Parzival
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Is a little Stir Crazy this year...
Posts: 343
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Post by Parzival on Jan 22, 2023 19:15:50 GMT -6
I’m wondering what currently published (if any) adventure modules and campaign settings are favorites among the community here.
Could be any game system or edition— OD&D, Classic, 1e, 2e, 3e, 4e, 5e, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, OSRIC, S&W, LL, etc… whatever floats your boat.
Free or commercial.
If you can elaborate as to why, that would be great. There’s a lot out there, and I have no way to judge one from another. So I’d like to know which, if any, y’all appreciate!
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Post by howandwhy99 on Jan 22, 2023 21:08:12 GMT -6
What are your interests? Maybe you could post some of your own favorites?
I think the classics are the best examples.
1. The Keep on the Borderlands - perhaps the only starting adventure ever created DMs can use to start a campaign. One which is a "Sandbox" game design where the area is balanced like a strategy game.
2. In Search of the Unknown - this one is all dungeon, but one which teaches how a dungeon is constructed and drawn and interestingly laid out for exploration and difficulty. A very good primer from so early on.
3. The Village of Hommlet - another classic town and dungeon; balanced, but this time with the town completely integrated with connections to each other and the dungeon inhabitants. There is great deal of intrigue, many characters for the DM to track, and many potential outcomes.
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Post by waysoftheearth on Jan 22, 2023 21:37:54 GMT -6
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Post by tdenmark on Jan 22, 2023 22:26:09 GMT -6
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phantomtim
Level 3 Conjurer
13th Age Enthusiast
Posts: 85 
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Post by phantomtim on Jan 23, 2023 2:48:50 GMT -6
My group and I are having a great time playing through Empire of the Ghouls from Kobold Press. While the adventure was written for 5th Edition, I'm running it using 13th Age. Kobold Press has hundreds of products published for their setting, Midgard. It's based on Eastern European myths and legends, and has a darker tone, without being grimdark. PCs are able to make a big difference in a world that has so many challenges to face. If you enjoy dark forests, Baba Yaga, blood magic, an empire of ghouls that are under the surface, and a wasteland blasted by an ancient war between wizards, then I recommend checking the setting out. |
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Post by ravenheart87 on Jan 23, 2023 4:21:56 GMT -6
Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia, Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor, and the Wilderlands of High Fantasy boxed set. I also have a soft spot for Arduin.
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Post by doublejig2 on Jan 23, 2023 4:27:05 GMT -6
N1 as a beginner and then T1. These adventures are pretty good served back-to-back. Book of Treasure Maps I.
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Post by dukeofchutney on Jan 23, 2023 5:38:31 GMT -6
Recently, Castle Xyntilan. Very entertaining.
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Post by Vile Traveller on Jan 23, 2023 8:13:14 GMT -6
Anomalous Subsurface Environment I must second this. I feel it may be my favourite campaign/setting of all, D&D or otherwise. |
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Post by rredmond on Jan 23, 2023 9:59:23 GMT -6
1. The Keep on the Borderlands Used this one several times to good effect. Currently using it when we don't have enough players for the main campaign, they just take a bunch of PCs into the Caves - just so much fun! Anomalous Subsurface Environment Such a fun read, but I've never DMed it. Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia, Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor Also great reads and look like they'd be fun! So much fun, played in it, DMed it a couple times. It's got some issues, but it was never not fun. I also really enjoyed playing and DMing I1: Dwellers of the Forbidden City. There's a lot there to expand upon, but honestly I just streamline the "city" to just the encounters  I've used The Illhiedrin Book (Judges Guild) several times, and used that town of Tassin's Wood as a home base for my most recent campaign. It's really a fun one with a lot to it and works well with younger players too. Used Matt Finch's Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom, which is three levels of fun, with several entrances and different ways to finish the module. Usherwood's Yrchin the Tyrant is a fun, deadly, kobold lair, which can lead into a whole campaign. But even more fun is Arachnophobia! which is a 3-5 level module - new(ish) monsters and just a neat story all around. The party I was DMing literally blew the dungeon up, with the temple/monastery sitting on top of it! I'll have to think if there are any more, but I'm going to have fun following this thread and checking out the recommendations! |
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Post by Finarvyn on Jan 23, 2023 10:26:26 GMT -6
Recently, Castle Xyntilan. Very entertaining. Good choice. It reminds me of Tegel Manor in many ways, but more elaborate. |
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Post by Punkrabbitt on Jan 23, 2023 21:37:05 GMT -6
Dark Sun.
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Post by Vile Traveller on Jan 24, 2023 5:18:14 GMT -6
Although, "current"... that needs some cogitatin'. Any thoughts, crew?
