Argyle King
Legend
Red Hand of Doom
D&D 5E Which was the most recent Wizards adventure you consider a classic?
- Thread starter MerricB
- Start date
Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel is an awesome collection of adventures in a beautiful fantasy utopian setting, and so it gets my vote. It’s not perfectly executed by any means, but a campaign of fantasy Star Trek away teams from a post-scarcity society descended from refugees now travelling to their old worlds to help however they can is both an incredible departure for D&D and the best kind of hopepunk.
Some of the adventures are less interesting but the writing from those cultures - I really like the Korean adventure, as a Korean-English guy - is heartfelt and genuine. I think the core setting could use more explanation and expansion and have my own notes on how the society on the Citadel actually works.
Some of the adventures are less interesting but the writing from those cultures - I really like the Korean adventure, as a Korean-English guy - is heartfelt and genuine. I think the core setting could use more explanation and expansion and have my own notes on how the society on the Citadel actually works.
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If I could track down my players from the mid-80s and ask them what they thought of Isle of Dread, I imagine the response would be very negative. ("You just wander around fighting random dinosaurs for no real reason.")
It's not the adventure's fault - it was the first wilderness adventure I ever ran, the first sandbox adventure I ever ran, and the first adventure for characters above 3rd level I ever ran. And probably only the fifth or sixth adventure I ever ran.
On the other hand, as an inexperienced, teenage DM I was presumably the target audience for the module, given I got it bundled with the Mentzer-version Expert set. So I'm not sure it was entirely my fault either.
I have similar stories with both Isle of Dread and Keep on the Borderlands.
As an adult, experienced DM, I've had wonderful times with both of them. As an inexperienced teenager... they weren't great. (I did hit on the idea of just skipping the wilderness & keep and going to the Caves after my initial horrible efforts, and that worked well).
It's the thing you really have to keep in mind when discussing adventures: DM skill and tastes play hugely into their success.
I've had great success with Lost Mine of Phandelver, Tyranny of Dragons, Curse of Strahd, and Storm King's Thunder this edition, running each multiple times. But with Descent into Avernus, I was never more glad when covid lockdown meant we couldn't continue with it.
Tomb of Annihilation is a really weird one - because the basic structure of it frustrates me utterly. (How many clues are there to the location of the Soulmonger? All this hexcrawling, and no clues to be found!) But then I get to Omu, and have the best time you can imagine. Meanwhile, I know many of my DM friends just added lots of stuff to the hexcrawl and made it an Adventure To Remember. Same thing I do with Tyranny (though I think I rely a lot more on the inspiration of the base text).
When an adventure inspires the DM enough to add to it, surely there's something to it?
But then you get Vecna: Eve of Ruin, and I'm watching a lot of people's reports on running it (I finished it last year), and almost to a man they despair at the actual scenarios, and replace them with their own material. The underlying idea is fine, but the implementation -- it's serviceable. You can run it. But great? Not from where I'm standing.
Hussar
Legend
I mean, really, a module being "great" or "blah" is going to be so different to so many people. I like running modules. I do. But, I like modules that are fairly bare bones that I can then build on. And, even when the module isn't bare bones, I'm still going to go off on tangents and do my own thing. I tend to look at the module that's written as the skeleton of the campaign, but, the meat is often going to come from me and a lot of the meat is going to come from the players giving me cool ideas to run with.
As an example, I had a short lived game using Dragonheist last year. One of the players decided he REALLY wanted to dive into the whole pit fighting/boxing thing. So, now, my Waterdeep has a huge fighting championship organization that runs regular, non-lethal, legal fights - sort of MMA type stuff - in lots of different locations. Had the campaign not come to a grinding halt due to scheduling issues, I was really looking forward to building on that. One of the other players in that group wanted to become a perfume merchant (as well as assassin and poisoner but that's another story) to the wealthy and we had all sorts of interactions between him and various higher up NPC's, not about dangerous killing stuff, but, just to get a new scent.
All of that was stuff I'd never do on my own. And I REALLY don't think any module would include that. But, it was incredibly memorable. Tons of fun.
As an example, I had a short lived game using Dragonheist last year. One of the players decided he REALLY wanted to dive into the whole pit fighting/boxing thing. So, now, my Waterdeep has a huge fighting championship organization that runs regular, non-lethal, legal fights - sort of MMA type stuff - in lots of different locations. Had the campaign not come to a grinding halt due to scheduling issues, I was really looking forward to building on that. One of the other players in that group wanted to become a perfume merchant (as well as assassin and poisoner but that's another story) to the wealthy and we had all sorts of interactions between him and various higher up NPC's, not about dangerous killing stuff, but, just to get a new scent.
All of that was stuff I'd never do on my own. And I REALLY don't think any module would include that. But, it was incredibly memorable. Tons of fun.
Yeah, people use modules for different things and get different things out of them. I don’t think I’ve run a module completely out of the box for nearly forty years.
My personal classic old school D&D module experience was the Dragonlance modules, which I ran as a campaign. It was an awesome campaign but honestly I don’t think I used more than 10% of the material at best.
More recently I ran a version of Dragon Heist set in a parallel version of the modern world which the D&D characters had visited in search of their nemesis, and honestly it was more like Shadowrun than anything, down to mostly being set in and around Seattle.
My personal classic old school D&D module experience was the Dragonlance modules, which I ran as a campaign. It was an awesome campaign but honestly I don’t think I used more than 10% of the material at best.
More recently I ran a version of Dragon Heist set in a parallel version of the modern world which the D&D characters had visited in search of their nemesis, and honestly it was more like Shadowrun than anything, down to mostly being set in and around Seattle.
I would say no on that, they’re all about too many cooks, freelancers, on all adventures since.
Also
Isn’t ToA a very aggressively rehashed mashup of isle of dread and tomb of horrors? Always seemed like the idea to me.
They actually did pull back. The teams are a lot smaller after that one and Rime. (Not counting anthology products, of course).
Descent into Avernus: 11 story creators, 2 story consultants, 15 writers. (some overlap).
Rime of the Frostmaiden: 1 story creator & lead writer, 11 writers
Wild Beyond the Witchlight: 1 project lead, 4 writers, 5 additional writing
Shadow of the Dragon Queen: 1 project lead, 10 writers
The Shattered Obelisk: 1 project lead, 6 writers (but 2 were only on the original Lost Mine).
Vecna: Eve of Ruin: 1 lead designer, 3 designers
(And Eve of Ruin is substantially longer than Descent).
It's inspired by Isle of Dread and Tomb of Horrors, certainly. But that's not a bad idea at all - as long as executed well.
I like Tomb of Annihilation a lot less than many of my friends, but I do think it has enough of the "right stuff".
Paul Farquhar
Legend
ToA is a fine adventure. But it’s not an innovative adventure, it’s highly derivative of what has gone before. Which is the issue really: the longer D&D is around, the harder it becomes to come up with anything new.
Which leads be me to conclude that Radiant Citadel is the only Classic of the modern era (which is not saying it’s the best).
Compare to Lost Mines: Utterly unoriginal but very well executed.
Which leads be me to conclude that Radiant Citadel is the only Classic of the modern era (which is not saying it’s the best).
Compare to Lost Mines: Utterly unoriginal but very well executed.
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