There's a lot of bad writing out there across movies, video games, books, etc. That's no surprise, there's a lot of writing out there, some of it has to be bad.
But sometimes, writing is bad in an especially frustrating way. A sequel you've been waiting for forever not only doesn't live up to the original, but actively seems to set out to invalidate all the good things the first one did. Or a movie that's really great, until the last 10 minutes complete ruin it. When I read/watch/etc. one of these, I like to do an activity I call, "The Minimum Acceptable Fix". Basically, what's the smallest change(s) you can make to take something bad, and make it good?
Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery (that's a long title) is an easy and popular example of this. After spending most of the movie with KISS as space wizards:
Not just Sailor-Moon-Esque, some of these are flat out swipes.
Before switching to being a hallucination by Shaggy and Scooby in the last 5 minutes. (Or maybe not?)
It's a much better movie if you cut most of that last 5 minutes, and put it in the "this time, the monsters are real!" part of the Scooby continuity.
My wife is a big fan of the Glass Cannon Podcast/Network. Short version, they do a podcast playing TTRPGs, mostly Pathfinder. Their current main campaign is Gatewalkers which is infamously terrible. I decided to take a look at the actual books today to see how much of it is bad module writing vs bad podcasting.
I blame it like 90% on the modules. So, after sending my wife a Discord post that's longer than this blogpost (and thus wasting time I should've spent doing an actual post...) I decided to talk about MAF today, using Gatewalkers as an example. LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD!
GW is made up of 3 books. The initial adventure hook is that, a few months ago, your characters lost time ("The Missing Moment"), went through not-a-stargate and woke up with mild superpowers without knowing what they did. They meet other people who had the same thing happen, including a professor who is trying to research things. The primary issues are everything lack of player agency, a disconnected plot, and inconsistent theme/tone. The campaign is billed as horror/mystery themed. The horror is inconsistent, and there's very little mystery (The Missing Moment is the only real mystery, is largely resolved by the midway point, and requires zero real mystery solving by the players.)
Book 1 deals with the players investigating the legally-distinct-Stargates, an ancient curse, and traveling first to a shadow-fey realm and then to an elf planet. The first 2/3 of the book lean into horror, primarily slasher/body style. The final third has minimal horror, and doesn't really fit the rest of the book, while attempting to establish a tenuous link between the previous events and the rest of the campaign. The characters eventually return to their home planet.
Book 2 is an extended escort quest with a seer, where 90% of the plot of the whole trilogy is handed to the players via narration/dream sequence. Horror content is fairly low, consisting of a ghost ship and some slightly Lovecraftian dream sequences.
Book 3 is Rhyleth Trail, with the players playing an idiotic navigation minigame to stop Whale-Cthulhu from awakening. Also, unsurprising betrayal of the professor from the opening scene who's been largely absent/disguised. Public domain Lovecraft goodies abound, and the writing attempts to pivot to Cosmic Horror with mixed results.
This post fixes mostly on fixing the story elements, but I'll touch on gameplay where it's relevant.
Book 1 is the best of the three, and allows an easy demonstration of one of the basic MAF techniques. Sometimes, a part of a story doesn't fit with the other parts, and can be easily pulled out. Book 1 is all about jumping between planets and dimensions, with a modest amount of squicky horror. That's a great adventure theme! It's also totally dissonant with the rest of the series. The best thing Paizo could do for Book 1 is to yank it from the trilogy entirely, and either make it stand alone (PCs investigate the gates/curse>PCs get transported to horror-fey-land>PCs beat the shadow king> PCs go home [cutting out The Missing Moment and the final third to beef up the other parts, possibly enhancing it with part of Book 3]) or the start of another, more thematically unified campaign. This could either lean into the body-horror, or go for a "horror of the week" theme, using the gates to fling the PCs into different subgenres every session or two. The final section on the elf planet could probably fit here by touching up the horror a bit, but is too out of place if it's standalone.
Book 2 is probably the worst of the bunch. The extended escort quest needs to go, obviously. The Missing Moment is mostly resolved here. During this time, the PCs were capturing a legally-distinct-yeti and dragging it to legally-distinct-Leng (which is public domain anyway) to free Whale-Cthulhu, who is mind controlling them. The full details won't come out until Book 3, but the broad strokes are there. There's an Inception-city that could possibly have been leveraged into a useful dungeon by better writers, and a ghost-ship sidequest with a small dungeon. While you could pull out some parts out, the best plan here is to axe 90% of the book, and keep the yeti-napping as the starting point for a campaign. The mystery isn't "what were we doing?" but "why/how are we here?" The PCs have vague memories of dragging the yeti and something big and scary being near them. They wake up in a blizzard a day's journey from the nearest settlement. They make it back, but no one can tell them why they're there or who they are. Random bands of crazy explorers pass through all the time, so none of the natives think a ton of it. The PCs have to do actual investigating (instead of getting everything handed to them via NPC/dreams) to figure out why they're here, which eventually leads them to the end of book 3, stopping the space-whale-monster they were brainwashed by.
Book 3 starts with a link back to Book 1 (the doctor was evil all along!) It's one of the better sequences in the adventure, even if it's fit awkwardly here between two trips to the North Pole. Again, this could be lifted as the final chunk of Book 1 (with levels adjusted). In the new Book 2-3 campaign, I don't think there's a ton of space for it. Maybe if the location was shifted to being in the Arctic, instead of halfway across the world, you could use it. Section 2 is 200+ skill checks (seriously, who writes this stuff?) as your characters trek to the pole. A much abbreviated version could be used to investigate how you wound up there (there's spots for encountering monsters, ruins, explorers, etc. this could much more satisfyingly be used to find clues instead of random encounters.) Section 3 is stopping whale from escaping from its prison under the Artic city watching the NPC you escorted in Book 2 stop the whale. Again, that's gotta go. Paizo sidesteps having you fistfight Cthulhu by using a corrupted yeti here, which is a decent idea. The professor should be the final boss here, and can be used with minimal modification. He was still part of the earlier expedition, he still tricks the PCs, etc. Beating him gives the PCs a chance to disrupt the ritual (not via skill checking to aid an NPC) and close out the adventure. Alternatively, the elaborate travel sub-game could maybe be used as part of a an Artic West March. It'd need to be redone, but random bullshit on your way to explore the lost city is very OSR.
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