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Post by rredmond on Jan 24, 2023 5:45:24 GMT -6
Although, "current"... that needs some cogitatin'. Any thoughts, crew? Yeah, I didn’t realize until I got the email notification about the “current” part. Even my “OSR” recommendations are really old. We did take a delve into “The Palace of Unquiet Repose” a month or two back. But the players are too freaked out by their initial foray to want to play again, yet.  |
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Parzival
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Is a little Stir Crazy this year...
Posts: 343
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Post by Parzival on Jan 24, 2023 8:52:03 GMT -6
Yeah, “Current” is really what I’m going for. Aside from that, I have no preference— I just want to know what others are using or at least admiring.
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Post by dukeofchutney on Jan 24, 2023 10:02:04 GMT -6
I’ve used a few of Gabor Lux’s things, Xyntilan as mentioned which is a large hammer horror castle dungeon. Very comedic but deadly. Easy for the party to get in and out of for short 3-10 room dives yielding copious loot and casualties. His recent point crawl Forest of Gornate is also good. His stuff is generally high risk reward they requires risk taking players to shine. So not for all groups. I admire but have not played Antony Husk’s modules (on lulu). They are classical Ad&d done very well and often higher level.
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bobjester0e
Level 4 Theurgist
DDO, DCC, or more Lost City map work? Oh, the hardship of making adult decisions! ;)
Posts: 182
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Post by bobjester0e on Jan 25, 2023 16:17:41 GMT -6
I just picked up a Bundle of Holding for Advanced Adventures. I haven't counted the PDFs, but there are a LOT of modules here!
White Dragon Run I and II, Barrow Mound of Gravemoor, Stonesky Delve, Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shrooms, etc. The Bundle also came with OSRIC and a monster manual collection of which I forget the name of.
Other than that, I am totally diggin' DCC and MCC. Dandyline Press released 2 tribute modules based on B1 In Search of the Unknown and B4 The Lost City for Mutant Crawl Classics. These are post-apocalyptic and are nearly unrecognizable to anyone who hasn't played the originals in awhile.
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Post by tetramorph on Jan 25, 2023 16:32:51 GMT -6
Anything by Gabor Lux ( Melan) is top quality. Anything by Guy Fullerton (is he here?). Anything by Jimm Johnson ( austinjimm), especially anything with Lawson "BLOODMASTER" Bennet, e.g., Tomb of the Sea Kings (really a must have). All the Advanced Adventures stuff is pretty good, but often defaults to "Gygaxian naturalism," which isn't my style. For old stuff, I agree that JG is good. In fact, for me, it is the gold standard. And I prefer Thieves of the Fortress Badabaskor and the Illhiedrin Book as starter kits over B2 and other TSR stuff- again, because I do not enjoy Gygaxian naturalism. |
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Post by Vile Traveller on Jan 25, 2023 17:02:02 GMT -6
I enjoyed Hole In The Oak for OSE.
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Post by dwayanu on Jan 26, 2023 14:30:43 GMT -6
tenfootpole.org is a fine site for OSR reviews.
I have a hard time with the game of favorites, so I’ll mention a bunch! I’ll start with some things that might get overlooked. Caveat: I’m not paying much mind to whether something is ‘current’.
The D&D 5E book Tales From the Yawning Portal includes two of my favorite old TSR modules. Lawrence Schick’s White Plume Mountain is a great ‘funhouse’ dungeon. The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is similar to Tomb of Horrors (also included in that book), but not as deadly, and has engaging Mesoamerican flavor.
Dark Tower is a Jaquays design that gets less talked up than Caverns of Thracia, but one of my favorites. Although the original was written for AD&D, I ran it with OD&D. Goodman Games now offers an edition, as well as The Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor and Tegel Manor (also among my favorites from the Judges Guild).
Goodman also has a Lankhmar line for its Dungeon Crawl Classics game, and a Dying Earth release scheduled for March if memory serves. D&D has always put me more in mind of these literary sources than of any but the stories of Clark Ashton Smith.
Griffin Mountain is both a splendid ‘sandbox’ and a model for organizing material for such a campaign. It depicts the Elder Wilds and Balazar regions of Glorantha, and is written for RuneQuest, but one could site it in a backwater of another world and plug in D&D stuff. You can get it from Chaosium’s online store.
Cities by Midkemia Press is a fine resource for creating urban settings. Nowadays, it might be easier to find the Runequest Cities version.
The Citybook series from Flying Buffalo / Blade presents locations and NPCs to plug into your city, written up in the “Catalyst” format adaptable to any game system.
Online, B. Scott Hoover’s (Kellri’s) Classic Dungeon Designer series is written with 1E AD&D or OSRIC in mind, but #3 Old School Dungeon Geomorphs and #4 Old School Encounters Reference are useful with almost anything in the old-school D&D family.
