Fantasy, supers, horror, post-apoc, sci-fi or anything else. What is your favorite module and why do you think it's the greatest?
Tie between White Plume Mountain and Palace of the Silver Princess.
White Plume Mountain is the best funhouse dungeon, IMO, and it's got enough serious hooks that my brother made a whole campaign out of Keraptis and the three magical weapons.
Palace of the Silver Princess I like because it's got an evocative backstory that you discover through exploration.
Probably my favorite is B4 The Lost City. Compelling weirdness and great factions, that get the players to start thinking about politics and alliances and relationships instead of just clearing rooms. Plus, the way the upper levels are fully developed, but the lower levels are less defined, is a great way to gradually train a new DM. Not to mention it could potentially turn into an entire campaign.
Other honorable mentions are MX4, A4, CM6, D3, Q1, MH3, S4, WG4, X1, X2, and Zogorion. But I'll leave those for someone else.
Going to have to second White Plume Mountain. It's just a great little dungeon.
Going more modern, Red Hand of Doom is one of the most overlooked adventures, probably because it comes from third edition. Tomb of Annihilation is probably the best thing about 5e, and while that's not saying much its been pretty fun.
Dwimmermount, because it's the only thing that I've ever tried to run that has maintained a lengthy campaign. (25+ sessions, 6+ months)
I think I lost one story-gamer early on, and another modern/trad gamer is a little unhappy, but certainly the two players who said they wanted an uncomplicated dungeon-crawl for teenage nostalgia are very happy, and they're sufficiently hooked that now that we start turning up faction play & consequences & external clocks they're ready to do more than kick open doors and kill monsters. It's keeping a full table (6 players of 5e).
I don't know if "favourite" means "had the best session with". I'll go for the second.
For D&D, a medley: Isle of Dread with both Dwellers of the Forbidden City and Drums on Firetop Mountain located in it.
For Call of Cthulhu: No Man's Land (partially rewritten): the single, most intense experience we ever had in an RPG.
For D&D I like Dwellers of the forbidden city, Lost shrine of Tamoachan and Vault of the Drow - all evocative of their background and with lots of rom for expansion/GM addition.
For RQ, I loved the Borderlands pack - lots of different styles of scenario, where hack and slash had its place, but was not the major deciding factor.
Traveller - probably twilight's peak. Again, lots of scope for GM additions.
CoC - Masks of Nyarlathotep is probably the best, but it can be a real meat-grinder.
I think the most fun I had running a module was Tomb of the Lizard King. It was part the module and part the particular group of players. I can't say for sure the ratio, because that's been a long time. I probably should get a copy. The one I ran was borrowed.
Keep on the Borderlands. Sure, not the best module ever written. But to a young kid picking up the game for the first time, it WAS D&D. Yeah, the menagerie of monsters made no sense, but it was the crazy dungeon delve, turn the corner and be wildly outnumbered, desperately try to negotiate one faction against the other, kind of adventure that epitomized the roots of the game. I've run it in every edition (sans 4e) and enjoyed it every time...
Lost Shrine of Tamoachan. Very thematic. Lots of good, logical puzzles and traps. Lots of tension.
I6: Ravenloft and its sister module, I10: The House on Gryphon Hill. Never managed to run either successfully (the one time I tried with Ravenloft, my a-hole friends stole the module from my bag and photocopied it for themselves), but the linked stories of those modules actually got me to write several chapters' worth of novel based on them. (This was well before the whole setting came out.)
I don't know that I can pick a single favorite, because I see modules as something you "plug in" to an existing game. That means the "best" one is the one that best fits your current game. It kinda depends.
That said, some of my favorites include TSR's B1, B2, B4, the D series, the G series, S4, WG4, WG5, and X1. Also Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom and Curse of the Witch Head. I also like the first Rappan Athuk module (the surface and the first three or four levels, IIRC), although I'd convert them (back) to AD&D. The later additions to Rappan Athuk were less impressive, IMO.
As time has gone on I find myself less and less of a module guy, though. These days, even when I use a module I tend to heavily modify it. It's often easier to just "roll my own" in the first place.
My favorite AD&D adventures oscillate between G3, WG5, and T1 (with the obligatory mention of the as-yet-still-unrecovered "Treasure of the Dragon Queen (http://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/gh_tourneys_dragon_queen.html)" tourney I played in 1984).
My favorite CoC adventures are "Grace Under Pressure" and "In Media Res" and _Walker in the Wastes_ (all from Pagan Publishing) and _Masks of Nyarlathotep_.
My favorite other fantasy adventures are _The Court of Ardor_ (MERP), _Caverns of Thracia_, and _The Broken Covenant of Calebais_ (ArsM).
My favorite SF adventures are _The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues_ (Paranoia) and "Deep Shit" (Blue Planet 1e).
