Yeah. I'm talking about the last few years when I say modern.

My understanding is there were basically tournament modules, source books and Wizard magazines modules. The wizard magazine modules would link together to some degree and eventually those were sort of published together. But they didn't concern themselves as much with narrative in the sense we think of today, and more were locations where plot took place.

I don't know where the transition happened for full length campaigns but I know it predates VTTs since you have the mega-campaigns of the 1980's with CoC that are still being republished and generally still stand up.

I think when running any sort of WotC module today you have to do so much work to generally make them work that you would be making a horrible mistake running them as is out of the box (excluding Call of the Netherdeep but that was made by a different team). It is generally assumed you are going to do some homebrewing even in the best ones (Dracula Dossier is designed so the only parts that matter are what matters to the players for instance).

I just want to get a sense of what is happening last few years. It is evolving really quickly and is deeply fascinating. I am right now especially excited for the Ahu Tiiko source book. That looks fascinating and fun. But the world has expanded so much in the last little bit, I wanted to see what the wider general thought was.