Over the past 20 years there has been a fascinating trend in vampire fiction. Ever since Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles crystallized the sub-genre, there has been a steady and seemingly inexorable trend towards systematically stripping vampires of their traditional weaknesses: Garlic and running water were the first to vanish, but holy symbols were quick to follow. It wasn’t long before they were able to cast reflections and even sunlight was downgraded from an instant sentence of death to a minor inconvenience before eventually being phased out entirely. Murderous, bloodthirsty beasts? Not so much. I mean, sure, they might get peckish once in awhile, but even that hunger is easily sated by a visit to the local blood bank or sucking a few rats dry.

The root for the trend was obvious: Vampires are alluring. They have the handsome, civilized polish of Mr. Darcy with a dark edge of bad boy danger. And this appeal moved them steadily from them villains to anti-heroes to heroes and, from there, to romantic leads. The result may be a rather bland creation with only the faintest glimmerings of moral and ethical complexity that was once inherent to the vampire mythos (the typical vampire these days has all the moral conflict of Superman eating a Big Mac), but the motivation was also crystal clear.

What’s interesting in reading Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight is seeing what is, in retrospect, the perfectly logical progression of the trend: Having systematically stripped vampires of their weaknesses, the genre had no choice but to start giving them new bling.

And thus we end up with vampires who literally sparkle in sunlight while being gifted with various assortments of psychic powers.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Okay, quick concept summary for the three people who have no idea what the Twilight Saga is: Isabella Feyfucker moves from the sunny world of Phoenix, AZ to the cold, rainy climes of a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Once there, she becomes the romantic center of attraction for every paranormal male in a 500-mile radius. Particularly Edward Cullen (a vegetarian vampire) and Jacob (a werewolf).

Stephanie Meyer makes it very easy to dismiss her work as that of a talent-less hack. Her prose is crude. Her plotting is uneven and often nonsensical. Her world-building is simplistic and inconsistent. In short,her books simply exude a sense of either carelessness or incompetence or both.

For example, in New Moon Meyer very specifically establishes that it’s the latter half of February (within one or two weeks of Valentine’s Day). Bella wants to sneak out of the house to go hiking and she’s excited when she discovers that her father is planning to go ice-fishing on the river. So far, everything tracks. But when she reaches the woods:

The forest was full of life today, all the little creatures enjoying the momentary dryness. Somehow, though, even with the birds chirping and cawing, the insects buzzing noisily around my head, and the occasional scurry of the field mice through the shrubs, the forest seemed creepier today…

Well, of course it seems creepier! You’ve left your father ice-fishing in the middle of winter and entered some sort of Twilight Zone Narnia featuring eternal summer!

A few paragraphs later Meyer has added “chest-high ferns” (a well-known winter growth) and a “bubbling stream” (which has inexplicably failed to join the river in freezing over) just to maximize the surrealism of the scene.

In the big picture, this continuity gaffe is of relatively minor importance. But Meyer strews this stuff all over her apparently unrevised, unedited, and unread manuscript. And it’s not just the minor stuff, either. Major plot points often fall prey to the same traps.

It was particularly interesting to watch the Twilight movie after reading the books: Meyer’s fanbase screamed bloody murder about a number of minor changes which had “ruined the movie”, but ironically these changes almost universally fixed the fundamental flaws in Meyer’s novel.

For example, in the novel Meyer gets about four-fifths of the way through the book before suddenly realizing that she doesn’t have an ending. To “solve” this problem she has three vampires show up out of nowhere. One of them decides to harass Bella just ’cause he can, Edward kills him, and… that’s it. End of novel. These vampires have no connection to the rest of the narrative, but apparently because there’s a fight the story can be over.

The film doesn’t change much: It just adds a couple of extra scenes in the first three-quarters of the movie to establish these evil vampires as a persistent background threat. But the result is a narrative which actually holds together instead of falling apart.

