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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6120538" data-attributes="member: 42582">When I "use" an adventure, what I take from it is usually a map, one or more story elements, and perhaps hints of a situation.So for me, a memorable adventure should have a good map, evocative story elements, and compelling situations. Stats and the like are, for me, secondary; I can work out stats easily enough myself (and have done a lot of system conversion of adventures over my GMing career).One published adventure that I used in this way (converted to Rolemaster) was OA7: Test of the Samurai. I don't remember much about the maps in this one, but it had evocative story elements - a bansihsed celestial bureaucrat who, having thereby lost his immortality, takes steps to regain it by turning all the atmosphere of the world into a subtance that only he can breathe but that is poisonous to everyoen else; a snake cult; a peachling girl who rides through the Momoben Forest on tigers; etc - and suggested some interesting situations, such as travelling to the plane of the animal kings to get help from the king of birds (a phoenix) whose subjects are being poisoned by the changes in the atmosphere.If I was to make a general criticism of WotC (and for that matter TSR) modules, it would be that they don't do enough on the "compelling situations" front: they introduce evocative story elements, but don't make the effort to come up with ideas where that story element actually feeds into dramatic conflicts involving the PCs. For instance, Speaker in Dreams has the interesting idea of the Baron of the town being under the influence of a shadowy evil being - in the module it is mind control by a mind flayer; in the version of that module that I ran, it was the ordinary influence of an evil advisor. But the module doesn't take any steps to bring this to the forefront of the action. When I ran (my version of) that adventure, I (i) grounded it in prior events that had brought the PCs into conflict with the advisor, and (ii) brought events to a climax by having the baron, quite sincerely, invite the PCs to a dinner at which not just he but his evil advisor was present.That's what I consider a compelling situation: the players have to decide whether they will confront the advisor, or try to stay friendly with the baron, or somehow (<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?309950-Actual-play-my-first-quot-social-only-quot-session" target="_blank">as my players ultimately did</a>) try to achieve both. Without this sort of situation, the most evocative story elements are still just window-dressing.I don't subscribe to DDI, but an adventure in the free numbers of Dungeon that came out at the start of 4e - Heathen - did have a compelling (if somewhat predictable) situation at its core: the PCs go on a mission to learn the fate of a paladin who went missing on his mission to fight an evil cult, and [spoiler]discover that the paladin has fallen, and become the leader of the cult. They then have to choose whether simply to kill him, or rather to try and rescue and redeem him.[/spoiler] That's the sort of thing that I think helps make for a memorable adventure.</blockquote>

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