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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rogueattorney" data-source="post: 5172537" data-attributes="member: 17551">A lot of people are picking adventures from the earlier part of the 80's for stylistic reasons.  Keep on the Borderlands, Tomb of Horror, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and the Dragonlance series may not be your bag, but I'd say they were largely successful at achieving what they set out to do.I believe the worst AD&D modules were mostly published from about 1986 to 1990, in the transition between 1e and 2e.  TSR was moving away from adventures as the featured support for the game and concentrating on campaign settings and rule supplements.  That's where their main efforts were going.  They also started publishing Dungeon magazine during this time period, and although I was not a subscriber, I've had more than one person tell me that the good adventures were being put in the magazine.A lot of the adventures during the time period seemed to be slap dash, barely edited, space fillers.For the worst, I'd pick the following:The railroad-y Avatar trilogy has already been mentioned, as have the early 2e revival of the WG series - Puppmaster, Gargoyle, etc.  I'd add the FRC series, which straddled 1e and 2e, and read and played more like advertisements for the Gold Box CPU games than D&D adventures and the horrible I10 sequel to Ravenloft, which turned the events of the original into a dream.Also OP1 Tales from the Outer Planes anthology was pure dreck.  In the first adventure, the party literally has nothing to do until the end scene.  Until then, they are led by the nose through a series of planar scenes.  Horrible!Interestingly, many of the adventures in this era had tiny print runs (compared to the monstrous print runs in the hundreds of thousands for the modules in the earlier part of the decade) and despite their inferior quality actually are pretty darn expensive to get a hold of.Some of the worst D&D modules were published a little before the bad AD&D period.  D&D seemed to be where the b-list of contributors was being shunted.  About the same time AD&D started going down hill, Bruce Heard (1987-ish to 1992-ish) took over as the D&D product manager, and he did a great job of getting some top-flight freelancers to work on the D&D projects, as seen in the generally high-quality GAZ series of products.But some of the worst from the earlier phase were:B8 Journey to the Rock (1984)X6 Quagmire! (1984)B9 Castle Caldwell and Beyond (1985)X9 The Savage Coast (1985)All four suffer from similar problems of being just plain empty of any good content.  Very thin for the price tag back then and very thin for what you'd have to spend t get a hold of one of them now.</blockquote>

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