The film is also remarkably successful in turning Bella’s classmates — who are uniformly bland, forgettable cardboard in Meyer’s novels (to the degree that they quietly fade away in the sequels) — into quirky, memorable characters.

I bring this up only to demonstrate how little effort (or skill) it would take on Meyer’s part to fix many of the most egregious flaws in these novels.

THE SILVER LINING

So if these books are so painfully flawed, why did I keep reading them?

Because Meyer is not, in fact, a talent-less hack. To the contrary: She has one particularly exceptional talent that I feel fairly safe in saying is the reason she’s now a multi-millionaire and her books have become cultural icons.

While Meyer’s secondary characters are nothing more than interchangeable cardboard, Meyer’s handling of her central cast of characters is adept. I would even describe it as gifted. Bella, Edward, and Jacob leap off the page. They breathe. They live.

Are they foolish? Unstable? Irrational?

Absolutely. And it’s easy to make fun of them for that. But there are plenty of foolish, unstable, and irrational people in the real world. Meyer simply captures them in narrative form and then, through the application of the supernatural, she adoitly elevates these all-too-human characters into a mythical plane.

Are those supernatural elements nothing more than a cliched reworking of the vampire-and-werewolf cultural gestalt created by White Wolf’s World of Darkness? Sure. But it doesn’t matter. The mythic elements of Meyer’s milieu don’t need to be particularly original in order to heighten the reality of her characters.

So, basically, you have the powerful alchemy of teen romance with the dial cranked up to 11. That, by itself, is basically paint-by-numbers. What can’t be trivially duplicated is the potent reality of Meyer’s characters. With that added to the mix, the result is explosive.

It’s a pity that this gemstone is mired in the muck of Meyer’s weakness as a writer, but the jewel itself glitters no less brightly. And it’s not surprising to me that these books were able to capture the imagination of a generation of teenage girls.

THE DEEPER PROBLEMS

There has always been something vaguely disturbing in the sub-genre of vampire romances: Holding up the “dangerous man that I can change through the power of love” as some sort of romantic ideal is certainly a popular trope, but not a healthy one. On the other hand, while Meyer doesn’t precisely deal with these issues, she does manage to avoid some of the thornier patches of the sub-genre.

But where the series gets particularly creepy are the sequels. In New Moon, Edward suddenly embraces hardcore emotional abuse as his modus operandi. And then, in Eclipse — as if Meyer were checking off abusive relationships on a To Do list — Edward goes for full-on stalker. Whether it’s literally disabling Bella’s car so that she can’t go where she wants to go or the constant variants of “I only hurt you because I love you, baby” that he mouths, the warning sirens were screaming.

As if to emphasize Edward as a co-dependent, abusive stalker, Meyer simultaneously establishes a second love interest in the werewolf Jacob. Jacob is everything Edward isn’t: Emotionally available. Stable. Supportive. And, thus, completely rejected by Bella as anything more than a good friend (who she can’t see because her jealous boyfriend forbids it).

In Breaking Dawn, the abusive nature of the relationship drains away. But while it made for a more enjoyable reading experience, in retrospect it’s equally creepy: The subtext appears to be that marriage is a magical cure-all. Having problems with an abusive boyfriend? Get married and he’ll start treating you better!

Ironically, Meyer’s strengths as an author only serve to make the Edward-Bella relationship even creepier. She writes Bella with an absolute truthfulness, detail, and depth that seems to fully capture the psychological mire of someone caught in an abusive relationship. In other circumstances, one could hold this up as a literary triumph. But the narrative never presents itself as a the gut-wrenching tale of a girl trapped in a co-dependent tragedy. Meyer is writing a self-destructive horror story, but she thinks she’s writing about exemplary True Love. It’s sad, disturbing, and rather disgusting.

GRADES:

TWILIGHT: C-
NEW MOON: C
ECLIPSE: C
BREAKING DAWN: B-

Stephanie Meyers
Published: 2005 / 2006/ 2007 / 2008
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Cover Price: $10.99
ISBN: 0316038377 / 0316075655 / 031608736X / 031606792X
Buy Now!

