So what 3E adventures were worst?

[Psion]

"The Standing Stone" was quite bad.

Concur. I go on in my review about that.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I read a coule of positive reviews of them, but for the three "Coin of Power" adventures for Kalamar were awful. They were the ultimate in railroading. In each adventure there were segments that the PCs could do nothing to prevent. The quest itself was like a "Choose your own Adventure" without the choosing: You must get a special gem - oh a Blue Dragon who is much too powerful to fight has it. He'll give it to you if you take care of a problem for him, which leads to the next encounter...

Each part was exactly like that. I ran the first adventure, then stripped out a few elements to use from the other two to try and wrap up the story for the players.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Whispers of the Vampire's Blade is the worst I've read. Very vulnerable plot that needs the constant guiding hand of the DM to keep it on the rails. For example early on the PCs are involved in an overland chase with the BBEG. He *must* escape for the rest of the adventure to work.

 

[Mark Hope]

Shadows of the Last War was a total dud in my experience (as a player in that one, not DM.) Filled with bizarre assumptions about what characters are "supposed" to do in order for the adventure not to collapse, a stupid railroad plot, a hugely uninteresting dungeon (ooh, a linen closet - exciting stuff!) with a system of keyed doors that went from "challenging" to "soul-crushingly dull" in very short order, and a ridiculous ending where, yet again, you are "supposed" to do certain things or the adventure falls apart and you get TPKed by your frustrated DM. I heard that Whisper of the Vampire's Blade was similarly railroady and it has unfortunately put me off Eberron for life. A shame, as I was really rather keen to check the setting out initially.

 

[RichGreen]

Bastion of Broken Souls had the opposite problem, with a weak and contrived beginning.

I liked Bastion of Broken Souls a lot and will be running it again to finish off my Freeport campaign which started when 3e came out. This campaign also included The Standing Stone which I thought was pretty good too -- we had quite a bit of fun playing it.

I have Heart of Nightfang Spire and decided not to run it -- sounds like I made the right choice from some of the views I've read on here. A group at our gaming club were playing it recently and seemed to get very bogged down.

Thinking about Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil again, maybe there's a way of having Hommlet and the Moathouse lead on to a completely different adventure. Hmmmm.....

Cheers


Richard

 

[Son_of_Thunder]

I don't recall the name, as I was a player, but there was this adventure where we had to assault a castle on a mountain, with the final boss being an orc ghost (druid?). This was long ago, so I probably mixed up some details.

We started in some small village. We encountered a corpse, and realized it had clues. We tried to use Speak with Dead, but the adventure demanded that we use Raise Dead instead. Eventually we did so.

We were told to follow this path. You HAD to have someone in the party with Track, or you couldn't do it. Our DM wouldn't give us any leeway there, so there were lots of failed Search checks.

We go up the mountain. We fight and kill orcs. We fight and very easily defeat half blue dragon/half giants (of some kind). Half-dragons are overused, and half dragon giants have such low Will saves that we toasted them... I don't believe the adventure was actually playtested. It didn't help that psions are a twinge overpowered in terms of how many power points they have; our psion was using maximum level powers and never running out.

We fought some high level orcs and were smoking them (our mage took out a bunch using Color Spray) when we were attacked by a dragon and two half-dragon/half-chimeras. More freaking half-dragons! These monsters were advanced 3.0 style so not at all balanced (but had lame AC). Our DM bluntly told us we couldn't beat them (since they had more hit points than the dragon) but since we hadn't yet really been challenged, we argued until we were blue in the face, then went back to our hideout. (We didn't have Resist Energy, but I think we could have won... even if we suffered losses.) I think our psion could have single-handedly killed the half-dragons, while the real dragon would have been a fun challenge.

The next day the dragon charms a PC and takes him away. Gee, do you think we should have killed the dragon when we had a chance?

For some reason we couldn't teleport to the top of the mountain, even though we could see it. So we had two options. We could go up the mountain, clobber wimpy creatures until we get to the top, or we could fly up on flying mount spells (with lame hp). I suggested teleporting to the point of the mountain we had reached before but for some reason no one else liked that idea. The DM advised us not to walk up the mountain, so we flew up. I kept complaining about the wimpy mounts... no one cared. We were assaulted by ridiculously overpowered 3.0 advanced air elementals; the save DCs were wickedly high for their CR. At least they weren't draconic! The air elementals wouldn't let us drop, not even when it could have caused us terminal velocity damage; eventually the psion PC killed most with Recall Death overuse (they had high saves; I swear it took ten rounds and we had a large party... much wasted time) and saved us with Dimension Door. He couldn't get everyone, as Dimension Door basically dazes you for a round after you use it; I volunteered to fall to my doom (as a warforged fighter with high hit points, I figured I'd live). Somehow the psion ensured I only took half damage. For some reason the air elementals dropped us over a convenient plateau on the mountain instead of doing the smart thing ... eg killing us by dropping us over a deep chasm. Then the DM complained we kept making things harder for ourselves (eg flying up on wimpy mounts)... he was half right. We should have teleported up half way (or all the way), but he did scare off most of the players by saying ... I don't remember.

