[Dungeon] Which TSR Modules are "Classics"?

[Elaer]

Monte, Please Read This Post

Just a test... how many people remember Monte Cook's Labyrinth of Madness.

I never played Tomb of Horrors, but I always figured this is what Tomb of Horrors would have been if the demi-lich had been a little more bored and slightly more twisted. It had all the fun death traps of your normal super-dungeon, plus a strange magical effect that was kind of like a Forbiddance spell that wouldn't really let you heal (or at least, without slowly turning into a reptile). But the kicker was that in order to get to the end, you had to collect these twenty sigils, hidden in places like behind a statue or under a pool of water or stuck inside the eyesocket of a skeleton or something. There were like fifty to seven-five rooms, and you had to get the sigils in order, and that meant backtracking through this deathtrap to get to the next one you need. The kicker was there was no way of knowing that you had to get them in order, and you never even knew there was an order, or why you had to rescue this paladin stupid enough to trapse around in the Labyrinth of Madness...

God that thing ate characters like a fat kid eats cupcakes.

I just want to say: Thank you, Monte... if I ever meet you, I'm going to make you count the gray hairs that module gave me. In order. And you'll have to backtrack all over my skull to do it.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Ranked, in order, my top ten module list for D&D (all editions):
2. WG5 Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure by Kuntz

Y'know, I was going to pimp WG5 but I wasn't sure it fit the definition of a classic. For one thing, the adventure assumes you will play as Mordenkainen, Bigby, et al. That's cheesy at best and terribly munchkiny at worst. Also, the adventures starts off pretty lamely... Mordenkainen has just the right magic item to bypass "The Unopenable Doors".

However, once the Fantastic Adventures gets going, it's a doozy. You've got this giant dungeon complex full of weird sh-t. There is a room where a suggestion effect makes the PCs put their magic items into holes in the ground that then close, crushing and destroying the items. There's a room with the classic "paintings that come to life and attack" feature. There's bunches of cursed items - my favorite is some dust (a la sneezing and choking) that can deprive the PCs of various senses. Let me tell you from bitter personal experience that being both blind and without your sense of touch completely sucks.

The complex is also home to one of the coolest set-piece battles of all time, which pits the PCs against an apparently invulnerable stone golem armed with a petrifying whip and several other nasty abilities. Of course, it has a weakness (or two), but figuring out what that is while the golem is slaughtering party members can be quite a challenge.

Finally you've got the villain of the complex, the excellently named Eli Tomarast, and his pet demon. So all-in-all, there's plenty of stuff to do and fight in the Fantastic Adventure. But I'm not sure I would select it as the adventure for Dungeon to re-visit.