So I've been doing some writing today, and I've at least finished the first half of Part One of the module, the setting background and central "gimmick"—namely that Älyewinn is a Middle-Earth pastiche inflected by both "ancient aliens" style sci-fi and the infamous "Tom Bombadil is evil" postulate. I've always wanted to take that idea in both hands and dash for the horizon with it; this is the result.
The fact that I'm going to wind up devoting something like eight pages at the beginning of this module to nothing but backstory and setting info will, no doubt, irk some readers. There's a tendency in OSR circles to prize "tight" writing above all else (despite many bloggers' professed love for High Gygaxian prose) and to laud especially the phenomenon which has come to be known as implied worldbuilding—dashing off a single sentence in the corner of your artsy-fartsy game-module that suggests the presence of a certain world-element without actually doing anything at all to explain it.
Say that instead of a skill system, your RPG book has a career list. If you populate that list with entries like "electric goose wrangler" and "haberdasher assassin," that certainly implies that the setting presumed by your game includes such things as electric geese, people who wrangle them, and assassins who either are or who for some reason specialize in killing haberdashers—even if none of these things are ever mentioned again elsewhere in your book.
I fucking hate that shit.
Gaming sourcebooks don't need to be fucking coy. They are supposed to be examples of technical writing. Their purpose is to convey information to the referee! If they can do that while also telling the occasional entertaining story, well and good, but the main point is to get the point across. Sometimes, that entails saying everything that needs to be said. Sometimes, if you only try to say just enough and leave the rest to be merely inferred, you wind up saying nothing at all.
Yes, leave gaps for referees to fill in where appropraite. Yes, trust your readers to have both intelligence and imagination. But, for the love of all that is good, please please please do not merely imply that your setting might have elements which are interesting. Give it elements which are interesting—and do the work to unpack them, so that your readers can see why.
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