Mega-Adventures Vs. Normal Adventures

[baseballfury]

I like mega-adventures only occasionally. Some of the old CoC campaigns, for instance, are well worth playing. But shorter adventures are easier to adapt to my campaign or to use as a pick up. No one is going to say, "We've got a free weekend, let's bust out Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil!"

 

[Kaji]

It's hard not to agree with most about mega adventures. My campaign world has an overarching story, and I don't really have the time or inclination to take months or years out for some massive adventure. Plus, the big ones are harder to tie into whatever your doing. Little adventures can be a brief respite from the regular story, or easily adjusted and tied in to your campaign.

Oh, and I absolutley agree with the idea that too much dungeon really can be a bad thing. As a player especially, I get REALLY tired of listening at doors, searching for traps, listening, unlocking, searching, GODS THE INSANITY, RELEASE ME!!

Better now.

 

[Balrog]

I would have to agree with the majority that mega-adventures tend to run too long and therefore my players and I tend to use shorter published adventures if we have the opportunity. I am currently DMing a homebrew campaign in which i have used several different modules in this order( with various wilderness encounters and political roleplaying in between.)

1. The Wizards Amulet: made a great (and free) adventure to get PCs introduced to each other, and it tied in wonderfully with:

2. The Crucible of Freya: During this module the PCs made friends with several important people in the region, and then from that they springboarded into:

3. The Tomb of Abysthor: the PCs followed some legends and stories about the nearly forgotten Burial Halls and decided to enter both to search for treasure and to try to restore some of the older Deities' glory. After clearing out a couple of levels the PCs got news of some important events taking place nearby (a siege of the Dwarven homeland of 2 of the PCs) that caused them to decide to temporarily abandon their explorations. Which led to:

4. Natural Selection(DUNGEON magazine #85): The PCs got embroiled in a dispute between a Druids Circle and a local Duke. Following their success with this, the PCs were able to secure aid to go investigate first hand the rumoured siege of the Dwarven stronghold of Smaragholt, which led them to:

5. The Silver Summoning: which we just this Sunday concluded. The PCs are fast becoming friends with influential people and of course, making powerful enemies, which opens up plenty of options for both me and them in the future.

6. Without knowing with 100% certainty what they will do next, I would guess that some will call for returning to the Tomb of Abysthor, while some others may call for following the defeated army from the Silver Summoning into the mountains to find their base of operations.

During this time I tried to be careful not to railroad the PCs into their choices along the way, and naturally, there was some internal dissension about the actions and direction of the party, so there were a couple of defectors in the ranks (which really spices things up!)

So far, I have only used about 40% percent of the material I had thought to use, as they havent really surprised me yet with any of their decisions. I credit this mainly to good communication on THEIR part about their own character backgrounds and motivations. Of course, that can change with SOME characters. But I really dont see that a typical mega adventure would have provided all the flexibility that this series of pretty much unrelated shorter adventures provided. And if you throw in the fact that the vast majority of mega adventures are dungeons or variations thereof, they really dont give me what I want IMC. Of course, that can change based on the PCs. But considering our group went about a year going through the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil before starting my campaign, I think we have had our fill of super mega dungeon crawls for awhile ( i hope).

 

[Psion]

Well, a well done Mega-Adventure (c.f. Dead Gods, Rod of Seven Parts) is a glorious thing to behold. But a not so well done mega-adventure is like, well, being in prison (c.f., Night Below). I often find that 32-64 page modules are too long / take too much time / cramp my style, thus you can imagine how I feel about mega-adventures. If I am going to commit that much game time to a single adventure, it had better be good, and there had better be twists and turns and variety.

The problem with mega-adventures like CotSQ and RttToEE is that they involve entirely too much monster plowing, much like book II of the otherwise good Night Below. Mega-monster-plow adventures don't do it for me, sorry.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I would like to see more mega-adventures along the lines of the old-time module X1: Isle of Dread. For those who aren't old-timers , it involves a long boat trip to an island populated by superstitious natives, dinosaurs, crumbling temples to forgotten dieties... there are volcanoes, tar pits, jungles....

