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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9791789" data-attributes="member: 7006">This right here I think is the real issue.  You've hit the nail on the head.High-level campaigns have 12 to 17 levels of previous campaign material and stories that have occurred over the course of however many months / years the game has been running that an adventure needs to insert itself into.  What are the odds that some random adventure writer will come up with a plotline for an adventure that will actually make total sense for where the DM's narrative has evolved to and would make sense for the players to interact with?  Usually not great.  Especially because high-level modules tend to have more involved plots with odder, more powerful villains that don't just "show up in the wild" like low-level modules and monsters do.  At 5th level one can write a "townsfolk are disappearing, what is happening?" adventure and the DM can plop it into their campaign, because it'll involve something like ogres out in the hills surrounding the starting town... something that most campaigns are already starting with.But no writer is going to use that easily-inserted plotline except this time write it for 16th level characters.  Because you'd have to do all kinds of whackadoo things to warrant having it being at 16th level-- the townsfolk are sent to the Abyss... the person kidnapped is the King... the kidnappers are githyanki on a Spelljammer ship... or whatever other weirdass thing the writer can think of to make it worthy of actually being written for characters that high and powerful.  But all of those whackadoo things make them less useful to large numbers of DMs because their campaigns just have not moved forward to a place where going to the Abyss, or involving a King, or having to go Spelljamming make any sort of logical or narrative sense.I think this is one of the reasons why the Adventure Path format has become so useful and popular... because it almost guarantees that the DMs and players that play it will actually see their campaign stories reach the point where those Level 10, Level 12 "adventure sites" at the ends of the book are actually spot-on as to where the party is going to be.  The campaign has lead to those locations and plots.  And ultimately they will see more use than if those final "modules" that we get at the end of Adventure Paths just got published on their own.A Tyranny of Dragons adventure path that propels the characters forward from 1st level all the way to a finale at the Well of Dragons against a summoned aspect of Tiamat will see that finale scene get more use than just some writer making a module for Dungeon Magazine that is a 12th to 15th level adventure of Tiamat being summoned and the party has to arrive to stop it.  Sure... some DMs and their campaigns might find a way to work that module in to what they've already been building over the preceding 12 levels of the campaign... but most would just look at it and shrug their shoulders, knowing that it just doesn't fit with what they have going on in their game.</blockquote>

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