Published Adventures and You

[Eosin the Red]

I like modules but I don't think that I have ran any since 3E came out. Not a fan of Dungeons and I like my villians to be humans or at least humanoid. Come to think of it, I ran the Sherwood module from Dungeon.

I look for some specific issues before purchasing now days -
1. Not primarily a dungeon crawl.
2. Makes some kind of sense. I call this the "**Wandering Deathknight effect"
3. BBEG is not a demonic, vampiric, tuaric, 1/2 dragon, blah...
4. Reusables - maps, interesting town write ups, interesting NPCs (interesting, not Kewl).
5. The adventure ideally would be broken into smaller chunks that could be run seperately in case I have my own stuff to insert.

Coincidentally, this is the exactly type of stuff I am writing for my own modules.



*** I once had a DM who had us fight a random encounter with a Deathknight because he rolled it up on the chart. We later surmised that he was just taking the ole Nightmare out to strech its legs and happened to wander by our camp.

 

[Storminator]

I've run half a dozen or so modules for 3e, and hordes of them for 1e. I've got a 5 module series in mind for a campaign, but no time to run it.


I've just read this d20 book I got for Xmas, and I'm dying to use some of the ideas in it. It has this really great concept of a dungeon schedule, where your room key is based on time of day. It's also got this social geopgraphy idea, where you map out the relationships between the different factions in the adventure and how they react to events.

If I could find an adventure or two that used these ideas, I'd snap it right up!

PS

 

[Umbran]

While there are some exceptions (Shadowrun being a major one), I find that published adventures don't usually meet my needs.

One can usually consider a published adventure to consist of two things - the plot, and the encounters/locations. I find it fairly easy to come up with encounters and locations, so I don't need to spend money on them. While plot ideas are always welcome, I generally prefer to have them be very personal for my PCs. In order to get a published adventure to work well, I need to do enough re-writing that I might as well just write my own from scratch. Between that and the effort to become really solidly familiar with the published adventure, I don't find them saving me much work, overall.

In addition, there's the economic angle. Given a set of rules and the PCs, I can come up with adventures if I need to. But I don't have the wherewithal to produce great rules-sets on my own. When budgeting, then, of course priority goes to that which I cannot produce on my own.

Also in a semi-economic vein - typically I can use a published adventure once, and then it might as well get tossed out. Rulebooks and other gaming supplies that see more use will get my gaming dollar first.

 

[DaveMage]

I'm curious to see what EN Worlders think of published adventures. I've tried to make this poll as comprehensive as possible.

If you use published adventures, why? Are there any titles in particular that you enjoyed running?

If you don't, why do you find yourself creating your own adventures as opposed to using pre-made ones?

As stated above by others, I use published adventures to save time.

I really enjoyed Rappan Athuk, and the last couple of 2E ones I ran, which were Return to the Tomb of Horrors and Labyrinth of Madness.

 

[Turanil]

If you don't, why do you find yourself creating your own adventures as opposed to using pre-made ones?

Pre-made adventures almost never suit my needs. I always must adapt them to my campaign setting. Then, pre-made adventure usually have too much text to read, and I rarely have the courage to read through it all.

In fact I much prefer to design my own adventures which are essentially: a bunch of npcs; a rough map with some annotations; and a plot hook that I have thought of but not written down. Then, most of the adventure is improvised, adapting to the players' ideas on the fly, etc. This method saves me time a lot!

 

[ConnorSB]

I will usually start a campaign with a particularly good published adventure, and then basically extrapolate from there, either doing homebrew adventures or plugging existing NPCs into published adventures.

Maybe the evil cult in "Wings over Timbletown" has other circles in the City of Shards, and might be the same evil cult involved in "The Sword of Sin". Sure, I have to change some names and stuff, but it usually works out pretty well.

Since I actually use published adventures quite a bit, I usually have to make villains who are really flexable, as thier MO and motives need to be shifted to fit each adventure, which I usualy change a little bit to reflect the NPCs I use. So if I switch in an evil Vampire Sorcerer for the Cleric of Massive Death, I'll change all the henchmen to have arcane spells cast on them rather than clerical ones. And maybe that Glyph of Inflict Wounds trap is now a Glyph of Fireball trap. Little changes like that, for consistancy.

 

[Zappo]

I usually play my own adventures, because I like writing them and because they can be better integrated into the campaign. I have also played many published Planescape adventures, especially when I had no time to prepare (for example, one time me and my friends were on holiday together for an entire month and we played a lot, no way I could write enough adventure by myself). Or when I know that the adventure totally rocks (Dead Gods!).

 

[johnsemlak]

The well made adventures sit on my shelf and wait to be played. I have many adventures I bought and enjoyed reading and am dying to run. I want ot run them so much, I don't really have a desire to create my own adventures.

I tinker with adventures a lot, to make them fit my campaign, of course.

 

[MonsterMash]

I tend to mix homebrew and published adventures - always need to do a bit of customisation on the published ones, but I can appreciate the time that is saved compared to creating everything from scratch.

At the moment I haven't bought that many, but I've got the Grey Citadel and Morrick Mansion from Necromancer Games waiting to be run when my PCs get to the appropriate levels.

 

[MerricB]

I use a combination of my own material and bought adventures.

Adventures written by other people are important to my campaign because they address design issues and adventure concepts that I wouldn't think of myself. They're essential to the variety of the game.

Cheers!