What are the greatest published adventures you've run?

[Lanefan]

As my previous post in this thread was from 2011 (!) I can update it a bit:

Since then I've run about 2/3 homebrew but between that hit some truly excellent published adventures, some of which I'd previously played through and others I'd never touched:

Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (played but never run)
Dark Tower (never touched)
Castle Amber (played but never run stock, I once wrote and ran a homebrew variant)
Secret of Saltmarsh (never touched)
Maltese Clue (never touched)
Ghost Tower of Inverness (never touched - maybe not the greatest module ever written but we had a big-time blast with it)
Tomb of the Lizard King

In 2011 it appears I'd run G1 and G3 but not G2; since then I've run G1 again (stock) and G2 (stock except using Stone Giants instead of Frost, to suit the surroundings).

Sadly, I've also hit a few published duds. The Gauntlet isn't great, 4e's Marauders of the Dune Sea needed a lot of help over and above simple conversion (the dungeon-y bit has become my go-to example of how not to design a dungeon!), and JG's Druids of Doom needs some serious editing and a complete re-do of its maps.

Old-time Judges' Guild adventures in particular tend to be extremely hit or miss: their best (e.g. Dark Tower, Maltese Clue) just can't be beat while their worst are truly awful; and there's not many in the middle.

 

[Tonguez]

What was the module based on Clark Ashton Smith stories?

 

[MerricB]

What was the module based on Clark Ashton Smith stories?

Castle Amber.

If you're interested, my review of it is here: Whimsical and Deadly - A Review of Castle Amber - Merric's Musings

Cheers,
Merric

 

[Committed Hero]

Convergence for Delta Green has the greatest reveal of all time.

Orient Express for Top Secret was a very flexible toolkit for running missions aboard trains.

 

[Yora]

What was the module based on Clark Ashton Smith stories?

I think Castle Amber is based on Averoigne.

 

[Staffan]

My favorite adventure for D&D and its offspring:

DSE1 Dragon's Crown. It's epic as all heck and features the party traveling back and forth across the Tyr Region of Athas, and beyond. It's split into multiple parts, each of which is set at a different location, and includes such highlights as a football-like game in a gladiatorial arena, exploration of Cleansing War-era ruins in the Sea of Silt, man-eating halflings, encounters with thri-kreen driven mad by psionic interference, and all sorts of other fun stuff. In addition, it includes a number of side treks to spice up the traveling back and forth.

Outside of D&D, one of my best experiences as a GM was Operation Shadowpoint, the follow-up to Star Wars: Age of Rebellion beginner game. The PCs have just taken over a super-secret imperial spy base, and now have to figure out how to run it by interacting with locals, bringing in the appropriate crew, preventing the Empire from finding out, and keeping the Moff who established the base from taking it back.

 

[jdrakeh]

Night Below, Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and The Lost City were all great and fun for me to run (Night Below has some issues in Book 2, but they're easy enough to remedy).

 

[pemerton]

Leafing through this module I must say I don't see it. The greatness, I mean.

The house is mostly empty (i.e. no encounters except random ghosts). The story basically amounts to plopping a Doppelganger into the adventure, and letting the GamesMaster figure something out. That is, isn't this just the kind of good old non-adventure adventure where all the work needs to be done by the GM, rather than, say, supplying an actual plot with listed encounters, colorful NPCs, and such?

(And the latter half of the adventure is just a crypt stuffed with a large amount of non-descript undead and some high-powered random loot)

I guess I don't see what value the written text adds over the basic premise.

While the layout of the manor is okay (especially given it is such an early/old module), there's basically nothing in 85% of the rooms.

Do you remember what you had in mind when you recommended this scenario twelve years ago? Do you have any thoughts on what I might be missing? Or is it simply "we had a great time, and I realize now that it was MY imagination and MY energy that made this great rather than anything the actual module supplied"?

My best guess for when I used The Orgillion Horror would be in 1992, so that was nearly 20 years ago when I posted in 2011, and more than 30 now.

I did pull it off my shelf the other day, and had a look through it. It seems to be much as I remember it.

The key to it - which is how I used it - is that one of the PCs inherits (or similar) the mansion and hence the PCs move into it. So the fact that most of the rooms are empty is not really a big deal, as it's not a dungeon crawl.

I can't remember now how I handled the servants with their secret agenda, nor where the men-at-arms came from (but I recall that there were men-at-arms, under the command of the inheritor PC). Looking through it, I was reminded of the random encounter chart, and I remember the players in my game dealing with hauntings, although any memory of the details is gone (I do vaguely recall that one of the PCs developed some sort of phobia or paranoia, probably as a result of a Depression crit). But the overall dynamic, as best I recall, was more about social concerns, and associated emotions and relationships, than it was about room-by-room exploration.

 

[Voadam]

I really like a lot of the 2e Ravenloft modules, Gothic Horror D&D with investigation, atmosphere, and tragic stories but still D&D with monsters you fight with blade and spell and flasks of holy water/alchemists fire.

Howls in the Night is a great ghost story/curse scenario with opposed NPCs who have sympathetic backstories and terrible aspects who the party can ally with or oppose and there are three different versions of the truth behind the current situation and who the true villain is for a DM to choose from. A great D&D investigation scenario that played out great at the table.

Night of the Walking Dead is a fun cursed D&D gothic horror intro with an atmospheric Louisiana plantation type bayou town with a curse going on and escalating bad things and revelations to be uncovered. I started off a year long Ravenloft campaign with this one and it was fantastic.

About half of the Ravenloft line of modules were absolutely terrible autonomy removing scenarios or got the tone completely wrong, but there were a number that were just fantastic and hit high points in D&D adventures that I have run.

I also had a lot of fun running the first two Pathfinder 1e gothic horror Carrion Crown Adventures in 5e, particularly as fleshed out with the supplementary Legendary Games adventures the The Murmuring Fountain and the Fiddler's Lament. The fist Carrion Crown one, the Haunting of Harrowstone is a haunted prison that burned down fifty years ago scenario with five legendary executed ghosts and a fantastic children's rhyme about each one. The Murmuring Fountain integrates fantastically with the ghost themes and escalating hauntings in the adjacent town. The Fiddler's Lament takes a weird left turn with its background story that does not integrate well, but was easy to change to fit the actual AP story, and the events it introduces were absolutely fantastic to run at the table. The second CC module, Trial of the Beast, involves a trial, an investigation, and a lot of fun running around urban Lepidstadt and the rural countryside. It was going great until the pandemic shut down my going to the face to face group for a number of years so I did not finish running the AP.

 

[S'mon]

The greatest memories tend to be homebrew stuff. For published adventures, I ran Red Hand of Doom a few years ago in 5e, and have run about half of Odyssey of the Dragonlords. Both are extremely good I think. Gary Gygax's Necropolis was probably the most hated (both by me & my players) adventure I've ever run, so I disagree with 2011 MerricB! I do agree with him that 4e P2 Demon Queen's Enclave is very good, despite the dire 4e-era presentation.

One adventure everyone had immense fun with was Dyson's Delve, which is free at Dyson Logos' website.

I'm currently running and loving Shadows of the Ragged King, free at xoth.net - a very fun character-centric S&S romp. I found the very non-D&D presentation a bit odd/intimidating - it's nearly all characters, with minimal keying & a sketchy possible timeline. In practice it's brilliant.