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Quertus
2020-09-05, 04:36 PM
So, I was gifted some modules to add to my existing stack. Long story short, one of them was absolutely horrific. Now, a lot of modules are *bad*, and I often write up a list of errors as I'm reading through modules, but this was decidedly the worst I'd ever seen - worse than even the worst random fan-written modules I'd had the misfortune of reading. It was a professional D&D module, apparently written by someone who has never cracked a D&D book, didn't know how the rules worked, didn't know how simple human social interaction worked, was horrifyingly Railroaded, and filled with OP NPCs (honestly, if rather be running the NPCs (you know, the ones asking for help) against the module than the PCs). I'd written a whole page of notes about head scratchers… just reading the first page of the module. And it just got worse from there.

Yeah.

So, what's your horror story? What's the worst module you've ever seen, where you had to ask yourself, "someone got paid to write this trash?!" (or, if fan-made, "at least they didn't get *paid* to write this")? Tell me all about it in face palm detail. (EDIT: preferably, include the system for context, so we're not completely confused, as it doesn't have to be a D&D module.)

Florian
2020-09-05, 05:15 PM
The Witchfire trilogy. 3E D20, Iron Kingdoms setting.

This is no adventure, what it is, is a railroad of the purest form and it should not be played, but rather read as a novel around a campfire.

Hand_of_Vecna
2020-09-05, 05:35 PM
The Witchfire trilogy. 3E D20, Iron Kingdoms setting.

Oh wow I was thinking of the same module and couldn't think of the name. It's so bad. First it has serious theming issues the introduction makes a big deal about how magic is on the decline while steampunk tech is on the rise and necromancy has been dead for decades. Then the module is about a necromancer that can raise a ridiculous army.

One segment was a big windy dungeon where you're supposed to be chasing the villain. I had a scroll of Aspect of the Wolf allowing me to track her perfectly. The module flat out rubber bands the villain to get out just ahead of you and drops the next pressing plot hook on you.

This is partly on the DM, but he then teased us about the loot and xp we missed out on by circumventing much of the dungeon that the plot doesn't give you time to go back to. I say partly because the design is terrible too.

After the next dungeon a skeleton army is marching to the city and nobody will take you seriously. I walked from the game after various guildmasters refused payments of hundreds of gold to ready a force to defend the town based on my paranoia.

daryen
2020-09-05, 07:17 PM
It was a professional D&D module, ...
Hey! No fair asking for everyone to name names and then you don't. What is this module you are talking about?

NigelWalmsley
2020-09-05, 08:15 PM
Is "Tomb of Horrors" cheating? Because probably that. It's not that it particularly ignores the rules, it's just that it's a series of "what number am I thinking of" challenges where if you don't guess the right number every time your character is deleted.

HappyDaze
2020-09-05, 10:28 PM
Friends Like These for FFG's Star Wars. It's very railroaded and really asks for characters to take actions that are likely not what they would do (we need allies...let's get the slavers to help us by throwing expendable slave troops into the face of the Imperial attack and replaying them for their help by letting they take more slaves). And the ending is a multistage mass combat where every stage is virtually guaranteed to have the preset outcome and then the final end is really an auto-fail. It's absolutely terrible.

Jorren
2020-09-05, 10:40 PM
The Avatar Trilogy, namely: Shadowdale, Tantras, and Waterdeep. It's the Chutes & Ladders of adventure modules in terms of decision making required by the PCs. Unlike Chutes & Ladders which mercifully ends after a bit, these set of trains run quite a while.

Truly awful.

Quertus
2020-09-06, 06:17 AM
Hey! No fair asking for everyone to name names and then you don't. What is this module you are talking about?

True that. I intentionally didn't name the module initially, so as not to bias the results. I'm curious if anyone else found this particular module as bad as I did.

To be fair, I only said to name the system. Although, clearly, naming the module is a huge help.

But the real reason? I'm AFB. I've wanted to make a thread like this for a bit; now that I've remembered to make the thread, I've forgotten the module's name. :smallredface:

I'll post it when I remember.

When I get my hands on the module (and/or my notes) again, I'll go into more detail while roasting it.

Silly Name
2020-09-06, 06:51 AM
The Avatar Trilogy, namely: Shadowdale, Tantras, and Waterdeep. It's the Chutes & Ladders of adventure modules in terms of decision making required by the PCs. Unlike Chutes & Ladders which mercifully ends after a bit, these set of trains run quite a while.

Truly awful.

Ugh, seconded. Players are expected to just spectate and do whatever the main characters of the module want. Midnight is an horrible Mary Sue if you play the modules as written, and all the players get for their suffering through this thing is watching someone else ascend to godhood.

It's not even a railroad, because trains can be nice to be on. This is a bus ride, but the AC is broken, everything smells and the driver refuses to stop until he crashes into a brick wall.

Wraith
2020-09-06, 07:09 AM
I haven't played a lot of modules so my pool of experience is fairly small, however Descent Into Avernus really sticks out.

It may be a personal bias rather than the actual quality of the book, but I found it to be full of the sort of "lol random" nonsense that Forgotten Realms seems to think is funny, and I just can't take it.

For example: You're in Baldur's Gate, and you need to find a Wizard to cast a spell for you. One would think that would be a fairly trivial thing to do in one of the greatest metropolis along the Sword Coast but no; you arbitrarily have to slog your way down to Candlekeep in order to speak to a mage, who then conjours up a flock of Griffons for you to ride to find another mage... Who happens to be a magical talking otter.
And who can't actually cast the spell that the book says she can cast because she's not high enough level, but who cares about the rules? We'll just let Plane Shift work the same way as Gate because why worry about the details?

Also the Paladin who came with you from Baldur's Gate? She decides that she's not coming with you any further and goes home alone. She then dies offscreen, because players aren't allowed to have friendly NPCs that they can relate to.

At some point you meet an Elf Ranger NPC who the book takes great pains to point out is non-binary. This is excellent - more representation is greatly important and it's about time that WotC started to make up for lost time. Except that the character in question doesn't have a single word of written dialogue, they're just THERE and otherwise ignored so it comes across as pandering.

To say nothing of the actual module itself. If there's a map of a castle with 30+ rooms in it and only something of significance in 3 of those rooms, the books should tell you so right away. My GM was kind enough to read ahead and flatly tell us that the Duchess' manor was 95% empty rooms so he trimmed it down for us, but that kind of set the tone for the book.

Extensive corridors of empty rooms? Check. Lengthy fights with devils who throw out multiple poisonous/necrotic attacks per round and are also immune/resistant to most things that you can throw back? Check. The whole thing is just inane plot and NPCs propping up a grind through empty rooms and long, un-fun fights against enemies who can't really be conversed or interacted with.

In the end, I think we as a group decided to skip out large chunks so I admit I didn't experience the full thing, but I have been assured that the plot isn't redeemed by anything that we missed. All in all, I can't recommend.

NorthernPhoenix
2020-09-06, 09:12 AM
Is "Tomb of Horrors" cheating? Because probably that. It's not that it particularly ignores the rules, it's just that it's a series of "what number am I thinking of" challenges where if you don't guess the right number every time your character is deleted.

I've definitely gotta second Tomb of Horrors. I get why it is the way it is, but it's almost the antithesis of what i consider the modern game to be.

Khedrac
2020-09-06, 09:53 AM
The Dungeons of Castle Blackmoor.

Start with maps that were reprinted from their first appearance, but with none of the known issues corrected (the labels don't match the text description and the stiarcases between the first few levels don't match at all).
Then I cannot work out how some of the new maps for the later levels are supposed to connect either.
Add on poor design - 20 levesl and the monsters on each level are that CR (it's 3.5 OGL). The PCs are expected to spend a lot of time outide the dungeon getting enough xp to progress futher - not terrible design, but...
A large part of the dungeon is supposed to evolve over time - good design right? Well no - the DM is given the starting point not the point when the PCs first get there, and when you add in the way the levels work means there's a high chance they will trigger it then have to leave for a while to level up before going back thus rendering most of that area of the dungeon dead (full of lava as it happens).

It's got a lot of elements that could be marks of good design, but the way they are put together actually makes them into bad design.

MesiDoomstalker
2020-09-06, 10:00 AM
Jade Regent Adventure Path by Paizo for Pathfinder. It is, repeatedly, called out as Paizo's "Journey to the West" but the only thing similar to it is the fact you travel a long distance and there's a lot of NPC hanger on's. You are supposed to escort the true Empress of Not-Japan so she can retake the throne but since she starts out higher level than the party, they go out of their way to sideline her to keep the PC's in the spot light. And when the PC's out level her, they just kinda...forget about her till the last book where she's suddenly takes a center role and totes becomes a DMPC. The third book (out of 6) is literally filler. It has no bearing on the main plot besides getting closer to your destination. The designer's fell hard into job=class fallacy, so a lot of NPC foes from book 2 onward are Ninja and Samurai, which beyond the fact both those classes are terrible, are also built by Paizo (who can't build NPC's for nothing). So most things with class levels are weak, boring and very samey. For the campaign that is advertised for the Weebs, it spends a significant amount of time in familiar Not-Europe areas and not in Not-Japan. The campaign has 2 side-game rules, both of which are sketchy. The caravan rules are boring, largely a single player resource grind and largely ignored by the majority of the campaign (except worthless Book 3). The romance rules are hot garbage. If you aren't a Diplomancer, you are forever alone. The closer you get to a relationship with someone, the harder it is to progress relations. You can instantly change your friendly, love-hate rivalry to absolute infatuation and "True Love" in a single diplomacy check.

There are other issues, but those are the biggest.

Zeb
2020-09-06, 10:37 AM
The worst module I got to experience as a player was The Fright at Tristor (http://www.greyhawk.fr/IMG/pdf/RPGA_The_Fright_at_Tristor.pdf). At first I thought it was because the DM was new but no it was just that bad. Especially since it was "designed" for level 1 characters.

Plus the villian reads like they tried to make a whole party into one character- "Reuven learned the ways of the forest in the distant Adri, saw combat in Nyrond during the Creyhawk Wars, and picked up a host of thiefly skills in the decrepit city of Seltaren, in the Duchy of Urnst. To the Sorcerers Nexus of Rel Astra he traded his immortal soul for the ability to channel magic at will. Finally, in the bandit town of Stoink, Reuven spent his savings on a trained circus bear, Tasptaddle, with which he planned to exact his revenge against the cruel people of Tristor. He has been instructing the bear to kill wildlife and farm animals to frighten the Tristor residents, a prelude to a final act of villainy that will make his revenge complete."

Directions, spacing, and encounter distances are also a mess throughout the module.The first encounter is with an owlbear who 'only' has 25hp but is already engaged in melee with commoners who he can one shot so the party needs to get real lucky to have a chance of saving either of them.

Lots of the plot hook check DC's start plausible then jump to nigh impossible, start following the tracks: DC-18 continue following off the road: DC 28, hope you specialized in tracking at level 1.
Or 60% of the 80 villagers know the story, but only 10% of them are willing to talk and only if you succeed at a DC17 charisma check, and then you have a 50% chance they will be 'proud of the murder', so 4.8 useful villagers?

There are no real sympathetic characters and the encounters are either deadly or a joke, I know it was 3.0 but I can only recommend it as an example of what not to do.

The Glyphstone
2020-09-06, 11:15 AM
The romance rules are hot garbage. If you aren't a Diplomancer, you are forever alone. The closer you get to a relationship with someone, the harder it is to progress relations. You can instantly change your friendly, love-hate rivalry to absolute infatuation and "True Love" in a single diplomacy check.

There are other issues, but those are the biggest.

Sounds like every romantic comedy movie ever - the male protagonist does something that drives the female protagonist away, so he performs a crazy/stupid/insane romantic action that instantly reverses her feelings.

Or possibly elementary school, where you indicate your attraction to someone by harassing them. So pull your NPC love interest's hair and hide frogs in their saddlebags, to make it easier to fall in love.

Composer99
2020-09-06, 11:21 AM
The Witchfire trilogy. 3E D20, Iron Kingdoms setting.

This is no adventure, what it is, is a railroad of the purest form and it should not be played, but rather read as a novel around a campfire.

My brother bought this back in the day; never ran it, though. He'd read it through and thought it was crap.

MikelaC1
2020-09-06, 11:25 AM
I've definitely gotta second Tomb of Horrors. It get why it is the way it is, but it's almost the antithesis of what i consider the modern game to be.

A third vote for Tomb of Horrors....there isnt even an objective to it, just survive. No one takes a PC into a module where there is nothing to gain.

HappyDaze
2020-09-06, 12:03 PM
You can instantly change your friendly, love-hate rivalry to absolute infatuation and "True Love" in a single diplomacy check.


They are aiming at the late teens to early twenties age group.

tomandtish
2020-09-06, 01:00 PM
A third vote for Tomb of Horrors....there isnt even an objective to it, just survive. No one takes a PC into a module where there is nothing to gain.

In fairness to Tomb, it was written for D&D (not AD&D as that didn't exist yet) for the Origins convention in 1975. And Gygax designed it for PCs such as Tenser and Robilar, and the players knew going in that this was very much a DM vs. Players adventure, where success was measured in how long you survived, not whether or not you finished.

It's a perfectly fine module as long as EVERYONE goes into it with the understanding that the DM is actively trying to kill them. (And of course, it's so well known now that you can't really use it anymore in that context).


The Avatar Trilogy, namely: Shadowdale, Tantras, and Waterdeep. It's the Chutes & Ladders of adventure modules in terms of decision making required by the PCs. Unlike Chutes & Ladders which mercifully ends after a bit, these set of trains run quite a while.

Truly awful.

Along those lines, the original Dragonlance modules that followed the books. Railroading at its finest.

Silly Name
2020-09-06, 01:26 PM
Along those lines, the original Dragonlance modules that followed the books. Railroading at its finest.

The big difference is that while the DL modules are railroady, they have the decency to place the PCs in the role of the main characters, so at the very least they can feel like they're having an impact.

In the Avatar Trilogy, the story happens at the players. Kelemvor, Midnight and Cyric are there, doing the actual cool stuff while the players spectate.

HappyDaze
2020-09-06, 02:16 PM
The big difference is that while the DL modules are railroady, they have the decency to place the PCs in the role of the main characters, so at the very least they can feel like they're having an impact.

In the Avatar Trilogy, the story happens at the players. Kelemvor, Midnight and Cyric are there, doing the actual cool stuff while the players spectate.

That reminds me of the final "End Times" adventures for World of Darkness.

Quertus
2020-09-06, 03:45 PM
Descent Into Avernus really sticks out.

For example: You're in Baldur's Gate, and you need to find a Wizard to cast a spell for you. One would think that would be a fairly trivial thing to do in one of the greatest metropolis along the Sword Coast but no; you arbitrarily have to slog your way down to Candlekeep in order to speak to a mage, who then conjours up a flock of Griffons for you to ride to find another mage... Who happens to be a magical talking otter.
And who can't actually cast the spell that the book says she can cast because she's not high enough level, but who cares about the rules? We'll just let Plane Shift work the same way as Gate because why worry about the details?

Also the Paladin who came with you from Baldur's Gate? She decides that she's not coming with you any further and goes home alone. She then dies offscreen, because players aren't allowed to have friendly NPCs that they can relate to.

At some point you meet an Elf Ranger NPC who the book takes great pains to point out is non-binary. This is excellent - more representation is greatly important and it's about time that WotC started to make up for lost time. Except that the character in question doesn't have a single word of written dialogue, they're just THERE and otherwise ignored so it comes across as pandering.

To say nothing of the actual module itself. If there's a map of a castle with 30+ rooms in it and only something of significance in 3 of those rooms, the books should tell you so right away. My GM was kind enough to read ahead and flatly tell us that the Duchess' manor was 95% empty rooms so he trimmed it down for us, but that kind of set the tone for the book.

Extensive corridors of empty rooms? Check. Lengthy fights with devils who throw out multiple poisonous/necrotic attacks per round and are also immune/resistant to most things that you can throw back? Check. The whole thing is just inane plot and NPCs propping up a grind through empty rooms and long, un-fun fights against enemies who can't really be conversed or interacted with.


Different plot, but similar types of flaws to those in my module. I wonder if they had the same author? I may Google that later, if I remember.

Definitely on my list of modules to check out now.


The Dungeons of Castle Blackmoor.

Start with maps that were reprinted from their first appearance, but with none of the known issues corrected (the labels don't match the text description and the stiarcases between the first few levels don't match at all).
Then I cannot work out how some of the new maps for the later levels are supposed to connect either.
Add on poor design - 20 levesl and the monsters on each level are that CR (it's 3.5 OGL). The PCs are expected to spend a lot of time outide the dungeon getting enough xp to progress futher - not terrible design, but...
A large part of the dungeon is supposed to evolve over time - good design right? Well no - the DM is given the starting point not the point when the PCs first get there, and when you add in the way the levels work means there's a high chance they will trigger it then have to leave for a while to level up before going back thus rendering most of that area of the dungeon dead (full of lava as it happens).

It's got a lot of elements that could be marks of good design, but the way they are put together actually makes them into bad design.

Areas you've adventured through… get filled with lava? :smallconfused:

Also, was this "random encounters give you the needed (treasure and) XP to continue the module", or "come back after you've played through "Descent Into Avernus"?


The worst module I got to experience as a player was The Fright at Tristor (http://www.greyhawk.fr/IMG/pdf/RPGA_The_Fright_at_Tristor.pdf). At first I thought it was because the DM was new but no it was just that bad. Especially since it was "designed" for level 1 characters.

Plus the villian reads like they tried to make a whole party into one character- "Reuven learned the ways of the forest in the distant Adri, saw combat in Nyrond during the Creyhawk Wars, and picked up a host of thiefly skills in the decrepit city of Seltaren, in the Duchy of Urnst. To the Sorcerers Nexus of Rel Astra he traded his immortal soul for the ability to channel magic at will. Finally, in the bandit town of Stoink, Reuven spent his savings on a trained circus bear, Tasptaddle, with which he planned to exact his revenge against the cruel people of Tristor. He has been instructing the bear to kill wildlife and farm animals to frighten the Tristor residents, a prelude to a final act of villainy that will make his revenge complete."

Directions, spacing, and encounter distances are also a mess throughout the module.The first encounter is with an owlbear who 'only' has 25hp but is already engaged in melee with commoners who he can one shot so the party needs to get real lucky to have a chance of saving either of them.

Lots of the plot hook check DC's start plausible then jump to nigh impossible, start following the tracks: DC-18 continue following off the road: DC 28, hope you specialized in tracking at level 1.
Or 60% of the 80 villagers know the story, but only 10% of them are willing to talk and only if you succeed at a DC17 charisma check, and then you have a 50% chance they will be 'proud of the murder', so 4.8 useful villagers?

There are no real sympathetic characters and the encounters are either deadly or a joke, I know it was 3.0 but I can only recommend it as an example of what not to do.

Hmmm… what if we get one character to run up to the owlbear while a second goes all-out defense? Then Benign Transposition them. And have the Rogue sneak attack the owlbear in the 2nd round? Any chance of saving the NPCs then?

I'm… kinda liking the "proud of the killer" angle, actually. So we may be using different definitions for "sympathetic character". (Granted, if it's just random rolls for any given villager's response, well, then there aren't any characters, let alone any sympathetic ones.


The big difference is that while the DL modules are railroady, they have the decency to place the PCs in the role of the main characters, so at the very least they can feel like they're having an impact.

In the Avatar Trilogy, the story happens at the players. Kelemvor, Midnight and Cyric are there, doing the actual cool stuff while the players spectate.

Yeah, the module I'm complaining about at least had the decency to put the PCs in the starring roles (mostly). Of course, the fact that every NPC was better than the PCs makes you question why the PCs have the starring roles…

Azuresun
2020-09-06, 03:53 PM
That reminds me of the final "End Times" adventures for World of Darkness.

I liked some of those, especially the "blow up the setting!" ones, but others were...baaaad. Mage had one good scenario (I liked the twist at the end, where the PC's are fighting to destroy the world and the villain is trying to preserve it), and four variations on "an unstoppable asteroid / super-Nephandus / fleet of aliens turns up, you lose times infinity".

Man, White Wolf have had some real stinkers in their time......because I didn't read them personally, I'm not even including Aberrant adventures or most of the Sam Haight Saga.


Fear To Tread for Demon: The Fallen. This RPG is awesome, the peak of the World of Darkness according to me, and you should check it out. This adventure was not awesome, and you should avoid it. For the most part, it's fairly basic errors in adventure design (a PC who is a child or who can shapeshift into one can't infiltrate the evil orphanage because we say so, you have two NPC's tagging along for a big chunk of it, one scenario is smuggling a wounded ally to safety....if you don't have PC's who can teleport or take a shortcut through the spirit world), but it completely comes unglued with the ending.

The PC's discover that many of the infernal leaders in Los Angeles have become puppets of an Earthbound, one of the big bads of the setting! Surrounded by powerful enemies, their only hope of survival is to sell their souls and become its finger puppets. And then the module ends. Yup! You are now either dead or the servants of an evil, insane monster! Thanks for playing! And this is sold as an INTRODUCTORY scenario to the game!


Rage Across the Amazon, for Werewolf. It's a railroaded series of fights where the reward of the PC's is to find a legendary mage deep in the Amazon and then.....White Wolf's pet NPC to end all pet NPC's, Sam Haight, defeats him in a cutscene while the PC's presumably sit around picking their noses, and he escapes into a no-you-can't-chase-him Umbral pocket, now a vampire-werewolf-mage with a staff that makes him immune to Paradox.


Rage Across New York, for Werewolf. The climax of the story involves the PC's fighting Wyrm-spirits in the Umbra across from a TV debate. Their aim is to prove that the Satanic child abuse scandal was real. Yeah.....


Crusaders of the Machine God, for Exalted. Now, the Autochthonians were an element of the setting not in the core but introduced very early on. They lived inside, essentially, Fantasy Unicron, keeping him maintained after he fled Creation back at the dawn of time. They got a basic writeup, and a quick adventure where they were returning to Creation to try and find a cure for the sickness that was slowly causing their god and home to fall apart, establishing a beachhead in Creation with their weird artificial Exalts and funky technology.

Now, when the Alchemicals got a full book near the end of 1e, this scenario was expanded into a big adventure, where it was expanded into a Creation-threatening scenario that could form the backbone of an entire campaign.

One thing about Exalted is, most of the PC's are pretty much demigods. Not invulnerable, but at a power level where you can't really plan for what they're going to do. Think if you had Kratos, Wonder Woman, Sun Wukong and Elric in a party of PC's. So obviously, you want to go with a more diffuse "this is what happens if the PC's don't intervene, these are points where they could intervene, here is a general indication of the effects their intervention could have" writing style, right?

White Wolf did not do that. It's essentially fan fiction about a whole bunch of existing NPC's who run the entire arc of the invasion by themselves while the one paragraph that acknowledges this is an RPG is about the PC's "rallying" in a desert fortress and interfering with none of the events of the war. If your PC's do throw things off the rails--say if they're the scouting Alchemicals and decide something weird and unpredictable like "Let's not trust this creepy guy who's the first person to meet us.", then the entire story goes down in smoking ruins. A particular highlight is the Autocthonians (people who did not know what a sea was until they came to Creation) destroying the navy of the Dragon-Blooded, people who can quite literally have sailing in their blood.


The second War In The Heavens book for Fading Suns. FS has quite a few good adventures--generally, they set up a scenario and a cast of NPC's with clear agendas, and then take their hands off the wheel, allowing for several different ways the PC's might approach it. But this one....I knew I was in trouble when it began with "One of the PC's is KO'd and replaced by a doppleganger.". And the final reward is that you get to stumble round an illusory maze for a while, and then the Vau may or may not have been impressed by you and may or may not decide to change something based on what you did. I was actually kind of glad the third book never saw a release back then.

