Good/Bad D&D Modules

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 4:48 am

So what's some good modules people have played? Anything worth recommending for when I'm short of ideas of stuff to throw at a group?

On the flip side, what's some of the bad ones?

I play 3.x, but feel free to add 4e info here, too. Might as well have a sort-of reference thread.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 4:55 am

What, no AD&D modules?

Juton · Post by **Juton** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:06 am

Shackled City and Age of Worms are good, challenging campaigns that should take a group from level 1-20. They where both published in Dungeon magazine, back in the day.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:29 am

Doom wrote:What, no AD&D modules?

Slipped my mind.

Let's just make that all-inclusive, yeah?

CCarter · Post by **CCarter** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:52 am

I've heard bad things about Lord of the Iron Fortress (an Andy Collins adventure) but checking it out I'm not sure. It has stats for Jozan, Mialee, Tordek and Regdar as 15th level "pregenerated PCs" that may be entertaining due to sheer crapness, as well as official errata for slaadi (what, you thought those should be somewhere other than inside a random adventure?).

Plotwise it doesn't look too bad, though PCs who like living on the edge will probably steal the artifact sword rather than giving it up and/or may disassemble the BBEG's fortress for some free adamantine.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 12:15 pm

I've hear a lot of mentions of Red Hand of Doom, but I don't know if that makes it good. It still gets played a bit online.

[offtopic]What errata was needed for Slaadi?[/offtopic]

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 12:37 pm

I have a soft spot in my heart for:
Temple of Elemental Evil
The Keep on the Borderlands (and yes I know Gary wrote that one)

Gods_Trick · Post by **Gods_Trick** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 12:41 pm

By good do you mean plot, or resiliency in the face too-clever PCs?

I enjoyed Age of Worms but the conclusion is a bit weak.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 1:54 pm

To be absolutely honest, while there are enough DnD modules I wouldn't mind to run, there are very few I would call "good". Bad or minimalistic plots are standard, and so are writeups that don't take into account what mid- to high-level PCs can do.

If forced to pick, first (Sunless Citadel) and third (forgot the name) installments from the introductory series of 3.0 modules, (the whole series is decent, but other installments, IIRC, suffer from near-absolute lack of things to do, save facestabbing) are about the only ones I might accept with only minor tweaking. The rest I mostly plunder for general plot ideas, maps and NPC statblocks.

As about the usual suspects:

- Red Hand of Doom: The plot is better than usual but still shallow and railroady (but the railroad is fragile and vulnerable to sequence-breaking, which is also not good). Enemies are pushovers.

- Shackled City: Individual adventures are sometimes passable, the overarching plot is shit. You don't know and don't care about most of the end bosses until you meet and gank them, or soon before that. The scale of action is outrageously small for the covered range of levels.

- Age of Worms: The first half is not bad (but you will need to think how to connect individual adventures better), the second half tries to play just like the first half, except with PCs' levels now in two digits this doesn't happen. Indifference of the world to the coming apocalypse and rubber band NPC levels become really annoying in this AP and stay such in most of the Paizo's offerings since then.

- Savage Tide: Major and permanent shift from city adventures to wildnerness exporing around the fourth installment! Otherwise the overarching plot is not that bad, if you remove all the cocks PCs need to suck if they want to win the endgame and make their success more meaningful.

Enemies in both AoW and ST are - mostly - murderous early on, but will fail to keep up with a party hardened by vicious initial challenges later. Particularly because, again, level 13 is not level 3 with bigger numbers.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 1:57 pm

Pretty much every adventure path ends weakly. And I don't just mean Paizo ones. The reality is that as adventures continue, they diverge. With a one shot you can start it off that everyone is in Scarport and wants to rescue Princess Tai. Because it's the beginning of the campaign and you can just fiat that. But the position and motivations of the characters in later adventures are based on the divergent results of the actual games.

-Username17

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 2:11 pm

The problem with Adventure modules is that they don't take into account the personality of your players, or the group make up, or the style of game your group enjoys playing.

Modules can be fun to steal from, to use as side-quests in your game world.

Anyone remember the Modules that have sailing ships on a glass desert and Purple Worms?

I found it Desert of Desolation.

