Best and Worst Module Adventures

[The Fighter-Cricket]

I may be five years late to this thread, but I'll post anyway!

*gasp* This has to be the most powerful necromancy I ever witnessed! I still tremble from the shock... Got to catch my breath before I post my favourite module.

 

[The Fighter-Cricket]

Unfortunately, I never had the chance to play any of those old A(D&D) modules but only heard about them. Got started in the late phase of 2nd Edition and so my experience comes from this.

My most favourite D20 adventure to this day is Privateer Press' "The longest night" from the Witchfire Trilogy. It had everything: Investigation, a dark and vibrant city, a bit wilderness adventure, dungeon crawling, and very memorable NPCs! Would dm it anytime.

Top official D&D module(s): I liked "The Forge of Fury" as a very good dungeon crawler and 4E's "Tomb of Horrors" as an imaginative new take on an old and unfair classic.

Worst module: "Whispers of the Vampire Blade". It got action, colorful settings, and one of the worst shoehorned plots I can remember. The adventurers were constantly chasing the bad guy who escapes them three times. The module insisted on dangling him in front of the PCs' nose and they never could do anything about it until the end, where he just stopped and waited for them.

 

[Lanefan]

Unfortunately, I never had the chance to play any of those old A(D&D) modules but only heard about them. Got started in the late phase of 2nd Edition and so my experience comes from this.

Many of them can be found for reasonably cheap, and if you're DMing they're not that hard to convert to 3e or 5e or PF. Converting to 4e might take a bit more work.

Top official D&D module(s): I liked "The Forge of Fury" as a very good dungeon crawler

For post-1e modules FoF is among the best, I agree.

Worst module: "Whispers of the Vampire Blade". It got action, colorful settings, and one of the worst shoehorned plots I can remember. The adventurers were constantly chasing the bad guy who escapes them three times. The module insisted on dangling him in front of the PCs' nose and they never could do anything about it until the end, where he just stopped and waited for them.

I've never seen/played this one. The one campaign I know of that did play it collapsed halfway through, maybe the choice of module contributed to that?

 

[Jhaelen]

Worst module: "Whispers of the Vampire Blade". It got action, colorful settings, and one of the worst shoehorned plots I can remember. The adventurers were constantly chasing the bad guy who escapes them three times. The module insisted on dangling him in front of the PCs' nose and they never could do anything about it until the end, where he just stopped and waited for them.

'Grasp of the Emerald Claw', it's follow-up, wasn't much better. I once tried to adapt it for play in our Earthdawn group and found that after trimming it down by cutting filler encounters and removing Eberron-specific fluff, there was nothing left except 'Get the McGuffin before your adversaries do!'. I can write better modules in my sleep.

 

[ccs]

Unfortunately, I never had the chance to play any of those old A(D&D) modules but only heard about them. Got started in the late phase of 2nd Edition and so my experience comes from this.

My most favourite D20 adventure to this day is Privateer Press' "The longest night" from the Witchfire Trilogy. It had everything: Investigation, a dark and vibrant city, a bit wilderness adventure, dungeon crawling, and very memorable NPCs! Would dm it anytime.

Top official D&D module(s): I liked "The Forge of Fury" as a very good dungeon crawler and 4E's "Tomb of Horrors" as an imaginative new take on an old and unfair classic.

So if you've never played or DM'd the real Tomb of Horrors, how are you qualified to judge it "unfair"?

 

[JonnyP71]

Tomb of Horrors was completely fair, it's just a very different form of challenge.

I've DMed a LOT of old modules in the last few years, and it has been a good old nostalgic romp (it was 25-30 years ago I DMed many of them for the 1st time), thus my opinions of a number of adventures has changed based on how my current groups have dealt with them, plus being older I see certain parts of them in a different light.

The Best:
U1, UK3, UK4 and WG4 - 4 absolute blinders, creative, challenging and thoroughly enjoyable

The Good:
X2 (my players' overall favourite), UK2, I1, I3, I4, I6, S1, S2, S4, T1, X4, A1, A4, N1, C1 (gas toned down for campaign use!), G1

The 'So-so':
B2, X5, UK1 (Marmite! One of my group thought it was the greatest thing ever!), UK5, A0, L2, A2, A3

The Bad:
I5 (a mess), B1 (yawn)

The Atrocious:
C3 (12 pages of actual adventure, badly written, verbose, no substance, poorly edited, padded out with 20 pages of nothingness to give the illusion of a 32 page module)

Still to come in the current campaign:
G2, G3, D1-3, Q1, H1

So bad I refuse to ever run them:
N2, the entire DL series, H2, H3, H4


But even the 'bad' 1E modules were mostly better than the tat churned out during the 2E era.