Segev
2020-09-06, 04:37 PM
Adding my vote for the Witchfire Trilogy. The module is really a novel series about the necromancer in question, who is the protagonist thereof. If the players do well enough in the dungeon crawls and realize they’re supposed to appease the necromancer NPC, they get a front row seat to the module’s plot, which they cannot influence beyond determining if they’re in the ultimate victor’s good graces or not.

There’s a scene where the PCs are given a choice between two characters of questionable morals to give a plot-important artifact to. The choice is skewed by one choice being evil “but sympathetic,” at least by the way the module presents the NPC’s motives. Worse, there is effectively a right and wrong choice. If you choose right, things follow as if your choice mattered and you get points in your favor for the best seats from which to watch the plot unfold. If you choose wrong, the “right” NPC cutscene-kills the NPC you gave it to right then and there, tells you off, and storms off to keep enacting the plot, which you might not have as good a seat to watch, now.

Telok
2020-09-06, 05:06 PM
The Pazio AP for StarFinder called Dead Suns was pretty bad for my group. I remember that we ran across at least 6 or 7 different instances of "you cannot X your spaceship here" without any explanation. With X usually being land, although it did include fly over, scan, leave, use as transportation, and use as cover during a fight.

So the whole thing was a "race against the clock to stop bad guys getting the superweapon" scenario spanning a 3.p style 1st to about 15th levels. Literally every step of the way ends with a "they just left/got what they needed, you have to hurry to catch them". Unfortunately space travel time is random, from 1d6 days between ultra-civilization core worlds to 5d6 days for completely uncharted destinations. Then space combat requires upgrading your spaceship every level, which is 1d6 days per thing upgraded.

Suffice it to say that the AP is actually "speed of plot" but tells you that time & speed is critical. There's no difference between the PCs spending 14d6 days upgrading the ship then 5d6 days getting somewhere and just getting the best engines at level 4 or something and speed running all the space stuff at 1/3 * 5d6 days plus out running all the fights. Well there is a difference, the space fights count for xp and sometimes loot or plot critical info, and of course failing one involves your ship being destroyed by people who have no reason to take prisoners. The AP requires you to level up you ship, then fight and win all the space combats, despite telling the players that they have to catch up to the enemies.

There were other things of course. The gas trap on the airless asteroid that poisoned people through their space suits. The expectation that the PCs walk something like 4+ hours through a poisonous and mildly radioactive hellscape instead of renting an air car. The expectation that at 13th level either all the PCs can fly at 60'+ or none of them can. Loot that was, in one case, literally useless and nearly worthless. The usual stuff.

HappyDaze
2020-09-06, 05:48 PM
Good enough!

Friv
2020-09-06, 06:55 PM
Many of these modules are bad, but I'm not sure they hold a candle to D&D 3.0's Diablo II: To Hell and Back. In addition to being a companion book to possibly the worst character options sourcebook in the history of 3E, every aspect of the book is a nightmare. The plot follows the plot of the video game slavishly, but without giving any of the secondary information the video game's narration sequences provided. The NPCs are nonsensical. The maps are designed to create dozens of level-appropriate encounters using CR 1-3 enemies even after you've finished fighting CR 15-20 bosses. Several areas include groups of enemies with a listed CR lower than a single member of the group. Many monsters are wildly overpowered for their CR, others are wildly underpowered in obvious ways. Several areas include treasure that contradicts itself. Artwork is repeated. The random encounter tables are misprinted, and many of them include monster names that do not exist. Maps don't include proper room numbering for their generation method. 120' square maps exist within a 40' square on a larger map. The game suggests respawning bosses and major NPCs if the PCs go back into places they've already been. DMs are required to manually generated 8d6+32 magic items every week, with each generation not actually being possible because the game doesn't include a mechanism to generate magic items as a whole, only a mechanism to generate items and see whether they are magical.

If there was an aspect of module design that could be done incorrectly or half-assed, To Hell and Back did it. I wrote a hilariously lengthy review of it and its companion volume, which started as an attempt to mine interesting things from the pair of books and turned into me unleashing my most vitriolic sarcasm halfway through the character creation chapter.

InvisibleBison
2020-09-06, 09:22 PM
I wrote a hilariously lengthy review of it and its companion volume, which started as an attempt to mine interesting things from the pair of books and turned into me unleashing my most vitriolic sarcasm halfway through the character creation chapter.

Do you have a link to that review? I'm a big fan of lengthy sarcasm.

Glorthindel
2020-09-07, 03:51 AM
Damned Cities (for first ed Dark Heresy) - Not so much the whole module, but a specific element of it.

The parties base of operations during the adventure is an old tower currently occupied by the planetary arbities (40k police force). The section of the module about this building includes a description, floor plans, and a picture of the building from the outside... and no two of these three things match. It would require escher levels of spacial inprobability for the floor plans to occupy the building shape shown by the picture (and I don't just blame the artist for this, because the plan includes several subterranean passages that just disappear off the page with no clear idea where they are going and why the security force occupying the building are so blase about these unguarded passages), and the descriptions in the flavour text boxes don't match either the drawing or the plans. It is like all three were done in complete isolation. Sure, its an easy thing to completely ignore as a DM, but it signifies such a woeful lack of editting and proofreading that it sours the product right from the offset

Hand_of_Vecna
2020-09-07, 06:04 AM
HmmmÂ… what if we get one character to run up to the owlbear while a second goes all-out defense? Then Benign Transposition them. And have the Rogue sneak attack the owlbear in the 2nd round? Any chance of saving the NPCs then?


Not bad, but Benign Transposition came out fairly deep into 3.5's life cycle. You are right that a lvl 1 tank going full defense would do pretty well soaking up the owl Bear's full attack looks like around 7-8 damage a round, but open to a lucky kill by the DM. Without the Benign Transposition switcheroo I don't see how you get them focused on when the Owlbear could continue killing villagers.

You could put that tank up front and have the rest of the party use their probably mediocre ranged attacks. Colors Spray would be a good option to give you a free round with no Villager or PC deaths. The Owlbear will probably get to charge a light armored PC, but this hopefully won't kill them. If they are conscious after one attack, full defense and pray while everyone else wails on the Owlbear.

MoiMagnus
2020-09-07, 06:50 AM
Is "Tomb of Horrors" cheating? Because probably that. It's not that it particularly ignores the rules, it's just that it's a series of "what number am I thinking of" challenges where if you don't guess the right number every time your character is deleted.

IMHO, the Tomb of Horror is a module with a lot of potential.

I've had a lot of fun sessions (for both me and multiple groups of players) with it during the last few years. The catch is that I do not use the D&D system for it, but rather a narrative-heavy homebrew system (with powers as generalist as "air bending" or "alchemy").

Main consequence is that the PCs always have the possibility to react, and with clever enough use of their powers (and basic paranoia at every step of the exploration), they can escape almost every deadly traps of the tomb even after triggering them.

The first time I DMed this homebrew version, I messed up the balance of the PC powers and the PCs got away without even feeling threatened. I feel like I've managed to find a more acceptable balance, where they end up severely injured and afraid of every corridor, but still have the tools to survive various traps and ultimately defeat the tomb. [I also cut a third of the content of the tomb away, because it's too long to my taste. Since I push my players to advance very slowly, that would take way too long for them to go through the whole module.]

AvatarVecna
2020-09-07, 07:16 AM
Storm King's Thunder is split into four parts. Part 1 is an optional prologue designed to power-level the party from 1st to 5th with barely any semblance of actual challenge, including sneaking up on pairs of unaware goblins until you've murdered a town's worth of them, and shooting a small army of orcs that refuse to shoot back until they've figured out that the wall can't be climbed and maybe they should circle this thorp until they find somewhere easier to enter. Oh and they run away if you kill half of them in this time. Oh and if they're kicking your ass too hard, a band of elves shows up and basically immediately shoots them to death, then rides off to avoid any conversation. I wanna clarify that yes, them appearing if you're losing is written into the adventure, it's not a matter of "how long before they show up", it's explicitly a "save the game from TPK" thing.

Part 2 involves traveling to some far-off town to deliver news of dead family members. When you arrive, you find the town in the process of getting rolled by giants. You stop the giants, then go on to fight the leader giant of that particular faction. If you picked the wrong place to go to first, you might be in for a remarkably tough fight because some giants are tougher than others, but fortunately the closest town (and the one 90% of players will pick to go to) is where the hill giants are attacking (the weakest giants). However, the game puts in an option for you to reach the much further towns slightly faster, if you feel like giving yourself a difficulty spike with tougher giants: a cloud giant wizard 8 (just high enough level that he could be considered epic, just low enough level that he can't cast teleport) flies down in his cloud castle and offers to ferry you to one of the other towns for reasons. He's crazy and also not really super-interested in helping you beyond being a glorified taxi service.

Part 3 starts after slaying that first giant lord, where now you know that two towns have gotten rolled by giants, and you've gotten information that all giants are doing stuff like this right now for complicated religious reasons, and maybe that's something somebody should look into. Part 3 is the part of Storm King's Thunder where the party wanders around half of Faerun's wilderness picking random fights until they accidentally stumble onto the plot. In the form of another epic giant adventurer, who can escort them to a temple where they can get more info. Don't worry about this epic giant adventurer outshining the lvl 8 PCs he's traveling with, though - the designer's wrote in his description that he's aware of the fragile egos of small folk like you and that he'll deliberately hold back a lot in fights to let them have a bit of glory. When you reach the temple, you get to hear some fragments of giant prophecy that amounts to "the giant king was kidnapped", and then this random epic dragon adventurer shows up to try and kill you all. The giant and the dragon duke it out while the party runs away.

Part 4 is the climax, where the party realizes this teleportation item they got off the giant lord can be used to go talk to the giant princess. They go to talk to her and find out hey wait a minute that vizier or whatever has horns that are really similar to the horns on the giant princess' throne - specifically, the horns that are on the dragon skulls that are on the throne. They're also similar to that dragon who attacked you at the temple and oh hey surprise surprise it's the same dragon and this was all a big plot to topple the giants or whatever. Now that the traitor is revealed you just gotta rescue the giant king to restore balance to the giant kingdoms. The giant king was kidnapped in part by that epic dragon lady, who maybe gets away, but also she was in cahoots with a kraken. What's a kraken doing in an adventure focused around giants and (more broadly) an attempt to rekindle the giant-dragon wars of old? The kraken is the mastermind behind the mastermind, or something. Anyway, you can end up picking fights with one or both of these epic monsters, the kraken or the dragon. You're 13th lvl at this point. Good luck!

GloatingSwine
2020-09-07, 07:33 AM
In fairness to Tomb, it was written for D&D (not AD&D as that didn't exist yet) for the Origins convention in 1975. And Gygax designed it for PCs such as Tenser and Robilar, and the players knew going in that this was very much a DM vs. Players adventure, where success was measured in how long you survived, not whether or not you finished.

It's a perfectly fine module as long as EVERYONE goes into it with the understanding that the DM is actively trying to kill them. (And of course, it's so well known now that you can't really use it anymore in that context).


A lot of the really old modules like Tomb of Horrors were designed for PCs that didn't exist before you started and wouldn't exist after you finished it. Because they were intended to be played in a convention tournament setting where multiple groups would run the same dungeon to see how much of the bull**** they could dodge.

MoiMagnus
2020-09-07, 07:58 AM
Storm King's Thunder ...

I find it quite funny to compare your review to some of the reviews on the wikipedia page, e.g.:


Alex Springer, for SLUG Magazine, wrote "where most campaigns tend to begin in some kind of neutral, relatively safe location, Storm King’s Thunder thrusts our intrepid adventurers into a recently sieged village that is being picked apart by goblins. [...] Allowing the players to shift gears and take the role of a relatively normal person in the middle of a city-wide attack lets players experience the fantastic world of Dungeons & Dragons from the eyes of a civilian. In a game that expects its players to become superheroes, it was a nice dose of reality to see what it’s like to face a supernatural being without the benefit of supernatural powers. As we continued through the campaign, I was impressed at how well Storm King’s Thunder balanced structure with improvisational freedom. [...] We’re not talking about generic “go fetch” missions or cleansing ruin after ruin of its monstrous occupants, either—one chance encounter finds the players manipulating a lovesick hill giant into betraying her husband-stealing queen. Based on my experience running Storm King’s Thunder as a novice DM, I continue to be impressed with the quality of work that Wizards of the Coast puts into their roleplaying game peripherals. The art is fantastic, the maps are meticulous and all of it is set against a Shakespearean story of corruption, betrayal and power".

Grod_The_Giant
2020-09-07, 09:33 AM
I find it quite funny to compare your review to some of the reviews on the wikipedia page, e.g.:
After enjoying Curse of Strahd and Out of the Abyss, I was looking forward to running Storm King's Thunder.

Then I read it.

The module falls prey to the illusion of choice. There are three towns where the actual plot can kick off, but it doesn't really matter which one you use--the other two will never be touched. There are a huge number of locations detailed in the "wandering around the north" chapter, but no hints about how to tie them together. There are six giant villages, each of which gets its own substantial chapter, but there's no need to use more than two of them. It looks like a full-sized module, but in practice you're going to waste, like, half the material you paid for. I don't mind a bit of railroading in a module; quite frankly, I'd rather have one interesting path for the party to follow than waste page count on a bunch of alternates that will never get used.

NigelWalmsley
2020-09-07, 09:45 AM
A lot of the really old modules like Tomb of Horrors were designed for PCs that didn't exist before you started and wouldn't exist after you finished it. Because they were intended to be played in a convention tournament setting where multiple groups would run the same dungeon to see how much of the bull**** they could dodge.

I still don't consider that particularly interesting. Tomb of Horrors is certainly less stupid if it kills characters you don't really care about, but the baseline of the module is that the stuff that happens isn't really predictable or avoidable by any kind of skill. Whether you get ganked or not basically comes down to whether you win a series of coin flips. I can definitely get behind a high-lethality module as a thing worth doing in some contexts, but the danger has to be a lot more responsive to informed player choice than it is in Tomb.

awa
2020-09-07, 10:00 AM
I still don't consider that particularly interesting. Tomb of Horrors is certainly less stupid if it kills characters you don't really care about, but the baseline of the module is that the stuff that happens isn't really predictable or avoidable by any kind of skill. Whether you get ganked or not basically comes down to whether you win a series of coin flips. I can definitely get behind a high-lethality module as a thing worth doing in some contexts, but the danger has to be a lot more responsive to informed player choice than it is in Tomb.

If i recall correctly old school d&d encouraged what we would call meta gaming and pcs brought tons of minions along. So maybe the first person who steps into an instant death trap dies but that might not actually be a pc and even if it was you just make a new character who now knows about that trap.

also remember that wacky antics were common in those days so i would not be surprised to see an adventurer going into the dungeon with a herd of goats or sack of chickens to test for traps.

In part these traps seem unfair because the traps were in an arms race of 10ft poles and other tricks.

AvatarVecna
2020-09-07, 10:26 AM
After enjoying Curse of Strahd and Out of the Abyss, I was looking forward to running Storm King's Thunder.

Then I read it.

The module falls prey to the illusion of choice. There are three towns where the actual plot can kick off, but it doesn't really matter which one you use--the other two will never be touched. There are a huge number of locations detailed in the "wandering around the north" chapter, but no hints about how to tie them together. There are six giant villages, each of which gets its own substantial chapter, but there's no need to use more than two of them. It looks like a full-sized module, but in practice you're going to waste, like, half the material you paid for. I don't mind a bit of railroading in a module; quite frankly, I'd rather have one interesting path for the party to follow than waste page count on a bunch of alternates that will never get used.

It doesn't help that the first bit is just blatantly power-leveling the PCs (and doesn't even need to be so blatant, since it uses milestone leveling). I'm convinced the Nightstone stuff only exists because the authors wanted to tell a Giants vs Dragons story, but corporate required it start at lvl 1 for AL games, so they wrote some grindy nonsense in "Middle Of Nowhere, Faerun" for PCs to cut their teeth on - and the adventure even encourages you to skip it if you wanna get to the real story.

This disconnectedness makes it hard to solve the other problems that exist in this early part. Lvl 1 PCs are going to see Nightstone post-bombardment and think "if whatever did that is still here, Im gonna die" and they'll just leave, unless they metagame and know the adventure won't kill them five minutes in. I tried to "solve" this problem, and the difficulty of the grindy fights against the mass of orcs (and the mass of goblins, if you made the mistake of killing the ones in the church first, which most people probably do), but having the PCs be from Nightstone originally, and they got sent out on a more appropriate lvl 1 mission. Then, when they return to Nightstone to find it rolled, not only do they have a few levels under their belt, but they have enough personal connection that they probably want to actually see if their friends and neighbors and love interests are alive and alright. It's a really great way of making the early section not totally suck, but then it falls apart because you never come back to Nightstone, because it doesn't actually matter in the grand scheme of things.

It also doesn't help that, in the four steps I described above, it's possible for players to skip from step 2 to step 4 by using the conch they looted from a giant leader - except for step 4, you really need the info about the missing king and the enemy dragon that happen in step 3. But hey it's not like PCs are gonna try divining the uses of new magic items they get, or test them out to see what they do. Oh wait.

I'm running this game for my forever-group and they're fun but the adventure very much isn't. >.<

Segev
2020-09-07, 10:33 AM
After enjoying Curse of Strahd and Out of the Abyss, I was looking forward to running Storm King's Thunder.

Then I read it.

The module falls prey to the illusion of choice. There are three towns where the actual plot can kick off, but it doesn't really matter which one you use--the other two will never be touched. There are a huge number of locations detailed in the "wandering around the north" chapter, but no hints about how to tie them together. There are six giant villages, each of which gets its own substantial chapter, but there's no need to use more than two of them. It looks like a full-sized module, but in practice you're going to waste, like, half the material you paid for. I don't mind a bit of railroading in a module; quite frankly, I'd rather have one interesting path for the party to follow than waste page count on a bunch of alternates that will never get used.

The theory is that STK has replayability. In practice, I would suggest repurposing some of the giant lands and villages for other campaigns.

Friv
2020-09-07, 11:03 AM
Do you have a link to that review? I'm a big fan of lengthy sarcasm.

I absolutely do! The thread, along with some lovely colour commentary by others, is located over here (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/lets-read-diablo-ii-diablerie.835587/). It's an rpgnet link, but you can read without having an account. :)

Oh, and if you want to skip the godawful mechanics and poorly-designed treasure generation of the 'character' book, the actual campaign module starts here for unsigned in people. (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/lets-read-diablo-ii-diablerie.835587/page-18)

Kaptin Keen
2020-09-07, 11:15 AM
The Times of Trouble trilogy. I don't recall the names, but basically - the worst design decision of Forgotten Realms was made into a trilogy of books, which were among the worst fiction ever written, then made into a series of modules, which are hands down the worst junk produced by an industry with already horrendously low standards.

I may not have the chronology right - maybe the modules were before the books? No matter. As you may surmise, I didn't like them =)

Edit: Ah - someone else voiced the same sentiment, far earlier. Oh well.

Zakhara
2020-09-07, 11:15 AM
It's got to be "F'Dech Fo's Tomb." Scarcely more than a few pages, anemic maps and totally phoned-in encounters (what few of them there are). Terrible value; you can practically make something better off the top of your head for free!

I think "Tomb of Horrors" gets a bad rub because, being a competition module, it'd be too inconclusive to determine a winner if it were too easy. So, by necessity, it needs to be harsh. It preys on player assumptions and nuggets of 'conventional' wisdom that were already familiar in its day to create a serious challenge.

Talakeal
2020-09-07, 03:52 PM
I have heard lots of good things about World’s Largest Dungeon.

One thing that always struck out to me is that once the last boss is engaged, every monster in the dungeon animates as undead and then makes a beeline for the party. The sheer logistical nightmare of running this encounter as written must dwarf the effort some DMs put into entire campaigns...

Chauncymancer
2020-09-08, 12:42 AM
The theory is that STK has replayability. In practice, I would suggest repurposing some of the giant lands and villages for other campaigns.
90% of all design problems in D&D modules track back to the unexamined assumption of designers that a player ordinarily goes through the same module or adventure three or four times.

Segev
2020-09-08, 08:54 AM
90% of all design problems in D&D modules track back to the unexamined assumption of designers that a player ordinarily goes through the same module or adventure three or four times.
Can you give examples in other modules? There’s a little of that in any Hex Crawl, but most modules seem to only have a few “dropped” content bits for a given play through, and those due to giving meaningful choices.

STK isn’t in that latter category because while the choice of which chapter to do is meaningful, it is only really so because it’s choosing content. STK definitely expects replay to be valuable. I don’t know if any other modules that do.

Mordante
2020-09-08, 10:50 AM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

Cygnia
2020-09-08, 11:22 AM
Some GMs run them because they need practice/don't feel they're good enough to design their own adventures yet.

Segev
2020-09-08, 11:24 AM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

I run Tomb of Annihilation because it's a lot of content I didn't have to write up, myself, and has some fun and cool ideas I definitely wouldn't have come up with on my own. I also tweak and modify as I see fit. For instance, the first dungeon they went to was the Sunless Citadel, modified to be an ancient sunken Chultan monastery with Ashalderon being a figure tied to Ubtao. One of the dead adventurers they were after I replaced with one of the Merchant Princes' sons, and introduced the Death Curse to the PCs when the Merchant Prince tried to pay to have him resurrected and the resurrection failed.

I'm also going to have Blechorz have lightning bolts that disintegrate rather than a single-target force damage disintegration ray, because I want to make for a more threatening tactical situation on his level when the Tomb Guardians show up.

AvatarVecna
2020-09-08, 11:42 AM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

Modules are fast food.

DMing is storytelling. Most people don't like DMing, or just aren't very good at it, but some are pretty good storytellers. Most good storytellers aren't necessarily good story writers. That's not to say that they couldn't put out something worth playing, but it would take them longer to write than a good writer could. And that's a time investment that might not be worth it for the enjoyment they and their friends get out of the storytellling. Even if the effort that it would take to make a good adventure/campaign would be worth it for how good a storyteller that DM is, the DM just might not have the time in their life to write that story from scratch, not even to write enough of it to just run a session next week, or week after next.

Even if you're an amazing writer, these things take time. Stephen King has an absurd writing speed (5-6 hours a day to get 2k words out, which he gets pretty consistently without burnout), and it'd take him a month at first-draft-writing-speed to pump out Curse Of Strahd length campaign, which could take about 30 sessions to get through. If your DM could write adventures at that speed, each week could be running the game for four hours on the weekend, and an hour spent writing at Stephen King speeds every other day of the week. That's the kinda pace you'd need to just keep having weekly sessions forever.

But your DM isn't Stephen King, in speed or quality, I'll bet. More likely, your DM has some adventures or campaigns he's been tweaking for years and just keeps running groups through because he's the forever DM, and if anybody manages to complete those games, they've gotta take a break from DMing for a month to get working on something to follow it up (which is how all the other games they have ready to run got started too). But that's a big free time investment if you get to that point, and while you could put in the time every day, or big chunks on the weekends, that makes DMing basically all your freetime. And because that time is spent just making sure you have something, anything to run next time, it's more about quantity than quality so you gotta hope that your improvisation skills can make up for the lackluster content (unless you're a writing god, but you probably aren't). It's a big time investment that isn't going to deliver the kind of experience you really wanna give your friends, but it's the best you can do on your own.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/022/898/steamed-hams.jpg

50 bucks for a campaign module from WotC. Less if it's something from years ago. Bargain bin if it's an adventure from a previous edition. Writing a full campaign that's good takes lots of time, but if you skip the time by spending money, you usually have a decent-ish campaign. Sure the combats aren't balanced for your particular party, and there's not NPCs and plothooks specific to them, and maybe it has to be converted to this edition, but you can do those things yourself, and shuffle around NPCs to fit better. It's far easier and quicker to buy an existing module and alter it, than it is to write a good campaign from scratch. Ho ho ho ho, delightfully devilish, Seymour!

