[Dungeon] Which TSR Modules are "Classics"?

[Xorial]

This wasn't a published module, but an adventure included in Dragon #100. The City Beyond the Gate. It was a fun romp thru a setting everybody is at least marginally familiar with, London. The characters are sent thru a gate to Modern Day London to recover the Mace of St. Cuthbert from the Royal Museum. Very fun. So fun that I ran some character thru an updated version of it a little over a year ago.

 

[Henry]

This wasn't a published module, but an adventure included in Dragon #100. The City Beyond the Gate.

You haven't lived until you've seen a high-level AD&D ranger in a three-piece suit with a .38 revolver turn into Charles Bronson...

 

[diaglo]

I'm curious which D&D or AD&D adventures from the 1980s you consider "classics."

Obviously, Against the Giants and Tomb of Horrors fit into that category. Any others?

get your facts straight. against the giants was from the 80s but the original tomb of horrors was not. and the original giants series in its various parts was not either. your criteria also keeps us from including the original B1 and B2. although people may have purchased them then.

Why?

Your feedback is very important to a devious plan I have for Dungeon Magazine.

if and only if you print them in the edition in which they were first produced would i endorse this idea/plan.

if you plan to butcher them or bastardize them for the latest edition you will only further incite my ire.

but if you do keep them in original 1edADnD form. i would like to see uk2 and uk3 as well as U1, 2, and 3 redone.

 

[Arnwyn]

but if you do keep them in original 1edADnD form. i would like to see uk2 and uk3 as well as U1, 2, and 3 redone.

Guh? How can they be "redone" if they are kept in their original form? English...language...collapsing...

 

[diaglo]

Guh? How can they be "redone" if they are kept in their original form? English...language...collapsing...

simple. revisit them ala the return to crap of 2ed done for ToH, AtG, WPM, KotB, Slavers

but use 1edADnD rules and style.

 

[Teflon Billy]

I don't think anyone has mentioned my favorite: The Secret of Bone Hill.

it included everything that Clark mentioned over in the "do Adventures sell?" thread

It had a few dungeons

It had a small campign setting

A goodly amount of imagination had gone into it

God, that Wraith though

 

[barsoomcore]

I'm going to pick three, just cause.

L1 -- The Secret of Bone Hill (that's twice, TB!)

This is the module that showed me how to run a campaign "outside the dungeon", as it were. Where the PCs actions in the town were every bit as important as what went on underground. My whole campaign changed after L1, I reckon.

S1 -- The Tomb Of Horrors

Like it or love it, this is the module that spawned Grimtooth's Traps as a mini-industry. For pure dungeon-crawling PC-killing ugliness, it never got better than this.

I6 -- Ravenloft

I have run this module more times than any other I ever bought. Just this past summer I duded it up for 3E, set it in Napoleonic Romania and sent a bunch of d20 Modern characters through it. The maps -- remember the first time you opened that cowboy up and saw those maps? Trying to trace where each stairwell went, how the elevator worked, man, there's a mod that was as much fun to read as it was to run.

There are other favourites, of course -- Q1 blew the top of my head off with its wackiness, and all the parallel worlds the party could go to, and B2 was where I cut my teeth as a DM (quick tip to novice DMs -- don't let the Castellan go off with the party to fight the orcs. Kinda sorta takes all the fun out of the adventure). The cover Jeff Dee did for White Plume Mountain (I think that must have been the second or third printing) remains one of my favourite D&D illos of all time.

Sigh. A lot of fun packed into 16 - 32 pages.

 

[LGodamus]

I like the " night below " box set although I am sure others here might disagree, but It has alot of potential...and its big.

 

[Wraith Form]

S3 has lasers, nuff said.

And theramins. Don't forget the theramins.

 

[Wraith Form]

X2 - Castle Amber

It took the work of an author (Clark Ashton Smith) who was fairly popular in his time, but somewhat obscure these (er, those) days, and meshed it with D&D (I also like how they meshed it with the Known World/Mystara setting later on).

It was a very very odd adventure. It was something of a dungeon crawl, at least the first part (only set in a Castle), but it was a very weird one.

I also liked the art. It was one of the first modules (and only) that illustrated the same party of characters as they went through it.

I also really liked the job TSR did on the follow-up module, 15 years later. Though it's tied in a lot more to the Mystara/Known World setting, and the audio cd was a bit silly. But they did a good job of revisiting the same ground, without rewriting history or mocking it (something the Kenzer and Dungeon/Polyhedron people could learn from, I think, given how they like to rewrite old modules/settings in order to mock fans...)

If a re-write/update/d20 overhaul of Amber is going to squash the "charm," magic and fun of the original, I beg you (Erik, not TranceJ)--don't bother. I think that holds true of ANY re-write/update you might suggest. If you, as editor, read it over and it's 'lost something, that certain je ne sai qua' (sorry, 8th grade French teacher) then please consider leaving our timeless old treasures alone.

B4 - The Lost City
This is a very underated module, IMHO. Like the title implies, it details a lost city of a lost and dying race, which seems an awful lot like something out of Michael Moorcock.

It was very open ended - the hook was simply that the PCs were lost in a desert and found a lost underground city (I know, not the best of setups).

Not only does it sound Moorcock, it also sounds very RE Howard "Red Nails"-ish, one of the finest pieces of literature to grace...uhh...literature. Yeah.

Robert E Howard was up there with Shakespeare and Gaiman in my book.