I reread Curse of Mizzling Grove today (available digitally, and in print soon), and I was surprised by how good it was. I don’t know about you, but often forget how to repeat my successes, so I thought I might make some notes of my learnings from the project.

Big picture: I realised reading through this, given I was also writing something else, that a lot of the principles written for modules are written for large scale — dungeons with 60+ rooms or megadungeons. And for a compact, succinct short module, that advice doesn’t necessarily apply. Small spaces are not about manipulating groups, but interacting with people, and hence, the details about those people matter. And in terms of my capacity to manage complexity right now, while I have a few larger projects in the pipeline, I am in a time in my life where more succinct projects are better.

I am proud of Curse of Mizzling Grove as a succinct project, and I’d like to keep making these small, amateur but high quality, low production cost zines regularly. Most of the production cost was art for Curse of Mizzling Grove, pending printing and postage, and I think that particularly once I have the fulfilment sorted and costed out in retrospect, it’ll be a really good model to keep me creating through the hard times that approach me.

Anyway, my notes on how to reproduce what I think was a success:

• Focus on a single location with a single theme. In this case, Renwall Tower.
• Use the surrounding areas to expand on that theme, rather than make them independently meaningful, In this case, Mizzling Grove itself wasn’t the town, I only implied the town.
• Lots of specific, weird details. This did the heavy lifting for the surrounding area and world, as well as made many of the small features compelling. It also helped speak to what the people in the space considered important.
• Instead of thinking in factions, think in characters. Everyone in Mizzling Grove really belong to two factions — highwaymen and trapped souls. But actually it’s the NPCs goals that make it compelling, rather than the factions.
• Simple structure. Simple layout. I’ve since written in other structures and layouts, but I don’t think I will again. The single column plus sidebar structure, combined with no frills informational design and clear referencing works very well, in combination with the Hidden/Secret/Treasure keying.
• Keep the dungeon concise. The conciseness of Mizzling Grove is an asset. I’ve been sitting on a finished module for a few months, and couldn’t figure out why I didn’t care enough to start revising and finishing it. It was because the dungeon was too big; that meant there’s boring rooms in there.
• There are empty rooms, but not boring rooms. Reduce dead weight. Every room here is edited into significance. It’s obvious part of the process was, is this room interesting? Or, Where does it make sense to hide this?
• Just one, short random encounter table. This is another iteration of keep it simple. It means you’re communicating mood and theme strongly, at the cost of the perception of an ecosystem.
• Use sensory details to teach about the environment and allow predictions. Particular smells are associated with Cacus for example, and reveal his presence. Also exits: I like including exits (so know some grogs hate them because it’s repeating map information) mainly because I use them for sensory clues into what rooms PCs might go into next. However, in complex rooms here, they got a bit much. Perhaps simplify or bullet exits in future.
• Tragic or complex characters. There’s not a character in there that someone couldn’t relate to, even if they were making obviously evil choices.
• Random things in a dungeon are cool. Not everything needs to be a part of a faction. they can just be there, and cool.
• Hooks are a mix of direct quests and more interesting, quirky tidbits. They serve to create mood as much as practical hooking. Have things serve double duty.
• Subtle conclusions, like the implication the turtle sages are an escaped experiment, are awesome. Don’t explain everything.
• When laying out, it’s hard for artists to draw to weird sizes. Try to layout to portrait or landscape sizes. This might mean compromising your neat, room to a page preferences.
• It’s written in the second person, for the most part. I really like that. Keep doing this.

I’m going to try to implement these principles into my next tiny module, currently tentatively titled Sharky.

Idle Cartulary