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

[Zardnaar]

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



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.



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?



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).


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.

Early Pathfinder was better than later Pathfinder.

Stolen Lands is another contender with Burnt Offerings imho. Kingmaker overall not to bad but 1 and 2 are brilliant and you can ignore the building parts.

BECMI had a fairly high number of hits as well. Not just the obvious ones such as B2 (B10 is better for example).

Not familiar with Red Hand of Doom but there's enough buzz.

SunlesCitadell/Forge of Fury aren't bad but top 30 hmmm.

 

[John R Davis]

I would say to an alien visitor " so you want to run some DND?", You couldnt do much better than doing.

N1, then UK2/3, then Castle Amber OAR, then X4/5.

Enjoy.
PS what are you doing with that probe.

 

[delericho]

SunlesCitadell/Forge of Fury aren't bad but top 30 hmmm.

I would put Sunless Citadel above Forge of Fury (that being one of my biggest beefs with the list as-is). Back in 2004 I would probably have argued for it to be in the top 30. Now, it's place is probably taken by "Lost Mine of Phandelver" - they're both intro adventures, and the newer one just does the job much better.

 

[Zardnaar]

I would put Sunless Citadel above Forge of Fury (that being one of my biggest beefs with the list as-is). Back in 2004 I would probably have argued for it to be in the top 30. Now, it's place is probably taken by "Lost Mine of Phandelver" - they're both intro adventures, and the newer one just does the job much better.

I could probably come up with 30 better Dungeon Magazine adventures

Neither one is bad though and are above average maybe even good ymmv in all things.

Top 30 not so much. LMoP belongs on that discussion.

I think shorter adventures are just easier to write and finish.

 

[delericho]

I could probably come up with 30 better Dungeon Magazine adventures

As noted, they deliberately excluded Dungeon adventures from contention. Otherwise, it shouldn't be too hard - with 150 issues and 3-6ish adventures each time, there's a lot of material to pick from. Bound to be some classics in there.

 

[Zardnaar]

As noted, they deliberately excluded Dungeon adventures from contention. Otherwise, it shouldn't be too hard - with 150 issues and 3-6ish adventures each time, there's a lot of material to pick from. Bound to be some classics in there.

There are.

 

[Riley]

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.

Goodman Games has a cleaned-up reprint of the original AD&D Dark Tower available now in their store! I picked it up recently. It looks good: it’s on better paper and has sharper print than any original Judges Guild product I’ve looked at.

(I haven’t read it yet. I wanted to check out the fabled adventure, and I just can’t see adding that 3-volume 5e behemoth to my already-crowded home unless it’s the most amazing thing around.)

Dark Tower|Goodman Games Store

goodman-games.com

 

[Mannahnin]

As I recall Bryce Lynch culled the entirety of Dungeon's print run to ten adventures he genuinely liked.

Dungeon Magazine – Final Retrospective | tenfootpole.org

tenfootpole.org

Zardnaar started a project of combing through the run of the magazine looking for hidden gems a couple of years ago, but the thread I'm finding only has thoughts on a few issues, and they're not as in-depth as Bryce gets.

D&D General - Dungeon Magazine Hidden Gems 1986-2007.

#1 In previous threads I have argued that a lot of good adventures were in Dungeon Magazine. This is particularly true IMHO for 2E and 3E which were not known for their masses of high quality adventures. Dungeon had a circulation that seemed to vary in the 30-60k range and relative to the...

www.enworld.org

 

[Stormonu]

Goodman Games has a cleaned-up reprint of the original AD&D Dark Tower available now in their store! I picked it up recently. It looks good, and it’s on better paper and has sharper print than any original Judges Guild product I’ve looked at.

(I haven’t read it yet. I wanted to check out the fabled adventure, and I just can’t see adding that 3-volume 5e behemoth to my already-crowded home unless it’s the most amazing thing around.)

Dark Tower|Goodman Games Store

goodman-games.com

Strangely, prior to 3E, I never bothered to look at non-official D&D adventures. I'd like to see a list of pre-3E 3rd party adventures that are worth looking at. The only one I have is Tegel Manor (picked up in late 3E of all things), and I wasn't really impressed looking over it (Zocchi tricked me into buying the adventure with an extended sales pitch about events that aren't even in the module).

 

[DarkCrisis]

For todays 5th ed level of play, probably not.

If you play it old school the amount of death and having to "think around corners" might be a tad much for modern players.

If you play them converted to 5th ed the players would probably stomp their way through with barely a hindrance.