A cool thing about published modules

16 Oct, 2026

I used to refuse to run published game material. For the first 15 or so years I ran games, I insisted on homebrewing everything except the system itself¹. I wanted to build my own world, my own adventures, all of it. In this time, I only ever finished one campaign: a relatively brief Dungeon World campaign with some new friends something like 12 years ago. Every other campaign fizzled when I inevitably tangled myself up in my own expectations and ran out of energy to keep trying to meet them.

That changed a couple of years ago, largely thanks to Mothership. I'll write more about that another time, I think, because today I want to talk about a specific pleasure of running (or playing) modules that I'd never considered before.

Hey, Remember Elden Ring?

Fans of From Software's games know that there's a distinct joy in playing one when it's brand new, when everyone is exploring this world for the first time all at once. People get online and share their experiences like kids swapping gaming stories during school recess (something that FromSoft's games are specifically designed to prompt).

Elden Ring's release was an extra special version of this. Due to the impressive marketing hype and some kind of involvement from George R. R. Martin², Elden Ring reached outside of established Souls game fans and reached a much broader audience. And so, when it released, thousands and thousands of players took to social media to talk about what they had found, how they'd approached bosses, where they got their asses kicked, and strange mysteries they encountered along the way. It was a delightful time to be playing video games. (Remember everyone running directly into Margit and getting bodied? Good times.)

And when you play a published tabletop RPG module, you get to do some of that, too.

The Fun of Shared Experiences

This post was prompted by my experience running Year of the Rat, a one-shot module for Mothership. It's not an especially complex module: the PCs are assigned to retrieve the black box from a derelict ship called Year of the Rat, essentially a space version of a riverboat casino, so the insurance company can find a solid reason to deny the claim on the lost vessel. What ensues is a dungeon crawl punctuated by attacks by a dangerous monster and PCs being offered great wealth to tempt them into even greater risks.

It was a pretty fun time, all told. I'd recommend it. Originally I was going to use it to start a Prospero's Dream-focused campaign, but in retrospect I'm glad I didn't, because the surviving PCs walked out of there fabulously wealthy.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

As soon as she got home from the session, one of the players in my group dove into reading the experiences of other groups, other players, who'd also played Year of the Rat. She was curious how their groups had tackled some of the problems and how they'd achieved a goal that her group had managed to pull off³, and she shared what she found with the rest of us over Discord.

And that was cool as hell! It kind of hit me all at once: if you're playing game material that other people can also play, that means you can share your experiences with each other, compare notes, and see the very different ways the adventure played out.

It's different from that Elden Ring anecdote, of course, because there's no computer running the adventure, no code ensuring everyone's encountering mostly the same thing (barring glitches, of course). That means you not only get to read about what other groups of players did, but also how different referees approached it, and how different tables worked together to create their own unique experiences from the same source material.

That's not something I really get to enjoy when I'm homebrewing everything, and neither do my players. I still write my own settings and adventures sometimes (and hell maybe I'll actually manage to publish some one of these days), and that has its own distinct joys. Playing TTRPGs around a table is already a shared experience, after all. But when I don't, I know I have that other, more wide-reaching shared experience to look forward to.

A nice little dessert after a fun session. Or something like that.