Cazero
2020-09-08, 11:44 AM
I got myself an adventure/ruleset book for beginners. And while I understand that the game expect the GM to also be a newbie, and that running a railroad is easier, boy is that book railroady.
All five scenario reek of the "one right answer" problem. Especialy the first one where the GM is instructed on how to enforce that one answer, but not before explicitly letting players waste time trying to find their own answer. And you have to do that, because it ends on a cliffhanger plothook for the next scenario that can't realisticaly be reached otherwise. Talk about sending mixed signals.
The fourth scenario has a guard golem that is litteraly unkillable. And your players have to guess that before escaping it with their lives for the sole reason that it's a non-thinking automaton that got simple instructions and won't leave its post. Until they decide to lure it away halfway through town (because they will think of luring it away, no way beginners fixate on any other solutions to that problem, amirite?), then you have chase rules for that. Huh.
And there's a bunch of editing issues. Notably with plus/minus signs on combat modifiers. The fighter's armor rating is easy enough to guess (he's supposed to have the best defense, not one ****tier that what's supposedly the lowest possible), but there is only one weapon table and no way to know if those numbers don't make sense because it's an abstraction or because it's a mistake.


Why do people play modules????
Making your own adventures takes work. Especialy when running a heavy system like D&D.

NorthernPhoenix
2020-09-08, 11:58 AM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

A real question is Why Not? :wink:

Grod_The_Giant
2020-09-08, 12:01 PM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????
Running a module makes me feel more like part of the group.

Being the GM of an original campaign is more like being a puppet-master. I'm not directly controlling the player characters, I'm not railroading, but I am in total control of the circumstances they're reacting to and the options they're presented with. The contents of the world are up to me. The NPCs of the world are up to me. The choices are up to me-- maybe not which of several options the party will take, but tine times out of ten the party makes will follow a branch of events that I planned out (probably two hours before the session started, because I'm a horrible procrastinator, but the point stands). It's no bad thing, but it can get tiring. Running sessions doesn't burn me out, and neither does building encounters, but trying to figure out what happens next is exhausting sometimes.

A module strips all that away. I'm not a puppet-master; I'm not building the world around the party. The web of events and options and characters that create the framework in which players make their choices already exists, and I'm discovering it alongside the party. I'm not the source of the world, I'm just a referee. I don't have to decide how dangerous this entity is verses that entity verses the players; I don't have to decide what is and isn't possible to persuade NPCs to do. When encounters are amazingly weird or bad, we can laugh at them together.

Do I change things? Absolutely. I'll rewrite boring bits, weave new subplots to steer the group through the more open bits of the module, continue to develop characters the players like and sideline the ones they don't. When I ran Out of the Abyss, for instance, I completely overhauled the Rockblight, Gravenhollow, and Menzoberranzan. I pushed the Drow to the side, added an Orcus plotline that turned him into the main secondary antagonist, and brought Fraz-Urb'luu in as the ultimate big bad after the Monk picked up the diamond containing his mind. But I also got to crack up trying to pronounce names in Sloobludop, fall in love with Stool and the mycanoids, end enjoy the madness of the Maze Engine right alongside my players.

Telwar
2020-09-08, 01:47 PM
Using modules frees up workload on the GM. One of our GMs converted an old Dragon magazine adventure into a FFG Star Wars adventure, and it wasn't actually noticeable until he told us.

Also, you get to make fun of the adventure with them, boxed text especially.

My favorite, from a Shadowrun 4e adventure, has the PCs going to an antediluvian pyramid in Bosnia, into tunnels opened but inexplicably unexplored by the corporate archaeologists, in search of the MacGuffin. The tunnels have structural elements composed of orichalcum, with enough of it on site that they could remove one structural element, sell pieces of that for decades, and be set for life. No, we didn't run that one.

Trask
2020-09-08, 01:56 PM
First adventure I ever ran was a module, and it was freaking terrible.

"Fright At Tristor"

Complete trash, utter garbage module that was a total railroad and awful "mystery" that literally required players to follow a fragile breadcrumb trail and make certain moral decisions or the adventure literally could not continue.

Kaptin Keen
2020-09-08, 02:14 PM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

I tell myself I can design a general plot arch in my head, and fill in the many, many blanks as I go along.

The advantage to this method is that it's almost 100% inspiration, which is an adrenaline fuelled joyride. The disadvantage is that inspiration is by no means foolproof, it has no filter, and sometimes - to be totally honest - it falls flat on it's face.

If you're not like me, and make an actual effort to prepare ahead of time, making your own is very time comsuming, and playing modules is just .. easier. Also, sometimes, better than what you can come up with on your own. Sometimes.

Telok
2020-09-08, 03:30 PM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????


A real question is Why Not? :wink:

Personally I generally spend about 6 months of spare time building a sand box and custom beastiary before letting a group run amuck in it. Then it usually takes me about 2 hours post session to record notes, dissection, and how the sandbox reacts. Then often another 2 or 3 hours of prep before the next session, usually fleshing out the setting reaction to the PCs and updating plots/quests. That's pushing 6 hours a week just keeping up with a prepped sandbox that I'm intimately familiar with and just doing reactions to PCs.

I know a DM who doesn't prep a setting and writes the campaign as it goes along. That reportedly takes 12 to 16 hours a week and has occasional hiccups when the DM misses something in all the loose pages of notes they keep.

We don't use modules because they usually don't do what we want to do, and we have experienced players who accidentally break modules. Once a module breaks it's either continue with a bad sandbox or do the "the module author didn't expect you to <perfectly reasonable action>, please get back on the railroad?" speech again. That speech gets annoying after about the third time. For everyone. So the modules don't save us any real work after a while.

I also know two DMs who only use modules because they haven't been running games for years/decades, made the mistakes, and learned from them. Yet. They're getting there. However one will only run games for kids because they stay on the rails more and don't notice massive logic/plot holes as much. They want the structure and support that they think a module should supply. What kicks them in the head is that a lot of modules are strings of loosely related places and fights interspersed with occasional npc cutscenes, or sandboxy settings with some linked quests and a few set piece encounters that are like little bits of unconnected railroad track. Things that may be fine for an experienced DM (or one with lots of free time and energy) to mine or hack, but tends to be rough on the unprepared DM who thought they bought something they could play with very little prep time.

That link to the let's read of the Diablo d20 abomination on rpg.net? That's a hilariously terrible complete disaster of a module being documented in excruciating detail. It deserves every swear word it gets, and more. It should be used as a handbook on how not to write adventures.

Edit: Oh, yeah, reasons. "Uses modules" is often limited time or inexperience looking for support. "Doesn't use modules" is usually don't need to, modules don't have what we want, or they don't really help because players.

Composer99
2020-09-08, 04:43 PM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

I'm running two games right now. In one, the players are running through Hoard of the Dragon Queen. In the other, the PCs' backstories are driving the plot, in my own setting.

Honest answer? I'm enjoying running both: the custom game because I enjoy doing the worldbuilding, establishing details, the webs of cause and effect, and improvising encounters, scenes, and NPCs, and Hoard of the Dragon Queen because it's also enjoyable not to have to do that stuff (beyond tinkering with the module here and there) and instead just sit down and run the game (more or less).

Florian
2020-09-08, 05:21 PM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

Why not? It´s already sorta-kinda a luxury to spent the necessary time with friends to play the game, you know, besides family, kids, job, other hobbies and such. So unless someone pays me for it, there's next to now time to work out custom stuff.

Spriteless
2020-09-08, 11:35 PM
Worst module I read was some free sequel to the lost mines of Phandelver. Started with the ghosts of the humanoids the PCs slaughtered in the original module coming to attack the PCs, as a way to teach PCs that slaughtering humanoids is bad. I wondered at the logic, you could just tell the players if you're uncomfortable with murder hoboeing. Also it was useless as my PCs had taken hostages and only killed the chief.

Then I asked the players for sugestions, and they suggested the Fires of Creation. We went though the whole adventure path, and I tell you, it was despite the systems, not because of it. I bought all the module pdfs. The setting was interesting enough. There was nothing like a roster of threats, with enemy stat blocks either after the room description, or in one of two seperate appendixes in back. The maps had multiple paths to the same destination. The advice for if the players played smart and start fights was to add more random encounters, so the PCs would be high enough level to beat the threats later on.

But it was great at teaching me to improvise 5e using info from another system, or two as this was using a lot of starfinder alpha stuff. Or three as some of the creatures seemed a bit 40k. I am great at bad sandboxes, as Telok puts it. And I would never come up with the idea to have a buried spaceship grow it's own a autistic android assasin to repair itself. Think about it. Now you've thought about Seerath in her role as anything but a threat moreso than the writers of The Smoking Tower.

I like to use other people's imaginations as a springboard of my own. Thinking about plot holes makes me think of plots. Seerath's whole deal made me work out specific limits Cassandra's brain image copy later on.

Eldan
2020-09-09, 10:58 AM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

I've played D&D for close to 20 years now and I'm still pretty much unable to write a story that has a beginning, middle and end. Dont' know why, but whenever I try, it falls apart in the middle.

So I instead take a module, absolutely gut it, put it in a different setting, rewrite the encounters, take out most of the combat, introduce more NPCs and change some of the motivations of the bad guys until I like it.

Basically, I steal outlines.

Eldan
2020-09-09, 11:03 AM
Back to worst modules, the one that made the worst impression on me was some old adventure path for The Dark Eye that a friend showed me. Never ran it, I must say, but passages of it and his experience just looked terrible.

Take everything in this thread about railroading. IT had that. Including telling you in the beginning how the story would end, the PCs running through linear story bits to get from setpiece to setpiece, overpowered NPCs that drove both sides of the plot and text that told the game master not to let the players make the wrong decision. As in almost literally "If the characters make this decision, tell them to make the other one instead. If they don't, have that decision fail and go with the other one." You get to walk from location to location and watch the famous setting NPCs be awesome at one another, with lengthy pre-written speeches that the players can't interrupt. But you get some random encounters in between.

Florian
2020-09-09, 11:15 AM
Back to worst modules, the one that made the worst impression on me was some old adventure path for The Dark Eye that a friend showed me. Never ran it, I must say, but passages of it and his experience just looked terrible.

Take everything in this thread about railroading. IT had that. Including telling you in the beginning how the story would end, the PCs running through linear story bits to get from setpiece to setpiece, overpowered NPCs that drove both sides of the plot and text that told the game master not to let the players make the wrong decision. As in almost literally "If the characters make this decision, tell them to make the other one instead. If they don't, have that decision fail and go with the other one." You get to walk from location to location and watch the famous setting NPCs be awesome at one another, with lengthy pre-written speeches that the players can't interrupt. But you get some random encounters in between.

For those not in the know: DSA uses a "living world" format. It´s a persistent setting that's getting updated for 1 year based on the results of 2 real life years of modules, tournaments and such. It also includes a meta-plot that is updated and included into the source books along the same intervals.

Some, uh, 2 editions back, one of the devs stumbled across the bright idea that they could also base sorta-kinda Adventure Path on the concept of experiencing the meta-plot first hand. That proved to be as horrible as noted, same as the Avatar Trilogy for the Realms. They gave up on this concept after the second one.

Quertus
2020-09-09, 03:36 PM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

Excellent question. So glad you asked.

Have you ever talked to anyone about that movie you watched, or that sports ball game on TV? Why did you that?

Same reason to run / play in a module.

Have you ever heard tales of the fun of traveling to faraway places, or Disneyland, or whatever, and then wanted to go there?

Same reason to run / play in a module.

Custom content is great. Don't get me wrong. But it lacks that bond to the community, to something bigger than the "inside joke" level of connection you get from the GM's creations.

Also, reviews. "Have you tried Ben & Jerry's new flavor of ice cream? It's simply divine!" parallels "We had so much fun running through Tomb of Horrors - you've got to try it!".

EDIT: also, variety. Me running my custom content won't feel like me running a module. The module provides the spice of variety.

Grod_The_Giant
2020-09-09, 06:39 PM
Have you ever talked to anyone about that movie you watched, or that sports ball game on TV? Why did you that?

Same reason to run / play in a module.
Forgot about this-- it feels like it's largely a 5e phenomenon--but it's definitely fun to have those sorts of shared experiences.

Jophiel
2020-09-10, 09:22 AM
I haven't run any of the 5e hardback campaigns but I've DM'd my share of Adventurer's League and, let me tell ya, that is extremely hit or miss on AL one-shot module quality. The hardback campaigns may have their issues but at least they were written by professionals and went through an editing process and had a team to kick around what worked and what didn't. When you're running AL nights at the game store, you have a fairly limited catalogue, often made more limited by not wanting to repeat material and/or what you or the guy running the event has purchased for play. Some are good, a few are really good and some... I've had DMs apologize at the end.

One standout offender that I ran was a series of one-shots with a pretty decent premise: an ancient magical tree is giving up its mojo and the protection it gave to the surrounding forest is fading. You go in and learn that there is a now-abandoned elf city within the tree with a secret drow "mirror city" underneath it. The actual execution though was less well done. The first adventure was somewhat promising with a good blend of mystery, combat and horror -- if the players did it "right". They're given three options in the beginning and, if they picked door #3, the adventure just ended and I guess everyone goes home early. The second adventure was decent aside from weird inconsistencies. Like the first one starts with the characters seeking shelter from a storm. A lot of storm. Like "take exhaustion levels if you stay out in it" storm. That's been going on for some time, and is the hint that the tree is failing. The second adventure, a day later and a couple miles away, has a zombie army traveling down... a dry river bed? But, it was still okay and has a fun combat encounter or two. Then you get into a period of adventures that are all essentially identical. You're in the elf city (which, going back to inconsistencies, had been just abandoned -- you meet the fleeing elves in the woods -- but is presented as though it's been abandoned for eons) and every adventure has the same beats: small fight, small fight, large fight in a large temple area, stairs going down for next time. Usually an AL adventure has a mix of social, puzzle and combat to give a little something for everyone but this was all combat, and all basically the same combat, night after night after night. I like combat but even I was bored going into the third one of these.

Towards the end, it got a little better with adding some social and puzzle/exploration parts but was utterly confusing in presentation. Parts I had to read three or four times and try to draw out to understand the intent. In one adventure, the module refers to a non-existent map for (presumably important) monster placement. It was sort of a shame because the module had some cool set pieces and I legitimately enjoyed making my own maps for some of them but it re-used the same idea and pacing over and over until it was just a slog. And, being an AL game, I was limited in my ability to change it for the better.

DrMartin
2020-09-11, 03:43 AM
I think that the Dragonlance modules deserve the cake for jumpstarting the whole legion of "put the PC on a path to a foregone conclusion" modules that followed.

You play as the Heroes of the Lance - huzzah! except that you cannot die. There is a rule called "obscure death" or so that says that if one of the Lance character dies, they don't really die, they are fine, really. Next scene you are back in the saddle.

As soon as you deviate from the one true path you start rolling random encounters by the dozen. Until you give up and go back on the tracks or die, and when you die, you are not really dead. Repeat until you get back on the train.

There's one of them (one of the later ones, where the PC begin in a coastal town - can't be bothered to look into it now) where it doesn't even matter if you engage with the plot or not - the modules flat out says that whatever needs to happen will happen anyway, regardless of any PC intervention. That event is also the only thing that "carries over" in the next book.

And this leaves aside the whole hosts of issues with the most annoying DMPC of all times, Fizban.

/rant begins
The Dragonlance modules were terrible but a lot of people thought that they were a great idea - my wild guess is, without ever trying to play or GM them. I don't know if that is true, but i kind of consider them as the root of all the metaplot-based-evil that followed, that amount to players being spectators to event that affect the world where they have only marginal say in - or rather to stories that focus more on the world than on the individual characters, while still having the players play those individual characters! which in my adult age I call now a waste of precious table time. Go play microscope for that kind of experience, I say!
/rant ends

Other horrible, horrible modules are Mortal Remains, Damnation Views, and the adventure in the Vade Mecum for Chtulhutech. Can't comment on further adventures as that all I've read from the gameline. The villains get away because they have to play a role in the next book, success is always meaningless, story awards that need to be paid with XPs (seriously: as a reward the character get a military award of some kind, which grants them a bonus in social situations....but only if they spend their hard earned XP for it, as if they bought the boon at character creation. Otherwise you get nothing from it. Great reward). Plus a really indelicate way of handling and presenting very sensitive topics about personal violence make for a quite unpleasant read too.

Vahnavoi
2020-09-11, 06:53 AM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

I wondered that myself before I bought Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The referee's booklet for that game gave a simple answer: because you want ideas you wouldn't think of yourself.

Boy did LotFP module deliver on that front.

The problem with the few WotC modules that've passed through my hands through the years, is that they don't have ideas like that. If the feeling I get from reading a module is "I could've come up with this in my sleep", it is worthless to me.

The next, harder part is to actually use the module as written and playtest it. Most people give up on modules at this stage, because they don't have guts to run something that'd transcend or transgress their own tastes. It's hard to put faith in something you wouldn't have thought of and wouldn't normally do. It's very rewarding though when that nets unexpected positive reactions from your players.

LibraryOgre
2020-09-11, 09:57 AM
Worst would probably be a dungeon where EVERYTHING was miskeyed; it's been a long time, and it was fan-made, so I'm not going to link it, but I didn't realize it until I was in-play and fixing that **** on the fly SUCKED.

Worst published? Ruins of Adventure. Most of it was OK, and we had a ton of fun... but the graveyard key was off 90 degrees... So, if you had a layout of

AB
CD

Room A would be keyed as room C, C as D, D as B, and B as A. But for a much larger and more complex setup. Everything else was fine, and it led to an amazing rooftop fight between our Monk and an Assassin.

Azuresun
2020-09-11, 04:08 PM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

In my case, I use the basics of the module to provide a coherent plot, while heavily customising it to fit the group.

LibraryOgre
2020-09-11, 05:39 PM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

Time and maps.

Let's take some of my favorites, like Keep on the Borderlands. While it's missing a lot of information (like what is going on, how everyone interrelates, and so on), it's got enemies set up, it's got the area around it, it has NPCs in the keep... all things I don't have to write up. It saves me time.

It also has maps, which I really hate working on. I'm seldom satisfied with them, I don't like making irregular rooms, lots of stuff. A module has maps.

I've done off-module stuff many times. But unless I've got enough spare time to make such things, I prefer to borrow them.

Unavenger
2020-09-12, 09:02 AM
I have two answers and both of them have already been said so I will elaborate on them in a way that explains them in a little more detail. We'll start with the big one.

The Tomb of Horrors is possibly the poster-child for adversarial gaming, and I hate it. I'm most familiar with the 3.5 version so I'll go through some of the highlights from it:

Possible locations for the tomb include six different iterations on "The middle of nowhere". The description calls it a "Thinking person's module" which is a lie. It says that the players will benefit from playing it, which is a damned lie. It then insinuates that the players may find the module immediately to their liking, which - on this particular scale - is a statistic.

The module begins with a "Screw you!" to trying to think laterally by using spells like Ethereal Jaunt - doing so results in getting attacked by demons. Oh and the demons also reset any traps anyone trips? But otherwise they do nothing. Okay.

Interior features have impossible break DCs for a normal party. Pretty standard. Nothing stopping you hitting them with sticks until they break as long as you can deal at least 6 damage (for the doors) or at least 9 damage (for the walls) at least some of the time on an at-will attack. So to clarify, this is a thinking person's module where you can't use your spells to bypass things but you can hit things with sticks. Good, good, just checking.

Blah blah blah you're on a hill and the place looks like a skull if you make a hard int check; this is a useless piece of information.

If you search, you can find the way in. Failure means you've failed to get in and have to go home, I guess? Anyway, you find the way in but unless you decide you're going to make another search check after you've already found your way in, with no indication that you should do so, sike, you have entered the false tomb of Tal Ra... wait no wrong setting. It's a fake entrance, it's a trap, if you can't hit a search 24 or don't think to try (which, okay, that one's on you; it's the Tomb of Horrors, search for traps guise) you take 16d6, reflex 23 half, damage. Yeah all of you. You're level 9. Failing that probably means you're pretty badly injured, potentially even dead, and the cleric can't cast heal because you're only level 9. Did I mention that you're level 9, so failing the reflex save is almost a gimme? Oh, and it implies that flunking the disable device check (of course it's DC 24 too, which your average rogue at that level stands a non-negligible if small chance of failing) causes the thing to collapse on you all anyway.

If you search, you can find the way in. Failure means you've failed to get in and have to go home, I guess? This time, though, it's the real deaSIKE IT'S ANOTHER FAKE. This one has a trap that, if you set it off, hits you with another 12d6 damage and may just trap you forever if you don't have a good way of escaping. This is another DC 23 reflex to avoid, and a DC 30 strength check to break free, which is the same strength check that will take you straight through a wall. The trap doesn't have hardness and hit points unlike the wall, so after taking the 12d6 damage from being crushed you'll have to... hit the wall with sticks, rather than the actual trapping bar? Whatever. You escape the fake Tomb of Horrors.

If you search, you can find the way in. Failure means you've failed to get in and have to go home, I guess? This time, though it's the real deal. No, really. I promise. Welcome to room 3

There's some cool stuff that you can find here and it's sorta relevant to the excuse-plot but anyway get ready to take 20 on more search checks because why would this room not be trapped? These are basically the phantasmal killer of traps: they're reflex then fortitude, but if you fail both saves, you... okay, you take some CON damage, but it's a substantial portion of enough CON damage to kill you. There are five of these buggers, so you have to sit around and wait for the rogue to deal with them if you're not the rogue. Strangely, a truenamer is an oddly compelling party member just so you can add a random +5 to each of SO MANY SKILL CHECKS DEAR GOD.

Anyway there is a chest marked 4 on the map, and naturally it is trapped oh my god I am so surprised. But you can't detect this trap by searching around the chest, oh no. You have to search the inside of the chest for traps, and you can only actually find the treasure if you fall into the trap anyway so really now. It is a very slightly stronger version of the other poisonspikepits because this one deals slightly more damage if you fail the reflex save and whatever happens with the fortitude save - 3d6 instead of 1d6, which is not hugely relevant except that you are likely to lose most of your hit points from the CON damage so depending on what class you are this may actually kill you. I have no idea off the top of my head what goggles of day are but if you decide to search the trap for treasure you get some of them. Joy!

Attempting to go into door 5 will teleport you to room 7 unless you enter the correct code first. Fortunately despite the riddle which I suspect is supposed to lead to this outcome being completely opaque, you can press as many buttons as you like in whatever order until you get it right because this is a thinking person's module so brute forcing it is obviously encouraged because that's what smart people do. You can then go to room... 11. I don't know what's with the numbering here.

If you attempt to climb into the giant opening in the wall, marked 6, you die.

In room 7, there is...

What do you mean "Could you elaborate on that?" You die! It's not a trap so there's no search DC and there's no save. You. Die. There is nothing to suggest to the players that the opening is deadly. "Strong transmutation" could mean anything, good or bad, so detect magic won't cut it (although it will tell them that something's up at least); charitably speaking, a very paranoid party with more spell slots than they know what to do with can use one of those divine-intervention divinations like augury to check up on the weird not-a-trap but outside of that, there's just no real way to work out that the hole in the wall is actually a minor artifact that kills anyone who touches it.

