Quote from: Exploderwizard;734523So you liked Return to White Plume Mountain twice as much as the others eh?

Ha!  Fixed!

With a bit of work the Fighter's Challenge solo module can be turned into quite a decent mini campaign.

I believe Feast of Goblins can still be legally DL'ed free from the previous editions downloads page via the Wayback machine

My experiences with the 2e adventures I purchased went something like this:

"Hey, that looks/sounds cool...*purchase*...*read*...WTF is this shit?...*disappointment*"

The only one I can think of that didn't fit that pattern was Return to the Tomb of Horrors, which I thought was pretty good.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;734481A lot of the stuff from the late 90s looked cheap (i think due to financial issues at the company). I recall the ravenloft line suddenly going from having these gorgeous borders and Fabian art to being printed on plain white background with art that just didn't work for the setting.

Ive got I think the 2nd boxed set. The one with the BW Tarokka deck.

Quote from: Omega;734726Ive got I think the 2nd boxed set. The one with the BW Tarokka deck.

That one wasnt bad, they still used the Fabian art and had the borders. It was around Bleak House and Grim Harvest i believe, that the borders dissapeared and the art changed. I just remember things feeling thin at that stage.

It's all very well saying that it's great, but what about it is great?

Quote from: One Horse Town;734740It's all very well saying that it's great, but what about it is great?

Not sure if this is directed at me, but just to be clear, Bleak house and Grim Harvest are the opposite of great.

Feast of goblyns was great, at least for me, because it came with so much useable setting material and offers a blueprint of how a darklord might interact with the party without being the main antagonist. It also took the concept of the living NPC from the first ravenloft module and ran with it, emphasizing that all the major ones (Harkon Lukas, Ariel Lukas, Doctor Dominiani, Radaga, Daegon and even Duke Gundar) have agency and react to what the players do. So these characters were meant to roam and pursue their agendas. That style of play really clicked for me. Beyond that are the maps and map detail entries. There are:

-Two rural houses (Ontash home and Jacque's home) on the cardstock sleave
-Local terrain of houses on the same sleave
-Two sided character sheet on inside if sleeve
-a fold out gm screen with a super cool werewolf

Also a fold out map with the following:
-map of kartakass to be used with hex overlay
-Map of the kartakan inn in 3d and 2d
-3d map of Doctor Dominiani's estate (including a panel for the grounds)
-second map of kartakass
-map of the new town of Homlock (comes into existence through events in module)
-large map of town of Skald
-map of town of Harmonia

Inside the module itself is:
-the adventure
-full description of Harmonia
-map of the jail in harmonia
-description of Ontash home
-Full description of Skald
-full descirption of kartakan in (one of the best aspects of the module)
-map and description of the gorge and the cavern of the undead preistess
-map of the cavern of the crown of souls
-description of the crown of souls
-description of doctor dominiani's estate
-New domain (Daglan) with description of Homlock and map of a church
-new monsters: Goblyn (more awesome than they sound), carnivorous plant, and greater wolfwere

So the module is just brimming with stuff and it is tied together by the machinations of ariel lukas and doctor dominiani who try to draw the players into their dark plot. I have only ever actually used the adventure premise as presented once or twice, but have run the module countless times by taking the key elements and using them as i need (you can do almost anything by just focusing on the crown of souls for example and ignoring the stuff with ariel and dominiani or you can just focus on adventures set in harmonia and skald...all kinds of options). If you also have the castles forlorn boxed set it is even better because the domain in that module is right next store and the crown of souls ties in nicely.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;734733That one wasnt bad, they still used the Fabian art and had the borders. It was around Bleak House and Grim Harvest i believe, that the borders dissapeared and the art changed. I just remember things feeling thin at that stage.

   Bleak House at least had the Fabian covers for the individual books, but yes, the Grim Harvest modules marked a shift in layout and art direction. They'd just changed up the editorial team at that time--something that happened on Ravenloft fairly regularly--but Stan!, while he's done good work elsewhere, never really seemed to get Ravenloft, and falling in between the great runs of Steve Miller (some great 1995 stuff like the Guides to Fiends and Vistani and The Evil Eye) and Cindi Rice (Domains of Dread and its follow-ons) makes it look all the worse in retrospect. And this was just before TSR went under, so I imagine production values and the like might have taken a hit.

Second Edition books were really hit-or-miss. Not only content-wise (railroads) but also production-wise (choice of paper, illustrations, layout).
Some books had extremely large type fonts and margins/borders.

The Shattered Circle is a decent low level dungeon exploration (noteable in that it doesn't do giant rats and orcs) that gives the PCs some interesting choices to make and potentially campaign changing points- so in that way more of a game changing feel than provided by many low level adventures.

Return to Keep on the Borderlands is ok. When I ran it I took some from the original and some from the "sequel" and ended up pretty happy with it.

Quote from: One Horse Town;734740It's all very well saying that it's great, but what about it is great?

Well for Darkness Rising it was the general openness of the series. You had goals, but you were not forced into one way of getting from A to B. It also presented some interesting places to visit or even re-visit later that just begged to be fleshed out and explored. That and it made good use of the Illithiad supplement.

These threads always turn into "Name every fuckin' title produced."  I too would like to know just what the good modules were.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;734916These threads always turn into "Name every fuckin' title produced."  I too would like to know just what the good modules were.

Depends a lot on what you like.

But I could fuel an entire campaign around Feast of Goblyns as the 'surface' and Night Below as the underworld.