=========================
From old Dragon Magazine:
#32 had The Fell Pass by Karl Merris. #37 had The Pit of the Oracle by Stephen Sullivan. #41 had The Halls of Beoll-Dur by D. Luther, J. Naatz, D. Niessen and M. Schultz. #46 had Temple of Poseidon by Paul Reiche III. #57 had The Wandering Trees by Michael Malone. #67 had Fedifensor by Allen Rogers (complimenting a special section on the Astral Plane). #70 had Mechica by Gali Sanchez. #78 had Sid Fisher’s Citadel by the Sea. #81 had The Ruins of Andril by Ian Melluish #83 had The Dancing Hut by Roger Moore.
From old White Dwarf Magazine:
#18 The Halls of Tizun Thane by Albie Fiore.
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Post by soundchaser on Jan 27, 2023 21:49:37 GMT -6
We enjoyed Empire of the Ghouls for 3.x. Right now one memorable campaign we always talk about now is the first Paizo AP, Rise of the Runelords.
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Post by distortedhumor on Jan 27, 2023 22:18:47 GMT -6
My faves are some of the huge megadungeons that have come out (Barrowmaze and so on), the one that impacted me most is likely of all thing, Dwimmermount, due to me loving how dwarves are set up in that game.
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Post by aldarron on Jan 28, 2023 7:13:40 GMT -6
A lot of answers so far have focused on particular adventures so I will contribute to the settings question:
Red Tide
Its one of the most well thought out milieus out there. There are some things I would change - the Japanese inspired nation worships demons but undead would work better in context and I would add a desert environment for some variety, but overall it is really a unique and terrific setting.
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Post by dwayanu on Feb 12, 2023 20:38:41 GMT -6
Except for Tekumel and Glorantha, I tend to homebrew my settings; even with Greyhawk, I’m not very familiar with canon beyond the original folio. Nonetheless, I have (either as GM or as player) experienced a number of notable others over the decades.
Paul Elliott’s Zenobia is a free, rather rules-light game with an alternate-history setting for “sword and sandals” (and magic and monsters) play — initially in the Desert Kingdoms at the edge of a shaky (ca. 260 AD) Roman Empire. The Persian supplement is unfortunately no longer available, but the Egyptian and Greek ones are.
Xoth started online with D&D 3.0 for mechanical stuff, but I think now offers 5E material and conversion guides for several other systems.
I ran for a while Kevin Siembieda’s Palladium world with the first edition Palladium RPG, but if one thinks the rules set stinks that shouldn’t put one off the setting. Before that, I also liked his Mechanoids trilogy.
Bard Games’s Atlantis was a pretty groovy ‘antediluvian’ sword and sorcery setting, and more recently there’s a “Second Age” edition from Khepera Publishing (with a somewhat different attached rules set).
Most folks regard that Howard-like work as rather a warmup for the more Vance-like Talislanta, which is now free to download in all its several editions. As with Palladium, the game-mechanical idiom is close enough to D&D to make translation fairly easy.
Columbia Games’s Harn line is very nice if you want something a little lighter on the magic and heavier on the medieval than Greyhawk — and rather lavishly detailed. I think the larger setting is now divided between Columbia and another publisher.
The world of Yrth (originally presented in GURPS Fantasy) has medieval Earthly cultures that were brought by “the Banestorm” to a D&D-ish world. The city of Tredroy, divided into Christian, Muslim and Jewish sections, is rather a fantasy version of Cold War Berlin in terms of intrigues (and somewhat like Venice otherwise).
Other GURPS world books include R.E. Howard’s Conan (probably very hard to acquire), Andre Norton’s Witch World, Gene Wolfe’s New Sun, Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure and L. Sprague de Camp’s Krishna.
ICE’s Mythic Greece and Mythic Egypt include stats for RoleMaster and Hero System, but are nifty to use with any system. The same line includes volumes for Vikings, Robin Hood and Pirates.
If The Iron Wind and Vog Mur are sufficient indications, then ICE’s Shadow World is a setting in which I’d like to play. Their licensed Middle-Earth line, in my opinion, did a good job of mixing in enough FRP-ish stuff to please gamers (if not Tolkien purists). It is I expect fetching collectors-item prices higher than I’d want to pay.
Something I haven’t gotten around to running, which will call for a lot of translation work — but is in prospect looking pretty thrilling— is Gary Gygax’s Necropolis (the D&D 3 edition from Necromancer Games).
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Post by geoffrey on Feb 12, 2023 22:30:46 GMT -6
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flightcommander
Level 6 Magician
"I become drunk as circumstances dictate."
Posts: 370
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Post by flightcommander on Feb 13, 2023 0:02:38 GMT -6
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Post by machfront on Feb 13, 2023 4:44:06 GMT -6
Ok. You asked what “currently produced” we’ve been using or at least inspire by….and I see responses like “B2”….great but doesn’t count. Heh.
