Keep on the Shadowfell vs Reavers of Harkenwold

[cavesalamander]

So I've been thinking about what makes for a good pre-published adventure for 4th Edition. Keep on the Shadowfell is generally regarded as one of the worst (which was unfortunate, since it was also the first adventure for many, many people), and Reavers of Harkenwold is usually mentioned as being one of the best.

What are the fundamental differences between the two?

What is it that makes Keep so bad, especially with regards to 4th Edition? Had it been released for an earlier ruleset would it have been received more positively? I remember Bruce Cordell's adventures from late 2nd to early 3rd edition with some fondness, so I was a little surprised by the negative reaction to Keep, even among those who really like 4th Edition.

And what is it about Reavers that makes it better? More roleplaying opportunities baked in? A more open structure? What are the essential qualities Reavers has that Keep lacks? What make Reavers a better fit for its edition?

I haven't played either of these adventures, I've only read them. On the surface, Keep seems at worst like an uninspired bog-standard module, the sort that TSR and Wizards thereafter, pumped out by the truckload throughout their earlier editions' life-cycles.

So, for those of you more familiar with these two modules, what does Reavers get right that Keep gets wrong?

 

[masteraleph]

I haven't actually played through either fully, but most of the complaints about the original 4e adventures were exactly what you said- bog standard, combat heavy and railroad-y (and combat heavy with the pre-MM3 monster math, so encounters took longer). The better received options allow players to do things in multiple orders, have an effect on the outcome of events, and have multiple moving pieces. Take Madness at Gardmore Abbey as an example- there are multiple different potential enemies, so you could actually play through it multiple times and still have new discoveries because the different NPCs would act differently.

 

[Tony Vargas]

What is it that makes Keep so bad, especially with regards to 4th Edition? Had it been released for an earlier ruleset would it have been received more positively?

KotSf wasn't a particularly bad adventure, by broad D&D standards. It just did fairly typical things - overleveled Big Bads, grindy room-clearing - that it didn't need to in 4e. It was metaphorically pumping it's anti-lock breaks.

D&D puts a good DM, or capable adventure-designer, into the habit if compensating for it's failings. You need to build some grind into your dungeons, to provide a sense of challenge without just overwhelming the party, and to enable the resource-stress that passes for class balance. You need to throw down a higher-HD/level threat, give it a home field advantage, and play it viciously so it'll last more than a round and register as memorable/challenging above the noise level of that grind.

KotS tried to be helpful by building those over-compensations in for new DMs, giving them a few points if failure. Irontooth & Kalarel didn't need to be over-engineered (really, the Elite designs of early 4e were already a little over-engineered, something MM2 tried to address, and MM3 managed better), so became potential TPKs. The dungeon didn't need an underpinning of attrition-based resource-management, so became a pointless/contrived slog. In 4e, if an adventure didn't call for a grueling series of combats, you just don't have a grueling series of combats, but a few important ones, it didn't require that attrition model to underpin class balance or provide challenge.

I remember Bruce Cordell's adventures from late 2nd to early 3rd edition with some fondness, so I was a little surprised by the negative reaction to Keep, even among those who really like 4th Edition.

IIRC, he did Heart of Nightfang Spire, which I (and I may be distinctly in the minority in this) consider one of the better 3e modules, precisely because it does viciously punish the common abuses of that edition, and does have amped up, even 'gotchya' challenges. 3e needs the DM to step up and smack down the 5MWD and hammer the blindspots of unbalanced parties, and HoNS set that up for the DM, with actual reasons to do so built in. It was a great example of what it takes to preserve the play of the game in the presence of the 'build' meta-game.

 

[jacktannery]

I've DMd both. @masteraleph is correct. I also agree with [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION].

Keep of the Shadowfell was awful. 4E was different to older versions of DnD, because it was organised around the encounter, rather than the adventuring day (or week). Thus adventures need to have exciting decisions during the encounter in 4E, in contrast to earlier editions that might have worked with boring encounters but exciting long-term planning. 4E has no long-term planning. This adventure was written by someone who hadn't worked that out yet. So it feels grindy, and railroady. It might have worked well in 2E, for example, because then the plotting back in the town could have worked.

Both Reavers of Harkenwold (and the even better Madness at Gardmore Abbey) work perfectly with 4E, because the decision points are during encounters, rather than between them (or at the end of the day/week), so the structure of the game works with the adventure. In 4E an encounter IS a decision point (and many of the 'encounters' in Harkenwold and Madness are not best dealt with by combat); whereas in previous editions those moments were called 'roleplaying' and usually happened at the end of the day, or at the end of the adventure in the 'king's throneroom' etc.

