D&D 4E Best 4E module?

[Haffrung]

The problem with 4E's published adventures is they were not the right kind of adventures for the system. 4E is best when combat is the dramatic climax of an epic story. Not as part of the attritional grind of a dungeon-crawl. Big, combat-heavy dungeon settings are just not a good environment for 4E.

Thunderspire Labyrinth is a great D&D setting. It has fantastic geography, a cool backstory, imaginative and engaging encounters. It's just way better suited to a system like 5E that involves lots of combats than 4E, where you really only want to be having about two combat encounters per session.

It's a shame, really. Adventures like Thunderspire and Gardmore Abbey would have been well-suited, and earned a lot of acclaim, if they had been published for a different edition of D&D. They're excellent location-based sandboxes.

About the closest thing WotC published to an adventure that played to 4E's strengths is Reavers of Harkenwold. If you're willing to put in some work, the Neverwinter Nights campaign setting is also very good.

 

[teitan]

Oh from what I understand many of the organized play modules were really good and are also on DMsGuild

 

[RealAlHazred]

It occurred to me that I should "review" the 4E D&D Encounters mods, since there weren't that many reviews and a lot of 4E fans might not be aware they exist. dungeons-master has reviews of all of them, but they're a little long. I was thinking of bullet points. I haven't run them in a while (the first one I ran a decade ago!) but maybe someone will find this useful.

• Season 04: March of the Phantom Brigade (February - May 2011): I started the program running this one. It's got a few nice NPCs, the villain motivation is good. But the overall plot is really full of holes, and the main plot hinge is IMO dumb.
• Season 05: Dark Legacy of Evard (May - August 2011): Linked to Heroes of the Shadow. It has nice sections, the way it transitions to Shadowfell play is cool. There are a few railroady parts, but I liked the motivations of the NPCs and with locational changes I think this could work really well dropped into a campaign.
• Season 06: Lost Crown of Neverwinter (August - November 2011): Linked to the Neverwinter Campaign Setting. This one was very railroady. There are some decent NPCs, but it felt more like part of a novel someone decided to make into a module, and that rarely works well. To be honest, I found a lot of it forgettable, and couldn't give you any more details.
• Season 07: Beyond the Crystal Cave (November 2011 - February 2012): Linked to Heroes of the Feywild. This module is EXCELLENT. It uses 4E mechanics well, and takes the original module (which wasn't explicitly tied to the Feywild, which didn't really exist then in its current form) and updates it properly. I thought some parts of this were stronger in player agency than the original version, and I don't say that lightly.
• Season 08: The Elder Elemental Eye (February - May 2012): Linked to Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. This one felt forced, like they had taken another module and grafted on parts to make it appropriate to the book it was supposed to promote. Another forgettable module. The only part I remember was the mimic rug who killed 2 characters and almost a 3rd.
• Season 09: Web of the Spider Queen (May - August 2012): Linked to Into the Unknown: The Dungeon Survival Handbook. This one felt pieced together. It's a chase across the Dalelands to catch up with some drow. In hindsight, it was supposed to lead into the next season, but nobody told us that in the hobby shop, so the players didn't really get the build-up they were supposed to.
• Season 10: Council of Spiders (August - October 2012): Linked to Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue. You play a drow character, or you're going to play a slave of the drow. Had a great idea for a different character? Sucks to be you! My players were not fond of the loss of agency, and I almost had a party of all slaves, which they didn't really account for in writing the module. I'll admit, I don't read any Forgotten Realms novels, so I'm sure I missed a lot of backstory that would have brought this to life.
• Season 11: War of Everlasting Darkness (October 2012 - January 2013): Over the 8 planned sessions of this module, the game will span 2 years of in-game time. You level up every session. In 4E, as you get to higher levels, it generally takes longer and longer to do the paperwork to level up your character. By session 7, it was taking at a minimum half-an-hour out of my 2-hour session to level everybody up. As a result, it felt extremely rushed. It's a pity, because it was the capstone module of the 4E portion of the program. You race across the Forgotten Realms to try to confront the rising drow threat. Would have been great if you could have taken time and really set the stage properly for all these iconic locations.
• Season 12: Against the Cult of Chaos (February - April 2013): The first module after the beginning of the playtest, and you could run it in 4E or 5E; it had stats for both. Every player in my store opted to play it in 5th edition; they'd had it after the constant leveling up of the last module. This combines and updates three classic modules: B1: Keep on the Borderlands, T1: The Village of Hommlet, and N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God. I liked this a lot and so did my players. There was a four-week hiatus in play between the previous module and this one; hilariously, I had run my regulars through a homebrew development of B1: Keep on the Borderlands in the interim. There were several moments of deja vu as a result.
• Season 13: Storm over Neverwinter (April - June 2013): This was the follow-up to Lost Crown of Neverwinter, and had a few NPCs that carried over. You could run this in 4E or 5E. It dealt with an insidious infiltration of the Cult of Asmodeus. Not bad.
• Season 14: Search for the Diamond Staff (Launch Weekend) (June - August 2013): You could run this in 4E or 5E. A magic staff is stolen and you have to track the thieves and find the culprit. Not bad, but not as good as the previous one.
• Season 15: Murder in Baldur's Gate (Launch Weekend) (August - November 2013): You could run this in 3.5E, 4E, or 5E. I know, right? But seriously, this module is EXCELLENT. The DM chooses a villain, and there are lots of vignettes you use to advance the story. The DM can organize it, or the players can drive the plot by choosing who they're going to help and hinder. My players loved this, and I dearly want to see a reissue/expansion. The launch weekend module was the weakest part of it, but even so it starts the module off with a memorable bang. Extremely sandboxy.
• Season 16: Legacy of the Crystal Shard (Launch Weekend) (November 2013 - February 2014): You could run this in 3.5E, 4E, or 5E. Another good module, it takes place in Icewind Dale and is extremely fluid as to which avenues the players can take to achieve their objectives. Some excellent NPCs, too. One or two parts were too railroady for me, but this is another excellent sandbox module. I'm sure a lot of the material is superceded or rendered moot by the Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden adventure.
• Season 17: Sundering Adventure III: Dreams of the Red Wizards: Scourge of the Sword Coast (February - May 2014): This was the first purely 5E module, so it's out of scope from the thread.

