Dragon Mountain needs work but it is one of my favourites. As you say, any module (or nearly any) can be fixed with some work. Here are some of my recommendations (spoiler warning): 1) Remove the bait and switch with the first Book. Lothar DOES have information about the Mountain that will help the PCs find it. Instead of fleeing the assassin's guild, have him fleeing, half-mad, from Hittel, so that Lothar drops a subtle clue to that (without naming him). 2) Remove or reduce the potency of the Amulet of Dragon Warding. 3) Resolve the battle at the end of Book 1 using Battlesystem 2e (just for fun!). 4) Once inside the mountain, fill in all of those empty sections with monsters that are NOT Kobolds. Nests of pet cockatrices, angry Dwarven ghosts, enraged earth elementals and out of control Dwarven constructs. 5) Use the politics of the tribes as a centerpiece for the campaign, but don't allow for any alliance to last long. The players will obviously betray the tribes, so the tribes should do the same. Apply a cost for any alliance and makes alliances shift regularly so that cost changes and must constantly be paid. 6) You can have a few regular fights with them now and then, but the Kobolds should mostly be used as a force of nature… it should feel like the PCs are fighting against the ocean waves, not individual monsters. Throw out things like the overbearing rules… tell a PC that they are thronged with Kobolds and to make an open doors roll to avoid getting dragged down. Tell another few PCs that their area becomes saturated with all manner of missiles (darts, arrows, rocks, Kobold droppings)… 5d4 damage, save vs dragons breath for half. Introduce completely insane moves every few battles… Kobolds with hand grenades or barrel bombs, Kobold rust monster cavalry, Kobold flamethrowers, inebriated self-immolating Kobolds, Kobold war wagons or Kobolds riding in Dwarven battle mechs. If the PCs swat at the throngs, just say a couple of the little demons drop but the rest will keep swarming. If the PCs manage to do enough, the little monsters will recede into holes and dark corners for now only to return later. The Kobolds aren't 1,000 individual monsters… they are literally a force of nature.
@@WillyMuffinUK This was also one of my favorite campaigns to play. Two things I did to change this up was make most of the NPCs recruitable (most are anyway) for the purpose of killing them off later to amp up the danger of the Kobolds. As for the Kobolds themselves? I turned them into professional grade armies that have been hardened by years and years and years of faction infighting and politic-ing in the mountain. There is a battle in the town before you go into the mountain, I turned this into a Battle of Helms Deep-esque encounter to hammer in that while these are kobolds, they aren't the kobolds they are used to. This gave me the chance to be far more creative in kobold encounters with unforeseen difficulties (like a Spartan-esque Kobold pike wall in one of the corridors, or Kobold "arrow storms") as well as flavor out the individual factions for how they have adapted to the constant fighting for favor in the mountain. The real problem with Dragon Mountain is, as you said, the sameness of the dungeon itself. It's a slog. Nobody wants to fight the same creature 100 times. It also gave me a starting point for another campaign that was just alluded to in the story with the return of Nectos the Undying (of course, renamed). Heck, you can even retcon the 3 undead bosses you fight into his generals. All in All, like all old DnD stuff... was good but needs tweaks for the modern gamer.
@@Shrugnick238 Sounds like you've had fun with it! But, as I've said elsewhere, "good if you change a bunch of things" is still bad 😉 And don't forget - some new stuff is good, too. But needs changing for the older gamer 😁
Waaiit a minute, your Greyhawk video sent me here, but now you're sending me to a third video for your thoughts on the Return to Elemental Evil! You sneaky cross marketer you!
I find myself in agreement with Wally Muffin. There are so many well intentioned adventurers here that I wish I could share with my son as I originally enjoyed them with my friends so long ago. However… there are adventures that I would not pay the current price to play with him. There have always been throw away quests. And these are no exception. Well done my friend!
That's actually a fair point I hadn't considered: "Would someone spend money on an adventure to use it". I know there are plenty of adventures that I felt were overpriced for what they are, and a few that could have been more expensive and I'd still have deemed the cost worth it!
Interesting list, and while I usually write my own material, if I need to lean on something to start a campaign, I will use Keep on the Borderlands, and then feed my own "Rumors and jobs" onto the Tavern's "Help Board."
I'd say I'm a collector, but in my defense I do use much of what I collect instead of sticking them in some sort archival vault. Up the Garden Path is out of my league so I won't pry whether you still have it, but I do find it pretty amazing you were actually there to buy one and read it first hand. Graeme Morris is one of my favourite module writers, so it's too bad this one wasn't very good.
Yeah, classic case of collectability via scarcity rather than quality. But in its defence, it was never meant to be anything but a bit of advertising. I don't like to consider myself a collector - it's just an accumulation over the years. That's not to say the chunks of that accumulation I have sold off at various points in decluttering exercises hasn't been painful to some degree!
Dragon Mountain is a travesty of an adventure: money was lavished on the bells & whistles while the adventure is a joyless, mindless meatgrinder. Players are assumed to be fools locked into hack & slash (or bullied into it by DM fiat), when a find the path spell will allow the characters to bypass the entire dungeon and go directly to confronting the end boss dragon.
Thank you for mentioning Ghost Tower. Every time I read that module, I just can't envision a place for it in my campaign. My least favorite modules are the collected Dragonlance modules. Lots of neat maps and settings ruined by an entire series of modules that amount to a role-playing Transcontinental Railroad.
On DragonLance - it's also somewhat telling that they (TSR/WotC/etc.) have never managed to successfully move the game away from that old story. They've tried - but it's just stuck there. And here we are again, with DragonLance coming to 5E - still in that War of the Lance period. Anyway... I don't hate them. But yeah, one massive railroad. The start of all railroads to come.
