Yeah many people just plain do not know that an adventure module can be something other than a completely linear script you follow.
Here’s a very old, very classic adventure module for classic D&D from my dad’s attic.
It has a map of the dungeon (as you will see, it is not a linear series of fights, it’s a complex location the party explores. That line drawn in pencil tracks the way the party happened to go when this was played, not the way they’re “supposed to go.”)
And it has a full fleshed out description of the rooms and different interesting and interactable things within the rooms. It has pre-statted monsters, traps, etc.. The party explores it and tries to get out alive with as much treasure as they can carry. You can also weave this into an ongoing campaign or a “story” - it’s “modular,” that’s the point of a "module." When I ran this for my group’s rotating-DM AD&D campaign, the party was hired to rescue three children who were kidnapped by goblins. The goblins had one, but the other two escaped and got lost in the not-goblin-controlled parts of the dungeon, requiring the party to explore every inch of it to find them.
Of course, this kind of module cannot be used for a “plotted” D&D campaign, because it is designed to quickly kill unwary characters. But if you’re wanting your PCs to have plot armor, you really should not be playing any edition of D&D. It’s not designed for plotted stories, it’s designed to be a game where shit happens that you then tell stories about later.
The party in our group did suffer some pretty severely bad injuries, but no deaths, because they’re a group of competent, capable, and careful mercenaries.
“But that’s a dungeon crawler, modules like that don’t work for non-dungeon-crawler games!”
Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, an extremely non-dungeon-crawler game, has modules very much like this. In Eureka, the party doesn’t delve into dungeons, they talk to people, look for clues, and solve mysteries.
So, Eureka modules provide a “Truth” for the GM’s eyes only which lists exactly what happened that resulted in there being a mystery to solve, a “hook” for why the PCs would have gotten involved in trying to solve the mystery, and a set of relevant locations, often with maps. (The locations may be connected on a larger city/town/area maps but usually travel between the important locations is abstracted.)
The locations are given full descriptions, various points of interest that might be relevant to the investigation, info for the GM about what the PCs will find if they inspect those things properly, etc. They also include NPCs with visual and personality descriptions, lists of what information the NPC knows about the mystery, and how they might react to certain actions from the PCs.
Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG is even less comparable to a dungeon-crawler than Eureka. It’s a interpersonal politics sitcom-y comedy game where a Drow Mistress and her pathetic minions try to keep up appearances in a cutthroat society where the social expectations are arcane, byzantine, and very high stakes. Reputation is everything.
Something will go wrong in the palace, and the party will have to hide that it is going wrong and act like everything is fine while impressing the neighbors.
A module for Silk & Dagger comes with a particular problem that’s going to happen in the palace and when and where in the palace it will happen, as well as a guest arriving and/or some other social obligation. It includes visual and personality descriptions for the NPCs, and how they will react to certain actions by the PCs.
These are games which are about three very very different kinds of characters and situations, and yet they all benefit from having adventure modules.
