TSR/WotC Adventures - Are they REALLY any good? (Warning: Possible Spoilers)

[pemerton]

With heavy modification, I'm having fun with this too (in 3.5e).

The basic concept of an urban coup by cultists is pretty fun.

Agreed.

I modded it heavily also - stats, obviously (I'm running 4e), but also story elements. I used the cutlists, the wererats, the baron and the old dwarven woman, but mixed in plot elements from other modules (Thunderspire Labyrinth, Heathen, Night's Dark Terror, the Bloodtower from Open Grave) and took things in a different direction: the PCs stopped the coup, but have found themselves in a tricky political balancing act between the Baron and the Patriarch of the town.

 

[delericho]

With heavy modification...

I modded it heavily also - stats, obviously (I'm running 4e), but also story elements. I used the cutlists, the wererats, the baron and the old dwarven woman, but mixed in plot elements from other modules (Thunderspire Labyrinth, Heathen, Night's Dark Terror, the Bloodtower from Open Grave) and took things in a different direction...

As these two posts highlight, it's worth bearing in mind the other use for published adventures - as a source of bits to cannibalise and reuse.

While I'm extremely critical of the vast bulk of 4e adventures (soulless railroads), it is certainly true that they do contain a good number of well-designed combat encounters, encounters that can be reused for other purposes. They do deserve at least some credit for that.

(That said, I do believe that this is a secondary purpose of the adventures. Obviously, a genuinely good adventure should be able to stand on its own. They're supposed to be a help to the DM; they shouldn't require the DM to step in and fix them up!)

 

[Aenghus]

It's well known that adventures don't sell well compared to rule books, which gives one reason why their quality control is subpar.

Of the adventure modules that are sold, a fair proportion are just read and never run. But adventures that make a good read call for different qualities to adventures that are meant to produce a good experience for a referee and players in actual play.

I find that I almost always modify published adventures to customise them for my group. A fair amount of complex plot in modules ends up being unused or completely rewritten by me either I dislike it's particulars or the details don't suit my individual PCs or my group as a whole.

While complex interwoven plots can be great when they fit, the detailed assumptions built into them make it increasingly unlikely that the plot can just be dropped unaltered into an existing multi-layered campaign and work.

I tend to prefer less complex adventures with fewer assumptions that make adaptation easier. The 4e adventures had bad plots in general, which IMO made them easier to modify or ignore.

 

[haakon1]

I modded it heavily also - stats, obviously (I'm running 4e), but also story elements. I used the cutlists, the wererats, the baron and the old dwarven woman, but mixed in plot elements from other modules (Thunderspire Labyrinth, Heathen, Night's Dark Terror, the Bloodtower from Open Grave) and took things in a different direction: the PCs stopped the coup, but have found themselves in a tricky political balancing act between the Baron and the Patriarch of the town.

Huh, I kept the Fair, the wererat attack, the wererats in the bell tower, the baron and his "visitor", the cultist book store, and the evil clerics attacking the temple. I dropped the rest of the non-outsider bad guys, and added two groups of more conventional foes:

1) Caravan mercenaries who have an excuse to come together with the Fair (thus the timing of the coup). They are followers of a certain famous mercenary featured prominently in Dragon. They are all from a devil-worshipping country that was conquered a few years ago, and they've been plotting for comeback, starting here.

2) Allied goblinoids (inspired by barghests being in the original module) who are working as mercenaries for the other guys. This would be the Red Hand organization, doing some freelancing to raise money and destabilize things before their own big push.

The PC's have been interacting with both foes for several adventures now, but they aren't quite sure who they are. All very Greyhawk -- multiple, competing bad guys and "wheels within wheels".

I also added a plot element that the evil clerics need to sacrifice 13 divine caster levels worth of folks in descretating the temple, to activate a rift and draw in the devils featured in the module (and then some, since I made this a higher level module).

The Bell Tower plays a more critical role, as the plotters are keeping their timing to when it rings (not figured out yet, I think) and it's how the militia should be summoned if they want to do that (as Lt. Shella is now suggesting), so there's good reasons it will eventually be investigated.

Also, the new player who joined is playing the daughter of Bishop Gonphin, and there's rumors of a political split between him and the Baron.

It's slow (via email), but very fun so far. Right now, the baddies have attacked the fair, and the PC's have discovered it seems to be inside job, and just discovered the usual Town Guards are missing, replaced by seasoned veterans with lots of scars and bad attitudes.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Obligatory reference to The Forest Oracle and Dragonlance Chronicles.