I totally agree with you on the whole collector mindset. Things are meant to be used. I do..."collect" things, sort of, as I do have some things sitting on display on shelves, but those are things that, given the right circumstances, will be taken down and used. My old big box PC and Amiga games? They are meant for playing, and I wouldn't buy a game that I didn't intend to play. My AD&D books are meant to be used. The fact that currently, I'm not in a position to use them doesn't mean they won't be used in the future. I never saw the appeal of owning something, JUST to own it, nor that strange desire to "complete" a collection. I keep seeing people buying things they don't actually want, simply because they feel compelled to, because they have the other parts of a set, or some such. It boggles the mind.
Rampant consumerism. The big bugbear for me is when things are manufactured specifically to be collectable, or with artificial rarity built in by a publisher. One of the reasons why I never really got into CCGs. It does seem llke a lot of people buy stuff just to be able to make an Instagram or Facebook post about how they've bought stuff. Odd.
The collector's impulse has always been with us, I recall some 19th-century authors talking about it, and I doubt very much that it was new back then. While I agree that it can be taken to an unhealthy extreme, I understand part of where they're coming from - there's a kind of satisfaction in knowing that things are "complete", and that nothing is missing.
I actually liked Return to Temple of EE....it was huge, bloated...but also pretty creative and lots of cool encounter. I would not recommend playing thru the whole thing but just pick the good parts.
"Needs to be cannibalised to work" is a mark of a bad adventure - and that's what you seem to be doing in order to like RttToEE? I'm pretty sure all the design brief said about it was "we need a nostalgia piece with Temple of Elemental Evil in the title". And from there, Monte went mad 😉
And 5E adventures (which I have run several a few years ago before I dropped 5E), after Lost Mines of Phandelver for a fun little intro to the system, are good reading but horribly played without big work and alterations/additions. Not to mention taking place in an exhausted and now neutered Forgotten Realms.
They read like stories rather than adventures. It's a shame, in my opinion, that designers feel the need to go so overboard these days, filling 300 pages where 64 would provide a DM something more useful to work with.
@@WillyMuffinUK Absolutely! Almost as if we cannot possibly "take it from there" and run a great adventure at the table. DM fiat is kinda dead in this regard, and perhaps another as well.
@@WillyMuffinUK Indeed I do, and I miss those days of both freedom and creativity... to be the 'actual' DM. Thnx again Willy, for these looks back into our "glorious" past. 🤪👊
Don't know why you don't like Castle Caldwell. I've ran at is a session 1 game a couple of times. Ok yes I did basically cut down on the rooms and didn't run my party through everything. However I think the best part of the module is when the party enters a teleport room and the door they entered through vanishes right before them. Watching the numerous parties I've sent quietly utter holy sh*t to themselves was golden. And the little riddle at the end is brilliant and it really saves it from being an otherwise bland dungeon.
I think you've kind of answered the question for me... So, from what I understand from your comment is that you omit chunks, and there are only two elements of it that save it from being bland... Not sure what else to say!
I love your subjective opinions. This statement needs to be screamed from the rooftops of WOTC, and another gaming company I won't mention!! Welcome back, sir! 👊 Thnx for this 👍
Edit: Just to make it clear: I blame the biggest screw-up of Hoard of the Dragon Queen squarely on whoever at WotC/Hasbro was responsible for pushing out the abomination that was the first printing of this adventure without double checking if the adventure was even workable without tweaks within 5th Edition rules. If you can't put out a viable product, delay and fix the product. Period. No excuses ! One very important note about Hoard of the Dragon Queen - that makes it much worse than the other offerings on this list, imho - is that the original printing basically wasn't playable without adjusting many things on the fly (and I'm not sure how much has been adjusted for the reprint). The module was, appearently, written before the rules for 5th Edition had been set in stone and - somehow - assumed that level 1 player character would be fine with going through almost a dozen deadly encounters in a row without ever getting a long rest. Spoiler alert: That's not how 5th edition works, you only get 1 hit die to restore hitpoints at level 1 per long rest and most abilities and almost all spells only replenish after a long rest ! And even if you adjust all of that on the fly, the players are either going to be extremely frustrated by having to idly watch horrible things happen to the village/castle they are trying to protect in a cutscene-esque manner - or their characters are going to die in a pointless fashion in an encounter that is several times above the deadly threshhold. And if they somehow survive that, they get to stay on the boring, uninspiring railroad - fun !
I experienced the first portion of this adventure as a player (up till the wagon train) until our DM got bored of it & decided to make their own adventure. And funnily enough the 1st section was my favorite part BECAUSE it was so tense and brutal. But of course I'm the type of player who enjoys being stressed out in terrible situations, so I can see how anyone of a different sort of temperament would not enjoy it lol.
I saw a review of Hoard that heavily criticised it for being generic and uninspired - for example, a very simple addition would be for the random encounter tables to be less barebones. Even something as simple as "1d6 Hobgoblins tormenting townsfolk" would've been better than "1d6 Hobgoblins". It didn't give the DM a lot to work with.
No N2 The Forest Oracle? It is bad on so many metrics - from grammar to plot, spelling to editing, from inconsistent NPCs to missing text; The Forest Oracle fails miserably.
It's somewhat of a nonentity module for me. I've raided from it, but have never been inspired by it enough to run it. So, it falls in the "meh" category (and therefore outside my 10 list) for me.
It's somewhat of a nonentity module for me. I've raided from it, but have never been inspired by it enough to run it. So, it falls in the "meh" category (and therefore outside my 10 list) for me.
The traps in Grimtooths books are awesome to work with, especially those traps that can take out entire parties if the Rogue is not paying attention......
Campaign Cartographer. It's a flexible CAD-based programme that can do all sorts of maps - worlds, wilderness, dungeons, cities, space, astrological diagrams, elevations, modern... etc. etc. etc.
I’m currently DMing my fiancée with multiple PCs in her first big adventure (after solo adventures): Castle Caldwell. I’m thinking it’s a simple first adventure and I’m thinking that, by starting with a simple, silly adventure, later ones (e.g. Palace of the Silver Princess, Horror on the Hill, the Veiled Society and the Isle of Dread) will be even more enjoyable.
