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.)
(http://www.tsrinfo.net/archive/dd/dd-x6.jpg)
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.
Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;583943Right 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.
I'm a fan of Paizo's stuff and have adapted some of it for use online. But 'Crypt of the Everflame' was a recent purchase that I rather regret. I grabbed it because it is set against their flip-mat, whose PDF marries up to online play really well. But they made an assumption that I find pretty hard to work around - the adventure is for characters which are 'born' in the starter town. The entire premise of the crypt is a rite of passage gone wrong.
So, for an existing campaign, it doesn't really save me any time, which in my book makes for a bad module.
My memory isn't good enough to reach to older ones, unfortunately.
Honorable mentions: Forest Oracle and Journey to the Rock.
But the winner has to be the entire Dragonlance series after DL1. It was literally, "play this module exactly like the books." Deviate once, and the whole series is shot.
That would be Tomb of Horrors. Almost any Wizard worth his salt will put one or two real good deathtraps in a dungeon, but this was a festival of sadist GM's whose sole purpose was to kill off as many high level PCs as possible.
This started the whole trend where the players started looking for ways to get rid of the GM, or minimize his/her influence at the gaming table... sadly paving the way for the great DL/2nd ed. dungeons of mediocracy.
Mystery of the Snow Pearls. It was pretty bad even for a solo adventure and had a horrible gimmick of a "magic viewer", a red plastic film needed to read parts of the module. After reading about three blocks of text with it you usually ended up with a splitting headache. I don't think I even got half way through it before giving the module away to some other sucker.
Quote from: GameDaddy;583993That would be Tomb of Horrors. Almost any Wizard worth his salt will put one or two real good deathtraps in a dungeon, but this was a festival of sadist GM's whose sole purpose was to kill off as many high level PCs as possible.
This started the whole trend where the players started looking for ways to get rid of the GM, or minimize his/her influence at the gaming table... sadly paving the way for the great DL/2nd ed. dungeons of mediocracy.
I think you missed the point of ToH. It was meant as a tongue in cheek module that players did as a "let's do ToH and see how far we get because we're all gonna die!" Well, originally it was a tourney module and those were specifically designed to never be finished but were scored on how far you went. ToH specifically was created to show that any character, no matter how powerful, could die. I don't know anyone who looked at ToH as a serious module to use for standard adventuring.
Quote from: Sacrosanct;583992But the winner has to be the entire Dragonlance series after DL1. It was literally, "play this module exactly like the books." Deviate once, and the whole series is shot.
Sorry, but this is just not true. As I said before, there is
a lot to be said about the railroadyness of DL
(as written) but even if following the plot the modules play
quite different from the books.
Since we enter spoiler territory:
Spoiler
For instance, the biggest surprise in the novels is the secret identity of the wizard Fizban. In the modules the DM is free to ignore that. He might just be a befuddled, rambling fool.
There's an NPC called "Green Gemstone Man" that has a brief cameo in the novels and who might be the solution to turning back the evil invasion - or not.
The fabled dragonlances might be needed in the climax of the series - or not.
In the modules this is decided in a similar way as the location of the sword in the original Ravenloft - by chance! (And it happens quite late in the campaign so even the DM who most likely has read the novels doesn't know where his campaign will be going.)
That lead to interesting conversations between players of two different campaigns, similar to:
"Do you remember the moment when you learned who shot J.R.?"
"Huh? J.R. was shot?"
There are whole modules missing from the novels. The flying tomb in Thorbardin?
The heroes' visit to Sanction (and the discovery of the true nature of the draconians) happens off-stage in the novels.
Do Flint and Sturm need to die like they did in the novels? No.
Does the Blue Lady's unmasking need to have the same effect on Tanis and Caramon as in the books? No.
I DM'd DL mostly with characters that were not the pre-gens (only one player wanted to choose from the roster, so I had Tanis), they didn't separate in Tarsis (and left out several locations).
Nothing in the modules made me follow the rails. In fact, I used them as I would use every other module as well - an invitation to play with its contents, to mix and match, to bend it to my whim and that of my campaign setting (or my
interpretation of the campaign setting - my Greyhawk was definitely not Gygax's Greyhawk, and my Krynn was far from canonical Krynn).
I grant you that the DM was not
invited to deviate from the
different metaplot but then, no DM of the village of Hommlet was invited to change the parts of the module that he didn't like. Which I did as well.
For me, a railroad module is only then a truly bad module if it is written in a scenic format.
If it contains maps, dungeons, NPCs with character and motivations, memorable locations, items etc. everything is well - I can ignore any plot, and extrapolate from the salvageable content, just like a do with any sandboxy, mission-based, old school adventure.