 

[pemerton]

As these two posts highlight, it's worth bearing in mind the other use for published adventures - as a source of bits to cannibalise and reuse.

While I'm extremely critical of the vast bulk of 4e adventures (soulless railroads), it is certainly true that they do contain a good number of well-designed combat encounters, encounters that can be reused for other purposes. They do deserve at least some credit for that.

(That said, I do believe that this is a secondary purpose of the adventures. Obviously, a genuinely good adventure should be able to stand on its own. They're supposed to be a help to the DM; they shouldn't require the DM to step in and fix them up!)

I've never run a module "as written", I don't think. I use them for stats (if they're in the system I'm using, but often they're not), for maps, for ideas about characters, situations, backstory etc. But I expect to tweak all that to make it fit into my game, and be something that the players can explore and develop rather than just a railroad.

On the 4e modules, I own 3 (Thunderspire, the Drow one, and Death's Reach) but Thunderspire is the only one I've run most of. As written, I didn't think much of some of its encounters - they didn't really take advantage of the maps (especially the circular paths in those maps). Here is how I modded it (SPOILERS):

For the Chamber of Eyes I did two things. First, I joined the introductory encounter (with the hobgoblins torturing the prisoner) onto the Chamber of Eyes: (i) run the corridor in the introductory encounter onto the entryway into the foyer of the Chamber of Eyes; (ii) add a secret passage exiting the NE corner of the hobgoblin chamber via a secret door and running diagonally, with staircases, up to the balcony in the Chamber of Eyes foyer; (iii) add a spyhole/arrowslit on the E wall of the hobgoblin chamber (near the barrels) looking onto the Chamber of Eyes foyer; (iv) add a portcullis that the hobgoblins can drop in the entryway to their chamber, making the secret passage the only easy path between their chamber and the Chamber of Eyes.

Second, I was prepared to run the introductory encounter, C1, C2 and C4 as a single encounter with waves. The PCs first heard the prisoner being tortured (I made it someone they had already met earlier in the campaign who they knew had been captured by goblins/hobgoblins and were hoping to rescue) and entered that chamber. The portcullis (iv above) was dropped, trapping them in that room. As they made fairly short work of the hobgoblin soldiers the warcaster opened the secret door and fled up the passage (ii above) with half the PCs chasing him while the others finished off the soldiers. The PCs correctly feared that he was going to get reinforcements. The PCs narrowly failed to stop him on the balcony, and he went through the other door and alerted the goblins in C2. I had the bugbear engage the PCs on the upper level, while the skull cleavers came out through the main doors to make missile attacks - some of the PCs jumped down to engage them, while others fought the bugbear and one who had been left behind in the first room attacked through the spyhole (iii above). The warcaster meanwhile went on and alerted the chief, who came forward to join the skullcleavers with his wolf while the archers controlled the long-ish corridor with cover from the shrine doorway (I eliminated the second warcaster as unnecessary).

This was a very dynamic encounter, with PCs moving around through the various corridors in the entry way, going back and forth into the original room to take advantage of the arrowslit, and in the end causing the hobgoblin archers to retreat after defeating the rest of the goblins. (They then took on the archers with the rest of C3 - roused from their drunken revelling - as a separate encounter.)

I also decided that the duergar would wait and see what happened rather than joining in on the potentially losing side of a fight - the PCs discovered the duergar in their rooms as they were looking for somewhere to take their short rest and ended up negotiating a contract with them, paying 300 gp to be delivered in a months time to pay for the release of the slaves (the players preferred this to the thought of having to assault a duergar stronghold).

In the Well of Demons I also ran the gnoll encounters together as a single more dynamic encounter (again leaving the tieflings out of the equation, figuring that they would make a more interesting encounter after the gnolls had been dealt with). The interesting aspects here were (i) the players thought the first chamber with the motely crew of monsters was the more challenging encounter, and so blew quite a few resources on it and therefore were really pushed to the limits with the gnolls, (ii) the use of the connecting tunnel from the boar room to the entry chamber as a way of making the PCs fight on two fronts (and yes, enemies were pushed into the well) and (iii) replacing the barlgura demon with a naldrezu (sp?) from MM2, which is a lurker that captures a PC and teleports it away to munch on it - combined with the two-fronts aspect this introduced extra mobility and tension into the fight.

 

[pemerton]

The Bell Tower plays a more critical role

I had the Bell Tower as a derelict shrine to Erathis (the god of civilisation in 4e). The wererats had been given title by the Baron's chancellor (an evil wizard plothread that I had brought in from some of the other modules I was weaving in).