Do you know the best thing you can do to make the collector gods angry is undercut and sell your coffee for $30 so that sells instead of the ridiculously priced one
Ah, but then that would most likely be to a collector, who would then feel the urge to create a Facebook post about how he managed to nab a copy for $30!
I’d say most of these bad modules you could find a simple root cause for. Prior to 1987, I’d say the writers were either phoning it in to make a deadline, were toying around with ideas that didn’t flesh out, or in the case of Castle Caldwell - a group project where you always have that one procrastinator that crams it in overnight. Only the walls know how many may have been screwing around or, on bad drug trips, or stoned out until the deadline. Post 1987 I’d say there was too much corporatization. More shiny products, Dragon Mountain, that spent more time on marketing than writing and testing. Finally I think without Gary’s Greyhawk expertise or review, the product went downhill. TSR also probably wanted to distance themselves from his campaign.
Given the roller-coaster Greyhawk was put through, I'd say it was a definite that they wanted to distance themselves from it. I wouldn't say that they needed Gygax for QC - but they did need someone. As for the rest - I think there's merit to your "1987 theory". It's certainly borne out by some of the evidence, even if there are some fantastic works on both sides of your proposed line. Maybe they are the exceptions that prove it 🤔🙂
@@WillyMuffinUK I like to compare it in a way to Atari of the early age. You had people who showed up for a check, you had superstars, and then people who looked good on a resume. My friends who worked there between 82-92 likes their coworkers but the environment kinda sucked. I guess there were some huge egos and related issues in the early 80’s which shifted to production deadlines in the 90’s.
Fun video! I appreciate what you thought worked and didn't work about each. For 5th ed, while HotDQ is bad, you haven't seen excrement until you've read Descent Into Avernus. It was marketed as Mad Max in Hell, which would have been awesome. It was mostly a Baldur's Gate sourcebook with an adventure set there and a tedious and frustrating series of fetch quests in Avernus. It is the worst adventure I have ever read. It was then I decided to stop giving WotC money, because they are selling me materials I have to fix to make decent. I would also put any adventure written by Ed Greenwood on the bad pile. He is a talented world builder, but his adventures usually are railroads (with detailed instructions on how to force players into doing what he wants) that lead from one scene of NPC showboating to the next. The Avatar trilogy adventures are particularly bad about this, because most scenes leave nothing interesting for the players to do.
Descent into Avernus I sort of enjoy, mainly because it has some interesting idiosyncracies. But yes, it is another WotC railroad. I do agree with your Ed Greenwood assessment, too - at least, in those published adventures of his that tie in with novels. There's too much of an attempt to recreate the pattern of the novels. I think I'd blame more the remit than Greenwood specifically. However, if you follow back through his Dragon articles of yore, you'll see where the pattern of providing vast backgrounds for monsters comes from, rather than a paragraph and "let the DM fill in the blanks" that the original monster stats had. The devil's in the detail, and sometimes the detail is the devil.
This was a fun video. I would add a 5e adventure, Descent Into Avernus. It's complete garbage writing. The concepts behind it are amazing (Mad Max in Hell, the possible redemption of an Archduke, having to save an entire city from damnation) and the execution absolute garbage (Mad Max is basically so tiny a part as to not matter, the drama of the Archduke is spoiled at the very first chance and comes down to an obnoxious step and fetch quest followed by a die roll, and the city is one neither the PCs nor anyone reading the adventure has ever given a crap about). In preparing to run it, I had to rewrite pretty much everything and cut the pointless first half in Baldur's Gate. That's when I decided to stop giving WotC my money for garbage product.
The only one I didn't know on the list was "Up the Garden Path". But since I'm not British (my late grandmother would argue otherwise), it's hardly surprising. I started with 1st-edition AD&D around 1984 when I was in my twenties and if I didn't see the modules on the shelves, then I saw advertisements in Dragon magazine. The Tyranny of Dragons series had to be adapted to my homebrew world to start with. At least two chapters were excised and replaced with adventures which tied in more with what the PCs were doing. I certainly didn't run "Hoard" as is. First, the beginning seemed more work than it needed to be. Second, it was also unfair with the endless attacks. A friend of mine made the mistake of running it as is and it was very bad. He kept popping in new NPCs with yet more potions of healing. I tried to explain the problems out of the session and he stopped the campaign entirely. I'm not sure if that's because he was upset with me or simply decided it wasn't worth it. As for my "Tyranny" campaign, everything worked out well enough. I was amused but not startled to see "Ghost Tower of Inverness" on your list. I never thought I'd run it but after a couple of characters suffered mishaps thanks to the Deck of Many Things, it provided a nice rescue mission to retrieve the characters' souls. True, I had to change some things, but it wasn't too far from the original. The group spent about four sessions to get through it all. We would have come last in a tournament! Possibly the Con would be over too.
Ghost Tower is very tournament-y. I'm intrigued - did you run it with the scoring? You raise a good point - with respect to Hoard, but equally applicable to most "worst" adventures: none of them are irredeemable. Even if its just lifting an encounter or location or somesuch, they can be bad and still useful.
@@WillyMuffinUK No points awarded. I treated the module as a regular dungeon. I mentioned your list to my players (no replies yet), and pointed out that most adventures can be redeemed with some work. But there's a point where you may as well have homebrewed an adventure in the first place. Where that point is will depend on the person and the needs of the campaign.
WGM1 - Border Watch is pure dreck. Absurd plot. Saying it was written for nine year-olds would be an insult to nine year-olds. However, the setting has great potential. Favorite NPC line to ridicule: "Kill all Lizardmen on sight!" The problem with having a Saturday morning cartoon aimed at 7 and 8 year olds is that they might want to play D&D before they are really old enough to play D&D. WGM1 is sort of like Bible Stories for Children meets D&D at Sunday School in 1993. Of course by 1993, Greyhawk was well established as TSR's litterbox.
