Earlier edition "Adventure Paths"

[Bullgrit]

D&D3 has a couple or three "Adventure Path" series now. The first, and probably most commonly played/known, being the Sunless Citadel through Bastion of Broken Souls series. This takes the PCs from 1st to 20th level.

What is the equivalent for Bacic D&D and for Advanced D&D? What series of adventures would take the PCs from 1st to ~20th level in those earlier editions? What would you consider the quintessential BD&D and AD&D adventure paths?

I'm thinking, maybe for AD&D, it would be Temple of Elemental Evil followed by Against the Giants, Descent to the Depths of the Earth, Vault of the Drow, and culmunating Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

For BD&D, I'm not as familiar with higher level adventures. Probably start with Keep on the Borderlands, Isle of Dread, but then what?

What would you say is the most commonly experienced (or at least commonly known) series of adventures for the earlier D&D editions? I'm not looking for just a listing of individual adventure modules, but rather a good string of adventures as a series.

Thanks.

Bullgrit

 

[JoeGKushner]

Very hard to say. A lot of those earlier adventuers weren't necessarily designed to run together. That doesn't mean that they couldn't be worked as such though. one of the D&D sets of adventuers were collected in a nice perfect bound book "In Search of Adventure" I believe and did a good job of combining various adventures.

A few like Night Below, were pretty self inclusive.

 

[J-Buzz]

You have probably hit on the only one.

TOEE would probably take the characters to high a level to start on the Giant Series. However, you are correct that the G1-3 (Against the Giants) Series ran right into the D1-2 (Decent into the Depths) Series, which ran into Q1.

I am not sure of any other modules that ran together like that. But they had many adventures that ran together with 2-3 others. I am not aware of any that would take you from 1 - 20 though.

 

[Bullgrit]

A lot of those earlier adventuers weren't necessarily designed to run together.

I am not sure of any other modules that ran together like that.

Note that the D&D3 series adventures do not really run together, or into one another. Each was an individual adventure, with no connection with the others. (Although there were three that have flavor/background relationships.) So the BD&D and AD&D series doesn't necessarily have to be connected -- just often/usually/sometimes/could be/mechanically-by-level run into each other.

Bullgrit

 

[Maggan]

What is the equivalent for Bacic D&D and for Advanced D&D? What series of adventures would take the PCs from 1st to ~20th level in those earlier editions? What would you consider the quintessential BD&D and AD&D adventure paths?

Dragonlance would qualify, wouldn't it? Maybe even as the "original" adventure path, even.

/M

 

[Scotley]

Village of Homelet and the Temple of Elemental Evil stuff came much later. I would think the old Slaver (A1-A4) series makes a more logical intro to the G, D, Q series. I would agree that the Dragonlance Modules also qualify. I didn't play a lot of the Forgotten Realms adventures, but I would guess that some of them were tied together too.

 

[Mark Hope]

The traditional 1e adventure path was usually cited as being ToEE, followed by the Slaver series, followed by the GDQ series. However, this didn't always work out as the ToEE usually ended up with characters slightly too high level for the Slaver series.

A good Basic/Expert series might run Palace of the Silver Princess, Keep on the Borderlands, Castle Amber, Isle of Dread. That should bring characters up to around 12th level, allowing for the transition over to Companion level rules. Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread, while playable with characters of 1st and 4th level respectively, tended to chew them up somewhat until they were higher level.

An old campaign of mine used a rather wild mix of published 1e and 2e adventures (regular fantasy interspersed with Spelljammer and Ravenloft), with the characters ending up in the mid-teens. As I recall, the sequence began with a heavily modified version of Ruins of Adventure (because the original is pretty awful) and then went: Feast of Goblyns, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Wildspace, Ship of Horrors, Dungeonland, From the Shadows, Roots of Evil, Egg of the Phoenix. Lots of fun, that one .

 

[SWBaxter]

Village of Homelet and the Temple of Elemental Evil stuff came much later. I would think the old Slaver (A1-A4) series makes a more logical intro to the G, D, Q series.

The tie-in fluff for the combined A1-4 book assumes the PCs are coming from T1-4, and the combined GDQ book has similar fluff for those coming from A1-4. Never played 'em in that order so I'm not sure how the levels work out, but there you go.

I think one my group kinda sorta did back in the day was the U series ("Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh" and its sequels) leading into the two L modules ("The Secret of Bone Hill" and "The Assassins' Knot", IIRC), but I don't recall if we went anywhere from there.

I also vaguely recall there was a Battlesystem tie-in campaign - maybe "Swords of the Iron Legion" - that featured a series of battles against some extraplanar bad guy at many different levels. Not a full adventure path since it wasn't self-contained.

 

[Estlor]

B1-9 In Search of Adventure sort of made a ham-fisted attempt at cobbling the B series into an adventure path, but it required changing the locale of a lot of the adventures to do it.

The X series had a two parter, Master of the Desert Nomads and Temple of Evil (not sure if that's the right name for the second part).

The M series were basically extended super adventures where Alphak's desire to take out Norworld linked them.

The Hollow World's three main adventures linked together.

And, naturally, the DA series could be played as a continuous adventure.

 

[jdrakeh]

There were a bunch of two, three, and four module story arcs in D&D/AD&D - The Alderweg Series (UK1, UK2), Saltmarsh Series (U1, U2, U3), ToEE Quintet (T1, T2, T3, T4), Slavers Quintet (A1, A2, A3, A4), and The Unknown Series (B1, B2, B3, B4). Most of these arguably qualify as 'adventure paths' (most notably U1-3, T1-4, and B1-4). The others can easily be combined with other series (inlcuding such classics as G1-3) to extend an existing adventure path.