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Message: <blockquote data-quote="grodog" data-source="post: 4896363" data-attributes="member: 1613">I thought that might be where you were going, but the parallel construction of your examples sucked me in.  I think that there have been plenty of noteworthy, new "old school" modules released in the past few years, such as Rob Kuntz's "Maure Castle" modules in Dungeon 112/124/139, "Spire of Iron and Crystal" by Matt Finch, XPR's "Curse of the Witch Head" by James Boney, several of Gabor "Melan" Lux's adventures published in Fight On! and Knockspell, and Joe Bloch's "Castle of the Mad Archmage" @ <a href="http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com" target="_blank">Greyhawk Grognard</a>.  All good stuff, all worth digging into, and there's plenty certainly more, too!My hunch is that that's a style of play thing:  many of the pregen PCs in modules like S1 and S3, for example, were pretty "under" equipped in comparison to most PCs of those levels I've seen (or even in comparison to the pregen PCs in G1-3 and D1-2).  If high-level PCs are walking Christmas trees then it's definitely harder to challenge them ("Damn rust monster ate my vorpal weapon---I'll have to fall back to the +4 defender then" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).  I think you still raise a good point though, Hussar:  I think the hardest adventures to write are ones for 1st and 2nd level PCs, and those for characters of 12th+ level.  The lower-level PCs are so fragile, and because of that, your creative options are much-more limited in terms of monsters you can throw at them, types of traps, etc.; on the other end of the spectrum, high-level PCs have many options available, and failsafes when their first choice options fail.  And I suppose that's why I see the use of demi-planar- or outer-planar magic rules being different as a tool rather than a crutch---such rules force PCs to try to orient to the environment more when their spellcasting choices are more-restricted, and to come up with non-standard solutions to problems.  Example:  in an ice world, fire-based spells cause -2 per die rolled damage, save for 1/4 fail for 1/2 damage.  PCs may swap out fireball for slow, or opt for burning hands instead (which is generally shunned IME, but since it's not rolled damage, there's no loss in the spell's damage potential).</blockquote>

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