Wow, of my top 3 favorite modules:
1 is temple of elemental evil
1 is written by Gary Gygax
1 is written by Tracy Hickman

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:15 pm

I'll add another vote for Temple of Elemental Evil. Just a fun dungeon crawl that pretty much takes you through the good parts of a D&D game. There's really no reason to keep going, you'll be around 10th-11th level by the time you're done and that's when the game starts to break down anyway. Call it a campaign and start a new game.

Scourge of the Slave Lords has a few too many "because the module says so, that's why" moments in it. Queen of the Spiders is better, if you don't count the Drow as being "because the module says so", but it's at Silly Level. The Giants parts are fun, theDescent parts are decent, the Drow City and Demonweb parts are meh and below.

Most of the early modules aren't that great. Keep on the Borderlands is good clean fun, just a place with some monsters and no plot to speak of, but it's solid in a way that some of the others just aren't. It doesn't try to get fancy, so it succeeds on its own unambitious terms. I liked "Dwellers of the Forbidden City" for no reason I can elucidate. "Ravenloft II: Gryphon Hill" had a really neat Gothic Horror premise and a nice feel to it and, if you were prepared to put the necessary work into preparing it, it could work really well.

U1-U3, the Saltmarsh modules, made for a neat little low-fantasy campaign that was a little bit more than just mass slaughter. The UK series was of uneven quality, but had some neat ideas - they took more chances than the run of the mill at the time, some of them paid off and some of them didn't.

"Chadranther's Bane", one of the early adventures from Dungeon, still sticks with me. The conceit is nothing new (adventurers get shrunk down to tiny size and have to deal with an abandoned inn and gardens while they're miniaturized), but something about the way it was handled appeals to me.

Modules that really sucked: H1-H4 (Bloodstone) were just terrible. High level adventuring didn't work then and doesn't work now, and crap like throwing armies of Duergar and Vrock just makes everyone want to stab themselves in the eyes. Isle of the Ape was a much better ultra-high-level module, and it still wasn't all that great.

Egg of the Phoenix was cobbled together from 4 different unrelated modules, and it shows. "Needle" played the "OMG transported to modern Earth" card, which was cliched and terrible even then. "Day of Al'Akbar" featured a hilariously racist caricature of an Arab terrorist (he uses Delayed Blast Fireball to create what are recognizable as hand grenades) to go along with its sexploitation cover.

All the Krynn modules are terrible. I can feel your shock from here.

A special shout-out has to go to Vecna Lives!, which is probably the worst D&D adventure I've ever read, being at once stupid, badly designed, railroady, and completely intolerant of players having a brain.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:26 pm

FrankTrollman wrote: Pretty much every adventure path ends weakly. And I don't just mean Paizo ones. The reality is that as adventures continue, they diverge. With a one shot you can start it off that everyone is in Scarport and wants to rescue Princess Tai. Because it's the beginning of the campaign and you can just fiat that. But the position and motivations of the characters in later adventures are based on the divergent results of the actual games.

Can't you get the adventures to converge in some way (and at least have an acceptable finish) if you make the end goal something the players really really want like stopping Lavos or replacing the God of Ultrasex?

PoliteNewb · Post by **PoliteNewb** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:48 pm

talozin wrote: Scourge of the Slave Lords has a few too many "because the module says so, that's why" moments in it.

Yeah, but if you ignore those and just let things happen, they can be pretty fun, IMO. It's not like there's any real story to get fucked up if your PCs go off the rails.
The stupid bullshit traps that serve no purpose (and make no sense) are what annoy me about them...A3 in particular. I usually just write those out and put in something interesting instead.

I liked "Dwellers of the Forbidden City" for no reason I can elucidate.

Probably because it's a good, straightforward sandbox adventure....lots of room for the DM to develop things, no plot to speak of, just a mysterious lost city to fuck around in.

I personally enjoyed "My Lady's Mirror" from a 2nd Ed. Dungeon magazine...if you can get past the railroady intro (why the PCs want to go in the place to begin with), it's kinda neat...fighting all this chick's enemies that came out of a broken Mirror of Life Trapping.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 4:21 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: Pretty much every adventure path ends weakly. And I don't just mean Paizo ones. The reality is that as adventures continue, they diverge. With a one shot you can start it off that everyone is in Scarport and wants to rescue Princess Tai. Because it's the beginning of the campaign and you can just fiat that. But the position and motivations of the characters in later adventures are based on the divergent results of the actual games.
Can't you get the adventures to converge in some way (and at least have an acceptable finish) if you make the end goal something the players really really want like stopping Lavos or replacing the God of Ultrasex?

