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

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

Including Undermountain 2E but not Night Below is basically a crime against the entire concept of adventures.

 

[Lanefan]

Strangely, prior to 3E, I never bothered to look at non-official D&D adventures. I'd like to see a list of pre-3E 3rd party adventures that are worth looking at.

Back in the day Judges Guild put out a bunch of Basic and-or 1e compatible adventures. They were a VERY mixed bag; some are pure dreck but some are really good. In some cases you do, however, have to wade through JG's - let's just say 'unusual' - stat blocks for NPCs and monsters.

The real highlights for me are:

Dark Tower (as noted above)
Caverns of Thracia (ditto)
Maltese Clue
Tower of Ulission
Sword of Hope (it's gonzo, but fun. The ultimate high-risk high-reward adventure; you'll kill a bunch of PCs but the survivors will be richer than kings!)

Also, either City State quasi-setting (Invincible Overlord or World Emperor) is worth picking up if you can find it, as they are mine-able for all sorts of adventure ideas.

One caution, though: none of the above (in original form) are going to come cheap.

The only one I have is Tegel Manor (picked up in late 3E of all things), and I wasn't really impressed looking over it (Zocchi tricked me into buying the adventure with an extended sales pitch about events that aren't even in the module).

I bought Tegel Manor from Zocchi as well, having heard great things about it from numerous people other than he, but wasn't overly impressed with it.

 

[Lanefan]

Whenever a discussion like this comes up I realize I can never really understand what people are looking for in a "good" adventure.

Some features that can help to make an adventure good are fairly universal:

Interesting and-or memorable foes, creatures, etc. for the PCs to overcome (not necessarily via combat)
Interesting non-foe NPCs for the PCs to interact with
Interesting and-or memorable traps, features, and other physical elements
Numerous ways in and-or out of the adventure setting
A non-linear layout with loops (horizontal and vertical!) and options such that ideally no two parties will take the same path through the adventure unless by sheer random chance
Clear concise writing that a DM can easily interpret
At least some indication that an editor was involved somewhere i.e. no egregious mistakes or errors*
At least some consideration given by the authors to obvious "what-if-they-do-this" situations, the most commonly ignored of these being "what if they fly in?"

* - the module I'm currently running falls way afoul of this, in that the map and the written room dimensions/descriptions completely disagree. At first I thought the error was the map using 10' squares but the author thinking 5' squares, but aligning those only fixes about 1/3 of the problems...

 

[GuyBoy]

Including Undermountain 2E but not Night Below is basically a crime against the entire concept of adventures.

I’m 99% sure it will never happen, but I’d love to see a “Return to the Night Below” boxed set, maybe taking Haranshire forward a decade or so, with new (or maybe regrouped) threats from the Underdark rising again.

PS agreed; Undermountain is ok, but not fit to lick the aboleth slime from Night Below.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

PS agreed; Undermountain is ok, but not fit to lick the aboleth slime from Night Below.

The only good thing I can say about Undermountain is one time the DM had foolishly decided this was a Gold = XP game (his idea!) and we managed to find some ridiculous hidden cache on one of the upper levels of Undermountain that, in terms of gold would make us incredibly rich, and in terms of XP shoot us from pretty low-level to like 15+, at which point the DM just gave up on the Undermountain campaign and ran something more fun instead.

 

[Parmandur]

I’m 99% sure it will never happen, but I’d love to see a “Return to the Night Below” boxed set, maybe taking Haranshire forward a decade or so, with new (or maybe regrouped) threats from the Underdark rising again.

PS agreed; Undermountain is ok, but not fit to lick the aboleth slime from Night Below.

Less unlikely than you might think, in my book. We had a thread a while ba k speculating on what sort of books similar to Ghosts of Saltmarsh WotC could do, I threw out a book combining Night Below, Kingdom of the Ghouls, and D1-3, and maybe Q. The maps of the 3 Underdark segments actually line up by design, and the page count would work for a 5E book. I could legitimately see them do this still.

 

[Parmandur]

The only good thing I can say about Undermountain is one time the DM had foolishly decided this was a Gold = XP game (his idea!) and we managed to find some ridiculous hidden cache on one of the upper levels of Undermountain that, in terms of gold would make us incredibly rich, and in terms of XP shoot us from pretty low-level to like 15+, at which point the DM just gave up on the Undermountain campaign and ran something more fun instead.

That sort of sounds like what Ed Greenwoood intended to happen.

 

[Mannahnin]

I bought Tegel Manor from Zocchi as well, having heard great things about it from numerous people other than he, but wasn't overly impressed with it.

Castle Xyntillan, from Gabor Lux a couple of years ago, is basically an homage and improvement to the concept, and is amazing.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

The only good thing I can say about Undermountain is one time the DM had foolishly decided this was a Gold = XP game (his idea!) and we managed to find some ridiculous hidden cache on one of the upper levels of Undermountain that, in terms of gold would make us incredibly rich, and in terms of XP shoot us from pretty low-level to like 15+, at which point the DM just gave up on the Undermountain campaign and ran something more fun instead.

Under the Gygaxian rules that allowed gp=Xp, you immediately ceased earning experience points as soon as you gained enough to level until you stopped and spent time training. Which avoided situations like this.

If you don’t have a rule like that, you can’t allow gp for xp.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Under the Gygaxian rules that allowed gp=Xp, you immediately ceased earning experience points as soon as you gained enough to level until you stopped and spent time training. Which avoided situations like this.

If you don’t have a rule like that, you can’t allow gp for xp.

Yeah either 2E wasn't as clear on that, or it was one of the countless 2E rules that just about everyone I'd ever met who played D&D IRL ignored.