I've seen the current sidebars. While they're a great start, they hardly make each adventure "easy" to adapt. In fact, half the adventures I flipped through were dependent upon the specific politics, geography, and history of the individual setting (regardless of whether it was GH, FR or a made-up one) to work, making it very problematic to adapt anything in the adventure besides the bare-bones sequence of monster encounters. You'll notice the scaling sidebars specifically focus on adjusting combat encounters, with little to no information about how the adventures could fit into conflicts existing in other pre-established settings. One sentence in the introduction to the adventure doesn't make adaptation easy. It simply reinforces the idea that it's difficult to manipulate the story of the conflict in the adventure into another setting.
And we all know that the story of the conflict is the only thing that makes adventures different from a series of random monster encounters.
By choosing not to elaborate on how to adapt the story that connects all the encounters together, Dungeon (by default) limits the adventure to a specific place with specific monsters and specific NPC's. Like I said in my previous post, gamers are fickle; it's the rare DM that knows enough about his campaign ahead of time to anticipate which Dungeon adventures they're going to use, and plant the seeds necessary to flesh out a good, consistent, intrigueing series of adventures (that don't seem like they're simply lifted out of a magazine). Your Adventure Path series does that because it builds upon rumors and NPC's and occurances that have happened in previous installments. Can you see how room for that kind of flavor enhancement (which is the bread-and-butter of a good campaign) is virtually ignored in your non-AP adventures by not being acknowledged at all?
It's simply too much work, Erik, to re-write the story-line to fit individual campaigns. It won't matter how good the adventure is if it's too difficult to figure out how to fit it in. And quite frankly, once the nature and tone of the campaign is set, don't wise DM's consider what adventures are coming up for their players? Doesn't that imply that, at this point, previously published adventures from a long while ago are probably more useful than those of current issues, simply because a DM can build his campaign around them? Please help us figure out a way to avoid that somehow. I don't want to keep buying adventures that I have to create new campaigns to play...
Coreyartus