 

[cavesalamander]

Both Reavers of Harkenwold (and the even better Madness at Gardmore Abbey) work perfectly with 4E, because the decision points are during encounters, rather than between them (or at the end of the day/week), so the structure of the game works with the adventure. In 4E an encounter IS a decision point (and many of the 'encounters' in Harkenwold and Madness are not best dealt with by combat); whereas in previous editions those moments were called 'roleplaying' and usually happened at the end of the day, or at the end of the adventure in the 'king's throneroom' etc.

(emphasis added)

This idea of important decision points occuring during the encounter is, I think, key to 4e. Earlier editions put all of the deciding moments between the encounters (and also had a narrower view of what constituted an encounter to begin with).

I'm going to go back and have another look at Reavers keeping this in mind.

I knew that 4e worked better with fewer, but more relevant, encounters than did its predecessors. But I kept thinking that there had to be more to it than just that.

 

[Tony Vargas]

4E was different to older versions of DnD, because it was organised around the encounter, rather than the adventuring day (or week). Thus adventures need to have exciting decisions during the encounter in 4E, ... has no long-term planning.

I think that's been over-stated. Other eds /depend/ upon an adventuring day (or a whole campaign) to balance classes out over time, 4e just has (comparatively, for D&D) balanced classes, whether they're in an encounter per day or many, that's not an encounter-based design, just a less-pacing-dependent design.
In 3.x, in particular, it was popular to break the game with the infamous 5MWD (and, in 1e, sometimes the 5MWD - if not week - was necessary simply to survive 1st level), in 4e, you could play with that pacing if you wanted, and it would mean you could handle tougher encounters, but it wasn't a game-breaker. You could play 4e over an adventuring day with an emphasis on attrition & planning, it'd really kick in at 8+ encounter days, but you could do it - the dungeon section of KotSf could be run that way (it's how our DM in my old group ran it, and 9 encounters in a row at low level was certainly challenging) - it also wouldn't break the game, but it wouldn't have the virtue of /fixing/ it, the way HoNfS fixed powergamers' scry-buff-teleporting 5MWDs in 3.0, either.

Both Reavers of Harkenwold (and the even better Madness at Gardmore Abbey) work perfectly with 4E, because the decision points are during encounters, rather than between them (or at the end of the day/week), so the structure of the game works with the adventure. In 4E an encounter IS a decision point (and many of the 'encounters' in Harkenwold and Madness are not best dealt with by combat); whereas in previous editions those moments were called 'roleplaying' and usually happened at the end of the day, or at the end of the adventure in the 'king's throneroom' etc.

I hadn't noticed that about Gardmore, but I didn't play in it long. I've never so much as glanced at Harkenwold.

Though I can see how dramatic decisions would be present in combat, it seems to me more that higher-level decision points set up encounters (challenges), which then lead to other challenges or decisions, prettymuch regardless of edition (or even system). It's just that traditional D&D requires a certain structure - the 'adventuring day,' the dungeon crawl, magic-item acquisition, etc - to really work well, while 4e didn't. Once the need to force something like HoNfS or KotSf structure onto stories to impose functionality on the game is removed, the poverty of those stories is revealed...

 

[MwaO]

Here are some of the problematic issues of Keep on the Shadowfell:
Sir Keegan Skill Challenge. This has several worst elements of early skill challenges - namely, it focuses on two specific stats(Cha, Int), it is really just an extended social skill turned into a skill challenge, by the rules, supposed to be run in initiative order, and instead of roleplaying and then having the skill check made on the basis of the roleplaying, the skill check is generated by Keegan magically asking the right question of the PC. i.e. why isn't the party Face talking to Keegan and that being the end of it(yes, that's boring, but that's kind of the point - this skill challenge is boring)

Closing the Portal Skill Challenge. Int/Wis again. Extended skill check again. In combat and with odd effect on combat - good combat skill challenges make the party want to solve them, yet at the same time don't excessively reward or punish one route.

Encounter Strength - Defenses & hp tend to be too high. Damage is relatively low. So combats will drag. Etc...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

KotSf wasn't a particularly bad adventure, by broad D&D standards. It just did fairly typical things - overleveled Big Bads, grindy room-clearing - that it didn't need to in 4e. It was metaphorically pumping it's anti-lock breaks.

