Reading & Running old D&D adventure/delves... Am I missing something?

[Joe Sumfin]

So I only have used the pathfinder system and only started playing a year ago or so. I have not read any campaign books really.

I am wanting to run something though and have an interest in running Castle Ravenloft and Temple of Elemental Evil.

Now, my main question is these books seem to just give you a list of NPC's and places and encounters. Like in Ravenloft I have either missed it or its not there but I don't see any interaction between Strahd and Ireena, the woman he desires. Also in both books I don't see any NPC's that give reasons to go check out the big evil HQ and it just seems to me that the PC's are just going to go there because its there. Which is fine but...

Is that how the books were back then? They give you the players and set pieces and you make up most of the story bits and give the PC's good reason for motivation?

I talked to another player in my group and he says "you don't want to railroad players" which I get but by playing a dungeon delve aren't you having to essential railroad the players because yes, they can just leave in the middle, but the point is just going to the evil HQ and to town to sell stuff and buy new gear?

Was just wondering. Maybe I'll just have to read these closer. Like Ravenloft, I thought it'd have a story but I seem to be missing it unless I'm just supposed to RP it all. It just seems like a dungeon delve to me but its supposed to be a good one.

 

[Celebrim]

Like Ravenloft, I thought it'd have a story but I seem to be missing it unless I'm just supposed to RP it all. It just seems like a dungeon delve to me but its supposed to be a good one.

I get where you are coming from, but... how can it have a story when the writer doesn't even know who the protagonists are going to be?

It's the DM that knows who the protagonists are. He's the one that has to craft the story.

If you want to see what happens when you get away from that, pick up some of the early FR/2e modules where they focused on story over delve.

The protagonists are NPCs. The NPCs get to do the cool stuff. The PCs are there to witness the awesome events other characters do.

Like in Ravenloft I have either missed it or its not there but I don't see any interaction between Strahd and Ireena, the woman he desires.

Why would there be? Those are both NPCs. But, if you want to have Strahd attack/charm Ireena, you can certainly frame that scene. You've probably watched a vampire movie or read Dracula. If you haven't, do some research.

1e modules do not spoon feed the DM. They don't give the DM everything he needs to get the most out of them. They've got 32 pages and they try to jam that full of as much useful stuff as possible. After that, it's up to the DM.

 

[MerricB]

To some extent, yes. I touched on the issue just the other day when reviewing UK1 Beyond the Crystal Cave, a module from 1983 (same year as Ravenloft - for which my retrospective will be following in the next week or two).

D&D began as site-based, keyed encounters. All interaction between NPCs was handled by the DM, and often the adventure gave very little detail as to how this occurred. In the period of 1983-86, adventure-writing began to change, with people (most notably Tracy Hickman, but also the UK division of TSR) beginning to explore alternative ways of writing adventures. This led to more "railroaded" adventures, such as Dragonlance, and for a while the old site-based adventure was almost abandoned in favoured of linear, story-based plots.

Motivation is tricky: in a lot of adventures, the PCs are hired (and this is stated up front). Ravenloft has the party receiving a plea for help and going to investigate. The Temple of Elemental Evil uses the motivation of "they're adventurers" and "they've heard of adventure opportunities around Hommlet"! Ultimately, the players have to want to be playing the adventure!

As I recall, Ravenloft begins with the players answering a plea for aid, finding they can't leave, discovering the Count is behind it, and learning the way to defeat him from the Gypsies. Things flow from there.

Temple begins with the players coming into Hommlet as new adventurers, having learnt that there is trouble in the neighbourhood. Clues in town lead them to the Moathouse, and from there more clues lead to the Temple proper, from which the greater threat comes. However, given that I called my retrospective on the Village, "Some Assembly Required", I do think more detail could have been given to hook the players in!

Cheers!

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

So I only have used the pathfinder system and only started playing a year ago or so. I have not read any campaign books really.

I am wanting to run something though and have an interest in running Castle Ravenloft and Temple of Elemental Evil. (snip)

Wow, you picked two difficult adventures to run.