My overall favorite adventure of all time is probably "Treasure of the Dragon Queen" or "Deep Shit" or "Grace Under Pressure".
Allan.
Tomb of Horrors.
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament on April 26, 2021, 09:22:33 PM
I also like the first Rappan Athuk module (the surface and the first three or four levels, IIRC), although I'd convert them (back) to AD&D.
The shit monster was especially memorable.
My personal favorite is S3, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Mixing sci-fi and fantasy like that was a completely new concept to me when I first read it, and I loved it.
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament on April 26, 2021, 09:22:33 PMAs time has gone on I find myself less and less of a module guy, though. These days, even when I use a module I tend to heavily modify it. It's often easier to just "roll my own" in the first place.
I know what you mean. When I picked up D&D again I started with modules because I didn't have a lot of time to prepare. But in practice I've found that the prep is usually longer for a published module than making your own.
Quote from: grodog on April 26, 2021, 09:52:27 PM
My overall favorite adventure of all time is probably "Treasure of the Dragon Queen" or "Deep Shit" or "Grace Under Pressure".
"Grace Under Pressure" is great. I ran it with two of the players (husband and wife) who were absolute nuts about James Cameron's "The Abyss". I always thought that the movie was great until the final revelation: optimism ruined it. Just imagine "The Abyss" but with Mary Elisabeth Mastrantonio actually dying and the crew discovering that the light and water creatures are servants of an Elder God...
Anyway, I ran "Grace Under Pressure", and I was unusually cruel. I seldom saw a group of players so scared... ;D
Quote from: mightybrain on April 27, 2021, 06:16:13 AM
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament on April 26, 2021, 09:22:33 PMAs time has gone on I find myself less and less of a module guy, though. These days, even when I use a module I tend to heavily modify it. It's often easier to just "roll my own" in the first place.
I know what you mean. When I picked up D&D again I started with modules because I didn't have a lot of time to prepare. But in practice I've found that the prep is usually longer for a published module than making your own.
Same. This becomes more true for me the longer I run, too. It's pretty clear from reading Barrow Maze and Stone Hell that I'm never going to use either as written. I'll probably pluck pieces out to use, changing them considerably in the process. I've read both twice and some sections multiple times.
I started putting together an adventure of my own this week and had the outline done in 30 minutes while eating lunch. It should provide about 8 hours of play. Another 30 minutes at the PC to do a custom monster and custom spell. I suspect the fleshed out notes will take me an hour or two. To support comparable play in either Barrow Maze or Stone Hell will take me similar time making notes after all that time reading.
The main value in reading modules seems to be getting ideas, not using them as written.
I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City. I also liked the whole series from G1 all the way to the queen of the demonweb pits.
Quote from: Reckall on April 27, 2021, 07:49:09 AM
Quote from: grodog on April 26, 2021, 09:52:27 PM
My overall favorite adventure of all time is probably "Treasure of the Dragon Queen" or "Deep Shit" or "Grace Under Pressure".
"Grace Under Pressure" is great. I ran it with two of the players (husband and wife) who were absolute nuts about James Cameron's "The Abyss". I always thought that the movie was great until the final revelation: optimism ruined it. Just imagine "The Abyss" but with Mary Elisabeth Mastrantonio actually dying and the crew discovering that the light and water creatures are servants of an Elder God...
Anyway, I ran "Grace Under Pressure", and I was unusually cruel. I seldom saw a group of players so scared... ;D
Now that's a story worth hearing more about! :D
Allan.
never been into D&D so the only "modules" I had in the sense of a contained adventure were the star frontiers ones i inherited as a kid.
I really liked 'bugs in the system" mostly.
Flame away, shitlords.
I honestly hate running modules because as others have stated the prep time is far above and beyond what I have to do to make my own stuff. Still, in my own sandbox world I've used for years B1 and B2 exist and serve as "fuck I totally have no idea what is going on this session" ass-saver locations, albeit cut down a bit.
If I have to actually pick one, again it's going to be a toss-up between B1 and B2 simply because the first one showed me how to key a dungeon properly (along with help from the Mentzer red box DMs Guide dungeon) and B2 which laid the groundwork for a small sandbox campaign. A lot of the other TSR modules are easy to use for one-shots because most of them are from actual tournament games and have a definitive start->end. Many, many more modern adventures seem to gloss over this to some degree and expect you to either include the module as part of some overarching metaplot or as a cog in the "adventure path" you're running. Makes it Not Easy to run without shoehorning a lot of crap in, and at that point why not make up your own shit?
I normally DM. D&D wise I really enjoyed running When a Star Falls and Dark Clouds Gather. Both UK series modules. Both have fun locations and some good set piece battles. Also lovely Paul Ruiz maps.