u/Worldly-Bobcat-48

Hello all! I hope this isn’t too outside the ordinary scope of discussion, but I wonder if anyone would be able to point me to resources describing women’s everyday clothing in the nineteen teens for a historical novel I’m working on.

Because I know that’s a tall order, some more specifics. My heroine is what I believe we’d call lower middle class—her father is a farmer, but she lives in a boarding house in a small midwestern city and is educated enough to have secured work as an assistant librarian. I do not intend her to be fashionable in any sense; merely appropriate for her era and station.

The novel will also have a fair amount of…shall we say deshabille?—so information about dressing and undressing, clasps, closures, and garments that don’t appear as often in fashion plates would be greatly appreciated.

Besides re-reading Dreiser, is there anything else I ought to consult?

There seems to be a ton of advice out there for inexperienced DMs who want to start home brewing campaigns but are afraid of letting go of the training wheels of pre-made campaigns, but seemingly nothing in the other direction.

I have only ever run homebrew campaigns in homebrew worlds—not just because I’m interested in the creative work of doing so, but just as importantly because I feel like if I’m making it up as I go along, I can pivot easily to accommodate whatever wild tangents my players decide to go in.

But it’s just so much WORK to come up with everything from scratch (as you all well know). I would LOVE to run a module and outsource all that prep—but what worries me is that I won’t be able to speak as authoritatively about the world if I’m not making it up on the spot. If a player muses aloud, “I wonder if there’s an evil wizard in that tower,” I want to be able to just say “yeah, eff it, why not? His name is Schmendricor of the Teal Circle and…” and not have to flip frantically through a book and break immersion.

Similarly, I’m worried that it would be harder to keep track of all the ways my players’ role play shenanigans break the premade world (looking at you, NADD Pod) than to just make it up and co-create canon as we go.

I’ve seen too many DMs let the book be an albatross rather than a resource, and I just don’t want that to be me.

Can anyone weigh in on how to run a module without getting too bogged down by the book?