It's really this glorious mish-mosh of adventuring without much of a plot. But the lack of plot is a strength, because the PCs can go where they will and do a wide variety of things. The trend in modern adventures seems to be the opposite: layer on a strong plot that needs to be followed. I guess I prefer the old way.

 

[green slime]

The problem with the Mega Adventure isn't the plot per se, it's the inability of the designers to keep the plot afloat by itself without resorting to a massive monster massacres. Travelling through long passages of underdark encountering one murderous monster after another is just plain boring, and does nothing for the plot, the pace or the ambiance of the game.

Plotless adventures are just as bad, as it can resort to players wondering about what to do next and killing monsters over the hill for more gold, just because there is nothing better to be doing.

And then players ask "why are we doing this?"

It is the job of the DM to pace and change the adventure to suit his/her/its players.

 

[Leopold]

OK one thing y'all are missing on the big campaign books is this: They are guides not fact.


Night below is a slaughterfest. How do i know this? I am running it and converted it through book2 to 3e. It has more large scale combat and encounters per area than any other module out there sans the GDQ series. Do i throw all that at the party? No. Why? Because it's a guide and I know my PC's will get sick to death of it so I must alter things here and there to keep the PC's involved in the greater scheme of things (read: PLOT).

If I start to hear the "Why are we down here again" I start having encounters with groups of slavers that are trafficing prisioners down below to be sacrificed, thereby making sure they PC's are constantly being dragged down deeper and deeper by their own accord. When they go back to the surface their skin will be pale, their eyes burning from the sun and so forth. Time will have passed on the surface as the PC's have spent months down below in the darkness.

As long as you keep in mind that the uber dungeons (undermountain, night below, myth drannor) are all shells and guidelines and that YOU the DM has the power to add to it then your PC's will not grow weary of the drudgery underneath. Make it interesting, involve your players, make sure that they are not meerly going on slaughterfests and nothing more.

 

[Storminator]

I like to link a bunch of normal adventures into my own mega adventure. I think that was pretty common in the 1e days.

Also, this necro is for [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION].

PS

 

[delericho]

Different tools for different jobs. It would be impossible to judge whether my computer is better than my car, for example.

So, a good normal-sized adventure is great for slotting into an ongoing campaign from time to time. A good mega-adventure is good for building a campaign around. (And a good Adventure Path is a good campaign in and of itself.) Neither of these is truly 'better' than the other, because they're just not interchangeable tools - they do different things.

 

[gamerprinter]

I prefer shorter campaigns, usually consisting of several modules (at one module per character level) , with options of dropping in a one-shot as filler content, instead of an entire 15+ level campaign, like Paizo's Adventure Paths. I personally could never stand megadungeons - Temple of Elemental Evil, Undermountain, etc.

I would like to see more mega-adventures along the lines of the old-time module X1: Isle of Dread. For those who aren't old-timers , it involves a long boat trip to an island populated by superstitious natives, dinosaurs, crumbling temples to forgotten dieties... there are volcanoes, tar pits, jungles....

It's really this glorious mish-mosh of adventuring without much of a plot. But the lack of plot is a strength, because the PCs can go where they will and do a wide variety of things. The trend in modern adventures seems to be the opposite: layer on a strong plot that needs to be followed. I guess I prefer the old way.

Rite Publishing offers a 3 module trilogy and introductory mini-campaign for the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG), called The Curse of the Golden Spear which consists of The Gift (5th level), Dim Spirit (6th level) and Dark Path (7th level). The premise is that a group of typical Euro-centric designed PCs are invited by a wealthy merchant to escort the delivery of a magic item to a powerful noble lord in Kaidan as a precursor to trade alliance - of course things go terribly wrong.

The only storyline plot is escort the delivery of an item, deliver and return. While not truly a sandbox, there are sandbox elements and multiple choices in how to best escape Kaidan, with options offerred to PCs for varied path choice selections and 'what if' scenarios is PCs really go there own way.

The party is intended to explore the exotic far east. While not a tropical island, in every other way, this trilogy of modules exactly fits your concept. All 3 modules are highly rated by industry reviewers like Endzeitgeist.