Yeah - my Greyhawk video does highlight the period when the setting was a bit of a hole for crap. Puppets, Child's Play, Patriots of Ulek, Border Watch, Gargoyle.... There were some great 2nd Ed. Greyhawk works, but a fair chunk of it was just plain bad.
Love Tegel Manor. And Bone Hill don't mind Deep Dwarven Delve. But it's quite a simple dungeon. I have issues with Assassin's Knot. I'm eager to run it. We failed it a couple times as players. Love the Ghost Tower of Inverness, but we play it as a one shot. Yes the Conan adventures were terrible. I heard the Red sonja was the best of the three. But it was too late by the time it came out.
Ian, since you’re into using things and not collecting them, please sell your copy of Up the Garden Path and use the money gained to give to Oxfam or another charity or for presents for your loved ones or something.
I have sold on so much of my old odds and sods. It's an eye-opener what collectors will pay for things! And yes, the £££ goes to good use. I might have sold my copy of ST1. Or buried it. Or given it to Elon Musk to send to the Moon. Not telling! My general rule of thumb: * Am I likely to use this again? * If not, do the kids want it? * If not, can I really justify keeping it?
Good bad list. I completely agree regarding Dragon Mountain. A friend purchased it and then asked me to run it. Absolutely uninspired railroading. We made it about 1/2 through before I gave up.
I have to admit, I like Castle Caldwell. It is a nice adventure for new players, especially younger ones. Deep Dwarves Delve is pretty forgettable for sure. A few of the others I haven't played. Conan is basically cheesy tie-in-material
Maybe that's a context I hadn't considered regarding Caldwell. What age do you think it works best with? Personally, I don't think anyone over 10-12 would find it that interesting compared to other adventures, but I'm open to considering it suitable for a younger set.
@@WillyMuffinUK I ran it for my kids when they were 12 - 13 years old as one of the first dungeons. Very simple plots, maps, and concepts. Obviously, B1 & 2 will work fine as well
Even when I was really into 5e I couldn't stand 5e adventure books. They're more like interactive novels than anything else before them. Multiplayer Lone Wolf with extra work is what they are in my opinion.
By and large, I tend to agree. They already have too much of the intended direction of the plot already worked out - not much wiggle room for PC actions to carry weight and meaning!
Your collection is clearly missing the TSR adventure published: Red Sonja Unconquered by Anne Gray McCready. Ridiculously framed encounters, unbeatable monsters, and the "climax" of the adventure (spoiler alert) the players don't determine the outcome, but rather NPC does. So the players end up being just along for the ride. A little skin on the cover to sell it (in stark contrast of every other product of the time moving away from the dungeon bimbo style art) does capture the flavor of the old Robert E Howard character, but it is the only thing about the adventure that does. The extra large font, ever increasing headers, footers, and borders on the page, decreasing word count, increasing price, and absolutely no play-testing before release... this represents the lowest point of Dungeons and dragons.
No, it's not missing it - I just find it falling out of the top 10. When I get to the Hyborean Age in game settings, then I'll open up on it and the CB modules!
I can't attest to that - I put this list together before Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel came out, and I still haven't read through a copy. So, I will reserve judgement!
I actually enjoyed the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I think it could benefit from some expansion of the regions around the dungeons. (Much like Curse of Strahd did.) But I had fun running it. I am a bit surprised that there wasn't more recent adventures on this list, but i am well aware that TSR had some stinkers. Especially when they were still trying to figure out what makes a good adventure product. I'm also surprised that there wasn't at least a token adventure from Dungeon Magazine on this list. I suppose, however that there is only so much you can fit on a list like this.
Yep - when limiting to 10, token entries couldn't really be a thing. There were some awful adventures in Dungeon, Polyhedron, etc., but the list needed to focus on what I consider "things that had no right to be bad" - pro writers working with all the resources they could possibly need to create something great.
![ILLSLICK X YOUNGOHM - We're The same [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/yUJNkobYR0E/mqdefault.jpg)
Dragon Mountain needs work but it is one of my favourites. As you say, any module (or nearly any) can be fixed with some work. Here are some of my recommendations (spoiler warning): 1) Remove the bait and switch with the first Book. Lothar DOES have information about the Mountain that will help the PCs find it. Instead of fleeing the assassin's guild, have him fleeing, half-mad, from Hittel, so that Lothar drops a subtle clue to that (without naming him). 2) Remove or reduce the potency of the Amulet of Dragon Warding. 3) Resolve the battle at the end of Book 1 using Battlesystem 2e (just for fun!). 4) Once inside the mountain, fill in all of those empty sections with monsters that are NOT Kobolds. Nests of pet cockatrices, angry Dwarven ghosts, enraged earth elementals and out of control Dwarven constructs. 5) Use the politics of the tribes as a centerpiece for the campaign, but don't allow for any alliance to last long. The players will obviously betray the tribes, so the tribes should do the same. Apply a cost for any alliance and makes alliances shift regularly so that cost changes and must constantly be paid. 6) You can have a few regular fights with them now and then, but the Kobolds should mostly be used as a force of nature… it should feel like the PCs are fighting against the ocean waves, not individual monsters. Throw out things like the overbearing rules… tell a PC that they are thronged with Kobolds and to make an open doors roll to avoid getting dragged down. Tell another few PCs that their area becomes saturated with all manner of missiles (darts, arrows, rocks, Kobold droppings)… 5d4 damage, save vs dragons breath for half. Introduce completely insane moves every few battles… Kobolds with hand grenades or barrel bombs, Kobold rust monster cavalry, Kobold flamethrowers, inebriated self-immolating Kobolds, Kobold war wagons or Kobolds riding in Dwarven battle mechs. If the PCs swat at the throngs, just say a couple of the little demons drop but the rest will keep swarming. If the PCs manage to do enough, the little monsters will recede into holes and dark corners for now only to return later. The Kobolds aren't 1,000 individual monsters… they are literally a force of nature.
