So, what's the worst published module or adventure you ever made the mistake of obtaining, be it by purchase, gift or (I hope not) theft?

And did you figure out how bad it was before or after trying to run it?

RPGPundit

Cloudland.  Grenadier wrote adventure modules for various companies they made miniatures for; Cloudland was their foray into D&D-adventures.  P-U.

I will say the Book of Lairs I and II as distant 2nd place tieholders, however even those have some salvageable bits.

Race to the Yellow Lotus. Railroad. Which is not intrinsically bad. But it was the most unfun railroad I've ever seen, and certainly the most unfun I've tried to DM. What can I say? I was tired, and I'd only read the module in the hours before the game session...even then, I had that "sinking" feeling...

Probably one of the Dragonlance modules, but I uh 'inherited' them so I'm not counting them.

Probably Dungeonland or Land Beyond the Magic Mirror.

Nevermind, Quagmire!

(The exclamation point is part of the title, not excitement on my part.)



It was obviously bad on reading it, but many years later I ran (parts of) it just for shits & giggles.

What was wrong with Quagmire? I've actually never seen it before.

I'd have to vote Dungeonland and the Land Beyond the Magic Mirror...but I have not read either as an adult. When they came out, both were just so bizarre and unlike what our teenage selves though was D&D.

I wonder if I'd see more value in them now.

As for non-D&D, the absolute worst is the introductory adventure, the Imperial Fringe, that came in the Deluxe Traveller box. Here's the setup. You meet in a bar. Have a bar fight. Then you get hired by the Scout Service to survey 440 worlds. Go! Uh....okay.

I even ran it as a teenager. All the PCs packed into a 100 ton space VW Bug that could not outrun anything going around the sector like Star Trek with shotguns. Fortunately, the players were fellow teenagers and everything quickly went Natural Born Killers.

Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress and the 4e Dark Sun adventure. Bruce Cordell is responsible for both atrocities.

Terrible Trouble at Tragidore, the module that came with the 2nd edition DM Screen. Jean and Bruce Rabe are responsible for multiple horrible generic AD&D modules from the early 90s, but this stands out as being especially uninspired, overwritten and downright lame. Railroady plot, lots of boxed text, a Scooby Doo-style mystery (the "vampires" in the woods are bandits who dress up in gothwear and put fake wooden stakes in their mouth!), a non sequitur conclusion (it turns out the villagers have been kidnapped by drow after all! So here is a tower full of drow!) and boring room descriptions (this is a barrack room. there are multiple cots. The cabinet next to the third contains a pair of dice and 12 sp.)

This module was inflicted on everyone who bought that DM screen. They got a useless module and they also got a useless DM screen (four panels, badly organised data, flimsy material made it fall over with alarming frequency). So the usual business TSR was up to at that time.

I've purchased some real stinkers: The Forest Oracle, Gargoyle, et cetera.  But the one that pissed me off the most was Castle Greyhawk (the "Greyhawk is a big joke" module).

I ran a *very* heavily modified version of Forest Oracle.  I thought Gargoyle was so stupid that I never ran it.  And Castle Greyhawk was so far away from what I was looking for that I just put it in a box and tried to pretend it didn't exist.  I know there's a place for joke modules and they can be funny and fun.  And I know that the real Greyhawk dungeons included jokes and silly stuff, too (e.g., Dungeonland and Magic Mirror were from Greyhawk sublevels).  

But you don't publish Castle Greyhawk, the legendary dungeon that everyone has heard about and wanted to see for years, as your big joke dungeon.  Still annoys the crap out me, apparently...

Exit Visa for Classic Traveller. This mini-module is in The Traveller Book and is a tedious role-playing snipe hunt through a labyrinthine bureaucracy in order to get, you guessed it, permission for the PC's ship to leave port. You have to get strung along from one bureaucrat NPC to another bureaucrat NPC and try to find the right one to get the visa along the way while bribing and wining & dining each one you encounter. I have never run this for anyone, because after reading it, I came to the conclusion that I would be beaten to death if I ever inflicted this on a Player group (and it would be considered justifiable homicide).

A Distant Echo by the now defunct Viking Games for D&D 3E. This module has it all, bad art, piss-poor writing, terrible railroad metaplot, crappy dungeons, nonsensical NPCs, and a wizard's familiar that doesn't leave its master who died of stupidity (lone low-level wizard without backup takes on goblin tribe in lair and gets his ass handed to him). I keep this module around as an example of what not to ever write.

Quote from: Spinachcat;583911What was wrong with Quagmire? I've actually never seen it before.

A very blah pseudo-sandbox, that reuses its main interior map for two (or three) different locations, a conch-shaped tower that is allegedly a city.

A city named Quagmire.

It's like X9 - The Savage Coast except less interesting, if possible.

So many worthy modules mentioned already: Gargoyle, Tragiadore, Forest Oracle...

For me the absolute worst was Keep on Shadowfell - the intro module for 4E. There are probably worse modules going around but none of them managed to put me off an entire edition of an RPG like Shadowfell did in under 3 sessions.

That's not so easy. I read lots and lots and lots of modules, most of which were probably forgettable (nondescript, bland, boring) but the top ones that actively repulse me are:


DL12 Dragons of Faith
DL13 Dragons of Truth
DL14 Dragons of Triumph
There's much to be said about the storyfication of D&D and railroadyness of Dragonlance but every DL module before DL12 (not counting the boardgame DL11) I could at least salvage for maps and bits, making my DL campaign less railroady.
But the final three "modules" were no modules at all. They were sketches, and bad at that. The maps were utterly boring and generic (gone were the times of remarkable locations and 3D-maps like Thorbardin's Tomb, or Xak Tsaroth; the blandness and emptyness of the High Clerist Tower should have been a warning sign), and preparing those adventures was more work than writing them from ground up.


Right after those Dragonlance modules comes everything from Paizo.
I use photocopies of location maps, with scribbles of what goes on where. I can't copy those colored maps. Some of those locations look gorgeous, granted, but all this eye candy is wasted because only the DM can see it and it doesn't add to the usability of the module at all. Think about how a module is used at the table, Paizo. (I guess there is some truth in the notion that PF modules are mainly bought to be read and collected, instead to be used in active play.)
There might be gems hidden under all that color and fluff but I can't use them.


Third offender is the very few D&D4 modules that I saw. Those things look so different to me that that I have a hard time calling them "RPG adventures".  The general layout of the pamphlets, the listings of the combatants and who starts where on the poster map lets me only see set pieces for miniature skirmishes. More like a Battletech or HeroClix scenario.

Revenge of the Giants for 4E.

WOTC took a classic module series and churned out the most craptastic version imaginable.

Sabre River. This craptastic module was supposedly for Companion level characters. It promised a campaign setting. It delivered a railroad with a Mary Sue macguffin. Least amount of fun I had playing D&D in the 80s.

Quote from: Fiasco;583937So many worthy modules mentioned already: Gargoyle, Tragiadore, Forest Oracle...

For me the absolute worst was Keep on Shadowfell - the intro module for 4E. There are probably worse modules going around but none of them managed to put me off an entire edition of an RPG like Shadowfell did in under 3 sessions.

Oh lord I think I have a copy of Child's Play around here somewhere, or maybe it's Gargoyle but yes those were horrible.