Let’s get this out of the way: I’ve recently read B3 Palace of the Silver Princess and the area and other such is a pretty cool lil area.
I like the Greydeep Marches and have been wanting to integrate it and utilize it.
But to actually answer the question, I’ll echo Geoffrey….The Phoenix Barony. Simple. Old school. Easy. Fun. Very….”Saturday morning cartoon” in a good way.
I used it years ago for a very brief time and I recently came back to it, and I’d love to use it again…not “in the far future” but rather, like, ‘the future’ meaning this weekend or in the next couple of months. I dig it.
But…its important for my fellows to know context,...I don’t like much more than a few pages (of anything) and even after years and years of a campaign, I myself, end up with just and only a messy mess of one single page….so…yeah…
(I don’t run/use modules because….I don’t/can’t read them, let alone ‘run’ them. If anything is beyond a few pages…nope…no thanks.)
Modules, even as is or nearly so…nope….because I’m not going to read them.
Published campaign worlds, etc. Nope, Again. Not gonna read it.
A “whole world” published in under 30 pages….yeah…maybe…which is why I dig Phoenix Baroney, for example.
Most should be that way.
If Forgotten Realms was entirely under 20 pages, maybe I’d care.
“Dungeons”…don’t care at all…if they are a handful or dozen areas….maybe…maybe…otherwise…nope. Yawn!
If not “Yawn” then they’re far far too complicated to eff with.
I’d rather the group go through the wilds or cities. Much much easier!
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Post by machfront on Feb 13, 2023 5:05:16 GMT -6
Bringing it up again…. I wish more people would publish settings of any and every style, with Bezios’s Phoenix Baroney style/structure as a template….because, I cannot see the reason for anything beyond it (detail/weigh-wise). It’s perfect!!!
I really do wish someone would publish a grimdark setting with the same kind of degree of slight depth and structure of Phoenix Barony…or a ‘serious’ vanilla’ fantasy or an even more ‘deep’ LotR type world, or….well…anything.
Then I could digest it…..because I’d be willing to actually read it in the first place AT ALL, being under 30 page…AND, being under 30 pages, might actually could use it!
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Post by dwayanu on Feb 13, 2023 8:40:27 GMT -6
Granted they might seem pretty densely packed pages, but early modules from TSR ran about 8 to 16 pages. Super-size was around 30. (Dark Tower from JG was a ‘monster’ for its day at 70, but also in larger type.)
If I were to work up scenario and setting material for publication, I think I’d try to do it in booklets of 16 to 32 pp. — divided into briefer useful sections —instead of big tomes. I can understand some people being put off by a larger portion, whereas with “bite sized pieces” they might find they actually have more appetite.
(Solo gamebooks would probably need to be longer to satisfy me. RPG core handbooks would be 48-64 pp. each, and might take two or more for a sufficiently full presentation.)
Melan/Gabor Lux comes to mind as someone who does a good job of presenting both scenario and setting compactly, though his work is anything but ‘vanilla’.
I can see some appeal in bog standard D&D assumptions as an easy frame of reference; those of us with more exotic tastes are more likely to be up to modifying the material to fit our campaigns.
People up to producing polished works for publication might incline more to the relatively novel.
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Post by geoffrey on Feb 13, 2023 12:31:39 GMT -6
I like the Greydeep Marches and have been wanting to integrate it and utilize it. But to actually answer the question, I’ll echo Geoffrey….The Phoenix Barony. Simple. Old school. Easy. Fun. Very….”Saturday morning cartoon” in a good way. I used it years ago for a very brief time and I recently came back to it, and I’d love to use it again…not “in the far future” but rather, like, ‘the future’ meaning this weekend or in the next couple of months. I dig it... A “whole world” published in under 30 pages….yeah…maybe…which is why I dig Phoenix Baroney, for example. Most should be that way. If Forgotten Realms was entirely under 20 pages, maybe I’d care. I hadn't heard of the Greydeep Marches. Looks promising! Yeah, less is definitely more for me when it comes to campaign settings. I think 32 pages is a good limit for the length of the text. A 32-page Forgotten Realms book that felt like Ed Greenwood's old Dragon articles in the early 1980s could be very cool. An example of the type of thing I cordially dislike: First let me say that I have the utmost respect for the Troll Lords and for their Castles & Crusades game. Also remember that there's no such thing as bad publicity. All that said, the Troll Lords have a kickstarter going for their campaign world of Aihrde. From the kickstarter's page: Ummm... That is so not for me. One hundred thousand words (and that's only part 2!)? That is longer than The Hobbit. I notice that the kickstarter includes a book of 24-36 pages entitled A Trail Guide to Aihrde with a fantastic cover. Now that's more like it!  |
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