Swamp World Review, or Writing Dungeons Like Brian Eno
In which I take a magnifying glass to the tiny Swamp World by Brad Kerr and Skullfungus. It's truly a wonderful little thing, go pick it up - it's PWYW on Itch.
Here's the first paragraph of Swamp World, and the whole reason I wanted to discuss the design:
Yon brave adventurers fell through a magic portal into a foaming green swamp (area D2). The chill air buzzes with fist-sized mosquitos. Tiny, spongy, land-like islands punctuate the warm, gurgling, viscous, primeval bog.
Brad Kerr is on record saying that pamphlet adventures are a hard way to design. At some point I've heard his advice for aspiring writers to avoid 1-page dungeons in favour of short zines to avoid some of the design constraints of the extremely limited space.
It's a challenging task! It reminds me of Brian Eno, on composing the Windows 95 startup sound:
“The thing from the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,’ this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3.25 seconds long.’
“I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.”
And this is what Swamp World is - a gem. There's so little space here, I want to look more closely at its clever information design to see how it ticks. I invite you to pick it up on itch and dive in with me!
Layout and Art
Swamp World is a trifold pamphlet, designed to be printed on a double-sided A4 sheet.
For such a small package it has a surprising amount of art! It strikes me as curious, how with so little space, so much can be devoted to anything that doesn't directly contribute to the heft of the work. And here's the thing - I trust Brad Kerr's design sense. He's a sucker for good art, but he's also a strong designer. So let's look closer and see how he's able to justify eating into the slim word count available to him with all this art.
Here's a quick visual breakdown:
The orange blocks are titles. The blue block is the map. The green blocks are decorative. The purple blocks are prose.
It's a lot of art! At an eyeball I'd say one third of the available space is devoted to art, with about half of that being purely decorative and half being informational (titles and map). The art is well suited to purpose though, all of it pulling together with the text to sell the vibes of the module.
Vibes-First Information Design
And it's good that the art sells the vibes so effectively. The text has extremely little space to indulge in more than the barest descriptions. Take this location entry:
- B2: Bubbles, poison gas: Erupts 2x daily. Anyone in water: save or suffer 1d6.
No boxed text or purple prose here. The referee will need to lean heavily on improvisation to make an interesting encounter of this. But all the tools are available within the module. Let's look again at the opening paragraph (which I'll reproduce in full due to the luxurious lack of space restrictions in a blogpost):
Yon brave adventurers fell through a magic portal into a foaming green swamp (area D2). The chill air buzzes with fist-sized mosquitos. Tiny, spongy, land-like islands punctuate the warm, gurgling, viscous, primeval bog.
Adjectives - look at them all! Because the rest of the work is so spare, the intro loads us up on adjectives and images to pull from. Obviously this is way too many adjectives to put in a single sentence - but that's because these adjectives are gonna go a long way. And because the description is so superfluous, the mind goes into thesaurus mode, immediately supplying more - on top of what the intro gives us we can intuit that this place is steaming, bubbling, reeking, slopping, sliming, sloshing, dripping, grasping, fizzing, glooping, churning, and 1000 other swamp-like things. The reader is going to get their butter knife and scrape these descriptions over the entire adventure.
Sidebar: For its brevity, I love opening with the ridiculous phrase "Yon brave adventurers." Immediately we know the tone and genre of the module.
Pull Together Now
Often enough in adventure design, we see two or three themes that contrast or clash. A sun temple that is also hedonistic. A frog kingdom that is also chivalric. There's not space for this here - every location, every NPC, every piece of art, is swamp-themed.
So all these adjectives, all this art - though a lot of real estate is spent on it, it doesn't have to be repeated. The referee can paint everything with the same brush that they loaded up with swamp-colour during the adventure's into. Every design element is pulling in the same direction, text and image mutually reinforcing one another.
What's Here?
Moving on from layout, I want to have a quick structural look at the module. Most of what you would expect in a modern OSR work is here.
- Front page (1 trefold): Introduction
- Reverse page (3 trefolds): Map & Map Locales x 11
- Final spread (2 trefolds): Random Encounters x 6, Framing Device, Statblocks x 4
What Isn't?
- Factions! A brief faction writeup is a common inclusion these days. But it's not here. And weirdly enough, factions are where the juice of the module is.
Though the factions are never spelled out in their own sections, they can be inferred from the content of the Locales, Encounters and Statblocks. The act of piecing these relationships together allows a referee to start daydreaming potential avenues of conflict. A longer module might have to worry about leaving this sort of legwork to the GM, but here the information is never more than a flick of the eyes away due to the limited format.
Because the factions' goals and leaders are spelled out within the text of the Locales and Encounters, the text of these entries is a bit longer than our example Locale ("Bubbles, poison gas") from before.
An example:
- C2: Swamp Rangers’ Tree House 2d6 rangers present in large, smelly tree fort. Leader Raimunda (3 HD) is a devoted swamp paladin. Has: safety, tools, and food. Wants: to protect the swamp and its life (except the witch, they don’t like her).
Faction Play
The framing device directs players towards a dead simple collect-o-thon. The action happens when PCs have to explore the map and get involved with the various factions to recover the MacGuffins. The factions and their interplay will form the backbone of player interaction in the module.
The most nominally evil factions (led by an ex-pirate witch and a psychic vampire) are by default neutrally disposed towards the players. But they are set up at odds to one another, and in order to collect MacGuffins from the swamp, players will need to get intertwined with the factions and their dealings. This is a classic Prep Situations Not Plots - these dynamic relationships will automatically generate storylines once players start interfering.
Conclusion
Well, my analysis of this module is probably longer than the module itself. (That makes me feel dirty somehow.) But there are lessons here. Back to Brian Eno:
“I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music”, he continued. “I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”
I'm looking forward to the luxury of writing a six-pager some time soon.
That's it. Thanks for reading. I hope you go out and support the rest of this wonderful pamphlet series by Brad Kerr and Skullfungus - find YEAST GHOULS and DREAD SONG OF THE CRAB on DriveThru or on Skullfungus' Patreon.