That's a fair few fixes! Thank you for sharing.
@@WillyMuffinUK This was also one of my favorite campaigns to play. Two things I did to change this up was make most of the NPCs recruitable (most are anyway) for the purpose of killing them off later to amp up the danger of the Kobolds. As for the Kobolds themselves? I turned them into professional grade armies that have been hardened by years and years and years of faction infighting and politic-ing in the mountain. There is a battle in the town before you go into the mountain, I turned this into a Battle of Helms Deep-esque encounter to hammer in that while these are kobolds, they aren't the kobolds they are used to. This gave me the chance to be far more creative in kobold encounters with unforeseen difficulties (like a Spartan-esque Kobold pike wall in one of the corridors, or Kobold "arrow storms") as well as flavor out the individual factions for how they have adapted to the constant fighting for favor in the mountain. The real problem with Dragon Mountain is, as you said, the sameness of the dungeon itself. It's a slog. Nobody wants to fight the same creature 100 times. It also gave me a starting point for another campaign that was just alluded to in the story with the return of Nectos the Undying (of course, renamed). Heck, you can even retcon the 3 undead bosses you fight into his generals. All in All, like all old DnD stuff... was good but needs tweaks for the modern gamer.
@@Shrugnick238 Sounds like you've had fun with it! But, as I've said elsewhere, "good if you change a bunch of things" is still bad 😉
And don't forget - some new stuff is good, too. But needs changing for the older gamer 😁
Waaiit a minute, your Greyhawk video sent me here, but now you're sending me to a third video for your thoughts on the Return to Elemental Evil! You sneaky cross marketer you!
Hey, I've no idea how the TH-cam algorithm works - any channeling is purely accidental 😉
I find myself in agreement with Wally Muffin. There are so many well intentioned adventurers here that I wish I could share with my son as I originally enjoyed them with my friends so long ago. However… there are adventures that I would not pay the current price to play with him. There have always been throw away quests. And these are no exception. Well done my friend!
That's actually a fair point I hadn't considered: "Would someone spend money on an adventure to use it". I know there are plenty of adventures that I felt were overpriced for what they are, and a few that could have been more expensive and I'd still have deemed the cost worth it!
Interesting list, and while I usually write my own material, if I need to lean on something to start a campaign, I will use Keep on the Borderlands, and then feed my own "Rumors and jobs" onto the Tavern's "Help Board."
There are some good key "lean on" adventures out there :)
I'd say I'm a collector, but in my defense I do use much of what I collect instead of sticking them in some sort archival vault. Up the Garden Path is out of my league so I won't pry whether you still have it, but I do find it pretty amazing you were actually there to buy one and read it first hand. Graeme Morris is one of my favourite module writers, so it's too bad this one wasn't very good.
Yeah, classic case of collectability via scarcity rather than quality. But in its defence, it was never meant to be anything but a bit of advertising.
I don't like to consider myself a collector - it's just an accumulation over the years. That's not to say the chunks of that accumulation I have sold off at various points in decluttering exercises hasn't been painful to some degree!
Dragon Mountain is a travesty of an adventure: money was lavished on the bells & whistles while the adventure is a joyless, mindless meatgrinder. Players are assumed to be fools locked into hack & slash (or bullied into it by DM fiat), when a find the path spell will allow the characters to bypass the entire dungeon and go directly to confronting the end boss dragon.
That's not a bad summary!
There's really no such thing as a bad adventure... Only bad DMs.
Thank you for mentioning Ghost Tower. Every time I read that module, I just can't envision a place for it in my campaign.
My least favorite modules are the collected Dragonlance modules. Lots of neat maps and settings ruined by an entire series of modules that amount to a role-playing Transcontinental Railroad.
On DragonLance - it's also somewhat telling that they (TSR/WotC/etc.) have never managed to successfully move the game away from that old story. They've tried - but it's just stuck there. And here we are again, with DragonLance coming to 5E - still in that War of the Lance period.
Anyway... I don't hate them. But yeah, one massive railroad. The start of all railroads to come.
I totally agree with you on the whole collector mindset. Things are meant to be used. I do..."collect" things, sort of, as I do have some things sitting on display on shelves, but those are things that, given the right circumstances, will be taken down and used. My old big box PC and Amiga games? They are meant for playing, and I wouldn't buy a game that I didn't intend to play. My AD&D books are meant to be used. The fact that currently, I'm not in a position to use them doesn't mean they won't be used in the future.
I never saw the appeal of owning something, JUST to own it, nor that strange desire to "complete" a collection. I keep seeing people buying things they don't actually want, simply because they feel compelled to, because they have the other parts of a set, or some such. It boggles the mind.
Rampant consumerism. The big bugbear for me is when things are manufactured specifically to be collectable, or with artificial rarity built in by a publisher. One of the reasons why I never really got into CCGs. It does seem llke a lot of people buy stuff just to be able to make an Instagram or Facebook post about how they've bought stuff. Odd.
The collector's impulse has always been with us, I recall some 19th-century authors talking about it, and I doubt very much that it was new back then. While I agree that it can be taken to an unhealthy extreme, I understand part of where they're coming from - there's a kind of satisfaction in knowing that things are "complete", and that nothing is missing.
Yay, you’re going to make a UK vs USA gaming video! 🤩
Oooooh...this looks spicy. Will watch later this evening.
I actually liked Return to Temple of EE....it was huge, bloated...but also pretty creative and lots of cool encounter. I would not recommend playing thru the whole thing but just pick the good parts.
"Needs to be cannibalised to work" is a mark of a bad adventure - and that's what you seem to be doing in order to like RttToEE?
I'm pretty sure all the design brief said about it was "we need a nostalgia piece with Temple of Elemental Evil in the title". And from there, Monte went mad 😉
And 5E adventures (which I have run several a few years ago before I dropped 5E), after Lost Mines of Phandelver for a fun little intro to the system, are good reading but horribly played without big work and alterations/additions. Not to mention taking place in an exhausted and now neutered Forgotten Realms.
