What are the greatest published adventures you've run?

[Marx420]

Tomb of Horrors. (Oh, you meant great for PLAYERS?)

Followed closely by the entirety of Queen of Spiders.

Besides these an some Paizo paths I'm mostly homebrew, though I did have a grand old time playing through Necromancer Games' City of Brass as an endpoint to one of my crazier extraplanar romps.

 

[Greg K]

I6 Ravenloft
I3-I5: Desert of Desolation series
T1: Temple of Elemental Evil
L1-L2: Secret of Bone Hill, Assassin's Knot
G1-G3: Against the Giants
D1-D3: Descent Into the Depths of the Earth
DL1-DL3: Dragons of Despair, Dragons of Flame, Dragons of Hope
N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God
U1: Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh
B1:The Lost City
B2:Keep on the Borderlands
X1: Isle of Dread
Inferno by Judges Guild

 

[meomwt]

I've run NeMoren's Vault twice with different groups and had a blast each time. It's one of the better low-level modules out there, but has a great story which gradually unfolds.

I'd also put The Grey Citadel into the mix, it's a great blend of role-playing, investigation and dungeon-crawling.

I'm desperately trying to think of any 2e modules I ran which were well-received, but that seems to be a bit difficult right now. In 2e most of the stuff I ran was home-brew or heavily modified, mostly from the pages of Dungeon.

Even now, I'm having a blast with DCC28 Into The Wilds but have had to kitbash the thing to increase the challenge, we have 9 players round the table right now and therefore need more opponents to keep the challenge up. DCC57 Wyvern Mountain is getting the same treatment (plus a backwards conversion) so as to keep the players on their toes...

 

[howandwhy99]

All of the awesome early adventure mods have been listed or simply should be listed, if not. Some are better than others, but the list below is later stuff only

Harley Stroh's Legacy of the Savage Kings - is top notch. One of the best mod designers working today.

Erik Mona's Whispering Cairn - is awesome sauce with a tomb and dungeon classic feel.

Kevin Kulp's Of Sound Mind - is a great town and dungeon with a lot of space for extras to be added and some neat surprises within.

 

[Sir Robilar]

Some of my favorites are:

Tammeraut´s Fate
Mad God´s Key
The Lightless Depths
(all three from Dungeon Magazine)

Tower of the Last Baron (Paizo Adventure)

 

[JRRNeiklot]

There are some really great adventures out there. I've ran a bunch over the years. I'll just list a few of my favorites:

Ghost Tower of Inverness
Tomb of Horrors
Forgotten Tomb of Tharizdun
Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth
Bleak House
Rappan Athuk
Necropolis
Hall of Many Panes

 

[Bedrockgames]

I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but Feast of Goblyns for Ravenloft is my all-time favorite module. It really helped move me into more live play with things like NPCs (rather than having my NPCs hang out at one location). What I loved about it most, is ran smoothly and it provided so much setting material, even if the players went off track there was cool stuff to do.

 

[CapnZapp]

If we're doing non-D&D, I'll put forward one of the many early-90s ICE modules for Shadowworld (statted for RM and Fantasy Hero): The Orgillion Horror

Going off a tangent here (in 2023):

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"?

Cheers

PS. To be honest, of what I've seen of RoleMaster/MERP adventure scenarios, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that D&D won out and that there just isn't any choice if you want ready-made d100 scenarios. Almost all of ICEs attempts at writing actual scenarios (as opposed to supplying campaign worlds) fail miserably to me. Filling MERP module after MERP module with "here's a bear and there's some bandits; you can kill and loot them if you want" isn't exactly evocative of Tolkien's writings... Perhaps it could compete with early AD&D dreck, but it doesn't hold up today. (I thought I could run some d100 adventures with the Against the Darkmaster ruleset, but after looking around I'm basically baffled how hard it is to find even a single scenario of quality written for d100 games!)

 

[Yora]

Against the Cult of the Reptile God.

I've run it twice, and I'll run it again.

 

[Jd Smith1]

JG's Dark Tower

G&D series, by the master himself.

Ran both in 1e, and in several other fantasy systems.

Carved in Stone, by Harnmaster.

 

[Darth Solo]

Ravenloft (I6).

3 times, 2 TPKs. Actually the first run should've been a TPK but my friend was running a Paladin he really, really liked.

 

[TerraDave]

That I have actually run (there are still so many that I want to)...

Right now, running S1 Tomb of Horrors (RPGA/4E but also referencing the orignal). Great, great stuff.

Other then that, my favs in order

I6 Ravenloft (of course)
T1 Village of Hommlet
WG4 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun
NeMoren's Vault (by Fiery Dragon)
S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth
Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil
Sunless Citadel
Thunderspire Labirynth

So I did manage to run some of those classics. New list:

I6 Ravenloft (still of course)
T1 Village of Hommlet
WG4 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun
S1 Tomb of Horrors
S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
X2 Castle Amber
X1 Isle of Dread
S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth
B4 The Lost City
The Dancing Hut. Dragon 83
U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh
C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan
S2 White Plume Mountain
Forge of Fury
B1 In Search of the Unknown

 

[Ath-kethin]

My personal favorites are 1) Court of the Necromancers from the Al-Qadim Cities of Bone sourcebox; though it's tricky to run, it's an amazing adventure overall and 2) The Portal Under the Stars, which is IMO the absolutely perfect introduction to the Dungeon Crawl Classics game.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Raid on Innsmouth made a terrific capstone adventure for my Escape from Innsmouth campaign, with one PC eaten alive and another driven mad by the revelation of his Deep One ancestry. Not to mention all the action-packed parallel storylines following different investigators each accompanying a different group of (expendable) soldiers or sailors into Innsmouth...

