Ruins of Adventure - Any good?

I'm debating on picking up this old 2E adventure for conversion..I've been hearing it come up a lot lately. THoughts?:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=833
A great evil force descended on the town of Phlan years ago. The townspeople were all either killed or driven away, and Phlan became (literally) a ghost town. Fifty years later, the survivors are ready to reclaim their town. But they need a band of strong and brave adventurers to lead the fight-they need you.

Ruins of Adventure is a set of connected short adventures written by James Ward, David "Zeb" Cook, Steve Winter and Mike Breault-four names familiar to all AD&D game fans. It uses the same setting, locations and characters as the classic computer game Pool of Radiance by Strategic Simulations, Inc. In fact, many of the scenarios here in Ruins of Adventure will provide important clues to the successful completion of Pool of Radiance.

I never cared for this adventure. It's actually a set of mini aventures, loosely gathered together. The video game actually did a much better job at this, in my opinion. I've never played in it, and I've only DM'd part of it, but I really wasn't thrilled with it....

excellent computer game at the time, actually had to buy another 0.5MB of memory for my aimga to play it, not at all a very good adventure. Have seen a nice port of it to NWN.

JohnD

I ran it back when it was brand spanking new, and I really enjoyed it. The nice thing about it is that the adventures are more sketched rather than defined down to every last detail, and there was a solid metaplot that binded them all together. This worked for me because I was throwing a lot of my own material in there, adding sidequests and other details here and there. It's very easy to customize this to make it your own.

Overall, I'd say that you have nothing to lose by getting this since you can get the PDF pretty cheap these days. How much of it you wish to run in 3E is entirely up to you.

Whisperfoot said:

Overall, I'd say that you have nothing to lose by getting this since you can get the PDF pretty cheap these days. How much of it you wish to run in 3E is entirely up to you.

Click to expand...

How close was it to the computer game?

jh

Emirikol said:

How close was it to the computer game?

jh

Click to expand...

If memory serves, pretty close.

Yeah, it was pretty close the the computer game

I didn't like it very much at first glance (although I did enjoy the PC game) and wasn't impressed by the adventure "out of the box". The individual segments, while well-sketched were too bland to really grab me. The metaplot needed a bit more oomph to really do itself justice. There was a real dearth of decent NPCs. In general, I felt that each element of the adventure needed a bit more development and originality.

OK, enough with the negatives.

Despite all of that, I used it with two different groups to good effect and it became a staple setting of my campaigns for many years. But only after I did some heavy rebuilding and redesign. The bones of a great little setting are there, but they're just bones. Normally, I don't mind that kind of thing, but in this case it was just a little too skinny. If it's a cheap pdf you're talking about, then you'll get your money's worth. Dive in, hack it and crack it to your heart's conent and flesh out those bones. It should be worth your while, with enough effort. Plus it makes for a good lead-in to Curse of the Azure Bonds, which is the best little railroad adventure going, imho.

CLICK

Bye
Thanee

Voted other. The adventure is not bad as a base for a campaign, but it needs *a lot* of work to be decent.

The write-up sucks horribly.

Bye
Thanee

Its a good campaign setting.

But ... it really helps if the GM played through the computer game first.

There is a lot of flavor and depth in the computer game that was not captured in the module (bigger budget for the computer game than the tie-in module, etc.).