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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mycanid" data-source="post: 2919448" data-attributes="member: 40370">I am afraid I have to go with the crowd that says these were stupendous adventures design wise as well.U1 was the first (I think it came out before L2, yes?) that majorly emphasized plot over hack and slash, although there is plenty of material for hack and slash later on (particularly the raid on the ship). I thought that the balance, the detail and the ... err ... "level of presentation" for both foes and treasures were very, very well thought through and presented. This also includes, by the way, the "standard" of the pre-generated characters presented at the end of the module - particularly stats wise. I thought they were near perfect in balance. I had no probs with part two of the adventure myself and thought it WAS very well designed.My main criticism with the U1 module was that they did not develop Saltmarsh as much as they should. There are other examples of modules contemporary or earlier than U1 which are at least somewhat developed. Anything more would have helped. Even a map. Granted, towns take a lot of time and space. T1, L1, L2, A3 all have villages developed to one degree or another, but they (with the exception of A3) are small places while Saltmarsh has apopulation of 2000 (not including the farmers in the sticks and the fishermen away at sea I'll warrant). I just detailed a small village of 200 people or so and it took up over 100 hand written pages! Still, something more could have been done.Oh yes (an edit after posting the above). Regarding Ned. The mere fact that an NPC is present who betrays the party and "teaches" them to distrust any npc they meet is just not true. What about Oceanus? He's as trustworthy as they come (unless the party tries to help the Sahuagin in prison in U2 ... back that is plenty character consistent). Besides, early betrayals such as this can be easily, easily, EASILY used by the DM as future ground for rp'ing, especially as to how the pc's will value trustworthy and faithful npcs. In that sense it is a little like life. There are always bad people around who will try to take advantage of the newbies. But later on you start to see that not all people are like that and value them even more for not being like that.This is not a "bad module design" trait, IMO. It rather can be a common cause for people nowadays to FURTHER mistrust people in the rp'ing (it rarely begins in the rp realm I think). But this could well launch off into another topic, so I'll end here.</blockquote>

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