WORST. PLAN. EVAH.

Dwarves: Oh no! All the gold in our mountain has been cursed!

Dwarven God: That sounds sucky. Here’s a magical artifact to remove the curse.

Dwarf 1: Think we should use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. Let’s lock all the dwarves afflicted by the curse into the lower vaults.

Dwarf 1: And then use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. Let’s evacuate the mountain.

Dwarf 1: And then we’ll use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. We’ll hide the magical artifact in the depths of the mountain.

Dwarf 1: And… then use it?

Dwarf 2: Nope. We’ll create clockwork bodies for ourselves and inscribe the secret of how to find the artifact on the gears and cogs.

Dwarf 1: And… wait, what?

Dwarf 2: Then we’ll go senile. And centuries from now the grandchildren of our disciples will “con” a small group of adventurers into retrieving and using the magical artifact.

Dwarf 1: What the hell are you talking about?

I guess this is what happens when you write adventure modules by committee. (I really wish I was exaggerating this, but I’m not. Although they technically didn’t plan to go senile, this is, in fact, the background used in the module.)

THE SIMPLE FIX

The artifact wasn’t ready-to-use out of the box. The Secret Masters of the dwarves collected the tears of the Hundred Widows who had lost their husbands to the corruption of the curse. The fist-sized teardrop of gold they forged from the cursed gold needed to bathe for a hundred years in the widows’ tears before it could cleanse the mountain itself.

Unfortunately, long before the teardrop was ready, the dwarves had been forced to abandon the fortress. Or perhaps the Secret Masters arranged for the evacuation, planning to return a century later. Whatever the case may be, things didn’t go according to plan: A hundred years passed and, deep in the bowels of the mountain, the Golden Teardrop was completed. But the dwarves were never able to return to the Golden Citadel, and so the teardrop lay forgotten…

The Gateway Trip is purportedly a collection of short stories subtitled Tales and Vignettes of the Heechee.

But that’s pretty much bullshit.

This book would be more accurately titled A Child’s History of Gateway. Only the last eight pages deal directly with the Heechee to any meaningful degree, while most of the rest of the book is largely a recapitulation of the Future History which is already thoroughly explained in the other Gateway books. This blatant regurgitation of exposition is occasionally studded with short segues describing the missions of various Gateway prospectors, but these are passionless, short (averaging perhaps 5 paragraphs), and read like the informational placards at a rather bland museum.

(I would have dearly loved to have either: (a) A true collection of stories focusing entirely on the Heechee; or (b) a collection of short stories focusing on various Gateway-based prospectors. Sadly this book is neither. It’s a completely wasted opportunity.)

The only exception to this pointless pablum is “The Merchants of Venus”, a novella originally published in 1972 which serves as a prequel of sorts for Gateway. I found “The Merchants of Venus” to be a very entertaining yarn of Campbellian science fiction. The occasional tinge of sexism by way of golden age SF is cringe-worthy, but beyond that the three main characters are well-drawn; the milieu is evocative; and the hard science fiction is used dramatically (rather than self-indulgently).

In short, if you can find a copy for a couple of bucks, The Gateway Trip is worth it just to have a copy of “The Merchants of Venus” (particularly if you enjoyed Gateway and want to find the only other taste of the universe that’s worth paying any attention to). But it’s probably best if you just skip the rest of it.

GRADE: D

(Merchants of Venus gets a B-.)

Frederik Pohl
Published: 1991
Publisher: Del Rey
Cover Price: $6.99
ISBN: 0345375440
Buy Now!

The first sensation I had while reading the sequels to the exemplary Gateway was one of disjointedness.

First, the narrative of Beyond the Blue Event Horizon jerks around in an uneven fashion. It’s one of those books where (a) there are multiple protagonists; (b) sometimes nothing interesting will be going on with one of those protagonists; but (c) the author feels compelled to periodically spend a chapter telling you about all the non-interesting stuff happening to that protagonist as if some sort of Equal Time for Equal Narrators (ETEN) lobby existed.