Castle Ravenloft relies a lot on a DM to bring it and its atmosphere to life. If your heart is setting on running this, trawl around for reviews and see how other DMs have done it. It has a lot of potential but it requires a lot of effort from both the DM and the players.

Temple of Elemental Evil is a randomly-generated incomplete crap-fest.

To be more accurate, Temple of Elemental Evil was rushed into publication before it was finished. As a result, a lot of it comes across as randomly generated - because it most likely was - and the dungeon is simply a giant grind unless you as the DM spend a lot of time actually making it feel elemental and evil. And then you have the elemental nodes which actually are incomplete but this is sold as a feature rather than a bug.

Try Keep in the Borderlands instead. It's not perfect - nothing is - but it's really good for new DMs and new players to learn the mechanics of dungeon delving.

 

[Celebrim]

Wow, you picked two difficult adventures to run.

True. Castle Ravenloft is a more brutal PC killer than Tomb of Horrors if you play it straight. Plus, you really need to have hit your stride in filling out things as a DM to do justice to Castle Ravenloft.

Temple of Elemental Evil is a randomly-generated incomplete crap-fest.

To be more accurate, Temple of Elemental Evil was rushed into publication before it was finished. As a result, a lot of it comes across as randomly generated - because it most likely was - and the dungeon is simply a giant grind unless you as the DM spend a lot of time actually making it feel elemental and evil. And then you have the elemental nodes which actually are incomplete but this is sold as a feature rather than a bug.

Fully agree there. It would take me probably 12 weeks of work - maybe 240 hours - just to make the Elemental nodes work right. (I've got summaries for where I'd go with them in another thread somewhere). Might as well write my own adventure.

Try Keep in the Borderlands instead. It's not perfect - nothing is - but it's really good for new DMs and new players to learn the mechanics of dungeon delving.

Don't agree there. Making KotB into something worthwhile is as hard as running ToEE and CR combined. Talk about something that feels like an incomplete random hodge-podge, with no plot, no story, no direction, and no characterization.

Personally, I'd consider adapting 'Of Sound Mind', 'Whispering Cairn' or one of the other better 3e area introductory modules before I'd go with KotB. 'Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh' is a good intro framework, but the house itself needs work (too much poison for a low level team) and the follow-up modules are ridiculous in the degree of assumptions they make and burden they impose if the assumptions go wrong. If you want old school random delving, 'Caverns of Thracia' is far better than KotB.

Let me look over my stuff and think about it. I'm not sure what I'd recommend as a starter.

 

[DEFCON 1]

It just seems like a dungeon delve to me but its supposed to be a good one.

Yup... I've always felt the same way. And its really not that hard to understand why... at the time of most of these modules, the game had really only been in existence for like 5 to 8 years or so (and probably those first three or four were only played by the true wargaming diehards as not many people outside of that circle had probably heard of the game yet.) So the needs of a module was much different than today.

In today's roleplaying lifestyle... story, narrative and plot has much more of a place. Having characters with full backgrounds, needs, and wants and having all of those actually touched upon or satisfied during the course of play is a pretty typical playstyle for many players nowadays. Back then? Not even close. After all... it was expected in many modules that PCs dying was a normal result and that you'd move from one PC to another... which explains why they'd have like 20 or more "pre-generated" characters in the module which were little more than a line of numbers in a table.

So looking at yesteryear's modules with today's RPG eyes is a little off-putting for some people. Because as a DM you really pretty much *are* supposed to create whatever amount of narrative and plot yourself, in and around the encounters the module presents. Likening it to a Dungeon Delve is really not that far off.

(Which is why it also always amused me when people would complain about the 4E adventures being nothing but strings of combat encounters with little connective story. Because that's pretty much *all* of what the supposed "glory days" of D&D adventures were themselves.)

