an evening of drinking and war stories. A GM who has absorbed that paragraph may hesitate. Not because they can’t improvise, but because the text has already made a decision they now have to consciously unmake.

It isn't purely about the word count. A long adventure can be well-structured and GM-friendly. A short one can still be over-narrated. It's about posture; the way the writing positions itself relative to the GM. Is it handing the GM ingredients, or is it handing them a finished meal?

Now, it’s true that sparse writing does transfer labor to the GM. A bare-bones module asks more of the person running it to fill in details. That's real. But filling in the details of a sparse module is creative work, the good kind, the kind that makes the adventure yours and gives space for the players to help. Wrestling with an overwritten adventure isn't preparation, it's editing someone else's draft. The author's job is to create the conditions for a great session. The GM's job is to have it. When authors try to do both, they end up doing neither particularly well.

For writers, that means the discipline here is specific and genuinely hard: you have to write the detail, fall in love with it, and then cut it anyway — because it served your understanding of the adventure, not the GM's ability to run it. The bartender's scars, his lost love, the brandy bottle, maybe you need all of that to know who Datok is. But the GM only needs enough to find him interesting and know what he's for. Leaving space isn't a failure of imagination. It's knowing whose imagination the space belongs to.

DM Bones Running Tower of Gygax

By their nature, ttrpgs are collaborative. The whole point is that the people at the table matter: their choices, their reactions, their history together, their sense of humor, their willingness to be surprised. The best adventures leave room for all of that. They show up with a situation, some pressure, some interesting pieces, and then they get out of the way and let the people playing through the story fill in the rest. We tend to think that more word count from the author means more value for the GM. But in adventure design, the most generous thing a writer can do is leave space. The adventure ends when the book closes. The story starts when the game begins.