Second, the book is jarringly different from its predecessor. At first it feels as if it might be the different main characters or the different narrative focus creating the disparity, but eventually I figured out what was really going on.

Pohl switched genres.

The gritty, hard science fiction of Gateway is abruptly replaced with Golden Age Space Opera studded with Heinlein heroes. The fallible and interesting Robin Broadhead of Gateway is transmogrified into the Richest Man in the Universe married to the Beautiful Super Model Who Is Also A Genius. Together they fight crime and single-handedly solve all of the galaxy’s problems. Even the most ultimate and terminal of setbacks only result in giving the main characters superpowers.

Even this, by itself, wouldn’t necessarily be catastrophic. Unfortunately, it’s badly written space opera. This is Heinlein fan fiction by way of the brain eater.

The entirety of Heechee Rendezvous, for example, consists of absolutely nothing important happening. A bloated cast of characters go caterwauling around the galaxy, but they never seem to actually accomplish anything. The entire “plot” of the novel, in fact, appears to be leading up to nothing more than a “surprise revelation”… which might make some sense, if it wasn’t for the fact that the “surprise” had already been revealed at the end of the last book. (It’s as if someone made Citizen Kane 2 as a film entirely focused around revealing to the audience that Rosebud is… wait for it… a sled.)

Pohl’s aping of Heinlein’s brain eater years includes his beautiful-and-brilliant protagonists having lots and lots of sex. Not because this has any relevance to the plot or elucidates the characters in any way, but just because Pohl really likes to tell us about all the hot, hot sex that his Mary Sues are having. It starts out puzzling, becomes annoying, and then resolves into boring.

The mysterious and enigmatic Heechee themselves are transformed into nothing more than a momentary (and largely irrelevant) speed bump for the Heroes to cruise over. This is part and parcel of the switch to over-the-top space opera (conforming to the “Humans Are the Awesomest Awesome That Ever Awesomed” branch of the genre), but is nonetheless a terrible, squandering waste of one of the most intriguing and evocative creations of the genre.

In many ways, Pohl’s failure with the Gateway sequels is very similar to Arthur C. Clarke’s failure with the Rendezvous with Rama sequels (except that Pohl doesn’t have a hack co-author to shoulder the blame). The first volume of each series is a beautiful exercise in engima, creating evocative riddles that provocatively suggest the contours of their solutions without ever providing concrete answers. They force every reader to provide their own closure to the questions they raise, creating an endless panoply of possible truths.

The sequels attempt to provide the definitive answers to every single question and (perhaps predictably) fail.

Perhaps it would be impossible to provide any answer as satisfactory as the non-answers we create for ourselves in reading the first books. But if they were going to try to answer those questions, I wish they’d come up with something more than vanilla pablum that could be found in dozens of other science fiction books before and since. You’ve got a blank check: Take some risks.

The only questions Pohl doesn’t try to answer in the Gateway sequels are those which he has apparently forgotten about. For example, in Gateway a relatively big deal is made out of a golden spiral device in the Heechee vessels — it lights up with sparkling light when the ship reaches the mid-point of a journey and gets hot at seemingly other random times. Nobody knows what it does, exactly, but everyone is very curious about what its true purpose might be.

In the sequels, however, it becomes nothing more than an indicator light and the mystery of its “true purpose” is completely forgotten.

But these types of raggedly hanging loose ends are just a rather specific example of a wider problem in the books: Huge, gaping continuity errors are to be found everywhere. Within any given volume these errors are usually of only a minor sort, but between volumes the Gateway sequels fail to have any sort of consistency. For example, in the last five pages of Heechee Rendezvous you are authoritatively told that characters X and Y have gone to location A. Within the first five pages of the next book, only character X has gone to location A and character Y has instead been killed off-screen in a helicopter accident. Similarly, an entire ship full of people is miraculously resurrected because Pohl apparently forgot that he killed them all in the previous book.