 

[amerigoV]

Ravenloft is horror - so be sure you are on your game. If you just run it as a bunch of encounters with a BBEG, then it will be as fun as watching a horror movie at 1pm on a bright sunny day. Keep in mind that modern d20-esque systems will work against you. "I five foot step to flank" really destroys the horror mood - so do fig-less where you can (or use it do their advantage - throw out every fig you can find for zombie hordes and such). Set the mood, never give a straight answer, leverage all their senses, ask questions to make them nervous ("which had do you used to open that door?". Make them jump at shadows and show, do not tell.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Y
In today's roleplaying lifestyle... story, narrative and plot has much more of a place. Having characters with full backgrounds, needs, and wants and having all of those actually touched upon or satisfied during the course of play is a pretty typical playstyle for many players nowadays. Back then? Not even close. After all... it was expected in many modules that PCs dying was a normal result and that you'd move from one PC to another... which explains why they'd have like 20 or more "pre-generated" characters in the module which were little more than a line of numbers in a table.

So looking at yesteryear's modules with today's RPG eyes is a little off-putting for some people. Because as a DM you really pretty much *are* supposed to create whatever amount of narrative and plot yourself, in and around the encounters the module presents. Likening it to a Dungeon Delve is really not that far off.

I'd argue that story and plot have always had a place; the difference is that in today's products the narrative is explicit and spoon-fed to the DM whereas before the DM was generally expected to supply those elements and adapt them to his or her group as appropriate.

 

[billd91]

Don't agree there. Making KotB into something worthwhile is as hard as running ToEE and CR combined. Talk about something that feels like an incomplete random hodge-podge, with no plot, no story, no direction, and no characterization.

Personally, I'd consider adapting 'Of Sound Mind', 'Whispering Cairn' or one of the other better 3e area introductory modules before I'd go with KotB. 'Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh' is a good intro framework, but the house itself needs work (too much poison for a low level team) and the follow-up modules are ridiculous in the degree of assumptions they make and burden they impose if the assumptions go wrong. If you want old school random delving, 'Caverns of Thracia' is far better than KotB.

Let me look over my stuff and think about it. I'm not sure what I'd recommend as a starter.

I don't know that I'd entirely agree with Celebrim's assessment of Keep on the Borderlands, but if you can find it, Return to the Keep on the Borderlands provides more story structure along with adaptations of the adventuring area assuming that adventurers had cleared out the classic adventure 20 years previously. It also provides a lot of helpful advice for relatively new DMs.

 

[Celebrim]

I'd argue that story and plot have always had a place; the difference is that in today's products the narrative is explicit and spoon-fed to the DM whereas before the DM was generally expected to supply those elements and adapt them to his or her group as appropriate.

And I think you are both right.

It's true early modules didn't spoon feed the DM because it was assumed both buy the seller and the purchaser that, by accepting the mantle of DM, you were committing to spending a lengthy amount of time prepping to play a scenario - even a premade module. When I first ran Ravenloft as a DM, I spent probably 30 hours in prep, including adding more than 80 NPC's to the town of Bavaria and filling the town with additional intrigue and side quests, rewriting a few areas of the castle, and so forth. Modern DMs in general don't do that, and would balk at the suggestion that having bought a module thy'd be expected to do that. Which is why you seek module page counts increasing over time. All that additional info has to be added in, along with a lot of advice telling the DM how to run the adventure.

But its also true that the vast majority of early players of D&D weren't expecting elaborate plots, consistant settings, and lots of non-combat interaction with NPCs either. The introduction of plot, story, atmosphere, and deep non-combat interaction with persistant NPCs when it first occured in most early groups (say pre-1985 or so) was novel and revolutionary at each and every point. Most early games simply didn't worry about such things, and when each group invented it on its own or was introduced to it, they tended to be amazed by it. I can remember as a 13 year old a college aged DM that had already been playing for years introducing me to these concepts and how radical and amazing they seemed, and how radical and amazing they made the game he was running seem. I can remember this occurring as late as the early 1990s with long term groups suddenly realizing that they could take the game to new heights and places beyond hack and slash, and the sense of wonder and novelty THAT revolution brought.

Today, I just don't think you can get away with only offering the oppurtunity to kill things, take their stuff, and level up. There is just too much competition in that market, and its just too banal and mundane to even a younger player whose been introduced to levels of structure beyond that just by playing cRPGs.