Anyway. In room 7, there is one way to get out of the room: deliberately trigger the pit trap and take an obnoxious reflex save or fall into the room below. Fortunately, 10d6 is not deadly even if it's not nothing. You then have to fight 8 monsters with 13 hit points each, which I'm guessing are CR... oh, 1/2 each? I don't have my Libris Mortis on me and of course this module doesn't give you the stats for its own encounters because why would it? Anyway, so you fight an EL 5-I-guess encounter, which you should stomp except that these things sound incorporeal from the name. I have no idea if they are 'cause I can't have a look at the freaking stats and anyway you then have to climb out of the pit and then make some implausible skill checks and go to room 13, but before we deal with that there's another room you can go to from room 3 and it contains a CR 11 monster.

This is a thinking person's module, so of course room 8 contains a melee bruiser monster with no useful actions other than attack, charge and full attack. It has 199 hit points and a decent AC (but also attack bonuses higher than your AC has any right to be). If you can't face getting hit by 4 attacks at +24 and 2 at +22, each doing 2d8+10 for the primaries and 2d6+5 for the secondaries, then you can go to town on this thing's mediocre will save and hope it doesn't roll good and eat your face. It is large-tall so enjoy having to cast defensively if it stands next to you, but it's not really a complicated encounter, just a difficult one numbers-wise if you try to hit it with sticks rather than casting like, any ref-or-lose or will-or-lose spell. They do make ref-or-lose spells, trust me.

Anyway so you kill the gargoyle - assuming you didn't just brute force door 5 and skip this whole fiasco - and you get a special hint that you can only get for killing the gargoyle that you're not supposed to have to fight because you're supposed to do the clever thing and skip to room 11. Whatever. Note that room 7 is next to room 13 and nothing else, but room 8 borders room 3, so I'm bouncing around because I am reading this module in order even though reading this module in order makes no sense, Jesus guys you could have numbered this dungeon better I swear to god why are you even allowed to desi...

So complex 9 actually borders room 8. Anyway, it has two separate mechanics for how to open the secret doors: one is that you must take a DC 25 search check to discern that one exists, and the other is that you must simply guess how the door opens. It is implied that you only have to do the second one of these and not the first? Maybe the search check is a backup for if you can't psychically discern the actions you need to do? Or maybe you do actually need to do both? Okay, so the text that's throwing me is "The essence of this secret door complex requires this level of attention to avoid making the navigation of this area nothing more than a mathematical exercise", which definitely implies that you need to do the guessing game, but it's not clear whether the search check is a prerequisite to making the guess or a backup if you fail the guess?

If I were DMing this, I would probably allow the player to just guess how the door opens as many times as they liked, and attempt the search check if they need a hint. For example, the first one is "Pull down", so I might give the hint "You find a ridge at the top of the wall that you can just about reach up and put your fingers in." The player can attempt to pull the wall down whether they've found the hint or not. That's a reasonable way of doing it, but I have no idea if that's the intention or not.

Of note is door G: there are seven studs, and pressing studs 1 and 7 causes the door to hit you in the face. Opening the door requires you either to press 1 and 7 and activate the trap, or press all of the studs... therefore including 1 and 7, which will also activate the trap. You literally cannot open this door while it's trapped without it trying to whack you one, but the game acts like you can get through without setting off or having to disable the trap (DC 26). While "Stone door +10 (2d6)" is the attack routine of the gods, it's not really relevant here, though. Oh no.

What's relevant in complex 9 is that while you're making your way through 11 rooms, 7 of which have cruel and unusual secret door opening mechanics, you're being shot at by this attack routine: arrow +15 (1d8)/*3. You can disable it, but it comes back in 1d4 rounds, and of course, that means that when you reach the next room, you can be trying to disable that room's trap and then this room's trap will spring back to life and start shooting you again. While you're making DC 25 search checks and faffing about working out which way to open the door or which buttons to press and getting hit in the face with a door, unless you have a clever way of dispelling a caster level 20 effect that keeps the traps resetting (you are one level away from that truenamer I insisted you bring being genuinely able to do this), you are spending a minimum of 20 actions getting shot up by magic arrows. The traps take twice as long to disarm as they'll be out of commission for, so there's no point in it. If you have an AC of 26, quite respectable at this level, and if you pass every check to open every door first time, and then use that hint to guess the right action to open that door, you will still take about 8d8 points of damage (I'm assuming you can run through every unlocked room helter-skelter) and there's not a lot you can do about it (protection from arrows won't work, they're magical). Assuming you can't pass a DC 25 search check on a 1, this could take a lot longer. Complex 9's only saving grace is that it's skippable by using the goddamn cloud door - enter the code or don't, either way is better than this.

Riddled with arrows, you and your party stumble into hall 10. There's a not-trap that can't be searched for (again) but this one makes you wis-or-lose just for being near it. Did I say lose? I meant kill your own party, silly. There's some real traps too. Meh. There's another archway, archway 10A. If you step through it, you go back to room 3 and all your stuff goes to room 33. No, it's not a trap either, you can't search for it, and there's no way to work out what it does with logic or dice. The game notes that "While cruel, it is most entertaining for the DM" to force people back to the starting room, naked. Yikes. 10B is an optional encounter, which doesn't prevent it from dominating creatures even if the DM decides it's not there (see the notes on hall 10 at the start of this paragraph - I assume it's 10B doing that). It's CR 4, so apart from the dominate effect (you're ninth level, no you don't have mind blank), no big deal.

So, you can be in 11 for one of two reasons: you just went there from 10, through an illusion which offers no save so there's no way to realise it's an illusion except by trying to climb through holes in the wall which IIRC killed you back at hole 6, so the module just has you guess which undetectable effects you need to crawl through and which ones you can't, or because like a frickin' sensible person you put in codes for the first mist gate (5 which is the one with a code, not 10A which is the prelude to a bad hentai) and walked through it. There's a statue. By allowing it to crush your property - which there is basically no indication that you should do, and no reward for doing the first two times leaving you with no reason to believe that you should do it a third time - you are given an invisible object which you might have no way of finding, although at least the riddle is kinda obvious here.

There are two doors 12. Both are trapped with high search DCs and slightly more forgiving Disable Device DCs than some of the other traps - 28 and 20 - and they make 1d6 spear attacks at +23 for 1d8 points of damage each, to all creatures in a 30 ft cone. It's not much, but just another drain on your resources (if we assume you got hit by that 8d8 damage, the rest of the party ran through and took some scratches, and you got hit by the chest trap that there is no good way of not getting hit by, you're already down something like a 4th, some 1sts and a few 2nds just from the traps that are practically unavoidable, and if you fell for that first entrance you're down a lot more slots. The whole party taking 3d8 more is no small deal). Bonus points for the utterly gormless look on the face of the guy triggering the trap in the illustration. Oh, and the doors are both fake. There's no room 12.

To reach room 13, you either crawl through another goddamn hole in the wall what did I tell you? or you get here from room 7, the one with the pit trap which is actually sounding quite a lot safer than all the nonsense in complex 9 and room 10. Room 13 makes murmurings about a secret door into room 12, but we just got done establishing that there's no room 12. Anyway, if you try to enter room 12 through a secret door, it triggers "the annoying falling trap" that... puts them in room 13 and does d6 damage to them. I do love that even this module now admits that it's annoying. Anyway, there's three chests here. One has the same no-the-trap-is-INSIDE-the-chest malarkey from before in it; this one just fires d8 shots at each target at +18 for 1d4+1 which is still an extra cure light wounds or lesser vigour or whatever being burned per person, or thereabouts, so don't fall for it. The other two just summon monsters at you rather than actually interacting with the trap rules so naturally you can't disable them. One contains 12 snakes which count as tiny vipers except when they don't, and the other one summons a bone golem that naturally doesn't even pretend to use the bone golem statistics. One encounter is a job for a well-aimed burning hands while the other is immune to magic which means that it's immune to anything interesting you could possibly wish to do to it but this is a thinking person's module AMIRITE. There's no defence against these spawning except not opening the chests.

To reach room 14, now that the three possible timelines - walk through the mist after disabling it, walk through without disabling it, or run through room 8 and complex 9 - have converged, naturally you walk straight through another hole in the wall in room 10. This one is a black sphere just to add insult to injury: the very same thing that kills you with no real way of knowing about it in room 3 is necessary to continue the plot, also with no real way of knowing it, in room 10. This, this is what NigelWalmsley means when he says this:


It's a series of "what number am I thinking of" challenges where if you don't guess the right number every time your character is deleted.

There is no logical way for a player character to realise that the hole in the wall in room 3 is deadly or that the hole in the wall in room 10 is necessary to advance without busting out a divination spell that should not be necessary to speak directly with your deity on the matter, and the existence of the spell augury is no excuse for this kind of adventure design. There is no logical decision that you can make at character generation or in play which will tell you which of those holes is deadly and which you have to enter to continue - there are tests you can do on hole 6 in room 3 that strongly imply it's dangerous, but nothing that will confirm that the black orb in room 10 is safe beyond the kind of doubt that becomes reasonable after you've spent two seconds in a room with two fake entrances where literally everything is trying to kill you.

Whatever screw it room 14 there's traps, they do 2d4 str drain and 2d4 str damage if you set them off but they're not too hard (21) to disable so whatever. There's also some silver you're unlikely to be able to carry all of, let alone spend. Woo. The altar tries to kill you twice (one max lightning bolt and one regular fireball, 28 to disable but reflex 14 so at least the rogue with their evasion should be fine if...

Wait, DC fourteen reflex? What kind of 13-int wizard is maximising lightning bolts? Whatever I don't care any more there's a door of mist stuff and if you go in you make two will saves one is vs opposite alignment and the other is vs genderbending no really. Both DC 20. If you go through again you get your alignment back but take d6 damage, third time gets you your gender back but does the naked-at-the-start thing, and then the cycle repeats yaaaay. You have to go through the damn thing twice if you want to leave the completely pointless room it leads to, there's a slot that's the right size for a coin or flat gem, so you start looking for the coin or flat gem which will open it and then eventually you start stuffing random objects in it you find that you need to put any magic ring in it and guess what there's no indication at all that you need to do that woooo. Before you go check out the urns: one's empty and one summons more stuff to fight aww yiss.

Entering room 15 is mandatory to progress but destroys your magic ring so boo, then there are 3 traps and one of them you have to fall into in order to reach door 17 and there is no indication that you need to trigger the third trap. I SENSE A PATTERN. Anyway, if you do what you would logically assume to be the right thing which is to avoid all the traps, you go to door 16 which is another trap and will kill you if you're chucked in without fire immunity or strong fire resistance (or fire resistance 1 and a healthy disregard for RAI). Yaaaaay! Anyway, once you escape door 16, you have no indication of where to go next until you deliberately go into the third pit trap. Both door 16 and door 17 have identical obnoxious statblocks - open lock DC 41 among other things - which means you have to bash both of them which would be a real problem if it weren't for the fact that you can explicitly take as long as you need in the Tomb and even rest there (which is a good thing because it would be even more impossible if you couldn't). Anyway so you go through door 17 and into room 19 but before you do, let's have a look at the other place you might go if you don't realise there is a secret door in the pit trap.

Room 18, much like door 16, doesn't go anywhere. It instead contains a lich which is possibly the most obnoxious encounter in the entire tomb of horrors and it's nothing to do with the lich. CR 13 encounter versus a level 9 party, whatever, fine, that sucks but it's not the worst part. The worst part isn't that the lich needs to take concentration checks to cast if someone holds an item that doesn't exist either (presumably they renamed the mace found in the room and forgot to change it in one place). The worst part is that if you beat the lich, the DM is encouraged to pretend the dungeon is collapsing on the players and start counting slowly down from 10, as if to give them a timer by which they need to be out of the Tomb - presumably by running back through complex 9 among other places - or be crushed under the rubble. There is no save against this effect, which is actually an illusion, unless a player specifically calls your bluff. Those who revert - I think you mean resort - to true seeing can also see through the illusion, because obviously you're spending your highest-level spells on something that you're having to guess is relevant in this circumstance. Anyway, they get out of the tomb, and then you are encouraged to ask them "Aww, did you guys find the adventure too hard?"

:smallfurious::smallfurious::smallfurious:

THIS IS NOT A THING YOU SHOULD BE ENCOURAGING! The module goes OUT OF ITS WAY to tell the DM "Please be a jerk to your players at this juncture." Oh, and one of the items they loot is a fake treasure map because EVEN THE LOOT IS OBNOXIOUS.

:smallfurious::smallsigh::smallsigh:

Right anyway. You instead bypass this by - sigh - falling into a pit trap at an opportune moment, find door 17, mosey off into room 19 and there's 3 vats, one damages you a tiny bit no spot no save, one contains a gelatinous cube no spot, and those are the two that actually hold the key you need while the other is pointless. You beat the hell out of a CR 3 jelly cube and combine the two bits of the key into the First Key. There's a secret door on the side of the wall - no stats specified to open it - which leads to a corridor containing pit 20, which you can just walk through, except for the last section of it which is a trap. It's a fairly obvious trap, though, since it's a giant pit filled with spikes which just happens to have a path wide enough for a medium creature to walk through, so if you get caught by it, that's all you. It shoots you and your allies for a few d8s of damage if you do set it off, but with a disable device DC of 20, it's one of the less likely ones to get you. There's nowhere to go but room 21.

Room 21 contains two types of trap: the perturbation trap which can be disabled and has a 50/50 chance to go off each round, presumably including while you're trying to disarm the damn thing. It's DC 14 to avoid falling prone and taking a damage - a whole one! This is slightly more annoying when you're fighting the random snakes in some of the treasure coffers in this room, which are naturally unavoidable if you want to loot the room. They're weak but annoying, since they're 4 EL 1, 3 EL 2ish and 3 EL 3 encounters, in one room, which means a lot of rolling initiative and faffing about but not much anything else.

Room 21 also has two tapestries, one of which must be moved to reach the next room and there's no way to work out which. If you try to cut one of them down, or if you try to look behind one and the perturbation trap - you know, the one that I was laughing at a moment ago because it deals an entire point of damage? - goes off, probably because you decided that it was easier to get out of the room than bother disarming the damn thing because naturally there's no indication that it has a special interaction with the tapestries, anyway, if it goes off when you're holding one, or you tear one by mistake or try to cut one down, reflex or die. It's a neat DC 28 to spot either trap, 28 to disarm the perturbation trap, and you can't disarm the tapestries. While the perturbation trap has a save DC of only 14, you don't need to fail your save against it to get hit with the bigger whammy of the tapestry reverting to green slime and killing anyone in a 10-by-20 area unless those creatures manage a DC 24 reflex save (your daily reminder that you are level 9 at this point). Oh, and there's another door 12 in this room because we totally needed another door 12 - remember that it's the only obvious exit to the room. There's also one in corridor 21A alongside a bunch of pit traps because we totally needed another door 12. You guise, we needed another door 12, and one of the pits has a monster in for good measure.

Please help.

Cavern 22 confuses anyone there who doesn't hold their breath, which is odd, because holding your breath isn't normally effective against mist-plus-nasty-effect spells (such as stinking cloud, the obvious one for it to be effective against), but does allow a DC 17 will save, which isn't trivial unless you're the cleric or something in which case you can be relatively confident. Anyway, the effect lets you save each round to end the effect the round after and become immune for 24 hours, so it's not that bad - you're not likely to do more than a little damage to yourself and those around you. There's also a monster in cavern 22. I assume she's a little below level-appropriate, but I don't have her statblock to hand. She might cause some problems, but not much. Then it turns out that Cavern 22 is a wholly unhelpful room, but no logical deduction could have told you as much, no surprise.

Door 23 is a fake door, behind which is a secret door, in front of which is a secret trapdoor. It's very clever at doing something entirely obnoxious. If you don't think to look for the door, you're stuck, and if you don't think to look for the trapdoor, you get led up another stupid path, 23A. God I hate this. In 23A, you now need a DC 25 spot check - search won't do it! Gods I miss Pathfinder skills sometimes - to notice that the doors are double-hinged, meaning that they can swing both ways. Moving past the bisexual doors (I'm sorry) which provide you with no actual information about what's about to happen even if you do notice they're double-hinged, you go into a corridor and get gassed with no search or disable device or anything and it's DC 20 fortitude or fall asleep, but it's special asleep and people have to drag you out of the gas before they can wake you up, oh and a monster suddenly appears out of nowhere and it's a stone golem - CR 11 - only it relies on running you over instead of hitting you but it is unlikely to fail its overrun so it basically always tramples the entire party every round and even if you avoid the overrun you take damage, joy, and if you somehow manage to defeat that while half your party is asleep, you get to progress to 23B and 23C but they're not explained at all so I don't care about them and will assume they contain nothing but fluffy bunnies, but by now my players will be expecting the bunnies to be either trapped or trying to eat them so there's no hope, really.

So assuming that you did do the fake door/secret door/trapdoor thing correctly you end up at door 24, which is made of steel because adamantine is too expensive for the demonicus ex machina to replace each time which I don't believe for one moment because the percentage of parties that make it here is so low, and WBL 9 for each person high enough, that you could replace as many of these doors as you needed, but whatever, never mind. The door is made of steel so it's hardness 10 hit points 60 which means that it's greatsword time 'cause that's easier than a DC 45 open lock check and turning away any fourth- or lower-level spells and remember if you turn ethereal the demons will eat you. But this is a module for smart plays rather than just kicking in the door, as you will recall. There are also three slots in the wall, and you might be able to work out from the dimensions that they're meant to hold swords - and indeed, inserting three swords does open the door, and while the ring fiasco leaves you with every reason to think it'll crush your swords, it doesn't. When you're inside the room, you can't open the door with the three swords method again, which is a pity because it swings closed and locks itself again in 5 rounds, again with no indication that this is something that happens or that it will crush anything short of adamantine that you put between it and its hinge to stop it doing that even if you anticipate it. This includes the party fighter if he can't make a DC 30 strength check which of course he can't, not reliably anyway.

Room 25 - we're most of the way done, I know it's painful - is one of the worst rooms in the place. There are some pillars which aren't trapped so you can't search them for traps and find anything but if you touch them you have to take a DC 22 will save or float away. At 25A, there's also a face with a hole in its mouth which looks identical to hole 6. It isn't. If you go near it, you get a reflex save or a strength check, DC 20 (the fighter's reflex may well be better than his strength check, why you give us that option...) unless you're floating from a pillar in which case screw you. If you fail, or if screw you, then you're sucked in and spat out at... hole 6, and you'd better believe your equipment goes to area 33. At 25B there's also a face with a hole in its mouth which looks identical to hole 6. It isn't. If you go near it, you get a reflex save or a strength check, DC 20 (the fighter's reflex may well be better than his strength check, why you give us that option...) unless you're floating from a pillar in which case screw you. If you fail, or if screw you, then you're sucked in and spat out at... area 27A. But your stuff goes with you to area 27A. Where's area 27A? No idea, but I'll keep it in mind.

At 25C, there's some charred remains and a gem of wishing. Naturally, it's a cursed item, and it rolls for initiative - at no specified bonus - when used; anyone who doesn't roll better than it or who does but can't get out of the way takes 200 fire damage, with 70 damage being the consolation prize to anyone who can pass a DC 23 reflex save - because it's not half damage, you better believe that evasion doesn't work! It also perverts your wish so that it's not actually helpful. This is the first of multiple pieces of loot that is actively trying to kill you. You also have to loot the room if you want to find the loot that lets you progress, and hit the crown with the sceptre on the throne (there's a crown and a sceptre both on a throne at 25D) because why not? Oh and if you do it wrong, with no indication of which way to do it is right, you save or die, fort 23. Before you leave, check out rooms 26 for one sweet sweet empty room, and a mummy lord with a ring of fire resistance hidden on one finger and a giant obvious gem on its face. Stealing either requires the PCs to fight it - I recommend taking the ring first but since you have no indication that the damned thing will come to life other than "It's in the Tomb of Horrors, of COURSE it's trying to kill you", you have no way of knowing that and your attention is deliberately drawn to the huge gem on its face. Anyway, whatever, you end up fighting a CR 15 enemy. You're probably still level 9 at this point, maybe level 10? Have fun. I particularly think that a creature normally vulnerable to fire wearing a resist fire ring on its middle finger is totally classy.

Anyway, room 27 is the obvious place to go after rooms 26, assuming you haven't figured out that you have to hit the crown with the sceptre on the throne yet. Room 27 has a snazzy exterior - not my wording - and some crossed swords and shields on the walls. Turns out they're constructs, which are EL 12 and if you're shunted to 27A - did you think I forgot? You have to solo them unless your team jumps in to save you. They're CR 4 each which seems roughly right. There's some treasure here, some of which is useful, but I'm pretty sure the 0-charge wands are just there to troll the players.

Anyway, so you hit the throne with the... I'm trying to find literally any indication that the players have access to which tells them that they need to hit the crown with the sceptre on the throne and drawing a blank - look, you go to room 28, and it's very pretty, and there's That Damned Key in the room.

See, the thing about the key of antipathy, AKA That Damned Key, is that if you try to touch That Damned Key, you need to take a DC 23 will save or you decide never to touch the key again. And one look at the key tells you that it fits door 29, so either someone's gotta pass a will save or they need to mess around with telekinetic stuff or something like that and it's NOT EVEN THE RIGHT KEY BUT YOU CAN ONLY TELL THAT WITH A SEARCH CHECK, so someone has to have the bright idea of taking a search check to make sure that the stupid key actually fits the door it's meant to and THEN pass a DC 30 check. Again, there is no real indication that a creature should attempt that search check, particularly since searching the wrong thing in this stupid dungeon can get you thrown out at hole 6 with all your stuff in location 33 because that's okay now!

Door 29 is the mithril valves but they're not actually mithril because that's also too expensive for the gotcha anti-ether demons to maintain and I swear I am not making this up. Anyway, trying to put That Damned Key in the obvious keyhole deals 2d10 electricity damage to you, and trying to use the First Key deals 4d10, no save, no search (except MAYBE the search that shows that That Damned Key isn't the real key, but there's no such search for the First Key), no disarm... the real key is the same freaking sceptre, with again no indication that it should be the key, oh, and one end opens the door but the other spits you out at, say it with me, hole 6, with your clothes at, say it with me, location 33, unless you pass a DC 23 will save. The sceptre itself goes back to 25D rather than 33, as a nod to the fact that you need it to open the lock without a DC 45 check.

...this isn't real mithral. It's definitely not real adamantine. If you have a greatsword and enough patience you can bash it down. If you have a morningstar, a strength bonus, and patience, you can bash it down. Right?

HAHA NOPE. Because they realised that would work. They realised that they didn't want you taking 20 on that open lock with a +25 from somewhere, either. Every time you fail an open lock check by more than 5, or deal damage to it, not only does the throne pike off back to where it was to start with, requiring a DC 45 open lock check to get back down, but the entire room floods with blood in 4 rounds; spamming healing spells can stop it but the players don't know they can do that because it's a door and is not normally a valid target for healing spells. Unless you can either make a DC 45 open lock, or you can break the door in 4 rounds + however long it takes to drown (and your damage will go down underwa... uh, underblood?) - and I think the latter is more realistic - you're all dead unless you figure out exactly what the correct key is for the door, with no indication discoverable by the player characters. This isn't intelligence. This is sheer inane guesswork. Four left...

