Exquisite Dead Guy

My new favorite website is TV Tropes. It's a site I stumbled into and now can't seem to stumble out of! If you love to read or watch a lot of tv and/or movies you'll finally be able to put a name to that recurring literary device, theme, or meme that you thought only you recognized.

Gamer specific: If you're stuck for an idea for a game hit the "plots" section. Need to give an NPC some personality, checkout "characters" and "characters as device". Just really, really bored? Click on the "Random Item" link.

Just a note: spoilers abound on this site, so mind the spoiler-space (hidden text) if you really don't want to know what happens on an episode of Doctor Who that you haven't watched yet.

The introduction to 4th edition got me thinking about my beginnings with the hobby. Back then it was slay the orcs, save the princess, hit the tavern (usually in that order, but...). The words "ongoing campaign" would've drawn blank stares from my gaming crowd in 6th grade. Heck, in `82 we didn't have a lot of main stream fantasy epics to model our gaming on (Hawk the Slayer, FTW!) so we'd just wander the land beholden to no one and looking for adventure. In retrospect we were more like hobos than adventurers but we didn't care because we were having too much fun.

Pre-packaged modules were a shared experience for gamers of this era. Everyone had a story about the "exotic weaponry" found in that odd cave in the Barrier Peaks or battling the frost giant Jarl in his icy fortress. I remember reading on a WotC blog or some such that this is why WotC decided to do modules again after kinda aborting the idea early on in 3rd edition.

Fast forward now to 3rd edition and the introduction of adventure paths in Dungeon magazine. An adventure path is a series of linked adventures that are a lazy DMs dream. A campaign in a box if you will. I've DM'ed one and played in 2, and while they were ultimately great experiences they allowed for very little derivation from the metaplot. There were a few times I swore I could here an ethereal conductor calling "all aboard the plot express."

Now that I've had a chance to read the 4th edition core books I can't get over how easy it looks to design encounters, something I always dreaded before and the main reason I decided to run an adventure path in the first place. So when I needed to decide what to do for my first 4th edition campaign I decided to dust off those old modules siting on my shelf and re-vamp them for my current group (only one of which ever played 1st edition).

Now I know that some of you may be thinking that the Gygaxian theory of adventure design that a lot of (OK, most) those old modules used was oft times nonsensical to say the least. That said, this is a fantasy game. Just sit back and remember these three rules for enjoying classic modules:

Rule Of Cool
Bellisarios Maxim
MST3K Mantra

What I'm planning is to post an article or three regarding the conversion process of each adventure. Your comments will help me put the finishing touches on the adventure and then I'll create a single .pdf of the conversion notes and make it available for download.

Now that I've finished with the intro, it's time to decide on which module to convert first. Keep on the Borderlands springs immediately to mind since it was the first module I ever played in, but I'm open to other suggestions.