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way they are taking the adventure, but these players will not just be from an individual group. Rather, these players come from a collective that has played that adventure in many smaller groups with many different variations. Since Living Greyhawk, Wizards of the Coast and the RPGA have begun to adapt the way things are run to incorporate even more player feedback. Answers to adventure questions are collected from those that have played a particular module so that future writers will be aware what types of activities are happening throughout the campaign world. Although shared-world campaigning originally discouraged the DM from making adjustments, the RPGA now boasts that “DMs are now empowered to adjust adventures to accomplish this task, just like they would in their home games” (Tulach, 2008). It appears that the increased amount of feedback collected from the RPGA has enabled Wizards of the Coast to produce modules that more directly respond to the wants and needs of their players. While it is tempting to say that the module writers are the primary authors of RPGA adventures, what they write is based in part on the results reported by the players.

The main difference in how a DM in a home campaign might make use of a module is in terms of the way he or she incorporates that module along side other texts. Rather than use the text as is, the DM building a home campaign often samples from various modules to create his or her own world and story. In terms of the Sorpraedor campaign, it is difficult to trace the influence and use of gaming modules. Unlike the core rule books, modules are often published by various authors and companies, and often these smaller companies do not last. One of the key settings in Sorpraedor was the city of Gateway, which came from the module “Gateway: City of Living Water” by Darrin Drader and Tony Bounds. This module was published in 2001 by Dark Portal Games. It was one of the many that took advantage of the Open Gaming License to publish D&D adventures using the d20 system. However, Dark Portal Games went out of business and what used to be a free PDF on their website became difficult to obtain. In addition, Scott found it difficult to remember exactly what parts of the Sorpraedor adventure he had taken from which source and what had made up completely from whole cloth. When questioned about the Blaze Arrow adventure, he thought that it was mostly spontaneous; however, he later mentioned that he did remember reading a module that may have influenced the gaming session but could not recall the details. This lack of distinction between text created by the DM and text created by game designers shows just how problematic the idea of authorship is within the TRPG, particularly in a home run campaign. The DM will take a snippet here, and idea there—a name, a map, a character—and will incorporate these into his or her own world. This sort of “textual poaching,” to use Jenkins’s (1992) word to describe the way that fans rewrite TV shows, is common and acceptable in home TRPGs.

Unlike fan fiction writers, who take the text in a direction that the TV producers and writers don’t necessarily support, TPRG modules are meant to be adapted in this way. As previously discussed, they are written more like technical manuals than novels. These various sections help illustrate that modules are indeed manuals rather than stories themselves. They follow a fairly rigid formula that begins with an introduction, adventure background, synopsis, and adventure hooks (www.wizards.com). After the summary of the key parts of the adventure, the adventure hooks are designed to get the players interested in starting the adventure and give their characters a reason for being there. Often these hooks anticipate that the players have been together for a while in a regular campaign setting. After the adventure hooks, the writer of the module outlines encounters. Encounters are any actions that take place in the game. Often these are combats that occur where the players fight a monster, but they can also be key locations where