They read like stories rather than adventures. It's a shame, in my opinion, that designers feel the need to go so overboard these days, filling 300 pages where 64 would provide a DM something more useful to work with.
@@WillyMuffinUK Absolutely! Almost as if we cannot possibly "take it from there" and run a great adventure at the table. DM fiat is kinda dead in this regard, and perhaps another as well.
@@retrodmray Remember when we only needed a pamphlet-size book of rules... Sorry, "guidelines" back then 🙂
@@WillyMuffinUK Indeed I do, and I miss those days of both freedom and creativity... to be the 'actual' DM. Thnx again Willy, for these looks back into our "glorious" past. 🤪👊
@@retrodmray You actually think the days of original D&D were the days of being creative and free in the game? Your nostalgia goggles are thick.
Conan’s actual name is Arthur Doyle. When he’s he’s doing macho things, he likes to show off with the words, “Conan is my middle name!”
Heh... I do sometimes wonder if Howard lifted the name from Sir Arthur. It's not exactly a common name - the coincidence is strong!
"If the players complain" -- wait, now I think I need to get a copy off drivethrurpg to see this!
🤣
Don't know why you don't like Castle Caldwell. I've ran at is a session 1 game a couple of times. Ok yes I did basically cut down on the rooms and didn't run my party through everything. However I think the best part of the module is when the party enters a teleport room and the door they entered through vanishes right before them. Watching the numerous parties I've sent quietly utter holy sh*t to themselves was golden. And the little riddle at the end is brilliant and it really saves it from being an otherwise bland dungeon.
I think you've kind of answered the question for me...
So, from what I understand from your comment is that you omit chunks, and there are only two elements of it that save it from being bland... Not sure what else to say!
Can you do a best and worst 10 source books
Good idea!
I love your subjective opinions. This statement needs to be screamed from the rooftops of WOTC, and another gaming company I won't mention!!
Welcome back, sir! 👊 Thnx for this 👍
Too many people these days hate it when other people have different opinions. It's a daft way to live. Viva la difference!
Edit: Just to make it clear: I blame the biggest screw-up of Hoard of the Dragon Queen squarely on whoever at WotC/Hasbro was responsible for pushing out the abomination that was the first printing of this adventure without double checking if the adventure was even workable without tweaks within 5th Edition rules. If you can't put out a viable product, delay and fix the product. Period. No excuses !
One very important note about Hoard of the Dragon Queen - that makes it much worse than the other offerings on this list, imho - is that the original printing basically wasn't playable without adjusting many things on the fly (and I'm not sure how much has been adjusted for the reprint).
The module was, appearently, written before the rules for 5th Edition had been set in stone and - somehow - assumed that level 1 player character would be fine with going through almost a dozen deadly encounters in a row without ever getting a long rest. Spoiler alert: That's not how 5th edition works, you only get 1 hit die to restore hitpoints at level 1 per long rest and most abilities and almost all spells only replenish after a long rest ! And even if you adjust all of that on the fly, the players are either going to be extremely frustrated by having to idly watch horrible things happen to the village/castle they are trying to protect in a cutscene-esque manner - or their characters are going to die in a pointless fashion in an encounter that is several times above the deadly threshhold. And if they somehow survive that, they get to stay on the boring, uninspiring railroad - fun !
Yep, pretty much spot on. The players are merely spectators for much of it.
I experienced the first portion of this adventure as a player (up till the wagon train) until our DM got bored of it & decided to make their own adventure. And funnily enough the 1st section was my favorite part BECAUSE it was so tense and brutal.
But of course I'm the type of player who enjoys being stressed out in terrible situations, so I can see how anyone of a different sort of temperament would not enjoy it lol.
I saw a review of Hoard that heavily criticised it for being generic and uninspired - for example, a very simple addition would be for the random encounter tables to be less barebones. Even something as simple as "1d6 Hobgoblins tormenting townsfolk" would've been better than "1d6 Hobgoblins". It didn't give the DM a lot to work with.
I agree I've changed some things and tweaked story lines on a few . 🤔 Feed it to a Zippo 😅
I'm not sure I'd go that far! 🤣
I watched your videos for hours today. :)
I hope you... well, I guess you must have found them useful and entertaining!
@@WillyMuffinUK Well, I like your informational rants and your history knowledge. :)
Heh... I try to avoid ranting - but y'know, they come out occasionally.
No N2 The Forest Oracle? It is bad on so many metrics - from grammar to plot, spelling to editing, from inconsistent NPCs to missing text; The Forest Oracle fails miserably.
It's somewhat of a nonentity module for me. I've raided from it, but have never been inspired by it enough to run it. So, it falls in the "meh" category (and therefore outside my 10 list) for me.
It's somewhat of a nonentity module for me. I've raided from it, but have never been inspired by it enough to run it. So, it falls in the "meh" category (and therefore outside my 10 list) for me.
I've heard enough bad things about The Forest Oracle to steer clear.
Quite enjoyable, thank you.
Thank-you 🙂
The traps in Grimtooths books are awesome to work with, especially those traps that can take out entire parties if the Rogue is not paying attention......
Indeed... but a whole dungeon of them?!
What program are you using to draw this map? :)
Campaign Cartographer. It's a flexible CAD-based programme that can do all sorts of maps - worlds, wilderness, dungeons, cities, space, astrological diagrams, elevations, modern... etc. etc. etc.
I’ve run Castle Caldwell and Hoard of the Dragon Queen….both were terrible modules. Good list, thanks.
I've run part of Caldwell, but never the actual castle parts. As per the video, Tegal Manor does a similar thing with far better execution :)
I’m currently DMing my fiancée with multiple PCs in her first big adventure (after solo adventures): Castle Caldwell. I’m thinking it’s a simple first adventure and I’m thinking that, by starting with a simple, silly adventure, later ones (e.g. Palace of the Silver Princess, Horror on the Hill, the Veiled Society and the Isle of Dread) will be even more enjoyable.
