What are the worst classic D&D adventure modules?

[darjr]

I ran the tomb for my kids. They wanted to play monsters. A vampire and a werewolf. The vamp would go first to setoff the traps turning into vapor when crushed under rocks and such. Both having regeneration helped a ton. At the green face they thought sure it was teleportation until the fingers they lost grew back. Dead giveaway.

 

[tylerthehobo]

The obvious 2E Classic would be Undermountain

I rate the Al-Qadim set "Cities Of Bone" highly.

IMO, Undermountain - excluding many of the follow up one-off modules - had some merits as a classic dungeon crawl. There could have been more set up as to why your party was there, but taking it on the surface that Undermountain was just so danged famous a dungeon, there didn't need to be too much set up. Adventurers galore haunted the place to find riches, so that's why your party was going.

But yeah, by the time the one-off modules expanding it got going, it was just silly.

 

[Stormonu]

I think that one reason there are so many 1E modules remembered as classic and fewer 2E and 3E modules (and 4E modules) is that Dungeon magazine became the primary delivery system for adventures.

Yet for some reason, most people seem to forget that Dungeon is a part of D&D. It's almost treated like the red-headed stepchild of the game. I assume part of it is was the (bi)monthly nature of the magazine - and the fact it was a magazine, not an "evergreen" product like other adventures or supplements. Unlike the modules, if you didn't grab the latest magazine, it didn't hang around in stores for multiple printings.

I'd like to see folks mention what Dungeon Magazine modules they feel are classics.

 

[darjr]

Oh, the last time I played keep on the borderlands I was player in the game with my kid. We played for several hours, Moldvay basic. The GM was very good. I don't think we ever left the keep. It was my sons first and only time playing that module.

 

[the Jester]

Were there _ANY_ "classic" second edition modules?

Gates of Firestorm Peak and Return to the Tomb of Horrors are the only two I'd rate as classics, but I have not read or played a lot of the 2e modules. Most of the ones I checked out looked pretty awful, though.

I'm curious as to peoples' take on the Apocalypse Stone- I saw but never read it, and it vanished quickly after 3e came out.

As to the fairness of the Tomb of Horrors, a skillful group of pcs can get through it intact if they are careful and use their wits carefully. I ran Return to the Tomb of Horrors, converted to 3.5 at the cusp of epic level for my regular campaign and the pcs came through with shining colors. And I am a ruthless, rat bastard, high-lethality campaign dm- shucks, we just played Friday and Saturday (different group by now, of course) and the same player lost two characters! So believe me when I say that I showed no mercy at all. Yet they made it through the Tomb of Horrors section of RttToH almost untouched by the traps, despite being harried by three burly vampires while they were doing so.

My opinion is that the Tomb isn't unfair at all; it's simply too hard for most groups. It requires them to flex their brains in creative ways that they aren't used to having to do in D&D.

Don't get me wrong, I've both run and played in the Tomb when the party was obliterated, and I'm not trying to sound superior here. I'm just saying that it can be successfully investigated and survived.

 

[Celebrim]

My opinion is that the Tomb isn't unfair at all; it's simply too hard for most groups. It requires them to flex their brains in creative ways that they aren't used to having to do in D&D.

Don't get me wrong, I've both run and played in the Tomb when the party was obliterated, and I'm not trying to sound superior here. I'm just saying that it can be successfully investigated and survived.

I agree. One of the reasons that ToH remains such a timeless classic is that all the various attempts to emulate it largely fail in this regard.

In RttToH for example, there are several places where some lurking monster effectively is able to attack, and if the creature hits, the character dies with no save allowed. That really is 'unfair', because whether you live or die is then almost entirely a matter of luck. Your life is in the hand of some die. But its not like that in ToH. Your life is in your own hands.

