The topic here is identical to the other thread I just put out, except that this one is for High Level adventures.
Which do you think is the best adventure, be it TSR or OSR, for High-Level (say, levels 12+) play? And why?
I'm fond of Sabre River, which has nice maps and interesting encounters with a twist that I'd probably spot a hundred miles away but impressed my teenage self. The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror is the most successful of the high level Gygax adventures in my opinion. I know you're not a fan of Planescape but think Perrin's Fires of Dis and Cook's A Paladin in Hell do high level adventures right with some intrigue and humour thrown in. Baur's Kingdom of Ghouls and the latter half of Sargent's The Night Below are appropriately tough without tipping over into unfair, okay the magic item portals in Night Below are BS but easily removed.
*crickets*
I'm really struggling to think of something, even though I just ran a BECMI campaign up to 19th level. I used the stats for The Master & Alrethus from X5 Master of the Desert Nomads, but didn't really use the adventure itself. I've had very few good experiences with high level adventures, several of them I even abandoned during play. What has generally worked best is using the BECM GAZ Gazetteers for high level political shenanigans - Dawn of the Emperors is particularly good because of the Thyatis vs Alphatia conflict. The Northern Reaches also good with its three rival Viking nations.
Otherwise, well, Against the Giants is decent, being flexible enough to use easily. P2 Demon Queen's Enclave (drow city overrun by demons) is not bad despite the terrible 4e presentation. But most high level adventures are terrible.
Don't know...I've only ever owned B-1 or B-2...
But I'm curious, what motivates a high-level PC who has presumably become a lord or bigwig of some sort, to go out on a dangerous adventure? I prefer to retire a character who reaches such heights and begin again at the bottom.
Saving the world or the multiverse.
CM6 Where Chaos Reigns is surprisingly good. The party travels into the past to ensure the demihuman races get their clan relics. While the time travel itself is railroady, the 4 scenarios in different time periods are entertaining, and extremely open-ended. They span everything from prehistory to the iron age, and include stuff like mastodon riders, druids at war, fake-Greek isles, false libraries of Alexandria, and even aliens. It makes good use of the new rules in the Companion set, including a major War Machine scenario. No kiddie wheels, though. Lots of improvisation and flexibility required on the part of the DM.
Quote from: Voros;990949Saving the world or the multiverse.
Okay. Yeah, that sort of stuff doesn't interest me.
Quote from: Dumarest;990964Okay. Yeah, that sort of stuff doesn't interest me.
You must not do much role-playing if your characters don't care about saving the world they are living on. :D
Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits was awesome, but probably more because I used it as a template / starting point than anything inherent.
Back in the day, my group got a lot of play out of D3 Vault of the Drow. It was a great set up for espionage / infiltration. They players trying to insert themselves to become short term sleeper agents.
Quote from: Pat;990956CM6 Where Chaos Reigns is surprisingly good. The party travels into the past to ensure the demihuman races get their clan relics. While the time travel itself is railroady, the 4 scenarios in different time periods are entertaining, and extremely open-ended. They span everything from prehistory to the iron age, and include stuff like mastodon riders, druids at war, fake-Greek isles, false libraries of Alexandria, and even aliens. It makes good use of the new rules in the Companion set, including a major War Machine scenario. No kiddie wheels, though. Lots of improvisation and flexibility required on the part of the DM.
It is a fine one that I considered but haven't revisited yet. By the UK TSR crew if I remember right.
Quote from: Pat;990956CM6 Where Chaos Reigns is surprisingly good. The party travels into the past to ensure the demihuman races get their clan relics. While the time travel itself is railroady, the 4 scenarios in different time periods are entertaining, and extremely open-ended. They span everything from prehistory to the iron age, and include stuff like mastodon riders, druids at war, fake-Greek isles, false libraries of Alexandria, and even aliens. It makes good use of the new rules in the Companion set, including a major War Machine scenario. No kiddie wheels, though. Lots of improvisation and flexibility required on the part of the DM.
Did you actually run it?
I started it; it took 6 sessions just to play "In the Beginning" (about 4 printed pages AIR) and it swiftly became clear it was not really an adventure, more a light sketch of a campaign that would take around 24 sessions to play through. We ended it after that first chapter. I've looked at it now and then but I think it would take a huge amount of development work to run the whole thing.
