When Dice Were Made of Flint #5

Modules. It’s a strange word, and it was stranger still in the late 1970s. Everyone knew about the “lunar module” of the Apollo moon landings, and those with an interest in technology might think of mysterious, boxy electronic things that were plugged into the mysterious, boxy electronic consoles of the time – but what did that have to do with dungeons?

In the early days, almost everyone made their own dungeons (see column #3). While creative vanity was a factor, there were other very good reasons for doing so – at least, in my gaming circles. Firstly, because “dungeon modules” were available for anyone to buy, there was always the risk that someone in the group had already read it or even played it. Or my college friend (hi, Roger!) who, upon entering my room, would wave at my bookshelf, intone “read module!” as though that was a spell, and pull something down to read while I made coffee.

Paradoxically, though, modules were actually quite hard to come by in the UK, given the scarcity of hobby games stores at the time. There were a few in the major cities, and some placed mail-order ads in White Dwarf and other gaming magazines (more of them later). Even so, having been printed in the United States and physically shipped to the UK, modules were expensive enough to give pause to a student on a grant or a teenager with a Saturday job – especially compared to the cost of a few sheets of graph paper, some pencils, and a few hours of your time.

What you got for your money was an 8 ½” by 11” booklet with a loose, wraparound cover of very flimsy card. The booklet ranged in size from a meagre 8 pages to a lavish 32, and consisted of a short introduction and a key to the map that was printed on the inside of the loose cover.

The art was… well, let’s be kind and call it “affordable.” The cover was printed in two colours per side (usually black and blue for the map and black plus one other colour for the outside), and the interior was black and white only. The whole thing was so flimsy that even the tension of the shrink-wrap made it buckle.

I bought a few modules while at university – both “official” ones published by TSR and others, with even lower production values, from unlicensed publishers like Judges’ Guild. It really was like the Wild West back then: the industry was run by amateurs, no one really understood copyrights and licenses, and in any case no one was making enough money to afford lawyers.

Instead of actually playing the modules I bought, I read them for research. I’d like to say that I learned a lot about adventure design this way, and maybe I did, but being obsessed with all things D&D I approached them more as light reading.

Dungeon modules continued to be produced into the 1980s, including some early adventures for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. But the format’s limitations were evident, and adventures got bigger – and sturdier – as time went on.