@@SimonAshworthWood The Veiled Society is a great one to put into that mix - a nice slice of something a little different between dungeons.
I saw someone recommend B9 Castle Caldwel on youtube and got it last week. And I 100% agree it's the worse adventure module ever.
Pretty bland, isn't it.
Do you know the best thing you can do to make the collector gods angry is undercut and sell your coffee for $30 so that sells instead of the ridiculously priced one
Ah, but then that would most likely be to a collector, who would then feel the urge to create a Facebook post about how he managed to nab a copy for $30!
I’d say most of these bad modules you could find a simple root cause for. Prior to 1987, I’d say the writers were either phoning it in to make a deadline, were toying around with ideas that didn’t flesh out, or in the case of Castle Caldwell - a group project where you always have that one procrastinator that crams it in overnight. Only the walls know how many may have been screwing around or, on bad drug trips, or stoned out until the deadline.
Post 1987 I’d say there was too much corporatization. More shiny products, Dragon Mountain, that spent more time on marketing than writing and testing. Finally I think without Gary’s Greyhawk expertise or review, the product went downhill. TSR also probably wanted to distance themselves from his campaign.
Given the roller-coaster Greyhawk was put through, I'd say it was a definite that they wanted to distance themselves from it. I wouldn't say that they needed Gygax for QC - but they did need someone.
As for the rest - I think there's merit to your "1987 theory". It's certainly borne out by some of the evidence, even if there are some fantastic works on both sides of your proposed line. Maybe they are the exceptions that prove it 🤔🙂
@@WillyMuffinUK I like to compare it in a way to Atari of the early age. You had people who showed up for a check, you had superstars, and then people who looked good on a resume. My friends who worked there between 82-92 likes their coworkers but the environment kinda sucked. I guess there were some huge egos and related issues in the early 80’s which shifted to production deadlines in the 90’s.
@@nesmandan1037 And that's how we ended up with ET? 😉
Fun video! I appreciate what you thought worked and didn't work about each.
For 5th ed, while HotDQ is bad, you haven't seen excrement until you've read Descent Into Avernus. It was marketed as Mad Max in Hell, which would have been awesome. It was mostly a Baldur's Gate sourcebook with an adventure set there and a tedious and frustrating series of fetch quests in Avernus. It is the worst adventure I have ever read. It was then I decided to stop giving WotC money, because they are selling me materials I have to fix to make decent.
I would also put any adventure written by Ed Greenwood on the bad pile. He is a talented world builder, but his adventures usually are railroads (with detailed instructions on how to force players into doing what he wants) that lead from one scene of NPC showboating to the next. The Avatar trilogy adventures are particularly bad about this, because most scenes leave nothing interesting for the players to do.
Descent into Avernus I sort of enjoy, mainly because it has some interesting idiosyncracies. But yes, it is another WotC railroad.
I do agree with your Ed Greenwood assessment, too - at least, in those published adventures of his that tie in with novels. There's too much of an attempt to recreate the pattern of the novels. I think I'd blame more the remit than Greenwood specifically.
However, if you follow back through his Dragon articles of yore, you'll see where the pattern of providing vast backgrounds for monsters comes from, rather than a paragraph and "let the DM fill in the blanks" that the original monster stats had. The devil's in the detail, and sometimes the detail is the devil.
This was a fun video. I would add a 5e adventure, Descent Into Avernus. It's complete garbage writing. The concepts behind it are amazing (Mad Max in Hell, the possible redemption of an Archduke, having to save an entire city from damnation) and the execution absolute garbage (Mad Max is basically so tiny a part as to not matter, the drama of the Archduke is spoiled at the very first chance and comes down to an obnoxious step and fetch quest followed by a die roll, and the city is one neither the PCs nor anyone reading the adventure has ever given a crap about). In preparing to run it, I had to rewrite pretty much everything and cut the pointless first half in Baldur's Gate. That's when I decided to stop giving WotC my money for garbage product.
Heh - yeah, I can't say I was enamoured by it. In its defence, I don't think I'd read it through by the time I made this video 😉
The only one I didn't know on the list was "Up the Garden Path". But since I'm not British (my late grandmother would argue otherwise), it's hardly surprising. I started with 1st-edition AD&D around 1984 when I was in my twenties and if I didn't see the modules on the shelves, then I saw advertisements in Dragon magazine.
The Tyranny of Dragons series had to be adapted to my homebrew world to start with. At least two chapters were excised and replaced with adventures which tied in more with what the PCs were doing. I certainly didn't run "Hoard" as is. First, the beginning seemed more work than it needed to be. Second, it was also unfair with the endless attacks. A friend of mine made the mistake of running it as is and it was very bad. He kept popping in new NPCs with yet more potions of healing. I tried to explain the problems out of the session and he stopped the campaign entirely. I'm not sure if that's because he was upset with me or simply decided it wasn't worth it. As for my "Tyranny" campaign, everything worked out well enough.
I was amused but not startled to see "Ghost Tower of Inverness" on your list. I never thought I'd run it but after a couple of characters suffered mishaps thanks to the Deck of Many Things, it provided a nice rescue mission to retrieve the characters' souls. True, I had to change some things, but it wasn't too far from the original. The group spent about four sessions to get through it all. We would have come last in a tournament! Possibly the Con would be over too.
Ghost Tower is very tournament-y. I'm intrigued - did you run it with the scoring?
You raise a good point - with respect to Hoard, but equally applicable to most "worst" adventures: none of them are irredeemable. Even if its just lifting an encounter or location or somesuch, they can be bad and still useful.
@@WillyMuffinUK No points awarded. I treated the module as a regular dungeon.
I mentioned your list to my players (no replies yet), and pointed out that most adventures can be redeemed with some work. But there's a point where you may as well have homebrewed an adventure in the first place. Where that point is will depend on the person and the needs of the campaign.
