Mega Adventures

[Staffan]

I would love to see a mega-adventure along the lines of Dragon's Crown rather than Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Dragon's Crown was the stand-alone finale to a set of Dark Sun adventures (the only ties backwards were an NPC or two, one of which dies off-stage, and the included pregens), and featured an evil but well-meaning plot by an order of powerful psionicists to block all psionic use for a generation or two (because they thought psionics were misused). Anyway, this plot has the characters travel to the very edges of the campaign map and beyond, making quite a few stops along the way, and showcases many of the setting's features (savage halflings, thri-kreen tribes being driven mad by the thing that keeps others from using psionics, ancient fortresses, fragile alliances with sorcerer-kings, and so on).

Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, on the other hand, is mainly a big honkin' dungeon crawl. It's a well-crafted dungeon crawl, but it's still "slog through the dungeon for five or ten character levels" - that gets pretty dull after a while. Dragon's Crown has its share of dungeoneering, but it's not the main focus of the thing, and there are pauses between the dungeons at least.

 

[Kalendraf]

I have very mixed feelings about mega modules. While I've bought several that would be classified as such (RtToEE, Banewarrens, Trouble at Durbenford, etc), I find they are very difficult to drop into my campaigns, unless I focus my entire campaign around them from the start. At this point, many of you probably are thinking, "Duh! That's the whole point".

The problem is my campaigns tend to be long-running, lasting several years at a time. The overall arcs are set by me from the beginning. I'm expecting to create about 50% or more of the material myself, and what I look for in modules is something to fill in a few of the gaps here and there for those weeks where I just don't have enough time to get anything ready.

So far me, smaller adventures are ideal, especially ones that are high level and can be accomplished in about one to three typical 4-hour gaming sessions. Unfortunately, I don't see a lot of good material that fills that need. Many adventures are significantly bigger and will require half-a-dozen sessions to get thru, which is far more than I'm looking for. Meanwhile, the smaller adventures (AEG's Adventure 1 & 2 collections for instance) tend to focus on lower levels, locales that don't fit my area, or pose other problems for my campaign. Dungeon Magazine doesn't seem to have quite what I'm looking for either. Lately it's seemed too focused on specific settings (like Eberron) or has larger adventures than what I'm looking for.

Someday, I would like to run some of those mega-modules, but at the rate we are going that probably won't happen for another year or so. With all the adventures I'd like to run, I probably have gaming material to last me well into the next decade. In the meantime, I'll keep looking for some of those short but sweet ones I can drop in at any time.