These books are, in the final analysis, a complete and utter failure. By the time The Annals of the Heechee blatantly breaks the fourth wall, thus shredding any credibility the books have left, the sequels have already firmly established themselves as the literary equivalent of Highlander 2: Exercises in mediocrity interrupted only by stretches of atrocious self-indulgence which you would be well-advised to avoid even on their own sub-par merits. At the same time, they are the sort of work whose existence you must scour from your own mental reservoirs in order to enjoy the excellent work which lamentably gave them birth.

The fact that Gateway is a better novel than Highlander is a movie only makes it worse.

And the quality of the Gateway sequels continues to deteriorate from one volume to the next.

For example, I have a pet peeve about authors who feel the need to summarize the plots of the previous books in a series. First, it is unlikely that anyone is picking up Book 3 of a seven book series without having already ready Book 1 and Book 2. Second, the little snippets of information presented in awkward expository lumps they do include are insufficient to the task of bringing new readers “up to speed” — which means that (a) the extant readers are bored and (b) the new readers are still lost.

Some authors in series with less tightly-woven continuity do an excellent job of incorporating such details through the simple expedient of writing each book as if it were a stand-alone narrative. One of the tricks here is that they don’t try to summarize the plots of other books. Instead they simply drop in the necessary details from their protagonists past lives just as they would with any such detail. The difference is subtle and requires a certain mastery of your craft. Bujold, for example, has practically perfected the technique.

Pohl, unfortunately, has not.

What begins as a predictable drag on the narrative pace of the books eventually becomes something ludicrously disastrous: My copy of The Annals of the Heechee is 275 pages. Despite this brief length, 100 of the first 120 pages are spent finding clumsy ways to reiterate the narrative from the previous three books. And much of this material is studded with the familiar (yet baffling) errors of continuity.

Combined with the fact that Pohl treats his readers like idiots (by repeating the same bits of exposition over-and-over again just in case we missed it the first time) and structures his narratives around solving “mysteries” by revealing things that he he already revealed in the previous book the entire series quickly becomes completely interminable.

In short: Yes, that is an actual F- on The Annals of the Heechee. It deserves it.

GRADES:

BEYOND THE BLUE EVENT HORIZON: C-
HEECHEE RENDEZVOUS: D-
THE ANNALS OF THE HEECHEE: F-

Frederik Pohl
Published: 1980 / 1984 / 1987
Publisher: Del Rey
Cover Price: $14.95
ISBNs: 0765321777 / 0345300556 / 0345325664
Buy Now!

A question I’m asked with surprising regularity is, “Why do you waste money on adventure modules?” It’s a question generally voiced with varying degrees of disdain, and the not-so-hidden subtext lying behind it is that published adventure modules are worthless. There are different reasons proffered for why they should be ignored, but they generally boil down to a couple of core variations:

(1) Published adventures are for people too stupid or uncreative to make up their own adventures.

(2) Published adventures are crap.

The former makes about as much sense to me as saying, “Published novels are for people too stupid or uncreative to write their own stories.” And the latter seems to be derived entirely from an ignorance of Sturgeon’s Law.

On the other hand, I look at my multiple bookcases of gaming material and I know with an absolute certainty that I own more adventure modules than I could ever hope to play in my entire lifetime. (And that’s assuming that I never use any of my own material.)

So why do I keep buying more?

There are a lot of answers to that. But a major one lies in the fact that I usually manage to find a lot of value even in the modules that I don’t use.

Take, for example, Serpent Amphora 1: Serpent in the Fold. While being far from the worst module I’ve ever read (having been forced to wade through some true dreck during my days as a freelance reviewer), Serpent in the Fold is a completely dysfunctional product. It’s virtually unsalvageable, since any legitimate attempt to run the module would necessitate completely replacing or drastically overhauling at least 90% of the content.

A QUICK REVIEW

The only thing worse than a railroaded adventure is a railroaded adventure with poorly constructed tracks.

