Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2539228" data-attributes="member: 26473">I finally got around to reading the "worst adventures" thread, and after originally reading your comment here, I was quite surprised to find that it says nothing of the kind.I didn't find a single reference to White Plume Mountain in the worst adventures thread - there were only one or two references to Keep on the Borderlands, Palace of the Silver Princess, and In Search of the Unknown, IIRC, and a couple of reactions to Tomb of Horrors, but none of these negative comments had anything to do with "dungeon crawls in the middle of a wilderness."In fact the most common source of disparaging remarks (including your own...) had to do with modules that were heavy on metaplot and railroaded the players and their characters along a pre-determined plot line – Dragonlance seemed to earn the greatest ire. The subjects of ecological or cultural verisimilitude never came up in the six pages of posts that I read.I have no idea what you're citing as the basis for the opinion expressed above.Again, I disagree.First, let's let the 1e DMG comment on the view taken toward ecology and fantasy gaming, c. 1979 (twenty-six years ago):More than twenty years ago the primary text on constructing adventures and campaigns for D&D suggested that GMs consider some basic ecology in constructing their game-worlds. The idea that this is some sort of recent development, somehow shaped by contemporary fantasy fiction, isn't borne out by a simple look back at the rules of the day.The 1e AD&D DMG section quoted above concludes with the following:In a fantasy game, anything is possible - my view is that 90% of the world represents the probable and the other 10% the improbable and even the impossible. I have no problem with writing a White Plume Mountain into my games - the adventurers spend their lives immersed in that 10% because that's where the adventure is - the fame, the glory, the untold riches.I think authors like Leiber and Howard and Moorcock and Tolkien understood this intellectually and viscerally - they wrote to that 10%. Later authors took a couple of different approaches: Some still wrote to that 10%, but by aping those classic writers, recycling thematic elements but without the elegant prose and the spark of genius that inhabited the earlier works. (Terry Brooks, I’m talking to you and those who followed your example.) Others among contemporary fantasists seem drawn instead to exploring the 90% through a mix of post-modernist contextualism and marxfem philosophy, perhaps to add “depth” to fantasy that the “dinosaurs” of the genre lack (or maybe just to show how far beyond the pale they can be).Are their stories better? Without diving into the merits of literary criticism, I can only say that it’s a matter of taste. The more important question here and now is, do they make for good gaming? I’m simply not well-versed enough in contemporary fantasy to offer an informed opinion. I can offer a couple of metatextual observations however. (Yeah, I can work some post-modern mojo, too.)Taking a look once again at that worst adventures thread, it seems that many of the adventures deemed “worst” by our ENWorld peers are those steeped in metaplot, where the adventurers are reduced to being passive observers while other heroes do great things. Conversely, the best adventures thread and the commentary on the Wilderlands of High Fantasy all point to the classic feel of those “dungeon crawls” that some enjoy ridiculing. Many gamers enjoy angsty navel-gazing, perhaps following in the example of more contemporary fantasy authors' desire to explore the implications or inner life of fantasy worlds and characters – others enjoy more red-blooded, often politically incorrect kick-in-the-door, kill-things-and-take-their-stuff, then blow-it-all-on-whores-and-ale adventures in the style of the classic writers of the genre. (Please note that I am not attempting to disparage either style of gaming – I’m really just going for a cheap laugh with my descriptions. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ) It seems to me that perhaps the former group of gamers might draw more inspiration from contemporary fantasists while the latter would seek the classic authors for guidance.For myself, I write my games to the 10%, so I will continue to mine fantasy classics, literary and cinematic, both well-known and obscure for inspiration.</blockquote>

Verification