@@southron_d1349 Very true. Although... At the worst, there's always use as firelighting tinder 😉
@@WillyMuffinUK For example, WG7.
@@southron_d1349 Heh... Although - the cover is fun...
WGM1 - Border Watch is pure dreck. Absurd plot. Saying it was written for nine year-olds would be an insult to nine year-olds. However, the setting has great potential.
Favorite NPC line to ridicule: "Kill all Lizardmen on sight!"
The problem with having a Saturday morning cartoon aimed at 7 and 8 year olds is that they might want to play D&D before they are really old enough to play D&D. WGM1 is sort of like Bible Stories for Children meets D&D at Sunday School in 1993. Of course by 1993, Greyhawk was well established as TSR's litterbox.
Yeah - my Greyhawk video does highlight the period when the setting was a bit of a hole for crap. Puppets, Child's Play, Patriots of Ulek, Border Watch, Gargoyle.... There were some great 2nd Ed. Greyhawk works, but a fair chunk of it was just plain bad.
Love Tegel Manor.
And Bone Hill
don't mind Deep Dwarven Delve. But it's quite a simple dungeon.
I have issues with Assassin's Knot. I'm eager to run it. We failed it a couple times as players.
Love the Ghost Tower of Inverness, but we play it as a one shot.
Yes the Conan adventures were terrible. I heard the Red sonja was the best of the three. But it was too late by the time it came out.
"The best" is relative... None of them were good, but the Red Sonja one was... least worse.
Ian, since you’re into using things and not collecting them, please sell your copy of Up the Garden Path and use the money gained to give to Oxfam or another charity or for presents for your loved ones or something.
I have sold on so much of my old odds and sods. It's an eye-opener what collectors will pay for things! And yes, the £££ goes to good use.
I might have sold my copy of ST1. Or buried it. Or given it to Elon Musk to send to the Moon. Not telling!
My general rule of thumb:
* Am I likely to use this again?
* If not, do the kids want it?
* If not, can I really justify keeping it?
Good bad list. I completely agree regarding Dragon Mountain. A friend purchased it and then asked me to run it. Absolutely uninspired railroading. We made it about 1/2 through before I gave up.
It was a shame, given the scope it was afforded as a product. Annoying when a diamond turns out to be nought but glass!
Fun take, cheers.
Thank-you :)
Nicely done
Thank-you!
It says DELUXE on the box. Case closed, it's awesome.
?
@@WillyMuffinUK you must believe the marketing department!! If they say something is deluxe then that has to be true, right? 😂
@@crapphone7744 Hah! Quite the opposite... When something needs to tell you it's deluxe, it usually isn't ;)
Dragon Mountain, I assume?
@@WillyMuffinUK yeah it's hard to decide, which is the bigger lie? Deluxe! Or New and Improved!
@@crapphone7744 🤣
No mention of 'Terrible Trouble at Tragidore'???
Nope. That was a throw-away DM screen insert - and it never really bothered me that much. It's not as egregious as the ten that are on this list!
I have to admit, I like Castle Caldwell. It is a nice adventure for new players, especially younger ones. Deep Dwarves Delve is pretty forgettable for sure. A few of the others I haven't played. Conan is basically cheesy tie-in-material
Maybe that's a context I hadn't considered regarding Caldwell. What age do you think it works best with? Personally, I don't think anyone over 10-12 would find it that interesting compared to other adventures, but I'm open to considering it suitable for a younger set.
@@WillyMuffinUK I ran it for my kids when they were 12 - 13 years old as one of the first dungeons. Very simple plots, maps, and concepts. Obviously, B1 & 2 will work fine as well
I like return tomb of horrors but everyone says return to temple of elemental evil is junk. Avoiding that one.
Return to the Tomb of Horrors is a fun one :)
I thought C2 Ghost Tower was interesting concept, though I never played that one.
It is very definitely a tournament module. Fun, though.
This is going to be good.
Or bad... I mean, none on that list are good!
Even when I was really into 5e I couldn't stand 5e adventure books. They're more like interactive novels than anything else before them. Multiplayer Lone Wolf with extra work is what they are in my opinion.
By and large, I tend to agree. They already have too much of the intended direction of the plot already worked out - not much wiggle room for PC actions to carry weight and meaning!
Your collection is clearly missing the TSR adventure published: Red Sonja Unconquered by Anne Gray McCready. Ridiculously framed encounters, unbeatable monsters, and the "climax" of the adventure (spoiler alert) the players don't determine the outcome, but rather NPC does. So the players end up being just along for the ride. A little skin on the cover to sell it (in stark contrast of every other product of the time moving away from the dungeon bimbo style art) does capture the flavor of the old Robert E Howard character, but it is the only thing about the adventure that does. The extra large font, ever increasing headers, footers, and borders on the page, decreasing word count, increasing price, and absolutely no play-testing before release... this represents the lowest point of Dungeons and dragons.
No, it's not missing it - I just find it falling out of the top 10. When I get to the Hyborean Age in game settings, then I'll open up on it and the CB modules!
None of these hold a candle to the shit heap that is the Radiant Citadel.
I can't attest to that - I put this list together before Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel came out, and I still haven't read through a copy. So, I will reserve judgement!
@@WillyMuffinUK Youre better off!
I actually enjoyed the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I think it could benefit from some expansion of the regions around the dungeons. (Much like Curse of Strahd did.) But I had fun running it.
I am a bit surprised that there wasn't more recent adventures on this list, but i am well aware that TSR had some stinkers. Especially when they were still trying to figure out what makes a good adventure product. I'm also surprised that there wasn't at least a token adventure from Dungeon Magazine on this list. I suppose, however that there is only so much you can fit on a list like this.
Yep - when limiting to 10, token entries couldn't really be a thing. There were some awful adventures in Dungeon, Polyhedron, etc., but the list needed to focus on what I consider "things that had no right to be bad" - pro writers working with all the resources they could possibly need to create something great.