Best/Worst Published Adventures?

[Wiseman]

So I'm considering writing up some adventures for D&D and I was wondering if there were any good official adventures published? It doesn't matter which edition, I just want an example of the kind of quality to shoot for and traps to avoid.

Also, some advice on designing an adventure would be nice, thanks.

[erik]

Good/Bad D&D Modules

What Makes a Good Adventure Path?

[silva]

Never played any of these, but by reading them, D&D's Keep on the Borderlands and Temple of Elemental Evil, and RQ's Griffin Mountain and Pavis & Big Rubble look like the cream of the crop.

[hogarth]

You'll probably get some conflicting advice since some people love "sandbox" adventures more than others.

My favourite adventure path is Age of Worms (our play-by-post game has lasted almost 4 years so far and we've reached level 15). My favourite adventure from that path was probably The Champion's Belt: you fight gladiator battles by day and investigate a mystery by night. The gladiator battles were more fun than I expected; normally most dungeon-crawling is fairly reactive (you stumble across some monsters and react to their abilities as best you can) so it was fun to come up with strategies, spell lists, etc. specifically tailored to our opponents.

[fectin]

Red Hand of Doom is fantastically well written.

[brized]

Red Hand of Doom is fantastically well written.

Eh...depends on what you and your group want. It works well as an action-oriented adventure, since there's lots of combat, the plot is simple but effective, and it accounts for sequence breaking fairly well. However the group I ran it for used Phantom Steeds to get around, buying them a LOT of time. With all that extra time they wanted to interact with NPCs way more than the module had any semblance of material for, so it took a lot of effort to get them to seem more than cardboard cutouts. And Brindol itself wasn't fleshed out well enough for the PCs to really do anything interesting beyond getting plot coupons and buying gear.

For a different group I ran Masks of Nyarlathotep in Call of Cthulhu (CoC), and it worked great. Like RHoD, it's a sandbox/railroad hybrid, where there's an overarching plot and deadline, and there are locations you can go to and investigate/blow up, revealing more of the plot and pushing you closer to victory. In this case though, the named NPCs all had a basic framework of motivations and biases written in, so I could easily wing it on how they'd react to novel situations from the PCs.

It was also built with sequence breaking in mind, and you could win the whole thing in several different ways, some more costly than others. And all along the way, it gave enough info on the locations and NPCs for me to wing it when the PCs did unusual things, like decide to hijack a BBEG's superyacht, kill and impersonate him, and then infiltrate his volcano-island stronghold.

That said it could have done a better job of pacing the flow of exposition on what the badguys are up to and what's at stake, but it was still functional enough to keep the players motivated. The way clues/handouts are used in CoC was very helpful in pointing PCs at people, quests, and locations to check out. If not for that I think they would have given up before they got the full scoop.

[silva]

Yeah, Ive always heard great things about Masks of Nyarlathotep. I should give it a read sometime..

[tussock]

I really like G1. Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. Partly because it's tiny, a quick tournament module.

Like, it's super-simple, there's giants randomly attacking so you trace them back to home base to find out what the fuck is up. Which is easy, because giants are big.

And then you get there and the guards are passed-out drunk. Awesome. But then there's at least five paths and they branch and converge and loop back and the bad guys move around and there's a rebellion cooking to get involved in and disguise opportunities and social actions to make good and PC-replacements and stealth or fight or magic your way through things. And there's always this incredibly big and hard central battleground that lets you drag it out into running battles with cover and loops and prepared traps and getting surrounded and ... it's just really well laid out with a lot of options that keep pushing the big climax ever closer. And that climax is very different depending how you play through, especially if you barge strait into it at the first option and don't take the very big hint to try elsewhere first.

And then you win and there's a bunch of clues pointing you at G2. Which isn't nearly as good, having just two and half paths that are basically just a linear series of fights anyway. And then to G3 which is just one path full of giants and drow, pointing strait at D1, etc, etc, Q1, killed a god.


And it's not just the branching. Lots of modern branching modules keep adding choke points to stop you progressing too far and getting over your head. G1 put the "over your head" option right at the start to kill off groups who were stupid enough to take it. You're supposed to find out what's going on, and by figuring that out, exploring the place, thinking about it, you can beat it easy enough.