Room 30 is described as a "False Treasure Room" which fills me with hope. I hope it fills me with determination too because I wish I could save my game between these two killer rooms. The room is antimagic except that all the room's own stuff works fine because of course. There's an efreeti in urn 30A who isn't necessarily out to kill you and is your one chance to use diplomacy in *checks* the entire dungeon? But who might also just kill you depending. If you open sarcophagus 30B there is another piece of loot which is trying to kill you. Now you can take a DC 15 K (arcana) check to reveal that this broken stick was a staff of the magi, but no check will tell you that if you take it out of the sarcohpagus, in an antimagic field, that the staff of the magi which is ALREADY BROKEN will visit upon you the effect of the staff's retributive stike, which deals FOUR HUNDRED points of damage to the poor sod who takes it out - reflex half. Creatures within 10 feet take the same, within 20 but not 10 take 300, and 30 but not 20 take 200. Actually the damage is never specified because the number of charges the staff has when it was broken isn't either, but I assume it's meant to be at full charge? Anyway, so a character with evasion or maybe a barbarian passing the save in the outermost zone can survive this explosion, but since most of the room is within 30 feet of 30B, almost everyone will die horribly. 30C is three chests. Don't bother, they're all trapped and the only one with anything valuable in has gems that look 5000 times as valuable as they are because they're only actually worth 1cp each. 10,000 gems are... 100gp. Glamered to look like 500,000. Because get wrecked, that's why. There are also two giant statues, 30D, with auras of overwhelming evil and strong transmutation, with their weapons raised... yeah sike they're not trapped. If you move one of them out of the way you can find the Real Way to the Final Boss...

Or you can just go from corridor 21A - that's before the mithril bleed door, gas chamber with a golem, the throne, or the CR 15 encounter because sike, the treasure that tries to kill you, the other treasure that tries to kill you, the screw-you pillars, all of that nonsense - straight to 31 by breaking the damn wall down. Why do you have to break the wall down? Because exit 31 is monodirectional: it only allows you to escape after you killed the boss but can't get back past the throne which went back to its old position when you decided to beat up a door, but doesn't allow you a shortcut into the boss's office. Unless you break down the wall which you can do because the walls in this place suck. But in order to do that, you have to guess at your way through, but hey, it's no less feasible than doing this the way you're meant to...

Crypt 32 is another fake because of COURSE IT IS. Whatever. You have to use the first key, and then you have to not use the first key or you'll set off a trap, and then you can use That Damned Key if you like but if you turn it three times clockwise you'll set off a different trap, and if you try to open the lock and fail then you set off the same trap as the first key, but if you try to open the lock and SUCCEED then you set off the same trap as That Damned Key.

The First Key Trap - no that's its name - is search 32/disable 37 so Imma call it: it's unavoidable without passing the reflex save. Bright side, it's a dc 14 fireball so no huge deal.

The Crypt Trap - which is set off by successfully opening the lock with either the real key or an open lock check. It can be found but not disabled, it never misses, and it deals 20d20 damage to each target in 3/4 of the room. I think that the literal only ways to bypass the trap without getting hurt are to set it off telekinetically or summon something that can use a key (and pass the will save to use That Damned Key)... or use Knock, as this is one of the few doors at this stage in the game which is actually susceptible to it. The search DC is 30, so you should notice it by taking 20, at least. The module itself acknowledges that anyone hit by the trap is presumably dead - the trap is CR 6, just like its pathetic cousin the First Key Trap. Anyway, successfully setting off the crypt trap reveals a mithril ring, which on a strength check that a venerable wizard can make if he takes 20 (and which therefore does not need to be called for), opens the door to...

Crypt 33. The last room. The real deal. The final resting place of Acererak the Demilich.

Sike.

See, he's actually on his fortress on the negative energy plane and this entire place, this entire, stupid, horrible, Pelor-forsaken place is one big distraction. Forget the two fake entrance paths, the multitude of fake doors, the fake crypt, the other fake crypt, the third fake crypt, the my god is there a fourth fake crypt, THIS ENTIRE PLACE is the fake. Thank your lucky stars that there is, again, no way for the player characters to know this and the module even acknowledges that they will almost certainly go to their graves thinking that they have died at the hands - uh, if he had any - of Acererak himself. What's left isn't Acererak. It's not even a demilich, even a lich, even an undead. It's a construct, with DR 20 ignored by two specific weapon qualities - keen and vorpal, both of which are useless against a demilich and useless against this thing apart from the fact that it has that DR for no discernible reason - and immunity to magic. This construct does nothing interesting, instead choosing to Save or Die (but not a death effect?) the PCs one by one, once per round, fort 23, targeting whoever can actually hurt it first. If there are more than 8 PCs for some reason, it stops doing that after the 8th and spams blasphemy which some of the PCs might be immune to but if not it has caster level 3d6+6 so whether or not it kills you is based on something basically entirely out of your control, have fun. If a character is defeated by the construct, and then the construct dies, they need to take a DC 18 will save or it swallows their soul - else it's just trapped as per soul bind. Again, because screw you, that's why.

Once you defeat the damned thing, you pick up your treasure, and enjoy your new items like your lovely new swords, which OH WAIT THEY'RE CURSED -2 SWORDS, and that cute +2 shortspear which is obviously trying to kill you because this wouldn't be the tomb of horrors without a Cursed Backbiter spear.

You limp out of the tomb, bruised, battered, but oh, alive, alive oh!

Then the stupid frickin' demons put it back the way it was when you found it.

Epilogue:

In the days that follow, you decide to go on a treasure expedition, using your new map which leads to an exciting new adventure location. However, you can't find it, and spend a while traipsing around in the desert, and come across a random encounter. You try to draw your greatsword but just draw that stupid -2 sword again. You sigh and try to fight with it anyway. The cleric stabs himself with the frikkin' spear. You're dejected and drained. You wish that you could go home.

As if it heard your prayer, the stupid goddamn gem explodes for 200 fire damage and puts everyone out of their misery.

Tomb of Horrors: Fin

Grod_The_Giant
2020-09-12, 09:43 AM
Ugh. The Tomb of Horrors is flawed at an even more fundamental level, though. There are two things that can make an advantage slam to a halt: excessive traps that make players paranoid, and puzzles. ToH has both, and they're exponentially bad in combination. The players need to make guesses and experiment and play with things to solve the puzzles...but it's the ToH, so they're afraid to touch anything.

The three sessions of the Tomb of Horrors I played are among the worst gaming experiences I've ever had.

NigelWalmsley
2020-09-12, 11:47 AM
Yeah, there's a reason when someone says a DM is "Gygaxian", they're not complementing them.

Kelb_Panthera
2020-09-12, 01:08 PM
<hilarious ToH rundown>

Bad as that is, it's salvageable. Just need to add some things mostly, like search and spot check DCs and puzzle clues, readjust some DCs given. Basically just have to file the Gygax serial number off and remake the encounters with an eye toward "the PCs are supposed to win in the end." It'd still be a meat-grinder but a fair one.

comicshorse
2020-09-12, 01:48 PM
'Something Rotten in Kislev' for Warhammer

A scenario that starts with you dying and being raised as undead and told to go on a mission. Which involves dealing with a elf necromancer and his Dwarf, zombie wife in order to find out where the big, bad guy is. Getting to him involves fighting an utterly lethal tiny dragon and then reaching the bad guy......who effortlessly captures you, humiliates you and then tortures you to death ! ( Complete with gloating notes from the writer telling the G.M. that is the bit that they get to enjoy)
And that's how the scenario ends.

DrMartin
2020-09-12, 03:22 PM
Riddled with arrows, you and your party stumble into hall 10. There's a not-trap that can't be searched for (again) but this one makes you wis-or-lose just for being near it. Did I say lose? I meant kill your own party, silly. There's some real traps too. Meh. There's another archway, archway 10A. If you step through it, you go back to room 3 and all your stuff goes to room 33. No, it's not a trap either, you can't search for it, and there's no way to work out what it does with logic or dice. The game notes that "While cruel, it is most entertaining for the DM" to force people back to the starting room, naked. Yikes. 10B is an optional encounter, which doesn't prevent it from dominating creatures even if the DM decides it's not there (see the notes on hall 10 at the start of this paragraph - I assume it's 10B doing that). It's CR 4, so apart from the dominate effect (you're ninth level, no you don't have mind blank), no big deal.






The first room in the dungeon has a hidden poem which is supposed to help players with the rest of the dungeon, except they are all way to cryptic and are there just for the GM to be smug about a-là "not my fault you are not brainy enough". One infamous line is "Shun Green if you can", which is usually thought as referring to the green demon face with the sphere of annihilation inside.

I have another theory.

The first arch which teleports the characters in the tomb proper has yellow, blue, and orange stones. The infamous one which teleports you back to the start naked and adds your equipment to the dungeon's hoard has Russet, Citron, and Olive - all rather obscure colours - which are what one gets by adding a dash of green to respectively Orange, Yellow, and Blue.
So "shun green" should be giving the hint that you should avoid the arch with the green-tainted stones, since you already saw the "normal" one with the basic colors.

Obvious, hu? Tomb of Horror baby!

The problem with tomb of horror is not that is full of traps - is that they are not "clever" traps, they are mostly just mean and brutal.

Luccan
2020-09-12, 03:31 PM
Wow, I didn't realize ToH was that bad. I'd heard about the statues mouth, which I think is the most famous one, but it's also probably the only one that teaches an actually valuable dungeoneering lesson (albeit too harshly): Don't stick your hand in places you can't see properly. Gary really was just butthurt his players weren't dying enough, huh?

DrMartin
2020-09-12, 03:55 PM
It was meant to be run at a tournament, by many tables at the same time, and see who gets farther. It's Takeshi's Castle: the Module

Unavenger
2020-09-12, 04:15 PM
It was meant to be run at a tournament, by many tables at the same time, and see who gets farther. It's Takeshi's Castle: the Module

Needless to say, with the amount of dumb luck and guesswork that goes into it, it fails at that job too. It's a contest of luck, not skill.



The other thing, though, is that there's nothing stopping a sufficienctly dedicated adventuring team just bashing their way through most of the walls into the end of the tomb. One of the false entrances (I believe false entrance 2? The one on the right of the map...) even makes a decent jumping-off point to begin your mining expedition. The reason, in fact, for the bleeding door and the planechasing demons is because the dungeon knows full well that it loses the moment you don't play the game by the dungeon's rules... and not playing by its rules is far, far easier than letting it lead you through trap after trap after trap, half of which TeChNiCaLlY aren't traps so you can't search for them. If it wants to play Global Thermonuclear War, challenge it to a nice game of chess instead. Or just flood the place.

Yeah, it defeats the object, but the only real winning move in the Tomb of Horrors is not to play. It says something that I would have problems defeating it despite having read it because there are too many dumb gotcha moments for one person to remember.

Telok
2020-09-12, 05:41 PM
I've always considered playing Tomb of Horrors like it was part of an actual home game to be sort of like dropping a live-fire military exercise & obstacle course on a casual weekend LARP. It's a hardcore personal skills timed challenge, not a real module that's meant to be played as part of your home game.

It doesn't help that basically every "update" to a new edition has changed it by making weirdly different assumptions about the purpose, difficulty, and challenge of the adventure on top of failing to examine and account for the differences in the editions.

NigelWalmsley
2020-09-12, 06:09 PM
Needless to say, with the amount of dumb luck and guesswork that goes into it, it fails at that job too. It's a contest of luck, not skill.

Also, the nature of it makes any "tournament" pretty uninteresting. You can't outsmart it, and there aren't a variety of viable strategies. All you can do is throw bodies at the problem until you've got corpses lying on every trap.

I think a highly lethal tournament module could potentially be pretty interesting. But it would have to be in the vein of Red Hand of Doom or something, where there's enough going on that different approaches to problems are viable and people can make decisions that demonstrate skills. So instead of a tomb of random numbers that kill you, Acererak has assembled a legion of undead, demons, necromancers, and other horrors and is marching on your peaceful village. You have to figure out some combination of fortifying your stuff, destroying his stuff, and recruiting allies that prevents him from killing everybody. That's potentially interesting for a tournament, because different character builds or tactics could result in different levels of success. But in Tomb of Horrors, even the "smart" strategy is just "how much expendable chaff do you have" and "how expendable is your chaff".

Florian
2020-09-13, 06:47 AM
'Something Rotten in Kislev'

Hm. Ok, a bit of lateral thinking on my part:

Basically, we had a shift in gaming culture along the way. Previously, it was enough to pitch the characters against a scenario and they either "beat it" or died. We then experienced a change towards the "epic story", with more of a plot and the characters meant to solve that plot. That lead to more changes as RPG systems were adapted to allow the "heroes" to survive to the end and solve that plot. For example, your regular Paizo AP is build in such a way that the characters can survive and beat it.

Basically, those are all tales of victory, even when you are on the defense in Act II.

Something rotten is the polar opposite, it is a tale of losing, even when being on the offense in Act II.

Batcathat
2020-09-13, 07:02 AM
Hm. Ok, a bit of lateral thinking on my part:

Basically, we had a shift in gaming culture along the way. Previously, it was enough to pitch the characters against a scenario and they either "beat it" or died. We then experienced a change towards the "epic story", with more of a plot and the characters meant to solve that plot. That lead to more changes as RPG systems were adapted to allow the "heroes" to survive to the end and solve that plot. For example, your regular Paizo AP is build in such a way that the characters can survive and beat it.

Basically, those are all tales of victory, even when you are on the defense in Act II.

Something rotten is the polar opposite, it is a tale of losing, even when being on the offense in Act II.

While it's true that the culture's changed, I don't think what comicshorse describes has ever been anything close to standard. Even the worst "GM vs players" adventures I've seen usually doesn't make a humiliating defeat obligatory (just very likely).

King of Nowhere
2020-09-13, 07:08 AM
Worst module I read was some free sequel to the lost mines of Phandelver. Started with the ghosts of the humanoids the PCs slaughtered in the original module coming to attack the PCs, as a way to teach PCs that slaughtering humanoids is bad.

if you slaughter humanoids wholesale, you not only get xp for them, they return as ghosts and you get xp twice!!

best way to teach an aesop

Quertus
2020-09-13, 07:18 AM
if you slaughter humanoids wholesale, you not only get xp for them, they return as ghosts and you get xp twice!!

best way to teach an aesop

Sounds like the lesson is, "take all your humanoids captive; bring them to Phandelver to execute them". Unless (again, or as I said in another thread) you're a real Determinator, and know to optimize your wealth per XP ratio. Getting XP without treasure is suboptimal.

Florian
2020-09-13, 07:22 AM
While it's true that the culture's changed, I don't think what comicshorse describes has ever been anything close to standard. Even the worst "GM vs players" adventures I've seen usually doesn't make a humiliating defeat obligatory (just very likely).

Point being the reverse of the usual Act Structure.

Normally, we have something akin to "Engage, Parry, Riposte": The characters find themselves in a village under sudden siege, manage to heroically stop the first wave, are under pressure killing the mounting waves and finally manage a breakthrough by going out and killing the opposite warlord.

Lucas Yew
2020-09-13, 08:48 AM
Madness At Gardmore Abbey (4E).

...Well, it's not about the quality of the whole setup (it's apparently decent), but it's about the inherent "anti-Simulationist" philosophy of the 4E system that it was made on which triggered me, HARD, in a decisive manner.

Long story short, a bit more than a decade ago I procured my first RPG rulebook set as a late bloomer (4.Essentials, and I still love the Defender's Aura and Disrupting Shot power concepts), during a family union trip in Honolulu.
Soon after that I ordered the module in question from Amazon due to nice reviews in general and started to read it, albeit with a catch; just right before that I found out about the existence of the OGL and the 3.X SRD, and my hidden "Simulationist" instincts flared up like a nuke (and is passionately blazing up ever since).

The final trigger was me reading up the adventure's contents and witnessing a certain scene in which the stat block of a previously established Paladin NPC ally "transform" from a NPC type into a Monster type.
Right that moment, something in my consciousness changed forever; whether it was a general appreciation of the "Gamism > Simulationism" nature of my first RPG ruleset detonated to smithereens in a napalm rage (apart from the minuscule rule parts that I still think of rather fondly), or my budding realization of a general love of verisimilitude (which probably has lots to do with my ironclad INTJ personality) explosively blooming up with dedication, I still cannot distinguish clearly...

Segev
2020-09-13, 11:27 AM
Yeah, I am a huge fan of transparency over mechanical presence as a PC or NPC. I don’t mind too much if an NPC uses an NPC statblock, but he should use the same stat block regardless of whether he’s in the party or not. If he’s going to change, it should be some sort of natural growth or the like.

When my PCs adopted Erky Timbers, and they leveled to a point an adept with turn undead would be a hindrance, I “leveled him up” into a cleric. But that was a “level up,” not a shift based on changing his category as ally or enemy.

If he ever reveals his true colors as an evil agent of Acererak, he’ll still have the same stats.

King of Nowhere
2020-09-13, 02:27 PM
Getting XP without treasure is suboptimal.

but is it worse than not getting those xp in the first place?
i mean, if we assume that the laws of the universe are rigged to give you level appropriate encounters, i can see the point of not wanting to faced harder encounters with insufficient equipment. in which case you could just spend all those free xp scribing scrolls.
thinking about it, you can spend some of those xp scribing scrolls and sell them to turn xp into gp. then you can keep the wbl consistent indefinitely

Spriteless
2020-09-13, 02:47 PM
if you slaughter humanoids wholesale, you not only get xp for them, they return as ghosts and you get xp twice!!

best way to teach an aesop

You lightened my day! I think I might have to dig through my DMs guild freebies just to share that with the author now. :smalltongue:

Quertus
2020-09-13, 03:01 PM
but is it worse than not getting those xp in the first place?
i mean, if we assume that the laws of the universe are rigged to give you level appropriate encounters, i can see the point of not wanting to faced harder encounters with insufficient equipment. in which case you could just spend all those free xp scribing scrolls.
thinking about it, you can spend some of those xp scribing scrolls and sell them to turn xp into gp. then you can keep the wbl consistent indefinitely

You know, I was asking myself that question even as I wrote my post.

The optimization philosophy is older than 3e, you see - back then, D&D *gave* XP for crafting items. So, rather than "scribe scrolls to burn XP", it was, "it's better to stay home and scribe scrolls than to go out and earn XP the hard way".

There are several problems with adopting your plan.

First, it requires the entire party to be optimal enough to have ways to spend XP. Happily, Sculpt Self exists in 3e.

Next, it requires your GM to give you adequate and timely downtime to burn off those unsightly XP.

Lastly, it requires the entire party to consist of characters who won't die of old age while getting their XP-burning crafting exercise.

J-H
2020-09-13, 04:48 PM
Thank you for the detailed Tomb of Horrors write-up. I know to never, ever show up for a running of it now.

King of Nowhere
2020-09-13, 08:33 PM
You know, I was asking myself that question even as I wrote my post.

The optimization philosophy is older than 3e, you see - back then, D&D *gave* XP for crafting items. So, rather than "scribe scrolls to burn XP", it was, "it's better to stay home and scribe scrolls than to go out and earn XP the hard way".

There are several problems with adopting your plan.

First, it requires the entire party to be optimal enough to have ways to spend XP. Happily, Sculpt Self exists in 3e.

Next, it requires your GM to give you adequate and timely downtime to burn off those unsightly XP.

Lastly, it requires the entire party to consist of characters who won't die of old age while getting their XP-burning crafting exercise.

So, the aesop is "don't slaughter humanoids unless you have ways to turn xp into gold and enough downtime to do it, or you may level up faster than you get loot and your dm may send you stronger encounters and it may ultimately make your life more difficult, maybe, because there are a lot of 'if' and 'but' in this"
Or perhaps "don't slaughter humanoids, or you will be forced to consider a lot of hypoteticals"
Truly, that should be effective at keeping the murderhobos in check:smallbiggrin:

Unavenger
2020-09-13, 10:29 PM
Thank you for the detailed Tomb of Horrors write-up. I know to never, ever show up for a running of it now.

Another citizen saved!

The other module I would like to talk about is To Hell and Back, or "What happens when you try to combine Diablo II with Dungeons and Dragons and fail horribly." I strongly recommend Friv's rundown as posted earlier, but here's the abriged version - I will be using spoiler tags for spoilers because Diablo II itself is genuinely a good game and I recommend playing it if you haven't; you can still buy it and it's not expensive.

EDIT: Okay, this ended up longer than I expected: the tl;dr is that many of the encounters are impossible to construct, or too easy, or too hard, or some combination, many of the NPCs make no sense, many of the rules make sense, you can break weapons that you need to complete the adventure, you can BREAK WEAPONS that you NEED to COMPLETE THE ADVENTURE, and just generally nothing makes sense.

The adventure is designed for five character classes which vary wildly in power and all of them have some broken abilities but also a bunch of useless ones, some of the encounters are literally impossible to create because they try to make EL 1's worth of CR 4 creatures or something like that, some of them are impossible to create because they try to create up to EL 25 of low-CR monsters in a space that isn't physically big enough to contain all those monsters, almost every encounter is either too strong or too weak, one of the characters is a 20th-level sorcerer who doesn't have the knowledge skills to justify how much he actually knows, the monsters have DR/+X but the only +X weapons are unique, there are rules for breaking equipment which mean that you will generally break any weapon you use very quickly and that includes the horadric malus, the staff of kings, the horadric staff, Gidbinn Khalim's flail, Khalim's Will and the Hellforge hammer which are all needed to complete quests, and apart from the horadric malus, Gidbinn and the Hellforge hammer, are all needed to complete the game.

There are many, many, many things which aren't explained properly, several times where a monster which, in Friv's words, "isn't a thing" appears and you have to work out which of the two monsters they mashed up appears, except in the case of the poor necromancer who can summon a creature called a Skeleton Mage which is an entire class of monsters so it's not clear which one's meant to be which, oh and the first boss is Corpsefire, but the book gives no indication of what Corpsefire's stats are or even who he is. Oh, and there are two supplements, Diablisserie and To Hell and Back which use different statblocks for the same monsters, but only very slightly. No, this does not account for any of the problems with CR or monsters that don't exist. Oh, and there are potions, which do different things between the different books!

Oh, and you reach 25th level (don't ask why the maximum is 25th, rather than 20th) way sooner than the game expects you to, by the looks. As if to take the lessons learned from the Tomb of Horrors way too far, almost every trap in the game is weirdly pathetic, including the deadfall trap that drops a tree on you underground. But don't worry, because a bunch of the bosses make up for it - even though you're weirdly over-levelled by the ends of act I and act II, the first act boss has a reasonable chance of killing you all (understandable; an act boss should be that powerful) and the second act boss WILL murder you all. The fourth is practically immortal. There's a problem in Act II that you are very likely to stop from happening before it even happens because there's an hour delay on it and I guess the writers forgot how weirdly small the areas are? One of the characters cannot do a certain thing, specifically Radament cannot raise undead even though it's his primary combat tactic, but it's fine because he has another stupidly powerful way of killing you that's identical to the way that the very last boss killed you, and also another way of killing you that he didn't have in Diablo II. NPCs include a level 4 warrior in command of level 9-18 warriors and an adept with 10 wisdom who therefore cannot cast spells.

A few of my favourite quotes from Friv's rundown include:

"The second encounter is another hut. This one is on fire. Forever. Just your average permanently burning house in the middle of a field. And when I say permanently, I mean that explicitly, in the text, this hut is perpetually burning.

There’s a Fallen One shaman hiding inside, but not for long because shamans aren’t immune to fire."

"The players enter Tristram and have a single encounter with fifty CR ¼ enemies. Obviously, this is wildly above the recommended "no more than 12 monsters" thing."

"The players arrive to find that Encounter #1 and Encounter #2 are literally fifteen feet apart, so that's really just one encounter. On the bright side, it's an encounter of CR 2 Blood Clan (i.e. one of them), CR 1 Ghosts (which are a CR 4 enemy so that's not possible), and one Unique of each. By my count, that's approximately a CR 6 encounter, or it would be if CR 1 ghosts were a thing"

"the game advises you to roll a minor magic weapon for the armor rack, and a minor magic armor for the weapon rack."

