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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 8825316" data-attributes="member: 11760">I have all the existing ones and will be picking up Dark Tower when it comes out next year and probably Caverns of Thracia after that, although I never played that one back in the day and have no particular warm feelings for it.The books are OK. The content is great -- or as great as the original was or wasn't -- but the form factor makes them very hard to use at the table. I've run both the Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread from the OAR books and even with the bound-in bookmarks (I wish all game books had these), they're cumbersome. It would be great if WotC would allow Goodman to sell officially licensed PDFs of these so that DMs could print out what they need, rather than carrying around hardcover phone books to try and use in play.I started playing in 1979 and have very strong feelings -- all warm -- about the titles Goodman has reprinted so far, so that colors my feelings for the books. (And makes me their intended audience, obviously.)I'm reviewing them as a DM, not as historical artifacts, because I, too, am a historical relic and owned the original versions of all of these, except for T1-4, of which I owned two different versions of T1 (duo-tone and full color covers).That said, my ranking:#1: Into the Borderlands. Not only do you get two classic dungeons in one, they both hold up! You also get a bunch of conversions of BD&D monsters -- nothing says "you're not in Renton any more" like throwing a thoul at your player characters. This still has the quirks of the originals: You'll need to stock B1 for yourself (although they provide suggested load-outs) and no one in the freaking keep except for the villains are named. I went to the internet and copied all the names of the characters from the Keep on the Borderlands novel and Return to the Keep on the Borderlands and named them that way, keeping all the names in a separate document. Keep on the Borderlands, in particular, has a lot of potential for a long campaign, as even without the Caves of Chaos, there's a ton to do in the Borderlands. Do warn your players that these adventures have monsters in numbers that made sense in 1979. Players need to either hire a ton of hirelings as cannon fodder or plan to use a lot of AOE damage. The first encounter outside the kobold cave is more than a dozen kobold archers hiding in a tree, and they're more than capable of killing a party in a single round unless they're spotted by good scouting and then taken out with AOE spells immediately.#2: Castle Amber. This has a ton of crazy monsters, a wild funhouse dungeon, an alternate world and so much more. This can be played for laughs or treated like nested Ravenloft domains. It works either way. If you wish that Edgar Allen Poe had written fantasy novels, this is one to pick up.#3: The Lost City. I was glad to see this one made into an OAR, since I think it's too often overlooked. It's a dungeon crawl and a miniature campaign setting big enough and with enough going on to keep a group occupied for years, if they wanted. I would recommend reading the Conan story "Red Nails" beforehand to get a feel for what they're going for here, and this strongly benefits from reading and rereading the original module (included) and maybe charting out the different power groups in the complex, since if players live past their first session, they're going to realize they can't just hack their way through a whole city.#4: Isle of Dread. This is iconic, but the actual hex crawl is presented poorly -- there weren't a lot of great designs to steal from back then, so no shame on them for this -- and the story of the island is mostly "here's a bunch of stuff we like, although it doesn't really coalesce to tell much of a story." You will have to do some work to make this a fun modern adventure, but it has a lot of good bones. It's probably better as a setting book for you to run your own adventures in and it has a lot of potential there.#5: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. It has a great central idea and was a hoot when it was a shock to player back in the day. That said, it's overly long -- Dyson Logos did a set of maps shrinking the whole complex down that I recommend -- and some of the monsters feel very much like also-rans from Gamma World. Still, if your players don't know what's coming and won't be upset about mixing science fiction with fantasy, this is still a lot of fun, especially since the late 1970s version of futuristic means that some of the stuff aboard the crashed vessel is alien to today's eyes, since it's not how computers and the like actually turned out.And a HUGE drop to #6: Temple of Elemental Evil. T1 is great and holds up even today, with a well-detailed town and a short fun introductory dungeon that I've played through and run a dozen times or more. T 2-4 (the titular temple) is a turkey, though. It's a crappy dungeon, doesn't make sense with T1 and the new monsters, like the elemental grues, are terrible. Get this if you're a completionist or if you want to play through Village of Homlett, which is still a great adventure.</blockquote>

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