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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 5988206" data-attributes="member: 3586">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.</blockquote>

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