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Author Topic: Worst adventure you ever owned?  (Read 4400 times)

mcbobbo

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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #15 on: September 20, 2012, 11:21:09 AM »
Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;583943

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.


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.
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Sacrosanct

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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #16 on: September 20, 2012, 11:33:30 AM »
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.
D&D is not an "everyone gets a ribbon" game.  If you're stupid, your PC will die.  If you're an asshole, your PC will die (probably from the other PCs).  If you're unlucky, your PC may die.  Point?  PC's die.  Get over it and roll up a new one.

GameDaddy
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« Reply #17 on: September 20, 2012, 11:39:44 AM »
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.
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SneakyPete

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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #18 on: September 20, 2012, 11:53:34 AM »
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.

Sacrosanct

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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #19 on: September 20, 2012, 12:18:04 PM »
Quote from: GameDaddy;583993
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.


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.
D&D is not an "everyone gets a ribbon" game.  If you're stupid, your PC will die.  If you're an asshole, your PC will die (probably from the other PCs).  If you're unlucky, your PC may die.  Point?  PC's die.  Get over it and roll up a new one.

Dirk Remmecke

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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #20 on: September 20, 2012, 12:25:25 PM »
Quote from: Sacrosanct;583992
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.


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 (Hover over section below to view.)

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.
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Kaz

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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #21 on: September 20, 2012, 01:21:25 PM »
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.
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Justin Alexander
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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #22 on: September 20, 2012, 02:31:39 PM »
Quote from: RPGPundit;583893
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?


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.
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Justin Alexander
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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #23 on: September 20, 2012, 02:51:33 PM »
Quote from: Skywalker;583912
Assault 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.
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Jacob Marley

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« Reply #24 on: September 20, 2012, 03:45:28 PM »
Quote from: Justin Alexander;584065
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.


Bruce Cordell also wrote my most hated adventure - Die Vecna, Die! Three campaign settings ruined by one adventure. Can it get worse than that?

languagegeek

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« Reply #25 on: September 20, 2012, 04:11:38 PM »
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 (Hover over section below to view.)

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.

Skywalker

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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #26 on: September 20, 2012, 04:13:07 PM »
Quote from: Justin Alexander;584065
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.


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

mhensley

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« Reply #27 on: September 20, 2012, 05:59:53 PM »
the one i was most disappointed with-



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.

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« Reply #28 on: September 20, 2012, 08:40:25 PM »
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.
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VectorSigma

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Worst adventure you ever owned?
« Reply #29 on: September 20, 2012, 09:29:29 PM »
Quote from: thedungeondelver;583895
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.


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. ;)
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