Once the PCs had revealed that the chancellor was a traitor, they sued in court to have the wererats' title ruled invalid - and then served the eviction notice themselves!

After clearing the tower, they have paid dwarven artisans to rebuild it, and are turning it into a shrine to Erathis, Ioun (god of knowledge), Pelor (god of the sun), Moradin and (slightly unwillingly, but the party wizard-invoker reached an uneasy bargain) Bane (in his capacity as a god of soldiers and discipline). It's the closest that the PCs have to a home base.

 

[MerricB]

I've been going through and reviewing the old AD&D modules, and I've got to say that a lot of their mystique is purely due to them being "first". A lot of them aren't very good. The Slave Lords series is a case in point, with A1 in particular suffering very much from its tournament origins. Vault of the Drow is also a poor module, IMO. What's good about Vault of the Drow is its concept; a good DM can do a lot with it, but the material actually in the Vault only gives a small amount of help to the DM.

It doesn't help that per G1-3, the giant attacks were created by a rebel faction of drow. Is any attention given to that faction in D3? A brief description of their holdings and that's it. Instead it's all "attack Lolth!" When was that the point?

My personal favourite module is I3: Pharoah, though it's not perfect.

Once you get past the classics, you reach a lot of very, very poor modules. Forest Oracle, I'm looking at you. It's not alone.

The point is that writing good adventures is incredibly hard. I like Keep on the Borderlands because it makes no secret about what it is up to: it's a fun stomp and slay introduction to D&D for new players. And it works as that. A1-4 (Slave Lords) can't transcend its tournament origins.

I think Keep on the Shadowfell is underrated. Yes, it has massive flaws, particularly with the Irontooth encounter (TPK) and the final dungeon crawl is boring, monotonous and too long. However, the first half of the module worked really well for my group, because the town was really well developed with characters that interacted well with the players and opened up more as the adventure went on. There's a great flow between the town and the dungeon in H1 that really helps the DM.

Unfortunately, once the later section of dungeon in KotS is entered, it's slow slogging the rest of the way, thanks to an unforgiving linear design and massive problems with the length of 4E combat. KotS could be forgiven a lot of its sins if combat was more in the order of 15 minutes each. (It might be worth running it with an earlier edition's rules). At the end of our HPE campaign, due to attrition I had two players left, and we were able to go through combats in 20-30 minutes. The difference in pacing was amazing, and it turned what was a sub-standard module into one that was a lot better. Yes, system DOES matter, and encounter length has been one of my biggest problems with 4E for a long time now (although I don't think any version of D&D beats 4E for great set-piece combats).

Good adventure writing is really hard. I've just finished running Paizo's "Council of Thieves" AP, and I came away considering them some of the most incompetently written adventures I've run. There are good moments throughout them, but they don't make up for the incompetent editing, useless encounters and large plot holes that riddle the work.

Thankfully, my reaction to the first of the Kingmaker adventures is totally different: it's something special, and that's hard to do with 1st level adventures.

 

[Stormonu]

I think Keep on the Shadowfell is underrated. Yes, it has massive flaws, particularly with the Irontooth encounter (TPK) and the final dungeon crawl is boring, monotonous and too long. However, the first half of the module worked really well for my group, because the town was really well developed with characters that interacted well with the players and opened up more as the adventure went on. There's a great flow between the town and the dungeon in H1 that really helps the DM.

When we first started playing KotS, the option to go to any one of the three opening encounters was great. But once the PC's hit the railroad to the Keep, the whole thing just fell to pieces. If there'd been more branches in the adventure and the irontooth encounter weren't quite so bad, it *might* have not turned me away from 4E.

The one thing I despair about is the Dragonlance adventures. As a DM, they are joy to read, so full of flavor and they sound great - but I've tried running DL1 -Dragons of Despair on 3 occasions and never been able to get to Xak Tsaroth before the game crumbles.

 

[Lanefan]

I've been going through and reviewing the old AD&D modules, and I've got to say that a lot of their mystique is purely due to them being "first". A lot of them aren't very good. The Slave Lords series is a case in point, with A1 in particular suffering very much from its tournament origins.

A1 and A2 can be greatly improved simply by adding a few secret passages and-or doorways in the right places.

A3's "dungeon" part is pretty linear, but if you can somehow find a way to let them loose in Suderham there's all kinds of fun to be had.

My personal favourite module is I3: Pharoah, though it's not perfect.

Yep, that one passes most of the tests.

Lanefan