I think the problem with naming something a "classic" in a particular edition is that one of the things that made the older modules "classic" has been very hard to find in 3.xx and 4.xx modules.
In a phrase - that property is "shared experience".
If you look at all of the older "classic" modules, what makes them classics comes down to this:
- they were enjoyable;
- they have some element to them which is memorable; and
- the experience of having played through the module is widely shared by many players of the game.
Because of that shared experience, the players can trade stories and anecdotes which "ring true" and resonate with another gamer they have never met and never spoken with until that moment in time they talk about a particular "classic" module. They are both instantly talking about something that each of them recognizes.
Example: there are a lot of people who think
B2 - Keep on the Borderlands is a "classic" module. It was bundled with the original Blue box version of Basic D&D. The module itself has very little coherency within it. It's just not a well designed module from a modern adventure design perspective.
But it has nostalgia and shared experience in spades. So that's why it gets dubbed a classic. And rightly so.
A1-A4
Against the Slavelords epic path? The same.
As a new edition is released and there is a dearth of new material available, the "first" module out for the system tends to have a lot of people who each played it. The module is a classic not because it was necessarily "good" -
but it is a classic because it was widely played. Again - it's the shared experience at work.
So
The Sunless Citadel might not be that good an adventure either - but like
The Keep on the Borderlands - it was the only game in town for a while so a lot of people have a shared experience of having played it.
This
shared experience aspect was something that Paizo under Erik Mona and James Jacobs were both deliberately trying to foster with the
Age of Worms AP. They made a consious decision to reach for that brass ring - and they got it, in my opinion.
So while I think that
The Whispering Cairn is an excellent module, what makes it a classic is that element of "shared experience"; a LOT of people played it at more or less that same time. They traded stories about it and commented on it and have a certain collective experience in their all having played it.
In that sense, I think
Age of Worms was far more successful than the
Shackled City Adventure Path, as the AoW AP was released one after the other, every month (SCAP was not - there were frequent large gaps in the production schedule with SCAP), with a DM overview from the very start so that a LOT of
Dungeon subcribers started playing it at more or less the same time.
Because groups will game less frequently than others - or blow through adventures faster than others - they didn't all FINISH the AoW at the same time - or at all. So the later adventures didn't have that same shared experience element. Nor, I would add, did the later APs. That does not make
Savage Tide bad,
Shackled City better, and
Age of Worms best.
It does, however, speak to the timing as to how each of the Paizo 3.x APs were released, when they were released and the manner in which they were released.
All of that, imo, points to the
Whispering Cairn, along with the
Sunless Citadel, as the two leading modules for "classic" status as "classic adventures" for D&D 3.xx.
Churtle is my favorite NPC of all time.