Quote from: Baron Opal;990983Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits was awesome, but probably more because I used it as a template / starting point than anything inherent.
I ran Q1 about 30 years ago; AIR I liked it well enough but it's basically a dungeon bash with some oddly mundane inhabitants of the Abyss - bugbears and such in a 10th-14th level adventure set in the 66th lair of the Abyss. The alternate worlds are fun but I don't think my PCs bothered with them.
3.0's Bastion of Broken Souls is amazing.
I wouldn't actually want to run it, mind you, and I don't recommend anyone else try to do so either. It's a poster child for "D&D breaks down at high levels".
And yet, the scope of what a high-level D&D adventure can cover is represented in a fascinating way. I can't say it's a good adventure, really, but it's full of amazing ideas.
I'm not saying it's playable, I'm not saying anyone should try to run it, I'm just saying, wow, take a look at this as an instructive example of how far D&D can go.
Yes, I'm aware that I'm being self-contradictory. I'm just saying, if a really good DM got a hold of Bastion of Broken Souls and rewrote it extensively so that its amazing ideas could actually function as a game, it would be an incredible gaming experience.
And it's Planescape as Fuck.
(That's a good thing.)
Quote from: Barghest;991161I'm not saying it's playable, I'm not saying anyone should try to run it...
This is the general issue with "the best high level D&D adventure" - practically none of them are actually runnable. Some like Bastion of Broken Souls and Where Chaos Reigns have interesting ideas, but none actually work well as written.
Quote from: S'mon;991151Did you actually run it?
I started it; it took 6 sessions just to play "In the Beginning" (about 4 printed pages AIR) and it swiftly became clear it was not really an adventure, more a light sketch of a campaign that would take around 24 sessions to play through. We ended it after that first chapter. I've looked at it now and then but I think it would take a huge amount of development work to run the whole thing.
Not in a long time, but you're largely correct. CM5 is basically a collection of 4 campaign arcs (the individual time periods). Each only takes a handful of pages, but will take one to many sessions to play out (the library raid will be fairly quick, the pseudo-Celtic military campaign could take many games). But each section details the time period with background, locations, and so on. And it sets up a situation, giving the PCs a motivation, and then covering the movers and shakers, their personalities, immediate goals, and how they'll react.
And that's exactly why I think it works. Because high level characters in D&D can do almost anything. You can't stick them in a dungeon, and expect them to just move from one room to next. You can't come up with a plot, and then pre-script all the scenes (like so many bad adventures try to do). The PCs have great powers, and immense agency, so a tight structure simply won't work. All you can do is lay out a situation, and give the DM some tools to use as things spiral out of control.
Yes, it requires a lot of DM improvisation. But it's also not just a sketch or a plot seed. There are concrete details and tools, like maps and stats.
I recently ran Tomb of Horrors. It was pretty amazing. I once played in Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure. Didn't get through the whole thing, but what parts we did get through seemed like a lot of fun. My favorite, though is Hall of Many Panes. I've run it twice, and I could stand to run it at least a dozen more times.
Quote from: S'mon;991154I ran Q1 about 30 years ago; AIR I liked it well enough but it's basically a dungeon bash with some oddly mundane inhabitants of the Abyss - bugbears and such in a 10th-14th level adventure set in the 66th lair of the Abyss. The alternate worlds are fun but I don't think my PCs bothered with them.
That was what I expanded. They organized a resistance on the dwarf world, rescued the imprisoned cleric and had him head up a fifth column on another plane, and... did some drastic resolution with the spider maze. Then they had the forces to navigate the web.
It's right on the edge of mid and high-level, but the only ones I ran that I really liked were the DA Blackmoor series.
I am actually rather fond of CM1 Test of the Warlords. It was good to see an adventure that actually addressed the PCs setting up domains and having to deal with political issues. It was a good mix of that stuff and traditional adventure material.
Quote from: Exploderwizard;991993I am actually rather fond of CM1 Test of the Warlords. It was good to see an adventure that actually addressed the PCs setting up domains and having to deal with political issues. It was a good mix of that stuff and traditional adventure material.
I never ran CM1, but it sure looked like it had potential.