I think that's honestly what feels 'unfair' to players with a D&D background. The normal D&D adventure puts your life largely in the hands of dice, and then stacks the odds heavily in your favor so that you can succeed by and large by just straightfoward attacks, character optimization, and luck. In ToH none of those things are of much help to you. The module eats, chews and spits out characters without much regard to the mechanics of the game. If it gets to the point where you are rolling dice to determine outcomes, you've already failed. Your average D&D player goes into ToH with the expectation that the mechanics are there to defend him, and that crutch gets kicked out from under them and they say, "No, fair!" It's an entirely understandable response, but like many claims of missing fairness, not actually a valid one.

To my knowledge there has never been a module that is both as fair and as hard as ToH, and there certainly has never been another one to combine those attributes in a way that feels so terrifying instead of just cheesy. For what it is, it is just about perfect.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

You make a compelling point.

Were there _ANY_ "classic" second edition modules?

The two best ones I can think of, Night Below and Dragon Mountain, suffered from some similar flaws to TOEE--they're simply repetitive and boring and almost impossible to keep the players interested throughout the whole thing. I ran Dragon Mountain for about a year, and even with an engaged group I had to cut out about a third of the last book. You can only fight so many cheese-tactic kobolds before you start getting bored. And I mean _really_ bored.

I like Carl Sargent's "City of Skulls" quite a bit, though I never got a chance to actually run it. Because it was from the short print run era at the end of the Greyhawk product line I imagine most people are not aware of this module, but it's one of the better ones from the edition.

Beyond that...

I like Monte's Labyrinth of Madness well enough, but a printing error actually makes the main puzzle in the module unsolvable, and it's more of a one-upped Tomb of Horrors than a classic module in its own right.

Any other 2e candidates?*

--Erik

* Please no one mention Terrible Trouble at Tragidore...

The ones you name are good candidates, and I'd add A Paladin in Hell, Axe of the Dwarvish Lords and Return to the Tomb of Horrors to the list. I think they all came so late in 2e's run that they could never get the traction to be viewed as classics; the advent of 3e overshadowed them.

A Paladin in Hell actually took an iconic D&D pic as its inspiration and came up with an adventure that takes the PCs into some tough, unusual adventure sites. Axe was, in my opinion, the best depiction of an abandoned dwarven city TSR ever did. Return to the Tomb of Horrors was tough and spooky.

I'll add that The Shattered Circle should rightly be considered a classic low-level module. It also suffered from appearing so close to the end of 2e and the beginning of 3e.

But since this is about the worst modules, I'll chime in with my candidates:

Gargoyle - Already mentioned, and I'll add that I looked at it long and hard to see if there was a way to rework it into something usable. Even given that I used to look at stuff like that as a challenge, I just could never see how to make it into something I'd want to run.

Castle Greyhawk was a shock because instead of delivering the module so many of us had waited long years for, we got a joke-filled bit of nonsense. Now, I would say it could be used as a side trek for an extended, "real" Castle Greyhawk campaign, along the lines of how there were entrances into a Wonderland or Barsoom world from Gary's Castle Greyhawk. But that doesn't take away that TSR's "Castle Greyhawk" is one of the biggest disappointments in gaming.

I'll pile on The Forest Oracle, too. Poor writing is what did it for me.

Egg of the Phoenix is a module that irritated me. It simply doesn't hang together well, and the seams show badly where a number of modules were crammed together. Stuff like that works occasionally - the GDQ modules being the best example - but it failed badly in this instance.

Modules C3 (The Lost Island of Castanamir), C4 (To Find a King), and C5 (The Bane of Llywelyn) left a bad taste because they were simply lackluster. They came at the tail end of the classic era of modules, and were the first ones I recall not wanting to run at all. Plus C3 introduced the term "gingwatzim," for which I can never forgive it.

 

[MToscan]

The worst AD&D adventure I have ever played in my life was "Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga". At the end of the adventure, my friend wanted to write a letter to Lisa Smedman to ask for refunds.

 

[Crothian]

Of the 2e adventures I ran A Paladin in Hell and Axe of the Dwarvish Lords were the best. I actually was able to run Axe twice with totally different groups to good success.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

I also like Bruce Cordell's other late-2E era adventure The Shattered Circle and suspect that would have been considered a classic if released at any other time

I made my above post before I got to yours. I'm glad someone else has noticed how good The Shattered Circle is.