"Putting this poor, benighted woman out of her misery rewards the PCs with a magic chest. [...] There is, in fact, only about a 50% chance of there being any items in the locked chest at all."

"Beating Andariel gives the PCs 3,000 XP, which at Level 15 is worth about two and a half encounters, and a number of guaranteed magic items. It also causes an earthquake which collapses the ceiling and buries her, which given that you have to search monsters to get their stuff technically means that you don’t get any of those guaranteed magic items.

A portal then appears to return the PCs to town. If they ignore the fact that the Cathedral is collapsing around their ears, they can poke around and find six treasure chests waiting to be claimed, with absolutely no side effects or risk. "

"Monsters here range from CR ½ to CR 2, which is just… amazing. Let us remember that the PCs are Level [expletive] 16 now."

"And this is the moment where the magic happens, thanks to the mixture of three bad sets of rules.

So. First up, there are CR 1 enemies in this area, which means that a balanced encounter involves upwards of 150 enemies. Secondly, you roll for random encounters by room - unlike previous areas, the enemies are all crammed into a single space. Finally, some of these rooms are only fifteen feet wide and twenty feet long.

So imagine, if you will. You open a door. For a moment, you think that you are looking into an art installation. Your eyes do not comprehend what they see. It’s just a pattern of jagged white lines and bits of metal. And then you focus. And you realize that you’re looking at a room packed floor to ceiling with skeletons. Skeletons on top of skeletons. Skeletons entwined in other skeletons. Bones sticking into bones. They’re vaguely flailing at each other, but they use slashing weapons and have DR 10 against slashing weapons so they’re incapable of harming one another. One of the skeletons twists its head and moans, “Kill… us…”

You close the door and try another route, but the joke’s on you. Half the rooms in this cellar are just still-moving undead bodies stacked like cordwood."

"Next, we learn the following:


Placing Horadric Staff on the altar (Fixed Encounter #2) completes this Quest.

It is impressive! They got three mistakes into a single sentence. Obviously, the first is removing the word "the" from the phrase "the Horadric Staff". Secondly, the altar is actually Fixed Encounter #1 - FE2 is what happens after the quest finishes. Thirdly, they forgot to say what quest you finish by placing the staff in the altar."

"They wear armour, so 30% of the time their spells fail (yes, explicitly, I’m not just extrapolating some interactions the writers didn’t consider). Spells are their primary combat tactic."

"The fourth fixed encounter is an ambush by five Water Watchers. That is, it is a CR 22 encounter that involves five monsters, each of which attacks twelve times per round for 1d8+12 or 2d8+12 and throws poison spit that deals 1 permanent and 4d6 temporary Constitution damage on a hit (Fortitude halves.) Their text is a little unclear on whether the temporary damage is at the same time, or qualifies as secondary damage and hits a minute later. Also they have a massive Hide bonus underwater and are explicitly hiding at the start of combat, and have 200 HP each, and have Reach 20. Also their grappling would be ludicrous, although they don’t have grapple stats listed.

If the players survive that, the last fixed encounter is another trap which is only DC 20 to spot, but deals another 2d4 Constitution damage to everyone who triggers it.

I’m noticing a very slight difficulty uptick from the previous section. Is it just me?"

"So to summarize: CR 11 and 20 ambushes against you, a CR 9 ambush against someone else, and a CR 7 and 14 regular encounter. Good to know we're not trying to even these out at all."

"The upper level includes several attempts to trick-murder the PCs. The first is a dozen low-level enemies, and then a surprise attack from a CR 21 Stygian Watcher as soon as the PCs are engaged. The second is a set of eight Soul Killers (CR 7 each), with three Horadrim Ancients (CR 11 each) hiding just in range to raise them from the dead without being spotted - this is a CR 16 encounter, plus hidden ambush powers. The third is a CR 5 unique bat with seven buddies (a total CR 9 encounter) that is uninteresting. The fourth is an attack by four CR 21 Stygian Watchers that ambush the PCs. The Stygian Watcher is a much stronger version fo the Water Watcher we discussed last time. That is a CR 25 encounter, plus ambush and water features, involving enemies who attack twelve times per round each and deal Constitution damage, immediately after a CR 9 encounter.

EDIT Oh, for those taking notes. The Stygian watcher attacks eight times per round for 1d8+13 damage (two attacks at +33/+28/+23/+18), three times per round for 2d8+13 damage (+28/+23/+18), and then throws spit (+17 ranged touch attack) for 1 permanent and 5d6 Constitution damage (Fort Save DC 29 to resist.) It has 290 HP."

"Diablo’s actual attacks are nine melee attacks, starting at +57 and chaining down to +17, dealing either 2d4+13 or 2d6+13 per hit, with a critical threat range of 19-20, and also he has Power Attack so he can sacrifice 5 attack points for 5 damage per hit. He can also, once every 1d4 rounds, sacrifice his worst attack to make a breath weapon attack that deals 11d8 fire damage. So for those tracking at home, if Diablo gets next to someone, he will probably hit them 6-7 times and deal about 25 damage per hit, and then hit everyone behind his target too for around 50 damage (Reflex to half. Level 25 Diablo casters have about 115-165 HP. Meleeists have 167-242 HP. Diablo deals around 200-225 damage per round to his primary target, and 50 damage to any secondary targets every 1-4 rounds, so he can take out a PC most rounds. Also he has Cleave and Great Cleave. Oh, and his Reach is 15, so “next to someone” is a pretty broad concept."

"But wait! There’s more.

Diablo is immune to poison. He has Fire and Lightning Resist 30. He has Cold Resist 25 (which is accidentally included with his damage resistance, so good job, editors.) He also has SR 30, so 1 in 5 spells cast against him fail automatically. More importantly, Diablo's saves are Fort +29, Ref +31, Will +29. He saves against all spells on a 1. He saves against most class powers on a 1. If you really stack things, you can get to the point where he saves against your powers on a 2. Our theoretical Conversion Paladin? Diablo saves on a 2. Barbarian super-stun? Probably saves on a 1, but if you got your Strength bonus up to +11 by abusing the fact that magic items in this version aren't typed, he saves on a 2.

Oh, and also he has AC 30 and 441 HP, and DR 25/+4 (remember how that's not a thing in this game?)

So, hey, guess what CR Diablo is?

I will wait."

"Wrong!

Diablo’s CR is “-”.

THAT IS NOT HOW CR WORKS."

"Oh, and whenever Diablo drops to 350, 250, 150, or 50 HP, he unleashes a special attack - red lightning that covers a 90 foot by 15 foot area and deals 22d6 damage to everyone in it (Reflex Save DC 37 to halve.) This attack counts as a move, so he can follow it up with a fire wall or fire serpents. So those four blast turns are an average of 70-80 damage to multiple people, and then 54 damage each to two more people."

"But when Diablo dies…



Nothing happens.

The players can, as noted above, return to the Pandemonium Fortress at their leisure. Diablo just kind of falls over. There are no cool thematic effects like we got in previous Acts. The end."

"We start with Baboon Demons. Baboon Demons are not demons, so that’s a great start." "Like Baboon Demons, Frog Demons are not demons. They’re monstrous humanoids. [...] Like all frogs, these guys breathe clouds of poisonous gas that deals temporary Strength damage every 1d4 rounds." "Mosquito Demons[...] are also not demons. They're magical beasts this time." "Our first enemy is the Vulture Demon. For a change, the book acknowledges that this name is garbage"

"I suppose we’re here, so let’s just get the Fetish out of the way. These little racist caricatures are CR 4-8. They get a picture, because why the hell not. Only five pictures, give one to these [expletive]s. The CR 4 version has 16 HP, 16 AC, and attacks once per round at +3 to hit for 1d2 damage and no secondary effects. They have no special powers or good stats.

So I’m pretty sure this monster is about CR ½? Maybe 1/4? They have some HP and AC, but their damage is so ludicrously minimal. The CR 8 upgraded version has 38 HP and 21 AC, but still attacks at +4 melee (1d4+1) or +7 ranged (1d2) damage, and still has single-digit saves and no special powers. Someone try to figure out what level of character considers that a reasonable threat. "

"Being on the stack gives the Shaman "the Shaman bonus" for each other fetish when it attacks. There is no rule for what that means"

"Spike Fiends are apparently mainly found in the mountains, which is interesting because there aren't any mountains in Diablo II."

"Regardless, swarms pose a thorny problem for the savvy D&D developer, and this writer is up for the challenge!


Though composed entirely of insects, Swarms seem to have a semisolid "core" where they can be damaged. Even the most learned sages cannot explain this phenomenon. It is the salvation of an adventurer swinging blindly into a verminous mass, to strike the core, killing all members of the Swarm at once.

Just treat it like a totally normal enemy. No special rules at all beyond some minor damage reduction that doesn’t apply against magic. What Swarms do get is the ability to do automatic, no-save Constitution damage every 1d3 rounds. They start at 1d3 Constitution and ramp up to 1d6 at CR 3. On the flip side, they have terrible HP and not great AC. So what usually happens is that several swarms hit you at once, every PC takes 2d6 Con damage, and then the baddies are all dead. Also, their organization lists them as appearing as “superswarms.”

Bad enemy. No cookie."

"Next up is the Watcher, which we’ve discussed at length when they popped up in Act III to be wildly stronger than anything else in that section. You kind of know the drill - CR 17 to 21, tentacle monsters that lurk near water, spit deadly poison, and then grab people and drag them underwater. The strongest ones deal 5d6 Con damage (Fort DC 29 to halve), which averages to 17.5 Con damage and is a potential instant kill against most PCs, even ones with Con-boosting items. This is a standard action that they can only do once per round, which… I mean, yeah, that’s what a standard action is. They also never leave the water, instead using their tentacles and poison spit from range and making people come to them.

I seem to recall in the games that the way you beat Watchers was by hitting their tentacles, causing them to retreat rather than die. There’s no mechanic for that here."

Lord Shark
2020-09-14, 10:22 AM
The Unity for Deadlands. Like the Time of Troubles modules for the Realms, The Unity is basically a string of cutscenes where the PCs get to watch super-cool NPCs do things. To add insult to injury, it eventually railroads the PCs into a situation where they have to kill one of their number to finish the adventure (or everyone dies).

vasilidor
2020-09-16, 07:56 PM
I think a homebrewed diablo inspired game would be better then actually running the Diablo 2 adventure.
my worst Module is also my best module and I cannot remember the name of it right now, it was just entirely unremarkably boring.

Tanarii
2020-09-17, 08:42 AM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????
For good once, because they give the DM a good adventuring site for PCs to explore, if that's what they chose to do.

For bad ones, because they give you a good set of rails for the DM to tell a story with.

CharonsHelper
2020-09-17, 10:10 AM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

In addition to what the other people have said (maps/encounters - outline - save time etc.), running a module 100% straight is a great way to get into a new system.

Often it's difficult to know exactly how the designer of a system really expects it to be played. And while of course, that isn't the ONLY way to play a system (such as the classic of VtM turning into katana/trenchcoat superheroes), it's generally a good idea to use the designer's expectations as a baseline.

Besides that, a really well-designed starter module will dabble into most/all major pillars of the system to give you a good feel for whether or not you want to spend dozens or hundreds of hours digging into.

I know that I've had a few systems where I play a session or two only to find that it was NOT something I wanted to spend more time with, and for one of them it was after spending hours creating my own adventure to play through *cough* Cthluhutech *cough*, and it would have been nice if I'd only had to spend an hour or so prepping a module.

Which does actually tie back to this thread - and shows how important a system having GOOD modules is. If people use a starter module to decide whether or not to stick with your system, it had better be pretty dang good. Even if the system is great, a stinker of a module can put people off it, while even a mediocre system can be a lot of fun to play with a great module.

gijoemike
2020-09-17, 11:25 AM
To the OP: Thank you for allowing us this cathartic rant. It will be a blessing upon our psyche.

Time Frame: Early 2000 to 2002.
Game: D&D 3.0
Setting: Grayhawk ( Living Campaign by WOTC)

Unlike others who complained about bad writing, railroads, DMPCs, and no player agency, my experience had none of that and was with a one shot module meant to be be played and resolved in a 6 hour time block. The name of the module is mostly blocked from my mind after years of therapy. I recall that it had the word Echo in it.

NOTE: To those of you who have not played in Grayhawk 3.0. Grayhawk was always pitched as lower magic. A +3 sword was an amazing magic item. 7th lvl spells where things of myth that only a few NPCs could dream of. Keep that in mind.

NOTE: The GM told our party of 7 PC's this was a bit of a rough adventure and to be on our super A game. At least 1 or 2 of you may die. There is a sorta fix for that. It is HARD.

It started out STRONG and promising. The local scouts and wizard of the country spied a tall new structure on the edge of their domain about 12 to 16 hours of travel into the desert boarder. Scrying, augury, and general divination had all failed due to lack of any knowledge. Time to hire a band of brave adventurers to explore and map out whatever that mess is. I was a military scout(a lawful good rogue type). We were level 3 to 5.

The journey is making sure you have provisions. No encounter to speak of just a day's ride into hot hot sandy love.

The Tower

Upon reaching this old dilapidated structure we find one entrance and we feel a strange breeze that makes some of the parties' skin crawl. The scructure is no more than 200'' across 3 or 4 stories tall. We also heard a constant buzzing. Magic is detected all around. We slide down this opening and land on a large rock outcropping. What we see before us is a world of wonder and contempt of physics.


The NOT a Tower
Inside we can see 1000's of feet in every direction. There is no tower structure. ITS BIGGER ON THE INSIDE PEOPLE. 100 ton boulders float in midair disconnected from everything around it. Except there are buildings on and carved into the various floating rocks. In the far distance (up, down, left, right, doesn't matter) we see a "net" of arching lighting. The boundary walls of what we now stand in were a lighting storm. We can see and hear activity from one of the boulders far below. The mage with us explains it is like a extra dimensional space like rope trick, but it is aligned to some plane that isn't our home. (For every alignment step off Neutral a character was they got -2 for all social, communication skills. LG and CG were at -4 to most skill rolls)


A bait and switch can be a fun adventure. Also this is a cool sounding area. This was a far cry from what we were expecting but we are adventurers. We press forward as the fools we were.

Travelling
We discovered that every boulder had at least one archway built on a small platform. If we jumped through the arch we would be hurled 100 feet to a predetermined boulder. Jumping like this could take 12 seconds to land. That was a cool cinematic moment. We jump to the first few boulders and fight some kind of abomination lurking in the crevices of the tunnel. Nothing is of any challenge... YET.

BS DEATH
We come to a central rock that has 4 of these jump platforms. As a party we decide to take that one, our job is to map this place out. As scout, I say I will go first and signal the party to cross. We had done this twice already. I jump across the 150" gap. The DM ask me to make a spot check. That was my niche. Easily made it. GM responds, as you land you see a large crack in the archway of the jump pad you just crossed. I scream to my party of the hum of lighting "DON'T JUMP".

The GM responds I had just saved the entire party from a TPK.

WHAT NOW
The game comes to a screeching halt. The barbarian's player, the barb still with the party, asks the GM "Say what now?" The GM explains I just landed on the dining hall rock with a single jump pad. Its broken. Mend/make whole cannot fix it. There is no magical treasure or supplies other than dish wear and cutlery. There is a floating animated servant that speaks a language no one in the party can speak. Had I let the party jump, or if the party had all jumped at one time to avoid a 2 round wait everyone would have been stuck. The party spends the next hour trying to figure out how to save me. Our wizard didn't have fly prepped, he had haste and an offensive spell. This was lower level Grayhawk, no one had ever seen a potion of flight. I was dead because "we go left" was stated. No save, no warning, I was trapped on the other side of 150" bottomless pit.

Downhill fast
There are no other broken Jump pads in the module. F this module. The remaining party reaches the bottom and the 2nd encounter. They land on the flat platform weapons drawn and see 4 Githyanki around a strange structure with a gear, orb, and dials. Gith have an innate telekinesis power in 3.0. The way the mod is written, the party surprises the gith and they mind throw you into the abyss as a reaction. You get 1 will saving throw. If you win intiivate and attempt diplomacy you have up to a -4 due to the alignment step penalty stated above. Since this was the first time this module the GM actually had a say in anything at all, he had the gith throw the party against walls. The party survived but they were HURT and hurt bad.


Out of nowhere will save or die? Not just 1 but 4 in the same round, the first round of combat? Played straight How in the h--l is a party supposed to survive that unless they are all flying?

All for Nought
The gith were trying to repair the device because it is breaking down. It is possible to work with them. But the device cannot be fixed. The space will collapse and kill everyone inside and the gith community living in the next dimension. There are 3 magical portals in the back of the room. The gith don't trust any of them. That is backstory, the gith in our version are dead.

Blue, Black, Green portal. That is what you have to work with. what choice do you make? There are no other clues. The GM tells us. "You cannot know this but there is only 1 good outcome here. But there are no clues. Metagame this."

BLUE
You are teleported to the underdark where Drow capture you and make you a slave in the mines for the next full calendar year. Once you escape you permanently lose 1 point of wisdom. No save, no battle.
BLACK
You are sent somewhere to the far realms. Unspeakable horrors break your mind, body, and soul. You are dead. No save, no roll.
GREEN
You are teleported to a pasture days away from any civilization in a far country from where you started. It takes 2 weeks to return to the beginning city to complete the module.


In all cases the tower collapses and kills everyone by doing 10d6 lighting damage every round for 3 rounds and then winking you out of existence no save. You do not get shunted to the astral plane or back to the desert. That is what happened to my character.


Final knife twist
At least 1 party member made it back and reported. The various NPCs are surprised, saddened, and offer to bring back to life the members of the group who perished. But all payment to the group would need to be diverted (This is important). The few remaining folks want to rez folks. All party member are brought back via True res. Getting bodies is out of the question. SO that is up to 6 castings of true rez, a spell that is not possible for characters to obtain. SIX TIMES.

But they don't take just the payment. They take every magic item we found during the adventure, every potion, scroll, map, favor to various group/npc, salaries. ANTHING obtained during the last 6 hours of game play except for EXP, gone. We get restored with items. Except we used funds, consumables, transportation, supplies, horses to get to the desert. That is all gone too.


The GM walked over to the convention moderator and stated for all to hear. "This is the worst piece of shat I have every read, run, or imagined. Why did you have me run this?"


No railroads, no warnings, just a choice dead, dead, or you may choose again. Had the wizard just been able to cast fly on everyone, we would have been done in 10 minutes of game play. The clueless choices, and the whole thing is pointless since the tower goes poof. Because it was only 2 combat encounters we got very little EXP compared to most modules of the day.

WORST MOD EVER

MrZJunior
2020-09-17, 10:13 PM
Do you know if the arches would throw inanimate objects? Maybe someone could have tied some rope to a rock and created a path back for you that way.

Eldan
2020-09-18, 03:34 AM
Do you know if the arches would throw inanimate objects? Maybe someone could have tied some rope to a rock and created a path back for you that way.

My first thought: no way any party I was in would give up one of their own just like that. We'd probably spend the next two hours trying to get that scout back. Ropes tied to arrows, ladders, improvised hang-gliders, digging up the countryside to find enough rocks for an improvised bridge, bird familiar, praying for divine intervention, anything. We'd derail the entire module and probably never finish it because we wouldn't accept that.

LibraryOgre
2020-09-18, 10:28 AM
I'm gonna start a thread for discussing this, because I really want to workshop suggestions, too.

gijoemike
2020-09-18, 02:26 PM
Do you know if the arches would throw inanimate objects? Maybe someone could have tied some rope to a rock and created a path back for you that way.


Sadly they did not. We lost several mundane items trying to toss them to me. It was basically a JUMP spell but instead of +30 it was +200 skill cap. It allowed a running jumper to pass the distance of 100" to 150". It had to be a sentient target with additional limitations I assume. I had rope on me and tied it off and jumped. It didn't work. I had to climb back up dangling over a lighting net of hate. The wizards familiar would have been a GREAT idea. I don't think it could fly though.


My first thought: no way any party I was in would give up one of their own just like that. We'd probably spend the next two hours trying to get that scout back. Ropes tied to arrows, ladders, improvised hang-gliders, digging up the countryside to find enough rocks for an improvised bridge, bird familiar, praying for divine intervention, anything. We'd derail the entire module and probably never finish it because we wouldn't accept that.

That was the initial attitude of the party. At least one player in the remaining side was pissed off. As a group we choose go left and a character was just gone. The GM had a bad taste in his mouth, the pissed of barbarian was unhappy, I hadn't lost a character without some sort of roll before, so, I was upset. By no mistake or roll of either the DM or mine I lost the character.

The gap was just over 150 ft. The party on boulder A didn't have enough rope/extra robes/bedrolls to tie together to reach my character (we calculated). I didn't have 150 ft of stuff either. Because there was a empty void of air between the two platforms building a bridge ( without today's highly complex cranes and support structures) was out of the question. There wasn't enough loose stuff around anyway.

As a group we finally came to the conclusion the party could maybe if we're lucky find treasure, repair kit, npc who had a clue as to what was happening at the bottom of the "tower" then they could come back and save me. But the whole thing was a time bomb. Had the party stayed we would have all died in the collapse a few in game hours later.

The worst part for me was it WAS NOT Greyhawk. Losing the character was a far distant second issue. Wrong feel, flow, presence of magic. It felt like a much higher level Forgotten Realms adventure. I wouldn't have been surprised if a named literary mage popped up in that module. Bubble planes of existence that are collapsing is something from extreme high magic/Doctor Who stories. Or are full length campaigns that slowly lead back to a multi-dimensional greater evil. A 4 to 6 hour one shot isn't the place.

MoiMagnus
2020-09-19, 05:19 AM
Bubble planes of existence that are collapsing is something from extreme high magic/Doctor Who stories. Or are full length campaigns that slowly lead back to a multi-dimensional greater evil. A 4 to 6 hour one shot isn't the place.

That's not the first time I hear about a module which is build as "at the end of 6 hours of gameplay, if the PCs didn't already finish the module, everyone dies without test because 'a wizard did it' and the module ends". It seems to be a popular way to enforce the 6h limits on one-shot during a RPG convention.

Vahnavoi
2020-09-19, 06:01 AM
That's not the first time I hear about a module which is build as "at the end of 6 hours of gameplay, if the PCs didn't already finish the module, everyone dies without test because 'a wizard did it' and the module ends". It seems to be a popular way to enforce the 6h limits on one-shot during a RPG convention.

As a convention GM, I find this kind of design to be pointless. It has a place if a game is supposed to be run in real time, but every other case it's an insult to a GM's intelligence. You can end any game with "you're running short of real game time, what's your last plan of action?"

LibraryOgre
2020-09-19, 09:20 AM
As a convention GM, I find this kind of design to be pointless. It has a place if a game is supposed to be run in real time, but every other case it's an insult to a GM's intelligence. You can end any game with "you're running short of real game time, what's your last plan of action?"

There was a series of 4th edition adventures that did this... Fourthcore. Perfect for convention games. You have a little bit for set up and character selection, but you have a real-time limit before the world ends. Setting the limit from the outset, and letting folks know that real-time ******* around will cost them, makes for a high-stress situation where you take risks to achieve things, because the stakes are so high.

Chauncymancer
2020-09-19, 11:18 AM
Can you give examples in other modules? There’s a little of that in any Hex Crawl, but most modules seem to only have a few “dropped” content bits for a given play through, and those due to giving meaningful choices.

