Is The Temple of Elemental Evil a well-designed adventure module?

[Quasqueton]

Is the AD&D1 adventure module The Temple of Elemental Evil a well-designed adventure module?

I’m not asking if you like it or had fun with it. I’m not asking if it is a great piece of D&D history. Just, is it well designed as a published adventure for general D&D play?

If it is, what could current module designers/authors learn from it? What should current module designers/authors try to emulate about it?

Quasqueton

 

[Alarith]

We spent like 2 or 3 years playing this adventure (And I am talking like every Saturday).
There are many adventure hooks in there and I think we kinda explored all of them.
I will probably never forget the Ranger I played in this adventure, and some of the NSCs he came to know as friends or foes while battling the temple. I can not really say if the module design is good. I can just say, that a good DM can make A LOT out of it. I looked very strangly at every mushroom and fungus I encountered afterwards .

Ala

 

[3catcircus]

Let's look at each individual part:

T1: This is what I imagine a non-feudal medieval village would have looked like, with the town and the crossroads arranged around the inn. You got your religious leaders, you got your local lords building their castle, you got your bad-guy agents infiltrated into the town. Every locale has just enough information for the DM to either expand or gloss over. Endless possibilities here.

As to the moathouse... Hmm - why are the bandits in the room on the ground floor there? Are they working for Lareth the Beautiful, or just using the space? In the dungeon level, why would Lubash not mind being so close to so many zombies? Why haven't the baddies had a giant crawfish boil yet?

T2: Nulb seems less lifelike than Hommlett. The entire town isn't as detailed, and the DM really has to work to try and find a tie-in to Hommlett or the temple.

T3-4: While I like the dungeon layout and the information regarding how the various NPCs reacts to intruders, I don't like the layout of the information - sometimes a critical key is buried in the middle of a huge paragraph. It took me 4 times (recently, using a PDF of the adventure) to try and find what room Fragarach was in - I ended up having to do using the search function. I especially like the open-ended-ness of the four nodes.

 

[GeorgeFields]

One thing to consider is the age of the adenture (and most of them in this series of threads actually). ToEE is over 20 years old. Well-designed has something of a different meaning now than it did 20 years ago due to the evolution of RPGs in general.

Twenty years ago, this was one of the best advetures written as far as design goes, IMO. By today's standards, it is still high-quality; but experience shows room for improvement.

I agree with 3catcircus in that Nulb was pretty dry when compared to Hommlet, but I think Nulb was more of a "pit stop" in the adventure whereas Hommlet was the focus at the beginning.

The layout has never bothered me much; but once again, better ways have been discovered.

The only real problem I had were the NPCs living in the nodes. I don't recall details at the moment, but some of their survival seems a bit far stretched to me. Luck can only take you so far. Oil soaked balls of cloth ignited does not a fireball make.

All-in-all, I would say, Yes.

 

[Vigilance]

Temple of Elemental Evil is the best D&D adventure ever.

Today, yesterday, 20 years from now... it's simply the best.

It is everything a D&D campaign should be, and many people got that even TSR had tried to convince us (and themselves) that all D&D should be Planescape or Ravenloft, when I loaded Diablo for the first time I thought to myself "someone remembers what a good D&D adventure can be with all the fun and none of the WOD-esque pretense".

Chuck

 

[billd91]

I don't think it's well designed. T1 was reasonably well designed but the rest of the module could have used some significant editing down. It just dragged on and on. And the deepest level, the one shaped like Iuz, was just silly.

 

[DemonKing]

I ran a party through TOEE about 10 years ago. They had an awesome time interacting with the NPCs around Homlet and looting the Moathouse, but once they got into the temple proper things went downhill.

Giant dungeons might have been fun when we were 12, but to a group of 20-somethings it was really hard to capture their interest, particularly given how poorly fleshed out the module was with regards to the interactions amongst the NPCs and other factions.

If you've played the computer game adaption, you'll probably realise that the designers there, be remaining faithful to the original, also had a similar problem making the Temple itself interesting.

When I design dungeons now, I usually keep them to a dozen rooms or less, and try to make them logical adventure locales and not the focus of the campaign.

 

[Melan]

No. Village of Hommlet wastes too much space on describing mundane inhabitants of little interest (as opposed to Keep on the Borderlands, whose inhabitants are all interesting and more-or-less relevant to actual play), whereas the Temple itself suffers from too many rooms with "six gnolls, 120 sp and three moldy spears" ("cabinet contents" game design) - there are some well designed and imaginative encounters in there, but not enough to save it. The lowest level doesn't work well either, and the Iuz-St. Cuthbert showdown is an epitome of bad design (I will have to recheck this - I may be misremembering something). This leaves us the moathouse, basically (Nulb is such a non-entity that it doesn't merit discussion). The moathouse starts out really good (the surface level is a very well designed tactical scenario) but the dungeons, again, are deeply flawed. Except the giant crayfish, of course.

I consider this module series EGG's weakest design effort. Compared to the genius of modules like the GDQ series, B2 or even Tharizdun, it is particularly irritating. I don't know how much of the blame should rest on Frank Mentzer's shoulders, but I personally think Gary deserves the main share of the blame.

 

[Quasqueton]

describing mundane inhabitants of little interest (as opposed to Keep on the Borderlands, whose inhabitants are all interesting and more-or-less relevant to actual play)

I'm sorry, but this statement made me say, "Huh?"

The described inhabitants of the Keep don't even have names.

Quasqueton

 

[T. Foster]

Other: the upper works of the Temple, including the guard-tower with the bandits, is great; wonderfully evocative stuff. I like a lot of the first two dungeon levels as well, and had a lot of memorable play with these back in the 80s. Dungeon levels 3 and 4 and especially the Nodes lose momentum, though, and descend into blandness. I actually like Nulb's sketchiness and "let as an exercise for the DM" feel, but I'd have liked a better/more detailed wilderness map. I like a lot of things about Hommlet, especially the map and Trampier's illustrations, but agree that there's perhaps too much time spent detailing mundane inhabitants who are never likely to figure into the adventure -- this IMO set a very bad precedent that too many later products followed. The Moathouse (though I've run it probably more often than any other module -- at least 5 times) feels almost like an afterthought, a totally generic "low level" dungeon, and I could take it or leave it. I concur with Melan that the upper level (the ruins, with the bandits) is more interesting than the dungeon level, and have come to think (although I've never played it that way) that the Lareth the Beautiful encounter would actually work better as an extended roleplaying encounter (with the players "going undercover" and attempting to infiltrate the cult via Lareth, perhaps coming into contact with him via the Traders in Hommlet) than as a straight-up hack-fest.

There's too much that I like in this module for me to be willing to consign it to the scrap-heap, but if I were to run it again (not likely, two and a half times is probably enough) I'd want to make a lot of additions and changes and streamline the endgame considerably.