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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5930104" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes. Especially to the bit after the snippage.It's not just a lack of colour - a random name generator can plug that gap if you're that desperate as a GM - it's that there's nothing going on. There are no serious motivations on which to hang anything.I know [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has compared B2 unfavourably to B4, but I traded my copy of B4 a long time ago for G1-3, and don't remember too much about it. (I think I have an e-copy, but haven't read it.)But I'll compare to another B module - B10, Night's Dark Terror. I started my 4th ed game with that moduel, and only now - at 16th level - have I used more-or-less everything I envisage using from it. (Of course a lot of other stuff has been used in those levels too, both my own ideas as well as bits and pieces of Sleeper in Dreams, H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth, Sceptre Tower of Spellgard, Heathen, and Eden Odyssey's Wonders Out of Time.)But what B10 has is NPCs with names, histories, relationships and motivations. And it has ideas on how to relate them. The basic plot goes: (i) NPC hires PCs to take some horses to market; (ii) PCs arrive at homestead to find it under attack and save it; (iii) PCs learn that the NPC who hired them has been captured; (iv) PCs rescue said NPC; (v) PCs learn that motivation for attacks is a hunt for a tapestry in the NPC's homestead that is a magical map to hidden treasure; (vi) PCs hunt for said treasure.I didn't use the plot in this form much beyond step (iii) - the PCs learned about the tapestry before saving the NPC, and I changed what the map leads to so that that hunt will be different from what is in the module. And I turned other bits of the module away from the author's intended purposes to my own and my players'.But the ideas in the module are still great. And it has some richly thematic locations, with NPCs around them or in them who are easy to hook onto and link into a broader compelling backstory. Even when I depart from the module writers' ideas, those ideas suggest other ideas or connections that can be made. (For example, the module assumes that when the PCs come to the ancient city to rescue the hiring NPC, they will find him imprisoned and under interrogation from the enemy NPCs wizard. When the PCs in my game came to the ancient city - a minotaur city, borrowed from Thunderspire Labyrinth - I had them see the NPC wizard fly off on his flying carpet, and then put the NPC under interrogation in the first Thunderspire Labyrinth encounter, in place of the halfling NPC it uses at that point.)It seemed to have some traps, which aren't there in the Cult of Evil, are they?And more importantly, it had a location (a graveyard), a context (provided by the rest of the OP's adventure, plus the location), and colour (sacrificing villagers to open a secret entry) which are nowhere present in the Cult of Evil.The Cult of Evil make me ask, "What are these cultists doing hanging out in some caves? Who are they corrupting? Where do they get their food from?" whereas the OP's adventure makes me think straight away of evil cultists subverting a village by recruiting supersitutious peasants, sacrificing villagers to dark and ancient gods, turning the hallowwed ground of the graveyard into a haunted place, etc. I'm not at all suggesting that these are original tropes, and I don't think the OP is either. But it's classic fantasy gaming. (The Burning Wheel Adventure Burner has a somewhat similar adventure in it, and if I ever run that adventure I'm going to incorporate some of the ideas in the OPs set-up - I especially like the archer in the pub.)I don't think anyone was criticising your playtest run. For all I know, it was as entertaining as the OP's seems to be! But telling me how much good stuff you added to the Caves of Chaos isn't selling me on the Caves of Chaos.One way to put it, then, would be that I don't find the Caves of Chaos very inspiring.But anyway, I think what you say is far too limited a view of what a module can do. And for me it's limitations are borne out by comparing B2 to B10, or to any of the old Oriental Adventures modules (especially O3 Ochimo, the Spirit Warrior and O7 Test of the Samurai) or to Speaker in Dreams or Bastion of Broken Souls, or to any of the Penumbra modules (especially Maiden Voyage or 3 Days to Kill). These modules all do more than merely inspire - they provide compelling and gripping situations (people and locaions in conflicts that the PCs have reasons to take a side in) that the GM can use to engage the players and really pour on some pressure and drive the game.Of course all of these - and esecially Bastion of Broken Souls and Test of the Samurai - have some silly suggestions about how the action might resolve, and try to push the GM into needless railroading. But you can ignore all that and still get great mileage out of the situations presented.Just to take one example from Bastion of Broken Souls - to rescue the souls of the unborn from oblivion, the PCs have to speak to a god who was exiled and locked up in an earlier era for his tampering with those very souls. The only way in to the exiled god's prison is through a gate - and that gate is an angel, and will open only if the angel is killed. What do the PCs do? Defy the gods and kill an angel? Obey the gods and abandon the souls of the unborn? Or, as the PCs in my game did, persuade the angel to defy the gods and kill herself? I reckon that's pretty good material for heroic fantasy RPGing.The Caves of Chaos doesn't offer much of that sort of thing. The rivalries between the tribes, for example, don't seem to speak of anything of thematic significance and power. The imprisonment of the medusa, which could be interesting, is left unexplained. As I've already noted, the cult has no raison d'etre.Frankly, the Caves of Chaos is pretty underwhelming as far as modules go.</blockquote>

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