I've always wanted to run an Ultimate Dragonlance campaign (Ultimate in the Marvel Comics sense in that it resets the continuity and things are familiar but new and different) that played more like a sandbox.
As far as the OP, the only thing I can think of that was just really bad was Aberrant Worldwide Phase I. One of the adventures inside was pretty good, but the rest were basically just boring or stupid.
Quote from: RPGPundit;583893So, 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?
The Horror Beneath, an early D20 module from the same guy who produced
The Foundation. My original review of it from RPGNet:
This adventure, to put it bluntly, is a mess:
1. You've got a bunch of maps. Tragically, three of them are completely illegible. Actually, I don't know if "illegible" is the right word, because they're completely unkeyed. Let's just say that -- between the fact that they are unkeyed and reproduced in a muddy and indistinct greyscale -- it's nearly impossible to figure out what information they're supposed to be conveying. The fourth map is of a dungeon. This one
is keyed with numbers. For reasons beyond the scope of imagination, however, these numbers are not referenced in a standard D&D format. Instead, Metcalf has decided to describe his dungeon in, basically, a stream of consciousness format -- dropping the numbers into the middle of the text between a couple of parantheses whenever he feels its convenient. Simply incredible. It takes true skill to deliberately go out of your way like this to make a product as unusable as possible.
2. Metcalf seems to have persistent problems with the English language. My favorite examples are his nebulous sentence structures, which result in treats like this: "He is unarmed and has no weapon proficiencies. He doesn't think he needs them." Needs weapons or needs weapon proficiencies? "Steorra's temple is the oldest and largest in Ravendale." Oldest and largest... what? Building? Temple in general? Steorra's temple in general?
You're assuming in general, right? But this passage is made particularly hilarious by the sentence which appears two paragraphs later: "Temple of Saint Tollan: Ravendale's newest temple, as well as the largest."
3. What's truly bizarre is that the adventure spends a bunch of time discussing Ravendale... which serves absolutely no purpose except as a place for the PCs to pick up an undefined adventure seed which is going to take them to another town: Scarborough.
4. When the PCs reach Scarborough they will find the entire town deserted... except for one family, the Tendermores. They will discover this when they find the Tendermore's fourteen year old daughter drawing water – by herself – from the well. First off, this staggers my suspension of disbelief: Everyone in town has been dragged off by zombies except your family, and your daughter is wandering around by herself? The daughter will take them back to her house, where the PCs will meet her father Jonathon. To add insult to injury, however, Metcalf closes this description with: "...he believes that he and his "boys" can hold their own." Who are his "boys"? I dunno. Are they literally his sons, or do the quotation marks imply something else? I dunno. Is the wife of the house still alive and around? I dunno. Are there any other daughters? I dunno.
5. As if Metcalf's lock-lipped descriptions are not bizarre enough, we then get the sequence of events that night when the zombies come: "The Tendermores are not very effective archers, the zombies should have no trouble advancing to the front of the house." So, in other words, they've had no problems holding them off this long – but as soon as the PCs show up, the Tendermores are doomed? Apparently so, because no matter
what the PCs do, they will "see two of the Tendermore women taken by the zombies".
6. Actually, they're not zombies. They're grub hosts – which are just like zombies, except they can't be turned. They are also the way that the Brood Queen (who's hiding out in that dungeon, which is supposed to be part of an abandoned dwarven citadel, but doesn't look it) creates her young (the Brood Warriors).
Basically,
The Horror Beneath had a semi-decent idea (
Aliens in a fantasy setting), but then simply fumbled the ball in executing it. Actually, let me rephrase that: They didn't fumble the ball. They deliberately tossed it on the floor, tripped over it, broke their leg, stumbled over their target audience, and plunged off a cliff.
It would have been better if the maps had been legible. It would have been better if the presentation had been smoother. Heck, it would have been better if the plot had been comprehendable.
In short: Don't buy The Horror Beneath.
Quote from: Skywalker;583912Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress and the 4e Dark Sun adventure. Bruce Cordell is responsible for both atrocities.
Yeah. I consider the Delve Format's ability to turn Bruce Cordell from one of the best D&D adventure writers into a guy who produces forgettable or nonsensical pablum to be one of the biggest indictments of it.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;584065Yeah. I consider the Delve Format's ability to turn Bruce Cordell from one of the best D&D adventure writers into a guy who produces forgettable or nonsensical pablum to be one of the biggest indictments of it.
Bruce Cordell also wrote my most hated adventure - Die Vecna, Die! Three campaign settings ruined by one adventure. Can it get worse than that?