STK isn’t in that latter category because while the choice of which chapter to do is meaningful, it is only really so because it’s choosing content. STK definitely expects replay to be valuable. I don’t know if any other modules that do.
The four-seasons model in Dragon Heist uses the exact same gimmick in 5e, but mostly it's smaller things. The largely empty, meandering nature of old mega-dungeons. The insanely detailed NPCs of a town like Hommlet or the Keep on the Borderlands. Dungeon sub-levels concealed behind unflagged secret doors like in the Silver Princess. Lengthy historical backstories that can only be discovered by dropping thousands of gold on a Sage retainer. Bizarre trial and error traps like "The first time you drink from the fountain, gain 2 Str. The second time, lose 3 Str. The third time, gain 4 Str. The fourth time, die." NPC timelines that run down days before the PCs should have any chance of figuring out that the NPC in question is in motion.


Honest question.

Why do people play modules????
For the same reason people prefer the Silmarillion to LOTR fan-fiction. To many people, a published module feels "more real" than a homemade one.

Batcathat
2020-09-19, 11:38 AM
"The first time you drink from the fountain, gain 2 Str. The second time, lose 3 Str. The third time, gain 4 Str. The fourth time, die."

I must admit, that one sounds kinda fun, if only by virtue of how it screws with PCs trying to figure it out. My appreciation is more in the abstract though, I'm sure it'd annoy me as a player and I don't think it'd dare use it as a GM.

Chauncymancer
2020-09-20, 12:57 AM
I must admit, that one sounds kinda fun, if only by virtue of how it screws with PCs trying to figure it out. My appreciation is more in the abstract though, I'm sure it'd annoy me as a player and I don't think it'd dare use it as a GM.

In the module in question, the liquid you're drinking is putrefied mummy. It was one of the things that sparked my realization that you're "meant" to play D&D like your third playthrough of an open world game, just going down bizarre tangents because you've already scene the basic good ending, what else is in here?

Stattick
2020-09-21, 06:05 AM
The Pazio AP for StarFinder called Dead Suns was pretty bad for my group. I remember that we ran across at least 6 or 7 different instances of "you cannot X your spaceship here" without any explanation. With X usually being land, although it did include fly over, scan, leave, use as transportation, and use as cover during a fight.

So the whole thing was a "race against the clock to stop bad guys getting the superweapon" scenario spanning a 3.p style 1st to about 15th levels. Literally every step of the way ends with a "they just left/got what they needed, you have to hurry to catch them". Unfortunately space travel time is random, from 1d6 days between ultra-civilization core worlds to 5d6 days for completely uncharted destinations. Then space combat requires upgrading your spaceship every level, which is 1d6 days per thing upgraded.

Suffice it to say that the AP is actually "speed of plot" but tells you that time & speed is critical. There's no difference between the PCs spending 14d6 days upgrading the ship then 5d6 days getting somewhere and just getting the best engines at level 4 or something and speed running all the space stuff at 1/3 * 5d6 days plus out running all the fights. Well there is a difference, the space fights count for xp and sometimes loot or plot critical info, and of course failing one involves your ship being destroyed by people who have no reason to take prisoners. The AP requires you to level up you ship, then fight and win all the space combats, despite telling the players that they have to catch up to the enemies.

There were other things of course. The gas trap on the airless asteroid that poisoned people through their space suits. The expectation that the PCs walk something like 4+ hours through a poisonous and mildly radioactive hellscape instead of renting an air car. The expectation that at 13th level either all the PCs can fly at 60'+ or none of them can. Loot that was, in one case, literally useless and nearly worthless. The usual stuff.

This sounds like it would be an amazing AP to reconstruct for a home game. I'd make so that every locale isn't an item per se, but a beacon of sort, a megalithic item too difficult or impossible to move. From the megaliths, you're basically getting coordinates to the next locale. And I'd make the jumps truly random. You never know if you're going to get there first, or they are, or if you arrive at around the same time.

With each megalith, you have to decipher the next locale. I'd add in a secret DC on that roll, a very high one, but one that gets a little easier to hit with each locale. There's another way to read/decipher the maps. Further, I'd say that whoever sent you on this mission has also been working on this problem too, so if too much time goes by without the party deciphering it, they get a call from home. The second way of reading the maps give a different location. Perhaps a way to work on the puzzle without constantly getting attacked? IF the party explores one of the alt locations, they find another monolith, but of slightly different style. They ALSO clue in the party they've been chasing, and they'll shortly figure out the secondary way of reading the monoliths.

See, during one of the early "upgrades" the party did to their ship, their adversaries bribed the mechanics at the shipyard to add a low power transmitter to their ship. It's cleverly hidden, but detectible that there's a small, unaccounted for power drain in the Nav system during a high level diagnostic. It also makes the ship's bridge Nav consoles power unstable if they're running at minimal power (say, they're playing dead, or trying to hide by going dead) - basically, any time they'd input new instructions, the console goes dark/unresponsive for a bit. The tracking device gives a low power burst transmission every time new instructions are given to the Nav system. Enemies with the right transceiver code can even send out a signal to get a return "ping" from the transmitter, like an RFID, to give coordinates of the ship.

Any upgrades, repairs, or alterations to the Nav system has a pretty decent chance to find the tracking device. Hey, what's this thing? It looks like it's tied directly into Nav computers...

As to all the things listed where, "You can't land here" or whatnot, I'd leave them in. BUT, I'd give an explanation as to WHY it's dangerous, or whatnot. A good enough roll on the part of the players gives them a work around. Too much ionic interference to use comms to talk to that other ship out there? Point your high beams at them, and start flashing them in "Space Fantasy" Morse Code.

AFTER the party figures out that there's a second way to read the monoliths, their adversary will have a reason to want to capture them alive, if they're defeated. They head scientist working for them thinks that there's at least one more way to read the data, but doesn't have the computing power aboard to brute force a solution, and is having trouble coming up with it via inspiration. But maybe if he had the help of the people that cracked the second code, he can crack the third.

You might want to add in a safety net for the party, in case it becomes obvious that they're going to loose one of those space battles. Since the beginning, there's been an intermittent sensor ghost. Can't seem to figure out what's wrong with the sensors, but this ghost occasionally shows up for a few seconds of "barely there" contact before fading again. It's not a ghost. The party is being tailed by a third party, another polity, that wants to make sure that the super weapon, if it proves to be real, doesn't fall into the "wrong" hands.

Party will have to dodge patrols the whole campaign, as there's an escalating build-up between two polities - war's about to break out. That cloaked ship that's shadowing the party is on one side of that building conflict. There should be a worry that the adversary is going to start working for one of the warring parties, and really be able to set up a nasty ambush for the party. Probably the other party is also being shadowed, by the other side.

As the party arrives at the supposed location of the superweapon, they are ordered to stop and be boarded by one polity or the other (though this is supposed to be neutral territory). Before that can really happen though, the other polity's ships start arriving in-system, immediately opening fire. Party is free enough to decide what to do - join one side or the other, leave the fleets to their fate, or drop down to the planet to try to make a grab for the weapon while the fleets have bigger problems.

I'd say that whoever gets to the weapon first, discovers a weapon of godlike power, something that could totally break the setting. You could annihilate whole races, whole regions of space, at a distance. If the players are the ones that get there first, let them ascend into godhood, and let them decide what to do. The thing is, it isn't a weapon. It's a test. If you can give up the power, once you've attained it, you live, and your race is allowed to continue evolving toward godhood. If you can't give it up, it destroys you and arrests the evolution of your people toward becoming space gods.

ahyangyi
2020-09-28, 08:58 AM
Forgot about this-- it feels like it's largely a 5e phenomenon--but it's definitely fun to have those sorts of shared experiences.

Probably not. At least I remember part of the reason Pathfinder existed was that Paizo was making those 3.5 Adventure Paths and did not want to stop when 4e came.

Batcathat
2020-10-01, 08:50 AM
I absolutely do! The thread, along with some lovely colour commentary by others, is located over here (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/lets-read-diablo-ii-diablerie.835587/). It's an rpgnet link, but you can read without having an account. :)

Oh, and if you want to skip the godawful mechanics and poorly-designed treasure generation of the 'character' book, the actual campaign module starts here for unsigned in people. (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/lets-read-diablo-ii-diablerie.835587/page-18)

This might be slightly off topic for this thread (or not, since it's certainly about a horrible module) but after reading through that entire thread over the course of a week or two (it's very long but very worth it, I'd say) I figured I should thank you for an entertaining read.

And since I'm at it, I should also thank Unavenger for the lengthy description of Tomb of Horrors earlier in the thread. While I've heard about it (who hasn't?) I didn't really know much about it so it was good to learn why it's so... noteworthy.

Pex
2020-10-01, 09:38 AM
This might be slightly off topic for this thread (or not, since it's certainly about a horrible module) but after reading through that entire thread over the course of a week or two (it's very long but very worth it, I'd say) I figured I should thank you for an entertaining read.

And since I'm at it, I should also thank Unavenger for the lengthy description of Tomb of Horrors earlier in the thread. While I've heard about it (who hasn't?) I didn't really know much about it so it was good to learn why it's so... noteworthy.

Even if it was meant as a satirical competition for a convention, I wonder how many DMs took it seriously and thought that's how dungeons/adventures were supposed to work. It's a blur now on specifics, but gotcha DMing was not uncommon in those days.

Mister Sike
2020-10-29, 07:55 PM
My proposal for worst module come from the french book Scenarii which is a compilation of 52 adventures (the adventures are medieval-fantastic with advices on how to adapt it with D20 system, ect). Most adventures are not great but my pick is the 26th adventure "Sauver le Prince" (Save the prince). So a regent ask the PC to rescue her son (by picking them at random from her balcony and throwing them in her dungeon if they refuse). While liberating the prince isn't that hard, the inexcusable part is the ending : you learn that the person behing the kidnapping is a mage disguised as the regent's right-hand man and, even if the PC realize this, the PC can't do anything about it : they're at the party with the badguy whom they know is there under disguise (possibly with proof) but can't do anything and the badguy achieve is goal "easily" (that's a quote from the adventure). But there's more : when the badguy escapes, if the PC try to chase after him they die. No roll no saving throw just an instant TPK if the PC try to chase the badguy.

Yora
2020-10-30, 04:26 AM
Even if it was meant as a satirical competition for a convention, I wonder how many DMs took it seriously and thought that's how dungeons/adventures were supposed to work. It's a blur now on specifics, but gotcha DMing was not uncommon in those days.

Tomb of Horror was one of the worst missteps in RPG history. And it's consequences carried on for much longer than that.
Even 10 years ago I remember it frequently being talked about as this amazing classic that is kind of the platonic ideal of how a dungeon adventure should be made.

It's only been fairly recently that it's original context has become more publically known around contemporary players.

I say the worst adventure that I ever tried to read would probably have been the Temple of Elemental Evil. I have no idea what's going on there, and apparently so do most people who tried.

Imbalance
2020-10-30, 10:30 AM
True that. I intentionally didn't name the module initially, so as not to bias the results. I'm curious if anyone else found this particular module as bad as I did.

To be fair, I only said to name the system. Although, clearly, naming the module is a huge help.

But the real reason? I'm AFB. I've wanted to make a thread like this for a bit; now that I've remembered to make the thread, I've forgotten the module's name. :smallredface:

I'll post it when I remember.

When I get my hands on the module (and/or my notes) again, I'll go into more detail while roasting it.

So...what was the module?

comicshorse
2020-10-30, 10:44 AM
I can't remember the name of the book but White Wolf did a scenario where for Vampire the P.C.s meet Baba Yaga which LITERALLY railroads the P.C.s. In that if you don't find the clues you wake up on a train going to her location. If you get off the train the next night you wake on it again ! Repeat until the P.C's will to think curls up and dies
Besides that the fact that the end of the scenario is you see Baba Yage, another Vampire turns up and kills her (and any of the P.C.s he doesn't like) and then leaves without saying anything barely makes the grade of awfulness

Jason
2020-10-30, 11:27 AM
Honest question.

Why do people play modules????

Because a lot of prep time is necessary for a good adventure, and we all have regular lives that demand our time.

Yora
2020-10-30, 11:43 AM
And because people are under the mistaken belief that running an adventure from the book always takes less time than setting up your own.

When you try to make your own adventure to match the way modules are written, that will probably be the case. But when you prepare stuff to be run only once, only by you, and with you being present to fill gaps on the fly (which you can because you have the whole picture of the design in your head), then you can have good content with much less preparation work than reading and trying to understand a full module.

Jason
2020-10-30, 12:40 PM
And because people are under the mistaken belief that running an adventure from the book always takes less time than setting up your own.

When you try to make your own adventure to match the way modules are written, that will probably be the case. But when you prepare stuff to be run only once, only by you, and with you being present to fill gaps on the fly (which you can because you have the whole picture of the design in your head), then you can have good content with much less preparation work than reading and trying to understand a full module.
I would think that varies from person to person, and from system to system. 3.5 required a lot of work to set up enemy NPCs, for instance, because you had to choose their feats, magic items, and spells if they were a spellcaster. It's definitely much quicker to just look up the bits you're unfamiliar with on a pre-made NPC than create your own.

A single encountrer is notorious among my players for being the "worst ever". It was in FRC2 Curse of the Azure Bonds which wasn't a terrible module, really, just this one encounter.

The sewers of Tilverton have a lot of areas where the ceilings are so low that there is a -1 combat penalty for anyone over 4' tall. The players open a door to a 30' × 20' room with such a low ceiling and find it is occupied by five trolls each riding a giant crocodile. How 10 large (7 to 12 feet tall or long by 2nd Ed rules) creatures manage to live in a 30' × 20' room with a 5' ceiling goes completely undressed by the module. My players took one look and then closed the door and walked away.

Telok
2020-10-30, 01:17 PM
I would think that varies from person to person, and from system to system. 3.5 required a lot of work to set up enemy NPCs, for instance, because you had to choose their feats, magic items, and spells if they were a spellcaster. It's definitely much quicker to just look up the bits you're unfamiliar with on a pre-made NPC than create your own.

In 3.5 I just found a random npc generator on the web. Any time I needed npcs I'd set the class & level, crank out 15 or so, scan for a decent one and change a few feats or spells. There used to be lots of fan made utilities & time savers out there if you just went looking. There still may be but I'm not running games I really need it for any more.

Quertus
2020-10-30, 03:53 PM
Because a lot of prep time is necessary for a good adventure, and we all have regular lives that demand our time.

Personally, I spend roughly / at least as much time preparing to run a module as I do my own content.

Granted, that is because I functionally *rewrite* the module in my own format (has anyone noticed how *horribly* many modules are layed out, how much flipping one has to do to run them?), and run sample characters through either to try to familiarize myself both with the content, and with idiots that might arise.


So...what was the module?

Ah, thanks for reminding me - I just recently a) found my notes, and b) started running a party through said module (having previously started writing a spoof about said module). And I had previously had a GM attempt to run this module before giving up.

The module that prompted this inquiry is "Halls of the High King", by Ed Greenwood.

The module is chock full of errors at all levels, and, going through the module, I filled up nearly a page of text just *describing* the errors for each page of the module. Those errors… eh, I'll spoil this "brief" overview (divided/ordered by roughly what level of "annoying" I found them) both for length, and just in case anyone actually plays 2e modules / converts them to newer systems anymore.

Sure, there's typos, like the monster that deals "6.24” damage instead of 6-24 damage.

Sure, you are given the quest by someone twice your level, with a bodyguard twice *his* level.

Sure, "if the PCs don't do it, it doesn't get done (regardless of how many Uber competent beings *could* (and, often, *should*) have done these things)" is a common theme.

I can accept all that with little more than an eye roll.

One of the big draws of FR modules is, supposedly, the quirky NPCs. That's not exactly big for me, so I'll accept that I might not appreciate the NPCs as much as some, but…

The quest-giver is a total fanboy stalker… and a strange combination of honest and conniving.

Flamsterd is… what's the name for an OP female total ***** who, incongruously, all of the NPCs totally adore? Flamsterd is a male one of those, stepping on sleeping PCs, and cursing them to have their weapons *automatically break* *for months* for the audacity of a low-level party having the gaul to reject his generous offer of 0 GP to go to a foreign land to fight minions of a dark god that are steadily overwhelming said land (a wealthy militarized nation that has just commissioned the crafting of over 1,000 additional swords, the delivery of which is the initial focus of chapter 1). Yeah, it's really easy to see why all the NPCs think he's such a great guy.

And… that's all that really stand out in my mind.

EDIT: I just remembered another NPC personality issue I had: even the nameless NPCs metagame assume that everyone but the PCs are incapable of doing anything useful, prompting the (low-level) PCs with lines along the lines of, "when are y'all gonna fix all of our problems for us?" :smallyuk:

Now, this is Forgotten Realms - I expect that there's epic Archmagi running around. And that's fine. I'm not complaining about that.

I'm not even complaining about there being powerful NPCs involved in the storyline, on both sides. That's fine, too.

No, my complaints (and, yes, that's plural, as there are several) are separate from my acceptance of that setup.

One (actually rather mild) complaint is that there's a definite "haves and have nots" vibe, as some of the NPCs are just *way* better equipped than the PCs likely are or will be, even after completing the module - and that's not counting the NPCs whose equipment is "make it up".

To add to the "have nots" vibe, many NPCs have gear that cannot be stolen, and spellbooks that cannot be looted (since they hid them away, far away from the adventure). Because, apparently, it's important that NPCs always remain better than the PCs can ever be.

But most telling of all are the base NPC stat blocks. If it's a major NPC, expect something close to straight 18's (I think several NPCs are in "lowest stat is a 14" territory (actually, make that 6 of the NPCs just in chapter 1 with "no stat lower than a 14" - and several of the "lesser" chapter 1 NPCs are set up with their lowest stat as a 13)).

And it's not just the named NPCs - the PCs would be better off handing their gear to a random nameless NPC, because even those guys have better listed stats (also "no stat lower than a 13", BTW - they just cap out at 16 instead of 18) than the PCs are likely sporting. Baring some extreme luck / munchkinry, the PCs are literally the worst people in the world!

Apropos to the comment that part of the value of modules is having statted NPCs, a lot of the NPCs in this module have stat blocks of, "eh, make something up".

As if that weren't bad enough, a lot of these unstatted NPCs have "Lady of Pain" style text along the lines of, "assume that their defenses defeat anything that the PCs attempt to do".

And as if *that* weren't bad enough, check this out: one of the antagonists in chapter 1 (who actually got one of the more complete write-ups) has no magic items, no spellbook, no applicable memorized spells, and the text, "His defenses will prevent PCs from reading his mind or detecting his alignment". Um… how, exactly? :smallconfused:

-----

EDIT: now, some of you will doubtless be irritated that I include this, because it's a valid playstyle, but it irritates me, so I'm including it. What is this "it"? That there is (IMO) an overabundance of random encounters, but the GM is encouraged to simply ignore them if they "hamper the pace or enjoyment of play". The Plot is railroaded (even if ignoring it would make for a better story); the physics are not. :smallannoyed:


Just to name a few (and to pick on the Wizards), you've got Wizards…

Casting spells beyond their capabilities.

Casting spells that aren't in their "spells memorized" (which is full, I checked - so it's not just "they cast that spell, and their memorized spells are what they have left").

Casting Time Stop… just to Teleport away… instead of just teleporting.

Casting Invisibility… just to Teleport away… instead of just teleporting.

Casting spells which don't do what the module has them do.

When I say that the rails are "beyond lunacy", I want you to understand exactly what I mean. So let's start with spellbooks - and, more importantly, the background to understand just *why* this is beyond lunacy.

In 3e, PCs get loot, which they convert to GP value, and use to purchase magical items to increase their power.

Spellbooks are a *big deal* for Wizards, being an expensive magical item that is highly vulnerable, and without which they are simply a glorified Commoner.

Now let's look at 2e.

In 2e, Wizards are still glorified Commoners without their spellbooks (ignoring that the "Commoner" class didn't exist in 2e). And spellbooks are still vulnerable (arguably even moreso than in 3e). But everything else is different.

There is no assumption of magic item shops - items can be purchased rarely to never. So what do characters do with the actual "gold and gems" portion of their loot? Drink, buy castles, hire retainers, bribe magistrates - mundane stuff.

Now, here's the big one: spellbooks are just mundane books. They're just recipe cookbooks for "how to make gunpowder" (or the spell equivalent).

Replacing a spellbook (or creating a backup copy) is as trivial as buying some blank paper, getting out (perfectly mundane) quill and ink, and writing.

Yet, despite this, and despite how ridiculously much trouble it should cause the NPCs (one of whom crafts reams of scrolls for their buff routines instead of carrying a spell book… for reasons…) the NPC Wizards seem allergic to their spellbooks, hiding them as far away from themselves as possible, not even carrying small partial copies ("travel spellbooks") with them.

I mean, we all know that (enemy) NPCs only live for one encounter, and so all they need is a spell loadout, as they will never actually *use" their spellbook on camera, but geez! The "cardboard cutout" nature of the backdrop is really showing here.

And why? Why go through all the effort to ensure that the PCs never get ahold of an NPC spellbook? What's the payoff? Best guess? To make Flamsterd's offer of "one spell, each" seem very generous.

OK, real quick, here's just a few examples, starting with one that I have mentioned before:

"His defenses will prevent PCs from reading his mind or detecting his alignment". Even ignoring how, why? There is absolutely no reason for this. Yes, ganking him the moment you meet him will mean that you don't have a rather dumb encounter later (but certainly not the dumbest in the module), but... so what? Absolutely nothing in the module is dependent upon that encounter, nothing (other than "this is dumb") is learned from that encounter (that couldn't be learned - and, IMO, learned "better" - by reading his mind), there is afaict no point to that encounter, and the module would actually be *better* if the PCs realistically detected and ganked this guy, or, alternately, realistically *didn't* detect and/or chose not to gank him.

"Start this encounter when there is at least one PC on deck [at night]”. And, if that never happens (because, say, the PCs choose to actually sleep at night)?

"When… traveling anywhere overland… they will hurl spears from thickets and overhanging tree branches". So, when the party decides to follow the coastline, and there's nothing but sand…

"Regardless of which direction the party takes [they come to a grove]" - ignoring the questionable grammar, do note that this includes *backtracking*. "Huh, this grove wasn't here before…” :smallconfused:

(If I were going beyond chapter 1, I would talk about how there are no boats… until the plot demands that there's a boat…) :smallannoyed:

And I was going to say, "and that's all just in the 1st chapter", but I see that I've strayed into chapter 2. Oops.

As a final irritant, the author spends an undue amount of time and ink gushing over certain NPCs and detailing the customs of the clergy of Bane (like, exactly what each level of Cleric is allowed to wear to what function), while spending almost no time actually describing the scenes, or giving details to handle anything off the rails beyond, "if the PCs attempt to kill this NPC".

Tanarii
2020-10-31, 11:56 AM
The module that prompted this inquiry is "Halls of the High King", by Ed Greenwood.
Ed Greenwood was allowed to write a module?

I mean, he can't write a decent book to save someone's life, so I suppose there's a chance that his strengths were elsewhere. But given the reasons his books are so terrible, it doesn't seem like modules would be his forte.

Pex
2020-10-31, 03:11 PM
Ed Greenwood was allowed to write a module?

I mean, he can't write a decent book to save someone's life, so I suppose there's a chance that his strengths were elsewhere. But given the reasons his books are so terrible, it doesn't seem like modules would be his forte.

If other 2E modules were like this and DMs accepted them without question, even if innocently not knowing any better, combined with particular advice in the 2E DMG it could explain the origin of my distaste of tyrannical DMing. :smalltongue:

Tanarii
2020-10-31, 04:29 PM
If other 2E modules were like this and DMs accepted them without question, even if innocently not knowing any better, combined with particular advice in the 2E DMG it could explain the origin of my distaste of tyrannical DMing. :smalltongue:
Oh yes, 2e was definitely an era of both player storyplaying elitism and full blown DM storyroading. I've always understood you distates to be honestly come by.