Well, that's sort of the point of Age of Worms (kill Kyuss) and Savage Tide (kill Demogorgon), but as FatR noted, all "stop the bad guy" modules kind of suffer from "Why Doesn't Elminster Do It?" syndrome (unless your scenario doesn't have any high-level good NPCs).

souran · Post by **souran** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 4:40 pm

Modules really depend on if your group likes using them, you as the DM (or whoever is the DM) is good at adapting them to the party and improvising a little within the feel of the story, and how often your group likes/demands to go off the rails vs. how many of them are in it for the story.

Most modules fail because the story is so thin there is nothing keeping players wanting to do the story. This means that the "goal" becomes getting the whole thing off track.

The reason why people like red hand of doom is that the story is engaging enough that most players will forgive some of its weaker aspects in order to try and get through the story.

Adventure paths try to harness this effect some are better than others.

For instance, Age of worms is a very good adventure path --- if your group wants to play a very iconic game of D&D. The story line takes the party through an encounter with pretty much every iconic bad guy in the book (except beholders, I don't think there are beholders). You go from 1-20, and you start out fighting for nothing but money and end up saving the world from a rampaging god.

Its works end to end assuming your party likes being adventures. It falls apart after level 10 if your party thinks that high level characters don't just do more impressive versions of the dungeons they did at low levels.

Similarly, scales of War for 4E starts out a little slow (my group hated the second adventure) but it eventually builds up and turns into a really epic event.

Anyway good modules I have experienced (in no order):

1: Age of Worms
2: Scales of War
3: Red hand of Doom
4: Prophesies of the Dragon
5: Die Vecna Die
6: Dragonlance age of mortals adventures are good...if your party likes and KNOWS about dragonlance. A party where some do and some don't won't like this at all.

Bad Modules you Think woudl be good:

1: 3.X Castle Ravenloft - This starts out really good...but literally has no ending. The ending was CUT for page count. So Strahd dies and what....

2: The island based adventure path that Piazoo published. Didn't work for me at all
3: Demonweb pits 3.x Another republished adventure that was all about the name. Again the story just basically stops to add a few more maps and encounters.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 4:55 pm

2Frank: I accept that writing a universally satisfactory ending to a long AP is pretty much impossible. I don't accept, however, crap that would have been crap in a straightforward story as well. Like insufficient plausibility of connections between chapters, or bad guys who appear from nowhere, even though their supposedly weaker underlings and allies just have impacted the setting in serious ways. Also, it is not actually hard to make the end conflict so epically important that nearly any PCs would want to participate and to give their victory at least about as much meaning as most fantasy books do. Races of War AP does this, despite being made for fucking 4E. There you fight Tiamat in the end (after stuff like ending githyanki's threat to the Prime for good, helping to resurrect a god and deciding the battle for City of Brass), and your victory changes the whole foundations of the world. Frankly, I don't see any good reason why an AP running to the top levels should settle for less.

2hogarth: "Why Elminster doesn't solve it" is just a sympthom of lazy writing. I seriously don't see how it is hard to add small sidebars, providing examples of what forces might arise to oppose bad guys in the existing settings, and what alliances said bad guys might broker to keep them away. Replacing most loot (which usually stops making sense at higher levels anyway) with Elminster letting PCs to pick gear of their choice, within certain limits, from his Magic Mart between adventures, to help them in their world-saving efforts, is even easier.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:37 pm

I think that the big problem is that most people writing D&D adventures forget that they are writing for a Heavy Metal universe; much like the one that Phil Foglio uses for both their Buck Godot (Science Fiction) and Myth Adventures (Fantasy); there's an of overlap of content between the two that is meant to happen in a D&D campaign setting.

Settings that assume that there just are planar guilds of assassins, and meta-dimensional markets that occupy a whole plane.

Once you can wrap your head around the idea that Mega City One, fro Judge Dredd comics is tiny in the grand scheme of things, only then can you possibly hope to write pseudo-medival content that won't be busted apart when a wizard uses their 1/day Disintegration Ray (Disintigrate: green laser beam, srsly) or builds a Television Set (Scrying focus) or you know, whips up a gunpowder bomb (fireball).