We fought a skirmish with the dragon, freed (or killed?) our charmed PC friend, and our wizard missed an enemy with a Disintegrate ray because he was ten feet too far away and the DM didn't let him know that. I don't game with him anymore.

Inside, we fought this annoying trap; there were three iron golems (Int 0... not the way the DM was running them!) in a room with illusionary sunburst traps. I volunteered to fight the golems, figuring (correctly) I could take two, even while blinded (warforged are immune to poison!) but every tactic we used to keep the other one engaged failed (largely due to them being played with Int 10+). It didn't help that our wizard PC never prepped something useful like Otiluke's Resilient Sphere, as he was way too focused on ray spells; I wish I had been playing the mage that time as I'm really good at it. I think this took us days to beat as we couldn't just keep casting Remove Blindness.

Finally we got to the final area. We had no idea what to do. We fought an orc ghost; it possessed our rogue and due to a dumb DM ruling Protection from Evil didn't hedge it out. I was forced to kill the PC rogue. I broke all these magic stones, thinking that's what we had to do to win (the ghost was seriously kicking our ass... I think it was a druid but I'm not sure) and that ended up freeing the tarrasque. Wait... what? How the heck was I supposed to know that, seeing how the adventure had no clues whatsoever?

If anyone knows the name of this horrid adventure let me know. I'd like to read it so I know how messed up it would be if run by a semi-competent DM.

I think this was what you were playing.

 

[Evilhalfling]

Im not much for published adventures, but I ran RttToEE all the way to the 2nd elemental temple. Then, much to the relief of my players, blew up the dungeon. Really, it had to be done.

We had a lot of fun on the ruins of the old temple, and I remember a running fight all over hommlet, although not the particulars. Some good NPCs though, one had cameo in a later campaign.

I played through much of City of the Spider Queen, very dull, somewhat frustrating dungeon crawl. We ended up tunneling past the last chapter or two, and finagled the ending.
The timeline was very tight, and there was virtually no roleplaying for large streches, I have heard that a really good DM can make it a fun campaign by adding in sidetreks and more poltical involvement - which the modual has, but does not involve PCs in easily.

I also played sunless citadel and the Manic-depressive, nocturnal kobold bard will haunt my dreams for years to come. Meepo, in the hands of an inventive DM. His warcry "guuuys, im bored" still strikes fear.

 

[delericho]

Does this really matter? Can't you just play it as is, and not worry about the errors?

Sure.

How many DMs (especially new ones) would look at the stat blocks and try to reverse engineer things?

Hard to say. However, a new DM who wants to see how things work might well reverse engineer the adventure, to get a feel for how best to construct his own adventures. Such a DM, who is probably exactly the sort of person who should be a DM, will only come away confused and frustrated by that experience.

Frankly, though, stat blocks just aren't that hard, especially for low-level adventures, and especially when many of the encounters are drawn directly from the Monster Manual. Yet, of the seventeen or so stat blocks in the adventure, only one is actually correct. That is an absolutely disgraceful statistic. Somebody dropped the ball on that one.

That said, if the stat block errors were the only thing wrong with the adventure, I wouldn't be too bothered. However, the big layout problems (seriously, black text on a dark grey background?), coupled with the fact that this was the first adventure to be sold at a new, higher, price-point gets this adventure a well-deserved thumbs-down.

 

[Treebore]

You know, I'm going to go against the grain and say that I didn't like Wizard's Amulet very much on a read-through. Not that I had anything against the encounters, etc, but it seemed very rail-roady. First of all, someone just has to play a specific pre-gen character. In the actual adventure, boxed text tells the character on watch "you leave the campfire to investigate the noise," and, before the PC can take an actions, they're attacked. After reading that, I just can't imagine ever putting players through it. YMMV, of course, and I like the other Necromancer stuff I've looked at.

You didn't have to play a particular pre-gen. Since these were new characters anyway I just tacked on the background history to the players mage, who was cool with it. Still, using it as the lead in to Crucible of Freya is what made it particularly good, not by itself.

I'll have to read that particular encounter again to be sure, but I believe surprise chacks and initiative rolls were allowed.

The part I didn't like was the farm house. It ended up being way more dangerous then it looked to be. I had to do "active DM intervention" to prevent character deaths for that one.



As for my least favorite 3E module? I'll have to go along with Return to Temple of Elemental Evil, because I also hated the original. SO when you build upon crap how can it get better than just a bigger pile? I love Hommlet and the keep area, but once you get past the first level down below it just becomes totally monotonous, railroadish, and totally unfun to play or DM.

There are other modules I own that were lousy when I read them, but since I never even tried to run them I don't recall their names.

Another module that I don't like, mostly because I don't like clockwork is a module done by Necromancer, I think it was even written by Mike Mearls. Siege of Durham's Folly is what I think the name is.

Others liked it, but then again others liked ToEE and Return to ToEE.

 

[delericho]

As for my least favorite 3E module? I'll have to go along with Return to Temple of Elemental Evil, because I also hated the original. SO when you build upon crap how can it get better than just a bigger pile?

I dunno. Sometimes, the very best sequels and remakes come from an original that had a good concept but didn't really live up to its promise. The best example I can think of would be Star Trek II (although you'd have to discount the TV series, of course), and X-Men II.

That has nothing to do with RttTOEE, though.