D&D General Dungeon Magazine's Top 30 Adventures: Do they hold up?

[Sacrosanct]

I guess I'll be the detractor, and say the last time I ran T1-4 (about 10 years ago?), it was pretty easy to run. Play up the factions in the temple itself. It's not just a dungeon crawl; there are lots of opportunities to use roleplaying and diplomacy to work each faction and build allies and/or turn them against each other.

Like every other adventure back then, tweak things to fit your own campaign. For example, one of the villains from a PCs background was a general for Zuggtmoy and appeared at various times to harass the party until they finally fought him towards the end. The paladin was on a quest to find his holy sword (we were playing 1e), so the general wielded blackrazor. After defeating Zuggtmoy, they needed to take Blackrazor to White Plume Mountain to gain Whelm. Then take both weapons to the lair of an ancient white dragon and get it to breath on Blackrazor, then smash it with Whelm. Then take the pieces and reforge the weapon in the fire giant forges of G1-3.

It wasn't a lot of extra work to make all of that work.

I will say that UK2 and 3 need to be on that list.

 

[Stormonu]

A few more I've had experience with:

A1-A4: Scourge of the Slavelords. A good premise, A1 & especially A2 are strong. The "scripted" end of A3 is a problem and I wish Suderham was more fleshed out. A4 is a pain in the neck from the player's perspective, but if you're willing to go along with the premise (starting with no gear), it's one that really tests the player's creativity instead of the character's ability.

C1 - Ghost Tower of Inverness. To me, this module is trash - a bunch of random, anachronistic puzzles held together with an extremely loose plot. The last encounter is a random dicefest player killer where skill plays little to no part in its resolution.

N1 - Cult of the Reptile God. I like its premise, and this is essentially a homage to the Lovecraftian Secret of Innsmouth , but I had trouble running this adventure and keeping it from devolving into "kill every commoner in town, it's the only way to be sure" sort of mentality.

Ruins of Undermountain - the original is overly wordy for a snobbery-based attempt to tackle a megadungeon and attempt to prove the genre is "wrong". I wouldn't recommend it.

X1 - Isle of Dread - A great concept and oozes with theme, but unless you're willing to put in the extra work to flesh it out (or get the Goodman version that does that for you), it can be frustratingly barebones. Also, by the original B/X rules for sea travel, I discovered that it's impossible to reach the island without ending up losing your ship to a hurricane. This needs a little bit of fiat to reach the isle in one piece in the first place - I guess that's somewhat expected, but its annoying and should be kept in mind when used.

Dwellers of the Forbidden City - another Conan/Lovecraft throwback, this one is really bare bones and needs a lot of prep to be workable. It has a great premise, huge potential as an exploration sandbox and the potential to ooze with atmosphere in the right hands. Again though, takes a lot of work to pull off effectively and doesn't really have a plot - it's more of just an adventuring location. I think the ToA reinterpretation does this much better, though it too is a bit bare bones at time.

DL1 - Dragons of Despair. The adventure, I've tried it at least 3 times and its a slog to run. It's a great sourcebook for the novels, but has serious issues as an adventure. If you do try to run it, you have to put the novel out of your mind, and I'd still recommend NOT using the pregens. Which defeats the adventure's entire purpose.

 

[LordEntrails]

If you would like to help generate a list of Top Adventures for today, see; D&D 5E - Nominate Today's Top Adventures for Use in 5E

 

[Urriak Uruk]

I have not btw played or read all 30 modules, but I'm the OP so I should probably give my take on the ones I actually have;

Played:
GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders
I've played the beginning of the giant series, read the rest... this is pretty good. Yes it's a series of dungeon crawls, but it actually has a story as opposed to "Hunt for treasure" and each dungeon is linked together by that story. So it really is a campaign as much as dungeons, and a pretty fun one... who doesn't want to fight giants?

I6 Ravenloft
Ok I've played Curse of Strahd and not the OG, but if this is the core of CoS, then it's pretty damn good. It takes a lot of the vampire tropes and coalesces them into an adventure and setting that epitomizes Gothic Horror. It bucks the typical D&D trend, but in a good way.

S2 White Plume Mountain
A funhouse dungeon, but arguably the best one. I'd say of any dungeon where the premise is "Insane wizard built this" this is the dungeon that actually meets that premise. It's also fairly concise compared to something overly long like Undermountain. Plus, since the wizard isn't actually here, you can theoretically wring a whole campaign out of that premise of the insane wizard on the loose.