I have also had great fun with Graham Walmsley's various Trail of Cthulhu and Cthulhu Dark scenarios, most notably The Watchers in the Sky, The Rending Box and Screams of the Children.

 

[TheSword]

Without a doubt The Enemy Within. I’ve ran it three times and converted part of it to Pathfinder as well. It has the perfect balance of epic sprawl and extraordinary detail. You could use the elements of it in any campaign Bogenhafen, Wittgenstein Castle, Todbringer’s Court, The Schaffenfest, etc

NPCs are extremely detailed and well thought out. Very fun to play - both villains and potential allies.

Large parts of the game are sandbox but using events to make sure the plot drives forward. Winning and losing are both accounted for in the plot.

Maps and handouts are beautiful.

Shadows over Bogenhafen is the gold standard of mystery & roleplay based adventures. It should be converted to every system and made compulsory for every DM to run at some point early in their career.

All in all, it’s a campaign I would run over and over again.

 

[Tonguez]

Village of Homlett
Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh
Kingmaker
Isle of Dread
Howls in the Night (Ravenloft)
Wrecks Ashore and other of the 3.5 free adventures from WotC

 

[pemerton]

The cool remorhaz picture on the back cover of 4e's MM2 has made me want to run G2 for 4e (probably set either on the Abyss or in the Feywild). But my PCs aren't quite at that level yet.

I did this:
https://www.enworld.org/threads/session-report-against-the-frost-giants.358025/

Grugnur died prone in a pile of his own swordthanes!

We finished G2 in today's 4e session. As I've mentioned in and earlier post, it's the sort of adventure that runs a risk of d20-rolling-induced injury. Between that post and this one the PCs: * Reached 27th level; * Assaulted the giants' line of defence underground, in the corridor/long...

www.enworld.org

 

[aramis erak]

So... what are your lists of truly great adventures you've run? (Or played in, if you're a player...) And which potentially great adventures do you want to run?

Cheers!

Traveller: Adventure 2 (Research Station Gamma), 3 (Twilight's Peak) and 12 (Secret of the Ancients) - which are functionally an adventture path from 1979-1980... They present a different kind of view of the setting than...
Traveller: The Traveller Adventure. A half-inch thick Letter sized 6 to 18 month campaign, And the campaign that brought the Marches to life for me as a GM.
The combination of those (and they can be worked in together to one even longer campaign) is what brought The Spinward Marches and the 3rd Imperium to life for me.

ALIEN: Chariot of the Gods
ALIEN: Destroyer of Worlds
Both managed to capture the tone of the movie series, both manage to make the adventure interesting, and both have replayability. They both can be as little as 8 to as many as 40 hours of play, depending upon players, their curiosity, and the GM's indulgence in the many side-tracks they allow for.

Pendragon: The Boy King. A campaign spanning up to 100 years... and putting the players into the heart of Greg Stafford's then-vision of Arthur's legendary story...
Pendragon: The Great Pendragon Campaign. Same basics, better details, more adventures and adventure seeds.

WFRP 1E: The Enemy Within.
I'm in my 6th run of it? Yeah. Never had a single party make it all the way through, tho' i've run the whole thing across several runs.

WEG Star Wars: Otherspace and Otherspace II...
These are great for when a party just totally «bleep»s up the astrogation roll.... I've reused them in FFG star wars, too...

Sentinel Comics Starter set. Took me 13 sessions for the 6 included adventures. Teaches the game excellently, and provides several different kinds of adventures. One didn't work for one group, but did for the other group; the other 5 worked well for both groups.

Firefly: The Wedding Planners. Every time I've run it, it had different modes, but in every case, it was a fun time and love triumphed over money and power... thanks to the PCs. And in one case, Vera's twin...

 

[delericho]

If you're asking for those published adventures that I've run that I think are greatest, I'd say "Ravenloft" (the original), "Sunless Citadel", "The Shackled City", "The Shattered Circle", and "Lost Mine of Phandelver".

If you're asking which adventures that are widely considered great that I've run, add "Forge of Fury" and "Isle of Dread" to the list. I also think I've run "Castle Amber", but it was so long ago I've forgotten. For various reasons, none of those would make my personal 'best' list, though in some cases I'm tempted to have another crack at them.

 

[GuyBoy]

The Night Below is awesome.
I also loved running the Giants series (several times over many years), Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and Rappan Athuk.
Caverns of Thracia and Dark Tower are wonderful adventures by the supremely talented Jennell Jacquays.
Being a bit grognardy, I love KotB.
I’ve never actually run The Enemy Within, but I have played in it and, wow, is it great.