How do you use published adventures?

[Glyfair]

A recent thread, and a discussion with threads, has made me wonder how most people use the adventures they buy. Do you tend to run them as is? Do you get inspiration from them? Do you just use bits and pieces from them?

 

[Psychic Warrior]

Well - I use them in many different ways. The first 7 choices sum up how I use my published adventures (mainly in the form of Dungeon magazine but many 1E modules too). I find that I don;t buy any adventures anymore - with nearly 100 issues of Dungeon I really don't need any .

 

[palleomortis]

I don't really like them. The only thing I like about them, is that my dad had some that came with maps, so now I have two more nice maps. Thats about it. The only time I ever used them, was as the first time I DM'ed. They did work well for that, but only becuase it was my first time DM'ing, and the rest were new to the game, so no one thought it was a drag. Only problem was that as 4 first level players, they still almost got killed by 4 goblins. Kinda sad.

 

[tylerthehobo]

I generally modify store-bought modules to fit my campaign. For instance, I always found "Waterdeep" to be a little too clean cut for my Forgotten Realms campaign. Having grown up in a fairly urban harbor town, I wanted more grit to the City of cities in Faerun. When "Freeport" came out for d20, I bought up as much of it as I could find. The modules have been run in my FR campaign as a sort of dark urban version of Waterdeep, with all references to "Freeport" changed to Waterdeep, all references to the gods changed, the people of Yig changed to Yuan-Ti, etc. For me, that's part of the fun.

 

[palleomortis]

That's true, even on my first session mentioned above, I had to make a few changes just to make it more interesting. It was too much of a hack and slash deal.

 

[Wombat]

I've read a few written adventures in my time. The only ones I ever enjoyed were the ones written for Paranoia. I think I have stolen a couple NPCs over the years and maybe one or two encounters, but overall I found that I had to do too much footwork to force the adventures into my campaigns to make them useful to me.

 

[IronWolf]

I went with all but the last two. On occasion I will run them as written. More often I make at least some tweaks to them to help fit them into the campaign at hand. And NPC's, encounters, certain rooms are always candidates for getting ripped and dropped into something else I have in mind.

 

[nopantsyet]

Mostly for inspiration, but with the occasional heavily-modified adventure thrown in to make my life easier.

 

[Ysgarran]

Most of them I use with significant modifications. The latest Eberron ones I've only used as 'locations' while changing almost everything else about them.

I find that using modules 'as is' moves my games farther away from story telling and more towards sheer dungeon crawls. It might be just my own procilivities that result in that skew, but that is the way it is.

later,
Ysgarran.

 

[EricNoah]

Inspiration and maps; and sometimes with a great deal of modification.

I am hoping my answer soon becomes "I run them as-is" or with slight modifications, as I need a bit of time off to find my originality/creativity mojo but still want to DM.