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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7657283" data-attributes="member: 4937">If we judge a module by the age that a merely average DM could have produced a work of equivalent quality, I'm guessing that N2 nudges out H4 as the more mature and sophisticated work.  I was writing H4 like stuff at about age 11, and N2 like stuff at about 14.  But N2 occupies the position of 'worst module ever', because unlike H4 or 'Haunted Halls of Eveningstar', it's badness can be appreciated by someone without any real understanding of module design.  N2 is so bad it's good, where as H4 is just bad.   It's not really fun to talk about how bad H4 is.My very first dungeon, drawn at age 9, which thankfully I never tried to run, was a perfectly symmetrical square mote and bailey keep.  It had 3 levels and 10 towers and a throne room.  The complete list of encounters was something like: 20 skeletons (repeated 6 times), 20 zombies (repeated 6 times), 10 ghouls (repeated 6 times), 5 wights (repeated 4 times), 5 mummies (repeated 4 times), 5 wraiths (repeated 4 times), 3 specters (repeated twice), and a vampire.  I hadn't discovered proactive monsters, asymmetry, encounter design, descriptive text, or anything. The only template I had for a module was B2: Keep on the Borderlands, and the only part of it I absorbed was 'kitchen sink' (if every humanoid is a good idea, surely every undead is at least as good).  It was to Castle Ravenloft what an average 5 year olds drawings are to the Sistene Chapel.  But it was still perhaps a better adventure than H4.  At least I had an idea, "Here is the ruins of a haunted castle.  Every sort of undead is guarding the castle, and their king is a vampire."  H4 isn't remotely that coherent.</blockquote>

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