Modules As DM Screens

As ridiculous as this will sound, this idea came to me in a dream. It was really just a minor detail of a dream I had the other night, but it was one that stuck with me, because I woke up thinking that it would actually be a pretty brilliant idea. Why not publish modules in the form of DM screens?

There's plenty of discussions out there in the RPG community about the ideal form for published adventures and modules. How much text is too much? What's the best layout and organization? How do you efficiently describe a room with all the details you want to impart to the players without getting bogged down in flavor text? I don't really have a good answer to this myself. As long as it's something I can use effectively at the table, I'm not picky. But I realized that you could pretty easily pack all the important information for a small module into a DM screen.

There are definitely some advantages I can see. A DM should be able to reference any information on their screen at a glance, so by printing the module on the inside of their screen, you minimize flipping back and forth through a book to find what you need. Furthermore, since a DM screen is already used to hide information from players, you could just as easily put all the room keys and important plot events you don't want your players to know about there, and they wouldn't be able to see it. It would also make for an easily produced, inexpensive adventure, since it'd just be a single piece of printed cardboard rather than a full book. If you did it as inserts for a modular screen, it'd be even less production costs.

Due to the amount of information you'd need to include in a limited amount of space, this is probably something best suited for one-page dungeons and other small adventures, of the sort that could be completed in one or two sessions. The DM's side would include maps, room keys, stats for monsters and traps, and maybe a random encounter and/or rumor table. Me being me, I'd also put a space for notes that the DM could write in to customize the adventure, if they wanted to add their own features or change things to fit their setting or preferred style of play.

You could even use this to provide the players with easily accessible reference material too - on their side of the screen, you could have a map of the general area with sites of interest, expository material, lists of important NPCs and what the PCs would know about them, and such. That way, they could look at the screen to consult what options are available to them and what information they should know, saving time that would otherwise be spent asking the DM for reminders. You could also put inspirational art on there to help set the scene for the players.

The biggest obstacle I see here is that you'd need to make sure the player-facing information would be readable from across the table, which would likely require a larger font than on the DM's side, limiting the space that could be used for this material. But on the whole, I could see this model being used to produce an entire line of short adventures suited to pick up and play with minimal preparation, on the cheap.

Has anyone actually done something like this? If not, am I on to something? I've got a short dungeon percolating in my head, so maybe I'll try seeing how well this format works for it. But if it does, I think this has potential to be revolutionary.