First impressions: Mysteries of the Ancients (part 2 – writing, layout and structure)

This is the second post about Mysteries of the Ancients. Last time I talked about the campaign, this time, I’m looking at the writing, structure, and layout.

Okay, a quick warning. In this post, I am hugely critical of Mysteries of the Ancients – in particular, how it’s written and laid out and the structural decisions that don’t help a GM understand it.

I think a lot about this sort of thing. Making things easy for our customers is a key part of what we do at Freeform Games, and when something I care about gets it wrong, it presses a lot of my buttons.

(And if you think I’m singling out Traveller, check out my reviews of ALIEN’s Destroyer of Worlds and Heart of Darkness, where I’m equally critical.)

So if you are a fan of Mysteries of the Ancients, you may want to look away now.

TL;DR: Overwritten, badly structured, unhelpful layout

I found Mysteries of the Ancients hard to read. I felt it was overwritten, had a bizarre structure that didn’t help comprehension, and would have benefitted from a layout that helped separate background information from adventure text.

So let’s look at each of these in detail.

Writing: less is more

I had three issues with the writing in Mysteries of the Ancients. First, it has a lot of padding – it’s not concise and clear. Second, it’s often vague when it should be clear. Third, there’s too much unnecessary information.

Overwriting: Adventure writing isn’t fiction. It needs to be concise and clear, conveying enough information to the reader so they can run the game for their players. Unfortunately, I found Mysteries of the Ancients neither concise nor clear.

As an example, I edited the text about the enhanced security case (page 56) from 432 words to 225. The result was concise and readable, and it included everything I needed without the superfluous waffle. Similarly, I reckon the section on Omicron Division (pages 24 and 25) can be cut from over 1300 words to around 400 without losing anything important to the campaign. 

So with a good editor, I reckon Mysteries of the Ancients could easily be 50% shorter. Shorter, punchier, livelier and a more enjoyable read.

(It is not lost on me that Secrets of the Ancients is a shorter book but has more playable material in it.)

Vague when it should be clear: In many places, Mysteries of the Ancients is far too vague. It drops hints rather than clarifies. Sometimes explanations turn up later, and sometimes they don’t. It's okay to present the players with puzzles - it's not okay not to tell the GM about them.

Some examples:

• Page 73 contains the first description of a village. It says, “One building stands out, much bigger than the others…” A page or two later, we learn who owns this building, but why not be clear and refer to the page where the building is described? Or use the map reference?
• Regarding an Ancient artefact, page 90 says, "For the present, the purpose of [redacted] remains decorative only." But Mysteries never resolves this. There’s not even a hint as to where or when the artefact’s true purpose might be resolved, whether in this campaign or a later one. I found this tone irritating – why not just explain it to the GM?
• Page 94 refers to a ship that seems to travel without using a J-drive but says, "Either [redacted] was carried aboard another ship during these movements or she travelled by some mysterious means." This is never explained.
• Chirpers are mentioned several times without explaining what they are. (There isn't even library data for them.) I know most GMs will know what a Chirper is, but given the exhaustive detail about trivial items elsewhere, their omission is odd.

Unnecessary information: Mysteries of the Ancients is full of superfluous details that aren’t needed for the campaign. For example, a short scene (maybe one session max) on Egypt starts with around four pages of unnecessary background detail. This includes two paragraphs on the 100th fleet, which does not feature in the campaign.

It’s like this throughout Mysteries. So much of the detail is irrelevant and could be summarised, leaving the GM to improvise should the PCs go off-piste. Instead, I imagine some GMs will be paralysed by the detail, worried that they will get it “wrong.” I appreciate that some might enjoy detailed descriptions of a particular starport or the composition of the 100th fleet, but if it's not relevant to what's going on, that's not me. (I would have less of an issue with this material if it were clearly separated from the adventure material – as I discuss below.)

Structure: creating clarity through structure

Mysteries of the Ancients’ structure is bizarre, so say the least.