I'm growing increasingly disappointed with some of the DCC modules. I ran the character funnel Perils of the Sunken City for the gang as an experimental session with the DCC system that we were excited about.
The module is a "toss 'em all into a railroaded and see who survives", but the guys were interested in actually "playing" the module as adventurers: trying to avoid traps instead of shoving everyone through.
I mean
Spoiler
The module uses force fields to prevent the PCs from wandering away from the funnel/arena-o-traps which my players immediately wanted to do.
Half way through I gave up and told them to just follow the tracks so we can get through the funnel and play for real. There seems to be a similar lack of character choice in some of the other modules (can't remember the names off hand). I haven't given up of DCC, but at least
some of the modules are more interested in olde-style atmosphere instead of old-school play.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;584065Yeah. I consider the Delve Format's ability to turn Bruce Cordell from one of the best D&D adventure writers into a guy who produces forgettable or nonsensical pablum to be one of the biggest indictments of it.
I never got why Bruce Cordell's was so highly considered. He had made bad adventures previously like Die Vecna Die and even the much lauded Sunless Citadel was pedestrian.
Also, in regards to the Dark Sun adventure, it had nothing to do with the format. The dude put a stream of drinkable water in the first room of the dungeon... in Dark Sun! It was like putting Smaug's mound of gold in Bilbo's Hobbit Hole. :D
the one i was most disappointed with-
(http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/modpages/modscans/dda4.jpg)
It was supposed to be a sequel to DDA3 but it didn't have anything at all to do with the previous module and was very dumbed down in comparison.
Maybe Eldarad the Lost City was not total crap, but it was a very disappointing example of how Avalon Hill treated RuneQuest after such splendid Chaosium releases as Pavis and Big Rubble.
The "railroad" and "deus ex machina" aspects of Vecna Lives turned me off too much to consider what might be salvaged from it.
Quote from: thedungeondelver;583895Cloudland. 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.
I ended up with a copy of Cloudland in a bulk-vintage-stuff purchase, but I haven't read it yet. Now I'm intrigued. ;)
Quote from: VectorSigma;584182I ended up with a copy of Cloudland in a bulk-vintage-stuff purchase, but I haven't read it yet. Now I'm intrigued. ;)
The maps are nice. That's about it.
There is a superhero adventure available on RPGNow that shall remain nameless in which the entire premise is about a sewer dwelling supervillian blackmailing the city above with the threat of massive, city-wide toilet backflow.
And, before you ask, it's meant to be played straight.
When I think about it, almost all the Judges Guild Traveller adventures were stinkers...but the maps and other bits were useful.
Quote from: GameDaddy;583993That would be Tomb of Horrors.
As much as I love ToH (and the 4e version is nasty too), I have to agree that it inadvertently taught very bad lessons to many GMs.
Quote from: Soylent Green;584214There is a superhero adventure available on RPGNow that shall remain nameless in which the entire premise is about a sewer dwelling supervillian blackmailing the city above with the threat of massive, city-wide toilet backflow.
And, before you ask, it's meant to be played straight.
Oh come on...you've got to spill! I don't want to buy that turd!
Quote from: Spinachcat;584218As much as I love ToH (and the 4e version is nasty too), I have to agree that it inadvertently taught very bad lessons to many GMs.
Concur. It sounds like that DM screen adventure did at least as much damage in a different way.
A Challenge of Arm's (http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=950) is a huge mess of words in a format that's WAYYYYY too long.
At the time I reviewed it I thought Smuggler's Bane (http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=533) was the worst module ever written.
Alphonso Warden learned the wrong lessons from Tomb of Horros and created several in the same vein. I STRONGLY disliked all of them, and his style. He gets the bonus points for having the most on my list AND also getting published/exposure by XRP ... all so he can beef up his writing credits for his fiction.
AA4 (http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=344)
AA18 (http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=200)
AA11 (http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=315)
AA14 (http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=301)
AA09 (http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=167)
I would hate for people to get excited about the OSR and then run in to one of these crappy modules.
Quote from: bryce0lynch;584251A Challenge of Arm's (http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=950) is a huge mess of words in a format that's WAYYYYY too long.
Criminy. And it has a grammar error in the
title.
Quote from: Kaz;584253Criminy. And it has a grammar error in the title.
No, it has a pun in the title. You see, there is a thieves' guild operating in the city called The Hand, and its leader is called...
The Arm. Which makes it
so much better.
(it doesn't)
I'd probably agree, in my case, that it was some of the Dragonlance series. Those sucked.
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