You can occasionally find these modules on eBay, sometimes for ridiculous prices. The ones that say "(Launch Weekend)" had additional modules that came with them, that are sometimes absent from the eBay auctions.

I also ran all of the Lair Assaults, but I'll need to review those when I get home. In general, those didn't go over so well at my shop -- they're mostly just a combat encounter with an intriguing twist in the middle, and only the barest essence of a story around them. The maps and tokens were nice, but my players always wanted more roleplaying meat so they could ham it up.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Come to think of it, I think Search for the Diamond Staff also had a Launch Weekend module, a group dungeon crawl called Vault of the Dracolich. In it, the various groups of adventurers try to locate the Diamond Staff in a dracolich's den. The climax involves a massive battle of Cultists of the Dragon vs. adventurers, with the Dracolich eventually taking part. The guy I got to run the Dracolich at the various tables played him like a supervillain, monologuing and carrying on. People had a blast.

 

[RealAlHazred]

LAIR ASSAULT SERIES:

• Season 1: Forge of the Dawn Titan (September 2011): Outside the city of Neverwintcr, fiendish cultists conspire t.o unlock the power of a fiery primordial. Gods help the city if they succeed! This was meant to tie loosely into Lost Crown of Neverwinter, being released during that module's run, but it has no real hooks into the module (or vice versa), just using some similar characters (i.e., Asmodeus cultists). The battle takes place in a dungeon full of lava pools, where a primordial stirs in its prison.
• Season 2: Talon of Umberlee (December 2011): It's "kill or be killed" as brave heroes test their mettle against drunken Tidescourge pirates and the wicked servants of the sea goddess Umberlee. ARRR! This one also took place near Neverwinter, but had no ties to any module. The double-sided map has a ship on one side and a pirate hideout on the other; after a single scenario with their "twist in the middle" idea, they went with a scenario where the first part was an attack on a ship and the second was assault on a pirate lair.
• Season 3: Attack of the Tyrantclaw (March 2012): A dryad druid named Hyacinth has recently learned of a mined village called Tanaroa on the shores of the mysterious Isle of Dread. Now she hopes to land there and delve into the ruins of this long-ago society. She has chartered a ship to the island and hired adventurers to protect her. The job won't be easy, for a savage clan of orcs called the Tyrantclaw dwells on the island, along with great reptilian beasts. This one was the second most interesting Lair Assault. In this one, there is a major twist halfway through the combat, and there's the potential for a great roleplay moment if the party has grown attached to their patron. I mean, the module only covers the very end of what should have been an epic journey filled with adventure, but what do you expect in 16 pages, of which half are stats?
• Season 4: Spiderkiller (June 2012): Somewhere in the Lost Level of Undermountain, a fallen drow matron schemes to open a way to the Demonweb. Should she succeed, can anything stop Lolth's faithful? Don't be fooled by the throwaway reference to Undermountain in the blurb, you're only going down a waterfall into the tiniest 4-room "dungeon." It's drow again! This time, you have three major fights, and it's timed because you have to get to the boss before a timer counts down. The setup is that you're doing this as a favor for Vajra Safhar, the Blackstaff, so I was going to use this as one of the missions in my table's run of Dragon Heist, but the players lost interest before I could get that far. The scenario uses elements from a bunch of modules from previous editions -- Undermountain Adventures: the River Sargauth (2005); Undermountain: The Lost Level (1996); and, Expedition to Undermountain (2007).
