D&D General Dungeon Magazine's Top 30 Adventures: Do they hold up?

[Stormonu]

Huh? Ned's the best part, and very much suits the spying/scheming/can't-trust-anyone tone of the whole adventure.

No, he is not. He is the typical Gygaxian "screw you" that undermines the adventure whose purpose is to undermine the party ever trusting a NPC in the future. From level 1.

 

[Hex08]

Some I've run in the fairly recent past (spoiler - they all hold up). As a side note; all were campaigns I ran that were converted to Castels & Crusades in case that matters to anyone.

GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders - I've run this twice, the first time was only the Against the Giants portion and the second was the entire campaign. It holds up well but Against the Giants is the best part by far.

T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil - An all time classic, the first adventure I ran when I bought C&C. It was my first time running it as a DM but I had gone thought it twice as a player back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (both 2E and converted to 3.5).

U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh - I started this adventure but due to real life issues the group only finished the "haunted" house part and the game fell apart before they made it to the ship. Still, tons of fun.

About half of my regular group has been playing with me since 2E and the rest joined since I started running 3.x/Pathfinder. Whether they had experience with old school AD&D or not it took all of them a few sessions to adjust to the difference in gaming styles required by an old school adventure but once they did they all enjoyed it.

I really want to run S1 Tomb of Horrors, B2 The Keep on the Borderlands and C2 The Ghost Tower of Inverness, all of which I ran a long time ago and remember enjoying but I can't say if they hold up or not. The only one I have mixed feelings about is S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. I both got to be a player and DM for it in my 1E days and loved it because it was so different but as I have grown older and more crotchety I have learned that I hate sci-fi (and firearms) in my D&D games.

I was a player for Return to the Temple of Elemental when it first came out and didn't care for it.

The ones that work have a lot of great ideas but usually need some work on the part of the DM but I generally find that to be the case with any premade adventure I have run, including more modern ones from any game. It's always a good idea to customize an adventure to balance between it's original intent, the expectations of the DM and the expectations of the players.

 

[Lanefan]

I have either ran or played all of these. Some were better than others, as I rate Ghost Tower higher and Slave Lords lower, but feel that all deserve to be on the list.

Ghost Tower is quite good in its own way. It's certainly different (which is nice) and somewhat nasty (which is fine).

I've not run or played these, and honestly some I've not even heard of. I've had intentions of running Return to the Tomb of Horror, The Forge of Fury, and The Assassins Knot, but never had a good opportunity. Either the setting was wrong, the campaign setup was bad for it, or the group just wouldn't like it (particularly Return to the Tomb of Horrors).

Of those you've not run I highly endorse Forge of Fury (who'd have known the peak of 3e adventure design would be reached in just the second adventure released for the system?) and Dark Tower. I don't know much about most of the rest.

An original Dark Tower might cost you a few body parts to obtain these days, but I gather there's a 5e-compatible rewrite coming - I just hope that said rewrite doesn't sterilize it too much, as it's the wacko stuff in that module that makes it what it is.

 

[Zardnaar]

Ghost Tower is quite good in its own way. It's certainly different (which is nice) and somewhat nasty (which is fine).

Of those you've not run I highly endorse Forge of Fury (who'd have known the peak of 3e adventure design would be reached in just the second adventure released for the system?) and Dark Tower. I don't know much about most of the rest.

An original Dark Tower might cost you a few body parts to obtain these days, but I gather there's a 5e-compatible rewrite coming - I just hope that said rewrite doesn't sterilize it too much, as it's the wacko stuff in that module that makes it what it is.

Forge of Fury is more of an average adventure.

3E adventure design peaked latter with Dungeon magazin somewhere between Age or Wrymsvsnd the first half of Savge Tide APs.

 

[Lanefan]

No, he is not. He is the typical Gygaxian "screw you" that undermines the adventure whose purpose is to undermine the party ever trusting a NPC in the future. From level 1.

Exactly! That's what makes him essential - he sets a fine tone for an intrigue-based and-or morally-gray campaign in which you never know who to trust; you have to do your diligence and figure people out rather than just taking them at face value all the time.

Oddly enough, when I ran this module recently Ned was one of only two survivors at one point; everyone else fell victim to the

Spoiler

yellow mold

about two rooms after they first met him, but in order to not blow his cover - and because it fulfilled his mission of getting the party away from the scene - he helped the other survivor haul the dead back to town.

 

[Lanefan]

Forge of Fury is more of an average adventure.

3E adventure design peaked latter with Dungeon magazin somewhere between Age or Wrymsvsnd the first half of Savge Tide APs.

I never followed Dungeon magazine closely and gave up on it completely once 3e came out.

 

[Parmandur]

An original Dark Tower might cost you a few body parts to obtain these days, but I gather there's a 5e-compatible rewrite coming - I just hope that said rewrite doesn't sterilize it too much, as it's the wacko stuff in that module that makes it what it is.

Well, the Goodman Games product will include a complete reproduction of the original, and the exte ded material is from the original author.

 

[Parmandur]

More info on the OAR Kickstarter here, and a good chance to pick up the other Goodman Games reprints from the Dungeon Magazine list:

Original Adventures Reincarnated #7: Dark Tower

The classic tabletop RPG adventure returns for the 5E and DCC RPG rules sets!

www.kickstarter.com

 

[Zardnaar]

I never followed Dungeon magazine closely and gave up on it completely once 3e came out.

Bothered a reason Paizo did well.

 

[delericho]

Problem is there's not much good from 2E adventures except Night Below, remakes of 1E adventures and Dungeon magazines.

True. Unfortunately 2nd Ed went through a long phase of "narrative" (railroad) adventures, which doesn't make for many classics.

3E is in a similar boat.

3e has "The Sunless Citadel", "Forge of Fury" (though that wouldn't be my choice) and "Red Hand of Doom". But it doesn't have a lot of adventures in general, excluding Dungeon and third-party works.

4E has one potential candidate.

5E has 2-3 contenders most of the adventures are average.

Indeed. It's actually fairly shocking just how little good adventure material we have to show for the past three decades - what's that, half a dozen candidates since the start of the 90s?

There's a few Pathfinder ones I would consider as well.

I found that those got really repetitive after a while. Pathfinder AP#1 ("Burnt Offerings") was probably the absolute best issue in their entire run (pre-2e, at which point I stopped).

Well, since Curse of Strahd contains I6 in it's entirety (Chapter 3 or 4, I think), I say Curse of Strahd bumps off I6. Apparently Hickman started using Curse of Strahd instead of I6 for his own Halloween games.

Except that one of the virtues of I6 is its brevity, which CoS sacrifices - this means that things like the card reading now pay off months later rather than hours, which isn't an improvement, IMO.