The campaign starts with an overall summary but goes quickly downhill after that. In the 45 pages of dense writing that follow the introductory summary, we have:

• The Legend of Twilight's Peak.
• Who and What were the Ancients – the truth about the Ancients.
• Ancients Hunting, which describes the Ancients Hunters community and how the Travellers might come to the authorities’ attention. However, there's no list of the Ancient Hunters themselves – they’re scattered throughout the book (it would be much better if they were in one place). Also missing are the various theories that they believe.
• Omicron Division, a secret Imperium department.
• Droyne and the Ancients, which is mostly about the Droyne and not really about the Ancients. (This should have been an appendix.) It refers to someone called Yusote, but we don't know who they are yet.
• Project Gannessa, which starts talking about Research Station Gamma but then morphs into a black project run by Omicron. There are also a few pages about [redacted], which is nasty, but why is it here? This section has paragraphs that start with things like, “This adventure is initially about…” which suggests it was written to go later in the book.
• Glisten subsector and District 268. Well, mostly Glisten – almost nothing about District 268 (which is awkward as one adventure takes place in District 268).
• Incidental characters. Five pages of incidental characters that a GM can use for colour. Why isn’t this in an appendix?

Finally, we get to the start of the campaign itself. Apart from the sheer drudgery of wading through it all, the main issue with all this early material is that it lacks context. Why do we need to know about these things? It’s just dry, overwritten background material.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the structure of the individual adventures is also unhelpful.

In Fleeting Memoriam: This adventure is a monster hunt, starting on page 70 and finishing on page 91. Unfortunately, its complicated structure makes it hard to follow. For example:

• The first three pages describe the planet and could be cut right down. Most of it isn’t relevant to the adventure and could be moved to library data or made clear that it’s background material (more on that below).
• The details of the village are on pages 73, 78 and 81-83. Put it in one place!
• The adventure timeline is covered in several places, making it hard to follow.
• The equipment (the guns and the medical device) could happily fit on one page. (They could even be combined with other equipment in the campaign game in a “Ship’s Locker” section elsewhere in the book.)
• The section about how the investigation proceeds is on pages 80 and 90-91.
• Very little is cross-referenced. There are maps, but apart from the initial description, they’re not cross-referred to at all.
• The adventure is split in the middle by a room-by-room description of a locked starship and its deck plan. While its contents are important for the campaign, the only space relevant for In Fleeting Memoriam is the cargo hold (which is open – internal doors are locked). There’s then more detail about the ship after the adventure – which is where I would put the deck plan and room-by-room description (other than the open cargo hold). In Fleeting Memoriam should focus on the monster hunt – not the extra stuff needed for the campaign.
• Information about the monster hides in several places in the book. I wanted to find out where the monster came from and I knew I'd read that one of the NPCs had tracked it down, but could I find it? It wasn't in In Fleeting Memoriam (which has several "What happened in..." headers), and it wasn't in the chapter describing the monster (and its origins) in great detail. I eventually found it on page 13, which talked about the Legend of Twilight's Peak!

This uncoordinated approach isn’t limited to In Fleeting Memoriam. The whole book is like this.

Layout: making things easy to find

Overall, I like Traveller’s current graphic design and layout. The two-column text is clean and usually easy to read. However, in Mysteries of the Ancients, I found it hard to differentiate between adventure text and setting text. That made it difficult to identify key points that move the adventure on. 

This, for me, is a key element in writing RPG adventures: keeping setting material separate from the adventure. It's not always easy, particularly with a detailed, fictional world like Traveller. But using layout to separate adventure material from setting material would go a long way to making the Mysteries easier to comprehend.

And I don’t mind the background material. There’s more than I need, but I appreciate that some GMs might like the extra detail. What I object to is not being given a choice as to whether I need to read it or not. Keep it separate!

Some easy examples of things Mysteries could have done:

• Made more use of handouts. Mysteries has a couple, but I would add the books (Professor A’s work and the analysis of Twilight’s Peak, perhaps by a student at Regina University) and much of the world background data (perhaps as extracts from travel guides). Some of this could also be library data.
• Provide all the maps as player-facing handouts without the references.
• As I said, I would put the equipment in its own section and cross-refer to it when needed.
• Highlight key sections of the adventure – material the PCs need to progress to the next stage – instead of hiding it in the text.

Overall

“I apologize for such a long letter—I didn't have time to write a short one” – Mark Twain

Fixing the writing, structure, and layout isn’t hard. But it takes care and effort – and the ability to recognise that a campaign book is a game manual to be used by a GM, not a story to be read. It’s a shame we’re in 2024 and still haven’t learned that.

Am I going to run Mysteries of the Ancients? Probably not – it seems too hard to run.

Will I get Wrath of the Ancients? Almost certainly, because I want to see how everything wraps up, and I still like the Ancients.  But I’ve lowered my expectations.