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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6177604" data-attributes="member: 42582">I have HoNS but have never run it - it looks like a slog to me.I ran BoBS (using Rolemaster as my system) and I found it to have a lot of good ideas, from its initial premise to its banished god to its gate in the form of a living angel. But I had to basically ignore all the GMing advice (eg that the banished god would always attack; that the angel-gate could never be persuaded to sacrifice herself; etc). And I never ran the dungeon that is the second half. That looked like a slog too.I want to make one qualification to this: a lot of the encounters in the 4e modules I'm familiar with aren't even set-pieces!For instance, E1 has room after room with n blackstar baddies and one or two other random hangers-on, nothing of any narrative significance at stake, and no goal other than hacking through those baddies to get to the door to go through it to find the next room full of baddies. I've taken some bits and pieces from that module to populate a couple of adventures sites of my own - I like the idea of the angel encounter, for instance; I've used the cache encounter to build a room within the Dark Lake Ziggurat (from Underdark); I've used some traps to build another room in the same location; and I've used ideas from the reliquary to design the Reliquary of the Ebon Stone in Mal Arundak (from The Plane Below) - but I can't imagine running it as written. What a pointless slog!With P2, I cut out quite a bit of the filler, and in other places combined encounters to create genuine set-pieces (eg the whole of the temple, plus Maarth the assassin sneaking in from the rear, I ran as one big encounter).And here are the changes I made to H2, taking advantage of nice features of the maps that the module authors appeared to have ignored, and generally trying to make things more tactically dynamic with more dramatic narrative stakes:</blockquote>

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