 

[Pauper]

Apparently nobody in this thread ever played or ran N2: The Forest Oracle. Probably a good thing, too.

Here's my $0.02 US, focusing only on adventures I've played, run, or read:

Favorite adventures, non-D&D category:

- Festival of the Damned, Ars Magica (even more impressive as it's a sequel to a different adventure, and not only builds on some things from that adventure but surpasses it)
- The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, Paranoia (wondering where the idea originated that Paranoia was all about crazy combats, bizarre experimental equipment, and seeing if you could burn through six clones before the end of the adventure? Here ya go.)
- The Last Equation, Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green (no squamous horrors, just a peek through one of the cracks in reality)

Favorite adventures, D&D and similar category:

- Stolen Land, Pathfinder (from the Kingmaker adventure path, a better hex crawl than either Tomb of Annihilation or X1 Isle of Dread, IMO)
- L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, AD&D (absolutely classic intro adventure)
- DALE 1-6 The Vesperin Initiative, Living Forgotten Realms, D&D 4th edition (there are a handful of great 4E adventures in the LFR archives, including the WATE 4 series, but this one is my favorite, both to play and run)

Least favorite adventures, non-D&D category:

- Road Kill, Champions 4th edition (I'm sure someone out there is looking for a superhero adventure where the adversaries are a supervillainous rock band with robot roadies, but this was not my cuppa)
- PX Poker Night, Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green (it's curious to me that some folks include modules like Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan or other tournament modules in their 'worst' list, citing the very mechanics that make them tournament modules; PX Poker Night is clearly a convention module, and the fact that it makes very little sense if you don't play it with the characters provided is, while disappointing, part of the cost of entry -- no, what makes PX Poker Night disappointing to me is that the events of the adventure, no matter how they play out, presage a major change in the Delta Green setting that just doesn't happen. Call it the tyranny of declaring nothing canon.)
- Gone Long Gone, Shadowrun 5th edition (Not horrible, just...weird. It's almost as if the author hadn't actually played any previous editions of Shadowrun before writing up this adventure, because it dutifully regurgitates a bunch of old cyberpunk tropes, many of which have been done better (or at least with more interesting wrinkles) in other, even older adventures.)

Least favorite adventures, D&D and similar category:

- Thoughts of Darkness, AD&D, Ravenloft setting (I'm a huge fan of the Ravenloft setting, but dang do they have some clunker modules -- this one is right up there with Tomb of Horrors in 'you're the DM so screw with your players' BS, but also includes an actual plot that players likely won't bother following because they're too busy trying to figure out how to deal with the crap the module has you as the DM inflict on them just for showing up to the game)
- The Armageddon Echo, D&D 3.5 OGL (from the Second Darkness adventure path; really, the focus of the adventure is just Myth Drannor from D&D's Forgotten Realms, published in Paizo's Golarion setting nearly a year before the actual Pathfinder RPG, so can be forgiven for being an OGL adventure written for D&D 3.5)
- Curse of Strahd, D&D 5th edition (yep, you heard me -- the original is a textbook example of how adapting the adventure on the fly can lead to amazing gaming experiences, but the remake is just...cluttered -- Chris Perkins calls this adventure a "blood-soaked love letter to the Hickmans", and apparently that means indulging the Hickmans' reported distaste for the setting their adventures (this and I10) inspired by crapping all over the old setting lore and including one-shot indulgences more for cuteness and nostalgia than because they make sense in the story being told. And that doesn't even get into the racism, sexism, and.... Hideous, and the Adventurers League season associated with it wasn't much better.)

And that's my contribution to this walking corpse.

--
Pauper

 

[The Fighter-Cricket]

So if you've never played or DM'd the real Tomb of Horrors, how are you qualified to judge it "unfair"?

I'm in no way qualified to judge it. Got my judge's license revoked after I wanted to settle a case by splitting a baby in half.