For example, it’s virtually a truism that whenever a module says “the PCs are very likely to [do X]” that it’s code for “the GM is about to get screwed“. (Personally, I can’t predict what my PCs are “very likely to do” 9 times out of 10, and I’m sitting at the same table with them every other week. How likely is it that some guy in Georgia is going to puzzle it out?) But Serpent in the Fold keeps repeating this phrase over and over again. And to make matters worse, the co-authors seem to be in a competition with each other to find the most absurd use of the phrase.

(My personal winner would be the assumption that the PCs are likely to see a group of known enemies casting a spell and — instead of immediately attacking — they will wait for them to finish casting the spell so that they can spy on the results.)

Serpent in the Fold gets bonus points for including an explicit discussion telling the GM to avoid “the use of deus ex machina” because it “limits the PCs”… immediately before presenting a railroaded adventure in which the gods literally appear half a dozen times to interfere with the PCs and create pre-determined outcomes.

The module then raises the stakes by encouraging the DM to engage in punitive railroading: Ergo, when the PCs are instructed by the GM’s sock puppet to immediately go to location A it encourages the GM to have the PCs make a Diplomacy check to convince a ship captain to attempt dangerous night sailing in order to get to their destination 12 days faster than if the captain plays it safe. The outcome of the die roll, however, is irrelevant because the PCs will arrive only mere moments after the villains do whether they traveled quickly or not. On the other hand, if the PCs ignore the GM’s sock puppet and instead go to location B first for “even a few days” then “they will have failed” the entire module.

So, on the macro-level, the module is structurally unsound. But its failures extend to the specific utility of individual sequences, as well: The authors are apparently intent on padding their word count, so virtually all of the material is bloated and unfocused in a way that would make the module incredibly painful to use during actual play.

The authors are also apparently incapable of reading the rulebooks. For example, they have one of the villains use scrying to open a two-way conversation with one of their minions. (The spell doesn’t work like that.)  More troublesome is when the PCs get the MacGuffin of the adventure (a tome of lore) and the module confidently announced that it has been sealed with an arcane lock spell cast by a 20th level caster and, therefore, the PCs won’t be able to open it. The only problem is that arcane lock isn’t improved by caster level and the spell can be trivially countered by a simple casting of knock.

The all-too-easy-to-open “Unopenable” Tome is also an example of the authors engaging in another pet peeve of mine: Writing the module as if it were a mystery story to be enjoyed by the GM. Even the GM isn’t allowed to know what the tome contains, so when the PCs do manage to open it despite the inept “precautions” of the authors he’ll be totally screwed. And the tome isn’t the only example of this: The text is filled with “cliffhangers” that only serve to make the GM’s job more difficult. The authors actually seem to revel in serial-style “tune in next week to find out the shocking truth!” nonsense.

Maps that don’t match the text are another bit of garden-variety incompetence to be found in Serpent in the Fold, but the authors raise it to the next level by choosing to include a dungeon crawl in which only half the dungeon is mapped. The other half consists of semi-random encounters strewn around an unmapped area of wreckage which are too “haphazard” to map and key. Despite this, the encounters all feature very specific topographical detail that the authors are then forced to spend multiple paragraphs describing in minute detail. (Maps, like pictures, really are worth a thousand words.)

As if to balance out this odd negligence, the authors proceed to round out the final “chapter” of the adventure by providing an exhaustive key to a mansion/castle with 50+ rooms… which the GM is than advised to ignore. (And I mean this quite literally: “In order to [“get right to the action”] have them notice the bloodstains in the entry foyer, and thus, likely, find the bodies. Make the trail that leads to the infirmary a bit more obvious […] it should be easy to keep the PCs moving up the stairs and to the final confrontation with Amra.”) In this case, the advice is quite right: The pace of the adventure is better served if the PCs don’t go slogging through a bunch of inconsequential rooms. But why is a third of the module dedicated to providing a detailed key that will never be used?