Right, they took a system who's heart and soul would be adventures reminiscent of 'Jewel of the Nile' or 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', high intensity no-holds-barred action adventure with lots of crazy wide-open action scenes and a plot filled with crazy roller-coaster changes in fortune, etc. They turned it into a room-clearing exercise. Its just plain slogging through a maze of rooms, systematically clearing each one. AT BEST some of them are mildly interesting tactical challenges. The story itself is virtually an afterthought, just a thin excuse to lampshade the whole slog as a quest to 'stop evil' (cartoon evil at that).

It has some mildly better parts. The part in the town of Winterhaven is not too bad. There's a crazy traitor woman, a (sadly unexplored) cemetery you could play with if you wanted, and some NPCs you can get info out of. Unfortunately all the info amounts to "go to the Keep and kill everything you find, they're all EEEEVVVVVIIIIILLLLLL!" That by itself would be OK, but couldn't this info have had some more fun reveal? Like being garnered in the course of some cloak and dagger with the traitor? You CAN do that, but the module itself doesn't really help you set it up.

The parts with the Kobolds is OK. At least it isn't sloggy. The sheer deadliness of the Irontooth encounter is kind of interesting, but also needed to be better telegraphed.

D&D puts a good DM, or capable adventure-designer, into the habit if compensating for it's failings. You need to build some grind into your dungeons, to provide a sense of challenge without just overwhelming the party, and to enable the resource-stress that passes for class balance. You need to throw down a higher-HD/level threat, give it a home field advantage, and play it viciously so it'll last more than a round and register as memorable/challenging above the noise level of that grind.

Well, not in 4e you don't...

KotS tried to be helpful by building those over-compensations in for new DMs, giving them a few points if failure. Irontooth & Kalarel didn't need to be over-engineered (really, the Elite designs of early 4e were already a little over-engineered, something MM2 tried to address, and MM3 managed better), so became potential TPKs. The dungeon didn't need an underpinning of attrition-based resource-management, so became a pointless/contrived slog. In 4e, if an adventure didn't call for a grueling series of combats, you just don't have a grueling series of combats, but a few important ones, it didn't require that attrition model to underpin class balance or provide challenge.

Right, what would have been better was perhaps some sort of horrifying trip through a maze of half-shadowfell horror with lots of chasing around, trying to figure out who was really the bad guy, getting hold of some McGuffins, etc. It could have been pretty interesting! Instead if was a giant slog culminating in a brick of an encounter that goes on forever.

As you say, were it a 1e adventure, H1 would be simply mediocre, possibly even fairly entertaining. The resource game would make it a lot more of an interesting challenge to work through the maze of rooms, and the fights would be shorter and sweeter. The other parts of the module would probably seem a little less dull as well, and ridiculously deadly parts are just par for the course.

 

[Garthanos]

If you were a caster there seemed to be a few decision points in early D&D encounters (/snark).

 

[MartyW]

Reavers rock!

I am coming into this conversation way late, so I apologize for that, but I had to comment on Reavers of Harkenwold. [DND]D&D[/DND]

I love Reavers of Harkenwold. It's on of my all time favorites next to the Village of Hommlet.

I never ran Keep on the Shadowfell because I could see from the first reading it was going to be an utterly boring dungeon-crawl grindfest. Reavers of Harkenwold is almost exactly the opposite. It's a lot more like a Choose Your Own Adventure.

You come into the first scenario to get you hooked into the plot, but after that, there are several choices. I'm not going to spoil it, but the first book is wide open. You can hit the various mini-modules in different orders. You can turn almost turn it into a sandbox (which I did). You can let the players wander around the Duchy. You can let them jump in with the rebellion right away, or stay to the sidelines until they make an enemy of the Iron Circle.

What started out as a level 2-4 adventure, I turned into a multi-month low level campaign. I think I got my group to 5th or 6th before the big battles toward the end (I had to buff the foes somewhat). Harkenwold gives the improv DM a lot of room to play, but still allows the "adventure as written" DMs enough guidance to move them through the plot.

I think that's what distinguishes a good adventure from a bad one (of any edition). Do the players have interesting choices or are they just grinding in a straight line to get to the boss fight?

It's a real shame the DM's Guild PDF version (https://www.dmsguild.com/product/121978/Dungeon-Masters-Kit-4e?affiliate_id=13584) is missing all the poster maps. Some of them are on Mike Schley's site, but they really should be contained in the Guild version. I'm lucky enough to own a paper original and the artwork/cartography is fantastic... as well as some of the most useful maps in my collection.


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