[TheFlatline]

Let's see here... Warhammer Fantasy's Enemy Within was actually pretty epic (and absurd in it's length/dev time. It basically took like 10 years or something psychotic like that to put out). I picked up the 3rd ed version and it was pretty well written and intricate.

I have a few personal favorites from Paranoia: Me and My Shadow Mk IV is memorable in a slapstick sort of way. Random Access Mission is hilarious if your group is familiar with Paranoia, and Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues is a classic written by Warren Spector (of Deus Ex, Ion Storm, Looking Glass fame) back when he put out interesting stuff.

As for D20, well... I didn't use much D20 stuff. I did run Black Sails over Freeport and that did pretty well actually, although shoehorning D&D into a pirate themed game... well... sucked. If I had to do it over again I'd do almost any other system... Hell Warhammer 3rd would be kind of awesome in that respect.

Um... I have testing credits in The Grey Citadel somewhere. Though we never got through enough of it to actually get to the end because of DM wankery. I was playing a rogue and the DM would basically depart from the material whenever I thought "hmm... there might be a trap here I should exercise caution" and meta-fuck me. The author told my friend that it's hard to evaluate a play session when most of the play session is just shit that's been made up to fuck players.

But what I remember and what was stuck to wasn't bad.

[TheFlatline]

Oh, Masks of Nyarlathotep has a pretty high pedigree. Never ran/played it though.

[PoliteNewb]

Dwellers of the Forbidden City is a pretty nice sandbox adventure, which comes with several suggested plotlines you could use to drop it into a campaign.

[hogarth]

Yeah, Ive always heard great things about Masks of Nyarlathotep. I should give it a read sometime..

I started playing it once, years ago. My impression was that it was full of interesting ideas, but the problem comes with the fact that Call of Cthulhu sucks for long campaigns. In CoC, either you have a revolving door of replacements for dead PCs (which I hate) or you have the players acting super-cautiously (which I find boring).

So I'd place it in the category of modules that are more fun to read than play (which is a pretty big category).

[brized]

I started playing it once, years ago. My impression was that it was full of interesting ideas, but the problem comes with the fact that Call of Cthulhu sucks for long campaigns. In CoC, either you have a revolving door of replacements for dead PCs (which I hate) or you have the players acting super-cautiously (which I find boring).

Yeah...I did a few things to mitigate that:

1) Upfront, I encouraged character optimization, and allowed a 1:1 point buy instead of rolling for stats: 65 points, score minimum 3, max 18.

2) About 1/4-1/3 of the way through the campaign, I set your Cthulhu Mythos skill as damage reduction vs. sanity loss. This models the vague rules about becoming jaded after enough exposure to zombies and other lesser horrors. It worked splendidly, as the serious monsters deal d100 sanity loss, and the higher your Cthulhu Mythos, the more likely you are to fail a sanity check when you actually have to make one. This also allowed the PCs to learn and cast spells upon acquiring the proper literature, and not be constantly punished for it.

3) I was pretty generous with Idea rolls to keep the PCs from doing stupid shit when they would know better if they were actually in the situation, knowing what their character knows.

4) I used my expertise in security to let the PCs get away with things that most GMs seem to punish with teleporting, omniscient guards. They got away with some heinous and hilarious shit, mainly because 1920s security, and especially the security as written in some of the adventure locations, sucked. They also did their part in getting out quick, setting fire to the crime scene, using disguises and misdirection, and skipping town (or the whole continent). After awhile my group started calling itself the YOLO group.

5) There are some "red herring" adventure locations for PCs to investigate. Some of them are deathtraps, and it so happens that one of the first red herrings in the campaign is a deathtrap. The PCs went to it and 3/5 of the party died. They were mostly friendly fire, but still two of the deaths were deemed unfair. The players were pissed, so I removed most of the remaining deathtrap red herrings from the campaign.

I left in the Shanghai demon cat, though. We all agreed it was well worth it, even though 2 characters died to mundane police officers in the aftermath.

That said, we still had a lot of PC deaths. Only one PC made it from start to finish...But excepting the deathtrap noted above, those deaths were the fault of the PCs, and/or were meaningful sacrifices. Two PCs made it through the remaining 2/3 of the campaign, and another made it that far but died in the final battle, where they knew what they were getting into and what the stakes were.