Round out the package with a handful of key continuity errors and elaborate back-stories and side-dramas featuring NPCs that the PCs will never get to learn about (another pet peeve of mine) to complete the picture of abject failure.

THE STRIP MINE

I tracked down the Serpent Amphora trilogy of modules in the hope that I would be able to plug them into a potential gap in my Ptolus campaign. Unfortunately, it turned out that the material was conceptually unsuited for my needs and functionally unusable in its execution. So that was a complete waste of my money, right?

Not quite.

To invent a nomenclature, I generally think of adventure modules in terms of their utility:

Tier One modules are scenarios that I can use completely “out of the box”. There aren’t many of these, but a few examples would include: Caverns of Thracia, Three Days to Kill, In the Belly of the Beast, Death in Freeport, Rappan Athuk, and The Masks of Nyarlathotep. Tier One modules might receive some minor customization to fit them into my personal campaign world or plugged into a larger structure, but their actual content is essentially untouched.

Tier Two modules are scenarios that I use 80-90% of. The core content and over-arcing structure of these scenarios remains completely recognizable, but they also require significant revision in order to make them workable according to my standards. High quality examples include The Night of Dissolution, Banewarrrens, Tomb of Horrors, The Paxton Gambit, Beyond the Mountains of Madness, and Darkness Revealed. (For a more extreme version of a Tier Two module, see my remix notes for Keep on the Shadowfell.)

Serpent in the Fold is a Tier Three module: These are the modules which are either too boring or too flawed for me to use, but in which specific elements can be stripped out and reused.

(Tier Four modules are the ones with interesting concepts rendered inoperable through poor execution. Virtually nothing of worth is to be found here, since you’re largely doing the equivalent of taking the back cover text from a book and writing a new novel around the same concept. Tier Five modules are those rare and complete failures in which absolutely nothing of value can be found; the less said of them, the better.)

For example, consider that mansion with high quality maps and a detailed key for 50+ rooms.

That mansion is practically plug-‘n-play. Less than 5% of it is adventure specific. That’s an incredibly invaluable resource to have for an urban campaign (like the one I’m currently running).

But the usefulness of Serpent in the Fold doesn’t end there. I’ll be quite systematic in ripping out the useful bits of a Tier Three module (since I have little interest in revisiting the material again). Starting from the beginning of the module, I find:

Inside Cover: A usable map of a simple cave system.

Page 10: Three adventuring companies are detailed. (These are particularly useful to me because Ptolus feature a Delvers’ Guild full of wandering heroes responding to the dungeon-esque gold rush of the city. Ergo, there’s plenty of opportunities for the PCs to bump into competitors or hear about their exploits. Such groups are useful for stocking the common room of an inn or pub in any campaign.)

Page 25: An interesting mini-system for climbing a mountain. It features a base climbing time and a system for randomly generating the terrain to be climbed (prompting potential Climb checks which can add or subtract from the base climbing time). I’d probably look to modify the system to allow additional Survival or Knowledge (nature) checks to plot the course of ascent (to modify or contribute to the largely random system presented here).

Page 27: A very nice illustration that I can quickly Photoshop and re-purpose as a handout depicting a subterranean ruin.

(As a tangential note: I wish more modules would purpose their illustrations so that they could be used as visual aids at the gaming table. You can make your product visually appealing and useful at the same time, and you’re already spending the money to commission the illustration in any case.)

Page 33: Another useful illustration that can be quickly turned into a handout.

Page 54-55: A new monster and the new spell required to create them.

The module also features countless stat blocks, random encounter tables, and similar generic resources that can be quickly ripped out and rapidly re-purposed.

So even in a module that I found largely useless and poorly constructed, I’ve still found resources that will save me hours of independent work.

When you’re dealing with a module like Serpent in the Fold that you have no intention of ever using, these strip-mining techniques can be used to suck out every last drop of useful information without any particular care for the husk of detritus you leave behind. But similar measures can also be employed to harvest useful material from any module, even those you’ve used before or plan to use in the future.