Classic Adventures Modules -- wishes and failures

[Riley]

Fail: Not an adventure itself--Iuz the Evil. Back in the day, I purchased a copy on eBay for over $100.00...I wanted it bad.

I hope you were able to sell it for a similar price.

Heck, if that's worth anything like that today, I may sell my copy in order to buy other things.

 

[Riley]

Wishes: I want to run the Dragonlance campaign, with the freedom to liberally depart from the scripted storyline. I've had a vision of it in my head for 20 years. Unfortunately, I've never had a group to play with where at least one player wasn't already intimately familiar with the books - which pretty much ruins the idea.

Failure: I did try to run it once with an interested group, including a couple people who claimed that they "read the books a long time ago, but didn't really remember them." After we got started, most of the rest of the group remembered that they must have read them too. The actual encounters were a lot of fun, but there was just way too much metagaming and the like, and there just wasn't enough mystery left to make it worth while.

 

[TerraDave]

Wishes: A whole pile, with the Gs and Ds at the top. I really like the classics, but just have a hard time working them in, and count oh about 5 I have managed to really run over many years.

Failures: Of those I have run, I have had to do some active course correction to keep them entertaining, and often to bring to a satisfying close. RttToEE is an extreme case of this. There is tons of great stuff in there...but I still did a once over on the new Hommlet and had to really short cut a lot of the latter stuff (and my gods there is so much of it).

 

[Joshua Randall]

What makes this module lame to you?

It is not an adventure so much as it is a semi-empty framework for the DM to fill. Which is fine as far as it goes, but not what I want out of a module.

Contrast many of the other classics which have some plot to go along with the framework.

Also, in many respects, the caves near the Keep are kind of an inadvertent self-parody of D&D done in the style of simply paging through the Monster Manual fighting whatever is on that page.

 

[ExploderWizard]

It is not an adventure so much as it is a semi-empty framework for the DM to fill. Which is fine as far as it goes, but not what I want out of a module.

Contrast many of the other classics which have some plot to go along with the framework.

Also, in many respects, the caves near the Keep are kind of an inadvertent self-parody of D&D done in the style of simply paging through the Monster Manual fighting whatever is on that page.

OK. I guess we like different things from modules. I generally don't want too much pre-defined story clogging up my campaign.

Heh. Chocolate & peanut butter.

 

[amethal]

I've never run any classic modules, unless Red Hand of Doom counts (finished it last week).

I'd like to run Dragonlance, but reading through it I got the impression the party splits up at one point, with some characters going through one adventure and the others going through another. Not sure how that would work.

Also, the characters seem to spend a fair bit of time getting captured, which might annoy the players.

 

[JediSoth]

I always wanted to run the GDQ series, the Slavers Series (A1-4), and the Desert of Desolation series. I've run bits of them, but never the entire series as a campaign arc.

I always wanted to play through the Desert of Desolation series as well. The 2nd ed. FR module "For Duty and For Deity" looked like a lot of fun, too.

 

[francisca]

Wants:
Not many. I don't think I've ever been a player in X2.


Failures:

As a DM, I really didn't care for the A series. I'd massively re-hack it if I ever decided to run it again.

DL1 and DL2. Really didn't like the railroad style of play then, hate it even more now.

 

[francisca]

[*]Keep on the Borderlands -- sacrilege? Honestly, this is a pretty lame adventure.

Naw. Not sacrilege. As is, it's a grindy slog through cave after cave.

However, this module can be made to work as an scout/precision strike/"disrupt the power structure through several sorties" kind of thing.

I've run it 3 or 4 times in my life. The last 2 were about discovering the power structure and breaking command and control. One of them ended with chaos breaking out in the caves (no pun intended) and the evil humanoids fighting with each other to the point that they were so weakened the surviving tribes fled, leaving the evil temple to be cleaned out by the adventurers.

The last time, it ended with a siege of the keep, played out with a ton of minis, with the PCs acting as a special forces crew, taking out leaders, etc..

 

[jmucchiello]

It's funny. I've played in most of the classics but it was so long ago I don't really remember much about the actual game play any more. I remember being ticked off about the start of A4 but not how we got out of it. I remember first standing on the webs in Q1 but I can't remember who was playing the character who fell off. I have a crappy memory I guess (but I knew this).

As for wants, I don't think we ever got around to I3-5. And I've start U1 with folks but never finished it. Same with J1.