D&D is meant to, even in its magic system, to be based on science. The characters are supposed to be barbarians from after the time of the lost ancient secrets, living in a supposedly more awesome time than the actual medieval people did.

The big problem people have is that they think that D&D is meant to show past fantasy, when really, it's best to show future fantasy. Its content being lifted more from science fiction than classical medieval stories of chivalry.

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:58 pm

I know this is bad, but my group and I always had lots of fun playing through the straight forward dungeon crawls and trying to stab each other in the back while we went. World's Largest Dungeon, (teleportation banned, but summons were in, except they'd only be charmed for duration of their existence, wizards and druids in), Rappan Athuk were two highlights.

That being said, they both got quite a big "sloggy" at points; with WLD having way too many weak/boring encounters that were only kept amusing by turning on each other. Rappan Athuk had dozens of "We'll just throw something you shouldn't be able to beat" at you encounters, including a straight up "This monster can't be killed" monster on the first floor. And both had only the barest pretence at plot. But that's okay.

My group also does serious and typical homebrew games, but sometimes we take a break to do a classic treasure delve and some backstabbing in hopes of "winning" all the treasure ourselves. It's fun, just a different type of fun.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:02 pm

I stopped running modules when I was still a noob DM because me and my players were noobs and I could not keep them going by the guidelines laid down in the modules. That being said Sunless Citadel was one of my first and I had no problem at all running it.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:45 pm

It's interesting that a couple of people here have spoken favorably of Temple of Elemental Evil. Everything I've heard/read from people (mostly on grognard sites) has been really dismissive of it in comparison to Village of Hommlet.

PoliteNewb · Post by **PoliteNewb** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:22 pm

Blicero wrote:It's interesting that a couple of people here have spoken favorably of Temple of Elemental Evil. Everything I've heard/read from people (mostly on grognard sites) has been really dismissive of it in comparison to Village of Hommlet.

I don't know why the fuck people are so impressed with Village of Hommlet; the actual 'adventure' part of it is fairly bleh, and most of it is just a description of a village...a village filled with NPCs who are supposed to be (secretly) higher level than your characters and who mainly exist to either to make you look short in the pants, or kick your ass if you decide to try to push around "ordinary village folks".

It's actually a lot of the stuff I hate about early D&D.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:24 pm

FatR wrote: 2hogarth: "Why Elminster doesn't solve it" is just a sympthom of lazy writing. I seriously don't see how it is hard to add small sidebars, providing examples of what forces might arise to oppose bad guys in the existing settings, and what alliances said bad guys might broker to keep them away.

I hate the "balance of power" excuse for why powerful NPCs don't do anything. It's boring and static (IMO). I'd much rather just say that the PCs are the only super-bad-asses around.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:32 pm

hogarth wrote:
FatR wrote: 2hogarth: "Why Elminster doesn't solve it" is just a sympthom of lazy writing. I seriously don't see how it is hard to add small sidebars, providing examples of what forces might arise to oppose bad guys in the existing settings, and what alliances said bad guys might broker to keep them away.
I hate the "balance of power" excuse for why powerful NPCs don't do anything. It's boring and static (IMO). I'd much rather just say that the PCs are the only super-bad-asses around.

If you're setting it in Golarion or Faerun, you have high level people fapping around. When shit goes down, some of these people should show up and have a council to declare a fellowship of the ring or whatever. The PCs are going to end up in the team that actually throws the ring into mount doom, but the other guys should have various plans in the works and have shit they are doing so that they don't seem so fucking blase about Demogorgon eating the sun.

-Username17

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:44 pm

hogarth wrote: Well, that's sort of the point of Age of Worms (kill Kyuss) and Savage Tide (kill Demogorgon), but as FatR noted, all "stop the bad guy" modules kind of suffer from "Why Doesn't Elminster Do It?" syndrome (unless your scenario doesn't have any high-level good NPCs).

Which is why teleport (or really any super fast travel) is bad for storytelling. If Elminster can be anywhere, then he can be expected to show up anywhere. If he doesn't show up, people will wonder why he hasn't come in to save the day.