U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh
For a level 1 adventure, it's pretty damn good. Level 1 is a difficult thing to balance for, but this adventure meets that bar and exceeds it by subverting the players' expectations. A great beginning to the Saltmarsh series.

Read:
S1 Tomb of Horrors
Ugh. If you don't care about your PC, then sure this can be fun. But most players shudder when this module is suggested, and it's not hard to know why; it's actively anti-fun and designed to kill characters. It's contrary to most D&D design and therefore a failure IMO.

X2 Castle Amber (Chateau d’Amberville)
This is actually really, really good. It's a big mansion complex, filled with an interesting family with complex conflicting motivations. If that was it it'd be good, but with the entire province of Averoigne after it's simply awesome in scope. A great adventure that blows away most of the "Just a dungeon" TSR modules on this list.

The Ruins of UndermountainSONY DSC
I've read 5E Undermountain. If a megadungeon is your thing, it does it's job. But that's a narrow taste, and for everyone else this isn't going to cut it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My question is... does this list hold up under scrutiny?

It definitely didn't at the time, and only looks worse now.

Even back then, as you point out, it was basically "30-something dude's most nostalgic adventures from when he was a teenager and before he got bald and overweight", with a couple of random concessions to slightly more modern stuff like Dead Gods. I remember sneering at it pretty violently, as a mere 26-y/o stripling.

I mean, it's easy to say:

1) It totally unnecessarily favours TSR (not even WotC!) over 3PPs - this made a little more sense back in 2004 to be fair.

2) It largely (entirely?) ignores Dungeon magazine.

3) It's a gigantic nostalgia-fest with tons of deeply mediocre or even actively-bad adventures included solely because they're from when whoever wrote it actually used to play D&D.

Also I'd say even trying to list 30 is just begging to trouble. It's hard to properly curate a list that long, because for starters, it's unlikely anyone has played all of them (unlike a list of say, 30 classic movies or albums), let alone run all of them, so there's going to be limited peer-review. If you made a list of 10 or so, and and explained what they exemplified, and why they were included in some detail, that would make a lot more sense and have a lot more value. It would also less prone to include stuff which is pretty much just there for nostalgia's sake, because you'd have to actually justify it.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Not sure what 4E or 5E adventures might be added to the list, honestly; many are derivative from the ones on the current version.

The most well-regarded 4E adventures to my knowledge are Reavers of Harkenwold (an Asmodeus-worshiping mercenary company called the Iron Circle attacks a barony), Madness at Gardmore Abbey (a paladin's stronghold was thrown into chaos by the Deck of Many Things, which has left lingering effects; the cards of the deck must be collected to reassemble it), and Some Assembly Required (kobolds construct a mechanical body for a dragon's brain to inhabit).

Curse of Strahd seems to be the darling of 5E so far.

 

[delericho]

2) It largely (entirely?) ignores Dungeon magazine.

That was intentional - in the article they note that they didn't feel comfortable including their own adventures in such a list. However there is a sidebar that lists a provisional top 10 from Dungeon.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That was intentional - in the article they note that they didn't feel comfortable including their own adventures in such a list. However there is a sidebar that lists a provisional top 10 from Dungeon.

Oh christ I vaguely remember that now you mention it. But still it contributes heavily to the list "not holding up", because there's no shortage of Dungeon adventures better than a lot of those on the list.

In fact, push comes to shove, I think if I was really looking for the best D&D adventures of all time, Dungeon would be the place I'd start. Especially post-1E.

 

[GuyBoy]

Generally, I like the list but like any “greatest ever” list it will always tend to wallow in nostalgia a bit but IMO that’s kind of the whole point of the exercise.
The glaring omission for me is The Night Below of course.
I’m going to DM Keep on the Borderlands for 5e in a couple weeks which I’m looking forward to.

 

[LordEntrails]

The most well-regarded 4E adventures to my knowledge are Reavers of Harkenwold (an Asmodeus-worshiping mercenary company called the Iron Circle attacks a barony), Madness at Gardmore Abbey (a paladin's stronghold was thrown into chaos by the Deck of Many Things, which has left lingering effects; the cards of the deck must be collected to reassemble it), and Some Assembly Required (kobolds construct a mechanical body for a dragon's brain to inhabit).

Curse of Strahd seems to be the darling of 5E so far.

That discussion is what I started this thread for