[UPDATED] WotC & Goodman Games Partner To Reprint Classic Modules for 5E

Lidgar said:

Mine are, in no particular order (and excluding those from TftYP):

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The Sentinel/The Gauntlet
When a Star Falls
Pharaoh/Oasis/Martek (originals, not the Supermodule)
Descent into the Depths/Vault of the Drow
The Lost City
The Isle of Dread
Night's Dark Terror

How about an updated Greyhawk Boxed set?!??!
THE definitive collection of Castle Greyhawk?!?!

Goodman's got the tools and talent to bring the old skool to life. I can't see WotC doing much with the older materials beyond reprints. Give up the license, Mearls!

JonnyP71 said:

The Sentinel/The Gauntlet
When a Star Falls
Pharaoh/Oasis/Martek (originals, not the Supermodule)
Descent into the Depths/Vault of the Drow
The Lost City
The Isle of Dread
Night's Dark Terror

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Oh my God, Night's Dark Terror could be an amazing product as it's more a mini-campaign than a simple module. They could use it to not only update the adventure itself, but a larger hardback could also update the Karameikos Gazetteer as a starting point for 5E Mystara, much as SCAG brings the FR Sword Coast to 5E as a "core" region to base adventures in and build out from over time. I'd buy that in a frickin' heartbeat!

Will these also be in DMsguild? Paizo has Dragon Magazine and Kobold has the frozen castle among other things. If these cover other settings and are in the DMsguild I wonder if they would open up those settings?

Mouseferatu said:

Unless it's changed drastically since I was a regular contributor to the D&D line, no. The development process on a book, from the start of work to publication, is well over a year.

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Maybe.
It does seem to be more-or-less a year. We know that Out of the Abyss took just under a year since talks began at the prior GenCon. But they had the basics of the story planned.
However, from the official podcast, we know Perkins wrote Curse of Strahd over Christmas break just before its release, and SKT a few months after that (but he said the latter was grueling). But I admit that they likely had some art and such in the works prior, and some planning/ outlining.

Still, this product should have been quicker since all the maps were preplanned and just needed to be redrawn, and a huge chunk was already done. With Dead In Thay, a quarter of the book just needed a light editing pass.

I imagine a lot of posters (myself including) were expecting the Pendleton Ward adventure for the spring, since he was at WotC last April. But given the above fact that Perkins was burning through vacation time to do his job in 2016 *and* spent so much of the summer travelling and working on shows *and* was involved in Volo's Guide to Monsters, I wonder if he just didn't have the time for the originally planned adventure for the spring. And WotC realized that in the middle of 2016 and did this instead, as a product they could bang out in under a year.

That's my conspiracy theory anyway...


Even if that's totally wrong and they were always planning TftYP for the spring, they would have begun tentative work on that book in spring 2016. Unless all details of Goodman Games deal was hammered out in less than six months, there had to have been some planning overlap between the two projects.
(Although, this does explain the Christmas open call for 5e designers from Goodman Games around Christmas time.)
WotC has a long history of partnering with Goodman Games/ Necromancer Games. As seen by the unique license they signed to update classic monsters early in 3e. So they still choose to continue with a product that overlapped heavily with a planned licensed product. Which feels odd. The niche TftYP fills is less needed with the Goodman Games products.

Unless it was bailing out an overworked Perkins. In which case it's pretty forgivable...

I'm really excited about this. I've been hoping for more module type releases since 5E came out, and the fact that these will be classic modules is all the better.

Patrick McGill said:

The two tiamat adventure modules had no roots in old modules. I mean, it had dragons, so some people compared it to Dragon Lance, but the similarities ended at dragons. No gods missing, a cleric barbarian princess popping up, or knights with biker mustaches.

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The big WOTC adventure for 3.5 was "Red Hand of Doom" which was centered around a Tiamat-worshipping humanoid invasion with dragon-aspected bugbears, goblins etc. as leaders.

The online adventure path for 4E was "Scales of War" which was also about Tiamat, her worshippers, and various plots.

So "Tiamat threatens the world" has been featured heavily in the last two editions in official WOTC adventure material. She's not just "Dragonlance". Anything with "The Queen of Evil Dragons" in it is going to have dragons running around, that's a given, so there's a little more to it than that.

Patrick McGill said:

Princes of the Apocalypse had some thematic ties with the Temple of Elemental Evil, but again it was all new stuff, no reprinted dungeons or stories or anything. It had some elements* I guess, but anything dealing with the elemental planes will. (*pun intended)

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Beyond the original Temple of Elemental we had "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil" as a mega-adventure for 3.0 which added a bunch of material and involved the elemental princes of evil as well, and conversions of Village of Hommlet for 4th edition as well, along with at least one season of the D&D organized play campaign for 4th.

Patrick McGill said:

Out of the Abyss was a wild gonzo adventure about demons erupting in the Underdark and having crazy parties, no connection to old modules that I can think of.

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3E had the "City of the Spider Queen" mega adventure for 3.0 - not the same exact storyline but a bunch of running around the underdark. AD&D had D1-2-3 all happening underground and fighting all kinds of weirdness. 2nd edition had "Night Below" which was the "big underdark adventure" for that edition.

Patrick McGill said:

Curse of Strahd was a reprint and expansion of Ravenloft, so this is the one true retreading old ground I'd give to you. It's also the best module for 5e they've done yet, so, take that as you will.

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Including for completeness. There was also 3.5's "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft".

Patrick McGill said:

Storm King's Thunder is about giants, so some people have compared it to the Against the Giants modules... but again the only real similarity is you're dealing with giants. It's quite different in story and theme (and doesn't end with you going against drow).

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Besides 1E's Against the Giants there was the 2E update which added additional material (mostly Greyhawk-specific), and 4E's "Revenge of the Giants" . All of them involve fighting through the increasingly tough types of giants so there are some undeniable similarities when it comes to actually playing through the adventures.

Patrick McGill said:

So anyway, sorry for the rant, but a 'large chunk' having roots in old modules just isn't very accurate.

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On the contrary, I'd say all of these have direct similarities to multiple products from prior editions.

Now as to the contention that this is a bad thing, well, no! In an edition dedicated to bringing the various editions and generations together again I would say they should be mining the older material for inspiration! Especially early in the life cycle! I would expect more "new" as we get farther down the road with 5th edition.

Sure, if you've played the "Tiamat Adventure" in 3.5 and then again in 4th you're probably not terribly excited about playing "Tiamat Attacks 5th Edition" but there is other material out there. I thought Phandelver was a nicely done adventure with no direct ties to a prior scenario.

darjr said:

I hope so!

I hope it's AL too.

How was it btw? Was it multitable?

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The 8 sessions I played were each done as single-table events (of course each was offered multiple times)
But the Epic event that they ran on Saturday night, Keep on the Borderlands: Grand Assault) was a 4-hour tier 1 multi-table event. I did not play in that event.

Lord_Blacksteel said:

Now as to the contention that this is a bad thing, well, no! In an edition dedicated to bringing the various editions and generations together again I would say they should be mining the older material for inspiration! Especially early in the life cycle! I would expect more "new" as we get farther down the road with 5th edition..

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So, to be clear, we can't do Underdark adventures. Or adventures with giants. Or dragons. Or elementals. Because that's just retreading the past.

Azzy said:

So, to be clear, we can't do Underdark adventures. Or adventures with giants. Or dragons. Or elementals. Because that's just retreading the past.

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All adventures featuring eukaryotes are passé. When is Wizards going to do something new, like an adventure featuring bacteria? I've been dying to play a eubacterium. It has a +1 cytoskeleton and it gets two attacks per round with its flagellum.