• Season 5: Kill the Wizard (September 2012): An elf wizard has built a construct with a single purpose: the destruction of the drow. This discovery has led the drow houses of Menzoberranzan to forge an alliance and send a "murder squad" to kill the wizard and destroy his sinister creation! This one felt like a missed opportunity. The D&D Encounters module running when this released was Council of Spiders, where the party is (presumably) a bunch of drow. This could have easily been a mission they had to do for their masters, but it doesn't make sense in context; I feel like a little editing would have left a spot somewhere in that module to fit this encounter. It's a visit to a wizard's 8-room tower and 9-room dungeon, where you have to destroy his magic death machine. I actually got several groups to try this one, by telling them the "wizard" of the title was Elminster; nobody liked that blowhard.
• Season 6: Temple of the Sky God (December 2012): Astride the legendary Mounts of Wind, the brave heroes venture into a corrupted temple in the clouds. Will the party survive the battle with the dark force that dwells there, or will they fall before the might of the temple’s new master? This one was my favorite. It effectively uses the "twist in the middle" hook of the series (that they really only used in 3 of the 7 encounters), and had an evocative setting. The location is a mystical temple floating in the clouds, inhabited by a legendary oracle. You could easily drop this into a campaign as a place the players have to get to in order to learn a key piece of information. It's eminently reusable, and has some really fun bits to it. The Mounts of the Wind are Sarala the Silver Arrow and Telosi the White Sun (pegasi); Shiriki Sharpbeak and Orien the Golden Lion (griffons); Garogg of the North Wind and Tulanni the Indomitable (hippogriffs); and, Borsok Mightyspikes and Maura Raincloud (manticores). Each mount has a different special ability they give the rider, and the module makes excellent use of mounted combat.
• Season 7: Into the Pit of Madness (April 2013): Mad cultists have located the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun and sounded the dark god’s iron horn, the Wailer of Tharizdun. Now the ground trembles as the Chained God’s aspect struggles to escape. When it does, the Chained God will follow, plunging the world into Eternal Darkness. Based on Gary Gygax’s The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, as well as Monte Cook’s Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, this scenario uses two main locations from the Forbidden Temple: the upper chamber from the beginning and the Black Cyst from the end. The party can also visit five elemental nodes from the Temple of Elemental Evil. As a fan of those other modules, this disappointed me greatly, since it felt like you were just rushing through all kinds of interesting details to get to the fight.

The groups I ran these for at the local hobby shop weren't really enthused. They were basically intricate tactical combat challenges, and my players were more interested in roleplaying and exploration. For some tables, I expect these Lair Assaults are exactly the ticket: challenging encounters that reward tactical thinking. Others will find them lifeless slogs. In any case, these sometimes also show up on eBay, and I think they're usually much cheaper than the D&D Encounters modules, but keep in mind you're getting much less for your money -- a map, a 16- or 24-page booklet, a tactical map, and maybe some extras (Mount Cards for Temple of the Sky God, for example).

Not going to lie, seeing how much some of these are currently going for, I kind of wish I'd kept my extras...