So all in all the campaign felt like CoC but it was more fun and adventurous...Lovecraftian Indiana Jones, if you will.

With a sprinkling of murderhobo.

[Ancient History]

For Shadowrun, the Artifacts series is pretty bad, while Universal Brotherhood, Harlequin, and Harlequin's Back are the most-remembered, most-lauded campaigns.

[rasmuswagner]

Expedition to the Demonweb pits. You're going places and doing shit for the vaguest of reasons, constantly coming back to this utter dick of an NPC, and there's no reason at all to not just kill him, take his stuff and say fuck it.

Also, the adventure is full of the standard shitty design NPC who can't hit for shit, do piddly damage, but don't have the decency to at least die quickly.

Age of Worms, I liked that too. The first book and a half of Carrion Crown (pathfinder) are pretty neat: There's this big ruined insane asylum, and there's weird shit happening in the village, and you KNOW you're going to dungeon crawl that thing, but you want to gather information and resources first. And then, you have to defend a Frankenstein from being lynched.

[rasmuswagner]

For Shadowrun, the Artifacts series is pretty bad,

You are attacked by useless shitbags. Then you kill them. But the scenario specifically instructs MC to just send in more, until the players can really feel the pressure. Infinity useless shitbags attack you, until you're slipping in corpses and very low on ammo, or whatever. Then the NPC you're babysitting does something sparkly and magical - we're not writing rules, we're just rubbing her used [cloth with which she rubs her delicate parts] in your faces to show that she's special and you're not - she does something magical, and the rest of the attackers die. Oh, and then she has a headache and is useless for the rest of the scenario.

And that's just the first part of the trilogy.

[rasmuswagner]

[Orbital Decay]. It for Gurps Transhuman Space, their ambitious sci-fi line. Like all things Guprs, you read the Transhuman Space books, and they're awesome and well-thought out, but it's like IKEA furniture with no instructions and you really just wanted to sit down at the table and eat. So, a scenario...awesome, you think. Shitty b-movie zombies on a space station is what you get.

[Stinktopus]

Return to Temple of Elemental Evil was a horrid experience for my group, and for many others from what I hear. The whole "we're going to put a monster you can't beat in the module as a way of chasing your party into the dungeon" means TPKs galore.

[hogarth]

The first book and a half of Carrion Crown (pathfinder) are pretty neat: There's this big ruined insane asylum, and there's weird shit happening in the village, and you KNOW you're going to dungeon crawl that thing, but you want to gather information and resources first.

Good example. I thought The Haunting of Harrowstone was an excellent adventure. I usually hate dungeon crawls because the idea of going back and forth to the same adventure site usually kills any sense of urgency, but this one had a nice feeling that the clock is ticking (but not so fast that we felt we needed to overextend ourselves). Plus, I'm a sucker for a story where you have to defeat a series of unique colourful minibosses (cf. El Topo or Kill Bill).

The only down side was that the Pathfinder "haunt" mechanic kind of sucks; they're like traps (which already suck) that you have less opportunity to disarm (extra suck).

And then, you have to defend a Frankenstein from being lynched.

I liked that adventure up until the killer dungeon at the end, which sucked ass. Supposedly we were in a race to get the crucial evidence from a castle, but we had two near-TPKs where we had to trudge several days back to town to get people raised from the dead which brought the excitement to a screeching halt. Twice.

--

The crappiest adventure path installment I've read (but not played) is the second adventure from the War of the Burning Sky campaign.

1. The name sucks. The Indomitable Fire Forest of Innenotdar? Could there be any more syllables in that name? And who would try to defeat a fire forest? And could they have picked a name more awkward to pronounce than "Innenotdar"?

2. The author goes to considerable lengths to allow multiple paths to accomplish the same goal. That sounds good on the surface, but in practice it just means that the module has 20 encounters (say) but your PCs will only get to see 10 of them, so a good chunk of the module will be wasted. Plus, the whole plot is an enormous railroad anyways (you're stuck in a forest surrounded by GM plot barriers on all sides), so that sort of defeats the purpose of having multiple paths.

3. The plot has the big bad guy using all kinds of powers that aren't in his stat block, just 'cause.