Legends and Lore: March 29th

[Klaus]

Two of my favorites made it to Top Two, cool!

Re: Delve format: it is a good idea, but isn't for every encounter. The Slaying Stone and Orcs of Stonefang Pass did a good job balancing the use of delve format and non-delve encounters. Reavers of Harkenwold did them one better, and had a very Red Hand of Doom vibe to it.

In fact, Reavers of Harkewold pretty much combines the best features of Ravenloft and RHoD. It presents a setting (Harkenwold), with lots of NPCs to interact with. It has a non-linear castle to explore (Iron Keep), the large-scale battle can unfold in different ways based on the PCs' input during the war council, and it didn't use the delve format for everything.

 

[Harlekin]

Notice how none of the 4e adventures made it into the top 10? Let's hope they can get some talent back to put out gems like the Ravenloft adventure.

That may be the wrong conclusion; after all, only a single 3.x module made it on the list and that edition spans 8 years of adventure publishing and the first three adventure paths by Paizo. For me, this suggests either

A) WOTC (and Paizo) suck at writing adventures for any edition.
B) There is a significant bias for older adventures in these polls.


I believe it's B), for multiple reasons:

(1) More people played these adventures, so more people can vote for them.
(2) There is an ongoing mythology about certain adventures being the classics.
(3) Many people played them a long time ago and thus only remember the good parts.


As a corollary, I actually think Wotc is trying too hard to emulate these adventures of old which generates mediocre material such as the Keep on the Shadowfell. After all, the best Wotc adventure (Red Hand of Doom) stands out by being very different from the classic TSR modules.

 

[Zaran]

I liked the red hand of doom myself. Because it was seperated into many settings not unlike a James bond film. It had some dungeons but was not dominated by them. It also gave the monsters a purpose and timeline making for a living world.

 

[Larrin]

The set up for the actually encounter is really nice in my experience, stats, terrain and such all in one.....the connection between the encounter and the part of the adventure that explains how and why you got there and what happened before you rolled initiative is something i can almost never follow/find. I flip around and try and find something the people ask about, and i can't find it quickly because in the times i've used it there weren't "from page 15 section b" or something at the top of the page, or if there was i missed it. That meant that when trying to set up the encounter (this was mostly for the dark sun encounters season), i pretty much just winged it.

What really would be nice would be a cheat sheet with important people, places and things like: (a)Keep Waterdale: pop 100, 15 years old, mostly human, pop. worships pelor and hates orcs/half-orcs. notable residents: Gen. Hustler (b), Cooper Smith (c), ...
(b)General Hustler: human knight lvl 4, 32 yrs, grey haired noble, gives quest Q and Z
-etc

that way if someone says "who was that guy" or "who lives here" you have one page to look at for the whole cast.

 

[Zaran]

My enjoyment of Red Hand was also he reason why I am doing the Scales of War campaign. Since there is established setting it's easy for me to look up area maps and give background. But I'm the kind of gm that is not very creative in making my own setting.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I believe it's B), for multiple reasons:

(1) More people played these adventures, so more people can vote for them.
(2) There is an ongoing mythology about certain adventures being the classics.
(3) Many people played them a long time ago and thus only remember the good parts.


As a corollary, I actually think Wotc is trying too hard to emulate these adventures of old which generates mediocre material such as the Keep on the Shadowfell. After all, the best Wotc adventure (Red Hand of Doom) stands out by being very different from the classic TSR modules.

I'd go with B as well. I'd personally take something like the Styes over the modules on the list. Paizo's run of dungeon was among the best produced IMO. Back in the day, there were fewer modules to choose from, so groups had a higher chance of playing through any given module. Its also worth noting that the poll wasnt asking for the best or favorite. The tweet was

""Name up to three dnd adventures to serve as models by which all others are designed. Any source - print, PDF, Dungeon mag, d20 publishers."

Completely different question. I love the 2nd edition Ravenloft setting adventure "The Created" for its silliness. Any adventure where you're stuck in a puppet body, fighting other toys, house cats, and crazy torch wielding homeless people gets a big vote for fun in my book... but I would never vote for it under this question.

 

[Harlekin]

The set up for the actually encounter is really nice in my experience, stats, terrain and such all in one.....the connection between the encounter and the part of the adventure that explains how and why you got there and what happened before you rolled initiative is something i can almost never follow/find. I flip around and try and find something the people ask about, and i can't find it quickly because in the times i've used it there weren't "from page 15 section b" or something at the top of the page, or if there was i missed it. That meant that when trying to set up the encounter (this was mostly for the dark sun encounters season), i pretty much just winged it.

What really would be nice would be a cheat sheet with important people, places and things like: (a)Keep Waterdale: pop 100, 15 years old, mostly human, pop. worships pelor and hates orcs/half-orcs. notable residents: Gen. Hustler (b), Cooper Smith (c), ...
(b)General Hustler: human knight lvl 4, 32 yrs, grey haired noble, gives quest Q and Z
-etc

that way if someone says "who was that guy" or "who lives here" you have one page to look at for the whole cast.

I think this gets to the heart of the actual problem: The 2 page spreads for encounters in the Delve Format are very useful for running the encounter. However, in recent adventures, they often contained important information that is necessary to know outside the encounter. Thus when reading or preparing the adventure, I have to carefully read all encounter spreads to get the entire story and make sure I'm not overlooking anything important.

To me, all necessary information about what is going on in the encounter need to be replicated elsewhere in the adventure in a way that is easy to read. Wotc is still too reluctant to print redundant information when it is exactly this redundancy that makes adventures easier to prepare and run.

 

[Zaran]

The last adventure I bought for dnd was the one that was supposed to be for Dark Sun. But it felt like there was no flavor at all and that it was a desert type adventure with the names changed so it would fit the setting. Even the map that came with it showed a horse drawn carriage in it. To me that shows that there is no "love" put into these products. They are sold to us because we expect the product and there is no real effort involved. This is probably why there are so few books coming out this year because of all the quality complaints coming from this sort of thing.

Another adventure that was just horrible about this was the Pyramid of Shadows with it's quilt of encounters with little in the way of plot. They are fun encounters but when it feels like the monsters just stand around waiting to activate when you draw aggro...

Then there are encounters with monsters 5 levels higher than the party just to pad out the xp reward... I can see why there are no 4e adventures on that list.

 

[TikkchikFenTikktikk]

To see the delve format done right, DM the current season of Encounters.

March of the Phantom Brigade is an outstanding adventure that has tweaked the format so it flows very nicely and you don't have the flipping back and forth problem of the older style.

It presents a setting: the ruins (and later the settlement) of Inverness and the surrounding area between it and Hammerfast and Harkenvold.

In a home campaign there would be freedom: during Encounters it is necessarily a railroad. But the passing of time that gets handwaved away for Encounters would be ripe for character development and exploration in a home game.

Unfortunately, the maps aren't great: they use the currently en vogue tactic of using two sets of each box of Essentials dungeon tiles and make a 15x15 square in which to fight. As has been noted before, this is especially bad for outdoor combat. It does come with three poster maps, though.

It has an awesome hook: the adventurers start out into the unknown to homestead and are instrumental in establishing a new village. This is classic campaign material, especially when an army of undead threaten to destroy all the hard work PCs have spent months building.

I honestly think if they sold this adventure it would go down as a classic.

 

[Zaran]

Of course Encounters was put on a lousy night for gaming. I suppose there is no way to get the adventure without being a part of Encounters?