Batcathat
2020-10-31, 04:39 PM
Flamsterd is… what's the name for an OP female total ***** who, incongruously, all of the NPCs totally adore? Flamsterd is a male one of thos

I'm guessing the name you're looking for is Mary Sue? I believe male ones are usually called Marty Stu or Gary Stu. And yes, those are wildly annoying when they show up.

Quertus
2020-10-31, 05:05 PM
If other 2E modules were like this... it could explain the origin of my distaste of tyrannical DMing. :smalltongue:

Which part of "like this" in particular do you find familiar?


I'm guessing the name you're looking for is Mary Sue? I believe male ones are usually called Marty Stu or Gary Stu. And yes, those are wildly annoying when they show up.

I'm always bad with vocabulary - I thought "Mary Sue" (and Marty Stu) was the name for an OP self-insert? What I'm thinking of is epitomized (IMO) by the female Inquisitor psyker in... "The All Guardsman Party", IIRC.

Or are they really all the same thing, and I'm just as confused as ever?

Batcathat
2020-10-31, 05:10 PM
I'm always bad with vocabulary - I thought "Mary Sue" (and Marty Stu) was the name for an OP self-insert? What I'm thinking of is epitomized (IMO) by the female Inquisitor psyker in... "The All Guardsman Party", IIRC.

Or are they really all the same thing, and I'm just as confused as ever?

I'm no expert either but I believe a Mary Sue usually refer to a character that's Super Special in every way and beloved by all (except for the bad guys, who are easily defeated and/or proven wrong). Obviously, a self-insert can have this role in the hands of certain writers (or GMs) but I don't think it's a requirement for it to be a Mary Sue.

Saint-Just
2020-10-31, 05:12 PM
I'm always bad with vocabulary - I thought "Mary Sue" (and Marty Stu) was the name for an OP self-insert? What I'm thinking of is epitomized (IMO) by the female Inquisitor psyker in... "The All Guardsman Party", IIRC.

Or are they really all the same thing, and I'm just as confused as ever?

I am not sure about original usage, but at least for the last ten years it's definitely about OP too-perfect liked-by-everyone-despite-reasons-not-too character without any connotation about being self-insert. Self-inserts tend to go that way, but it definitely has been applied to characters who have nothing in common with the author.

I am also relatively sure that Mary Sue is used more often than Marty or Gary Stu even when character is male. It's not a gendered term (anymore).

Batcathat
2020-10-31, 05:16 PM
Since I felt a little unsure, I checked to see what TV tropes have to say (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue) in the matter and there seem to be a lot of different interpretations of what exactly qualifies as a Mary Sue, including what Quertus though, what I thought and several others.

Pex
2020-10-31, 09:57 PM
Which part of "like this" in particular do you find familiar?




NPC immunity to whatever the players do. NPCs can do things and have game mechanics PCs could never have. NPCs essentially break the rules players must game by. Oh look, another bad guy spellcaster without a spellbook.

Quertus
2020-10-31, 11:12 PM
Since I felt a little unsure, I checked to see what TV tropes have to say (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue) in the matter and there seem to be a lot of different interpretations of what exactly qualifies as a Mary Sue, including what Quertus though, what I thought and several others.

Well, looks like you've appealed to the highest authority :smallbiggrin:


NPC immunity to whatever the players do. NPCs can do things and have game mechanics PCs could never have. NPCs essentially break the rules players must game by. Oh look, another bad guy spellcaster without a spellbook.

Did you, by chance, play at the same tables that I did? :smallannoyed: :smallamused:

Stattick
2020-11-01, 06:00 AM
Also, a well-done self insert is often nearly invisible.

Example:
GM: Actually, Roger Zelazny had a self-insert in the Amber books.
Player: Wait, really!? Who, Corwin, Merlin, Dwarkin...?
GM: No, no, no. Blink, and you'd miss it. There was a guard at Castle Amber, talking about the fantasy book he was writing...
Player: Really? I don't remember that.
GM: Sure, the characters were sitting there chatting with him a bit. I think it was just before Corwin walked the pattern the first time.

LibraryOgre
2020-11-01, 10:55 AM
Also, a well-done self insert is often nearly invisible.

Example:
GM: Actually, Roger Zelazny had a self-insert in the Amber books.
Player: Wait, really!? Who, Corwin, Merlin, Dwarkin...?
GM: No, no, no. Blink, and you'd miss it. There was a guard at Castle Amber, talking about the fantasy book he was writing...
Player: Really? I don't remember that.
GM: Sure, the characters were sitting there chatting with him a bit. I think it was just before Corwin walked the pattern the first time.

Joel Rosenberg inserted himself into the Guardians of the Flame books... he's a junior engineer named Jayar (or something like that), who is writing a history of the Empire that the characters have created.

The Random NPC
2020-11-01, 12:04 PM
A well done nearly perfect character can also be done well. Worm has Scion who is responsible for granting nearly all superpowers and therefore has those same powers. But since he's so powerful, the story treats him more like a force of nature.

Batcathat
2020-11-01, 12:12 PM
Also, a well-done self insert is often nearly invisible.

Oh sure, a self-insert doesn't have to be a bad thing. Done right it's pretty similar to how some directors like to cameo in their movies, just a fun little trivia detail. It's when people start using it for wish fulfillment and/or preaching about their own opinions it gets bad, I think.

KoDT69
2020-11-14, 02:30 PM
I believe that a lot of modules were... Ok... But the idea of them saving time I fully disagree. I've always been a reactive style improv DM. I get a scenario but we all know how much players can derail your plans. I find it much easier to let the players drive the story. Fun is #1. I've never had the "railroad DM" said about me :smallwink:

Now the great thing is that s module can give you a solid framework that you can run multiple groups through. I did a 1st level module 3 separate times and all 3 were drastically different tones.

Now the locations and stuff they provide being added to your own campaign world... Oh boy I had a group with access to a Sphere of Annihilation, a temple built over the Tomb of Horrors, and a Tannar'ri Farm "trap" to harvest XP. So I guess that can go either way :smallbiggrin:

Quertus
2020-11-15, 09:53 PM
I believe that a lot of modules were... Ok... But the idea of them saving time I fully disagree. I've always been a reactive style improv DM. I get a scenario but we all know how much players can derail your plans. I find it much easier to let the players drive the story. Fun is #1. I've never had the "railroad DM" said about me :smallwink:

Now the great thing is that s module can give you a solid framework that you can run multiple groups through. I did a 1st level module 3 separate times and all 3 were drastically different tones.

Now the locations and stuff they provide being added to your own campaign world... Oh boy I had a group with access to a Sphere of Annihilation, a temple built over the Tomb of Horrors, and a Tannar'ri Farm "trap" to harvest XP. So I guess that can go either way :smallbiggrin:

Yeah, IME, modules do not save time.

They add content / tone / combinations of elements / whatever that the GM might not create on their own, making the game richer.

They provide the opportunity for the shared experience with the larger community ("remember 'Tomb of Horrors'?" as equivalent to "remember Star Wars?" or whatever).

But they don't save time. Not if you try to understand them. For example…

Let's look at Nymra, from Halls of the High King, known (to no-one, apparently¹) as the Wave Witch. Forgotten Realms modules are supposedly known for their quirky NPCs - what do we know about her personality?

Not much.

We know that she is so bad at math, that she bends the laws of the universe around herself to accommodate her bad math². We know that she's so bad at tactics, even Quertus (my signature academia mage for whom this account is named) would face palm³. We know that she will hound the party is left alive, so… she's probably vengeful. And… that's about it.

So, when the party (ko's her) takes her prisoner, and uses Diplomacy⁴… where's that vaunted quirky personality now? I've got nothing to work with as GM.

It would actually have been easier to make my own content, and run my own NPC, who I would know, and be able to roleplay them in that scenario, than be handed the module, and be forced to invent a personality that could possibly match that mess.

¹ since she uses the legend of the Ghost Ship to cover her piracy, and so cannot really make a name for herself.

² Seriously, nothing about her encounter makes sense, from her number of spells to the level of spells she can cast to the timing of her casting them to the number of pirates.

³ She makes her pirates invisible, then blocks LoS. She has massive ranged superiority, then penalizes ranged attacks / forces melee. Etc.

⁴ Actually role-playing, not just throwing dice at her.

Quertus
2020-11-16, 03:43 PM
So, based on *my* criteria for "worst module I've ever seen", does anyone have a recommendation for the *next* "worst module" for me to run the parties through once they finish this one? (Obviously, for this particular question, D&D modules are highly preferred)

Lord Torath
2020-11-16, 10:30 PM
I loved Lost Ships (https://spelljammer.fandom.com/wiki/SJR1_Lost_Ships), which is a Spelljammer sourcebook by Ed Greenwood, but he definitely loves his enemy mages not keeping their spellbooks around. One encounter has a ship where they pride themselves on not having maps to their treasure stashes. Which is great, but why detail what's at their stashes if there's no way for the PCs to discover them? There's also a large ship that is the research lab of an archmage and his three assistants, and none of them have their spellbooks with them! Apparently they use scrolls of Teleport w/o error whenever the need to replenish their spells. And a pair of liches literally brick up their spellbooks, and have skeleton minions exhume them whenever they need to look at them.

Batcathat
2020-11-17, 02:15 AM
One encounter has a ship where they pride themselves on not having maps to their treasure stashes. Which is great, but why detail what's at their stashes if there's no way for the PCs to discover them?

Out of curiosity, does it explain how the pirates themselves plan on finding the treasure? I suppose they could just memorize the location but that's basically asking for PCs to subject them to some less than pleasant questioning.

Lord Torath
2020-11-17, 10:02 AM
Out of curiosity, does it explain how the pirates themselves plan on finding the treasure? I suppose they could just memorize the location but that's basically asking for PCs to subject them to some less than pleasant questioning.The encounter text says they've got it all memorized. Or at least the navigator and captain do. I personally decided to add some maps and a spellbook. Spending weeks going back to your base every time you have to replenish your spells seems.... less than optimal. I figure there'll be back-up spellbooks there, but mages really should have something relatively easy to access when they need to memorize spells.

Other than that, it's a pretty awesome book! Well, other than the fact that the Viper ship is way overpowered. But I've taken care of that in my signature.

Quertus
2020-11-17, 10:15 AM
I loved Lost Ships (https://spelljammer.fandom.com/wiki/SJR1_Lost_Ships), which is a Spelljammer sourcebook by Ed Greenwood, but he definitely loves his enemy mages not keeping their spellbooks around. One encounter has a ship where they pride themselves on not having maps to their treasure stashes. Which is great, but why detail what's at their stashes if there's no way for the PCs to discover them? There's also a large ship that is the research lab of an archmage and his three assistants, and none of them have their spellbooks with them! Apparently they use scrolls of Teleport w/o error whenever the need to replenish their spells. And a pair of liches literally brick up their spellbooks, and have skeleton minions exhume them whenever they need to look at them.


The encounter text says they've got it all memorized. Or at least the navigator and captain do. I personally decided to add some maps and a spellbook. Spending weeks going back to your base every time you have to replenish your spells seems.... less than optimal. I figure there'll be back-up spellbooks there, but mages really should have something relatively easy to access when they need to memorize spells.

Other than that, it's a pretty awesome book! Well, other than the fact that the Viper ship is way overpowered. But I've taken care of that in my signature.

I wonder if the PCs at Ed's table are equally… eccentric… regarding the disposition of their spellbooks.

I think I may own Lost Ships. Somewhere. … wait, is it the one with dozens of unrelated encounters?

I find Speak with Dead solves issues with extracting information quite nicely, and with minimal mess.

Stats on the viper? What makes it OP?

Lord Torath
2020-11-17, 10:44 AM
I think I may own Lost Ships. Somewhere. … wait, is it the one with dozens of unrelated encounters?
<snip>
Stats on the viper? What makes it OP?Yes, Lost Ships has a bunch of unrelated encounters. Skull and Crossbones is similar, except that they're all somewhat related.

As far as the Viper, it's a mid-sized ship with an exceptionally high maneuverability class, very good armor, and a minimum crew of 1, which I presume is supposed to be the person sitting on the helm. You know, I'll just link you to my rant: Least Favorite Spelljammer Ship (https://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?p=131855#p131855)

Quertus
2020-11-18, 09:23 AM
As far as the Viper, it's a mid-sized ship with an exceptionally high maneuverability class, very good armor, and a minimum crew of 1, which I presume is supposed to be the person sitting on the helm. You know, I'll just link you to my rant: Least Favorite Spelljammer Ship (https://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?p=131855#p131855)

Google Images suggests that it looks like a Chinese dragon - which makes "can fly real good despite no 'control surfaces' to speak of" make a strange kind of sense. Also explains the minimum crew of 1, if there's no "control surfaces" to man.

Does look like a rather OP starter ship, though.


I loved Lost Ships (https://spelljammer.fandom.com/wiki/SJR1_Lost_Ships), which is a Spelljammer sourcebook by Ed Greenwood, but he definitely loves his enemy mages not keeping their spellbooks around. One encounter has a ship where they pride themselves on not having maps to their treasure stashes. Which is great, but why detail what's at their stashes if there's no way for the PCs to discover them?

No way? Well, in addition to my preferred Speak with Dead, there's always Suggestion, Mind Rape (OK, not before 3e), ESP, various divination spells, Diplomacy / Intimidation (by roleplaying before 3e), Time Travel, (pretending to) join the crew / get captured, or even just following them around to find the treasure.

Or even Gather Information / Piracy reports, star charts, and mathematics to try to triangulate travel times to deduce where the hidden treasure planet(s) might be.

I'm just not seeing "no treasure maps" as an inherent impossibility here.

Lord Torath
2020-11-18, 11:53 AM
Keep in mind that, despite the BG3 trailer, Spelljammer ships are (with a couple of exceptions) not alive. The Vipership is made of thick wood, and is not flexible. Essentially it's a long dug-out canoe: Vipership Deck Plans (http://www.spelljammer.org/ships/deckplans/Vipership.gif). No sails, no rudder, nothing to steer with. This thing should handle like a brick. Yet it's more maneuverable than the elves' most maneuverable and smallest ship.

If you compare it with the Lamprey (http://www.spelljammer.org/ships/deckplans/LampreyShip.gif), you see the Lamprey has several fins and a tail to assist in maneuvering. And it's got a worse MC than the Viper Ship. Plus, it's smaller than the Viper, and smaller ships are usually more maneuverable.

As far as Speak with Dead, I give you this (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0845.html). :smallbiggrin:

Kami2awa
2020-11-18, 02:48 PM
I have never run a module - I see them mainly as good (OK, often not so good) sources of ideas.

However, the original Scourge of the Slavelords is a good module in my opinion, other than that it requires the PCs to be railroaded into getting captured (and losing almost all gear) not once, but *twice*.

Socksy
2020-11-18, 06:26 PM
Of the official published modules, it would have to be Legend of the Silver Skeleton. A module with a CR 9 boss should not have a Marilith which auto-summons 4d10 mooks as a bonus boss. The players should not have the listed survival method be "Scream for help from the borderline-Epic NPCs that happen to be staying here and didn't rescue the Paladin themselves for some reason".

From unofficial modules... oh, boy. Vampires and Liches, which is for D&D 3.5 (allegedly, but seems to use the 3.0 system with the occasional bit of 2e). I spent last night reading through Friv's Diablo II review, so I'm feeling rather inclined to rip at this module verbally until there's nothing left.

The adventure takes part in the Sewers of the Underguild, an organised crime syndicate run by Sangre, the Hand of Death, head of a vampiric cult. They trade in slaves, information, magic items, anything really. Here's my summary of Part 1, and I'll get to later bits at a later date.

According to legend, Sangre has an item called the Hollow Blade, which is forged from equal parts positive and negative energy, allowing him to walk openly in the sunlight. The blade is sought after by other people as well, because it "grants the ability to cleave the undead as if they were living flesh."

Okay, let's see what exactly that means.

The Hollow Blade is an intelligent magic item which acts as a +3 shortsword for rogues (which would allow it to bypass pretty much all undead DR anyway) or a +1 shortsword to anyone else. If you aren't a rogue, you get a RP effect which means you leave it lying about carelessly, display it unwisely, or otherwise invite people to steal it. There's also some text about how it lets you sneak attack and crit undead with it, which is pretty cool.

It also lets you cast negative plane protection once a day, which doesn't exist in 3.5.

We then get this terribly written paragraph.


As it is forged from equal parts of positive and negative energy, the hollow blade causes what-ever physical part such as a hand that touches it to feel charged with life energy. Therefore in the hands of an undead creature, the undead becomes immune to turning, and other effects specific to undead, such as nethergaze, healing magic, and bright light, in-cluding natural light, allowing vampires for example to walk abroad in daylight for up to 4 hours per day.

So...
- Does it remove all undead downsides as long as the sword is equipped, or only for four hours a day?
- Does it remove all undead benefits as long as the sword is equipped?
- What does it mean when it says undead are immune to healing and bright light? Do they ignore these things fully, or treat it as if they were alive? Does this sword blind any undead which wields it, unless the undead has darkvision, which they all do anyway? Do they lose their undead darkvision because they are immune to undead effects? If they ignore both fully, they can't see, and if they respond to those stimuli as though they were living, they can heal from cure spells. What?

We still don't know how the sword interacts with incorporeal undead, or with undead that get back up again after you kill them as long as a certain condition is met, such as the Bleakborn.


Let's look at this dungeon one encounter at a time. Bear in mind this is aimed at level 12 characters.

If you're living, which you probably are at ECL 12, and you cross over or touch an emblem of a silver skull which is in the entrance to the dungeon, an alarm spell goes off, immediately alerting all vampires in the sewers, unless the PCs offer the skull a sacrifice of blood within two turns, which I guess mystically rewrites time or something. By the way, it's an inexplicable DC 30 Search check - rather than DC 10 Spot check - on the skull to see it's covered in dried blood.

If you decide to search the room, which you will because you're adventurers, the following things happen:

- a wall of stone seals off the entrance, which is a DC 34 Search check to identify this trap before it happens (so your level 12 rogue with +3 Int and 15 ranks in Search will successfully find it on a roll of 16 or higher)
- if a spellcaster is making a Spellcraft check at this point in time it's DC 25 to figure out what's about to happen and a DC 23 caster level check to counterspell it with Dispel Magic.
- after two rounds, the ceiling falls down, 20d6 damage automatic with no save. But don't worry! You can turn this trap off from elsewhere within the dungeon. Shame you... have to go through this room to get to the dungeon.


These three Archways are all pretty similar in that they're teleporters, decorated ornately with gems, that drop an AoE on the party if they try to tamper with either teleporter or gems beyond simply using it.

The orange archway allows you to move to the next area with all your gear, the yellow archway dumps you into encounter 11 with a demon, and the green archway...

...well, we'll get there.


The next area is the chamber of Ankoz, a dark and brooding Undead, part of this evil vampiric-- wait, the guy's a Lich? Sure, I guess. If you come in the expected way, through the orange archway, he's had time to buff. Given the orange archway is a teleport, and other ways of teleporting in explicitly don't let him buff, I guess he has some sort of Scrying up on that archway?

Anyway, he's about what you'd expect from a lich at first glance, until you read his statblock. To start with, he doesn't qualify to be a lich, because neither of his two Craft feats are Craft Wondrous Item. Secondly, he has DR 15/+1, which doesn't exist in 3.5, and thirdly, he has Alchemy as a skill, which also doesn't exist in 3.5.

He has a contingency which teleports him to another area to heal and plot revenge, but nothing says what activates the contingency, he's not high enough level to place the Teleport spell into a contingency, and he can't cast Dimension Door.

Once the players kill him, a DC 30 Search check on the body will reveal... HE HID HIS PHYLACTERY INSIDE ONE OF HIS BONES. Yes, that's right. He's a lich who carries his phylactery about. Furthermore, the book recommends the PCs sell the phylactery to a collector for 10,000gp. What?!

Amusingly, if you find his hidden loot stash, it turns out he has a bunch of potions, which for an explicitly skeletal lich are probably rather hard to drink.


This room contains six inexplicably-Vampiric crocodiles in a twelve foot deep pool, each of which gets a hilarious DC 9 Dominate attack and the ability to create Vampire Spawn but only out of other crocodiles. They've also got DR 15/+1 which only exists in 3.0, and their Initiative has been calculated wrongly. This encounter should be trivial for any Level 12 party.

Except, do you remember the green archway I mentioned earlier? It turns out, that teleports anyone who goes through it to the bottom of the pool, with a DC 14 Fortitude save to hold their breath suddenly (and no mention of what happens if they fail the save).

"But this shouldn't be a problem at all", I hear you say. "Any level 12 party should have access to Freedom of Movement, or at least Water Breathing!"

Well, yes, they should.

My party of level 15s did not. A PC died here.

We also need to note that the crocodiles' Children of the Night ability calls other crocodiles, because this'll lead to some interesting logic later.


The next few encounters are pretty standard. There's some pit traps with illusions over them to make them look like they're full of treasure instead of full of Oozes, a pressure plate trap which will send the players spiralling towards "Area 20" if they trigger it, and the room those crocodiles hide in to recover in their gaseous forms if they're not killed outright.

The Forked Pathway is home to what has to be the stupidest trap in this game: a wooden stake trap that can't affect vampires.


A deadly and extremely well hidden trap awaits those who do not notice the switch to turn it off. The cunningly hidden wooden stakes spring out at a length of 10 feet from the floor, ceiling, and the facing southern wall. This trap is set here as a test for new recruits to the Underguild.

It's a DC 20 Search check to find and a DC 20 Disable Device check to disarm, so you're going to find it and disarm it.

The trap attacks 2d6 times with a +15 bonus for 1d4+5 damage. Which will always be less than 15. Which is the DR of Vampires in this module.


This is where things start getting really silly. As the PCs enter the chamber, four vampires leap at them while hissing at them to join them in undeath.

Jandilar the Safe Cracker, Male Half-Elf Vampire Rog8 is sly and sneaky, "an assassin in all but training", and attacks by dominating a victim, making them inhale part of him in gaseous form, then partially reforming inside them, killing them instantly (but dealing no damage to him, apparently). He explicitly doesn't use weapons, but wants the hollow blade anyway, because it lets him go out amongst the living almost unseen, which he could do anyway with his +23 Hide and +34 Move Silently. Also, the blade doesn't give any bonuses to stealth of any kind.

Oh, and he speaks Common and Orc rather than Common and Elven.

Memze the Lame, Male Human Vampire Rog3/Wiz5 can do anything a rogue, wizard, or vampire can do, but really poorly, because he's multiclassed AND has a template that takes up a lot of ECL. He's known as the Lame because he's disabled. Thanks, game. His perversity "knows no limits" and he hosts terrible "orgies of blood and pain". He also knows how to speak Orc.

F'Huge Kneebreaker, Guild Enforcer, Male Ogre Vampire Bbn2/Rog4 is just a vampiric ogre with a lot of combat stats and not much else.

Hethel, the Acolyte of Thanatos, Female Elf Vampire Clr6 (Thanatos)/Rog2 is another multiclass templated caster who can't do much of anything. A bunch of her bonuses have been written in as penalties by mistake (Listen -16?!)

She's described as beautiful and full of hate, but her charisma is only 13, implying she had 9 charisma before becoming a vampire, so she's likely neither particularly beautiful nor capable of inspiring much emotion. She doesn't even have ranks in Diplomacy, because she took cross-class ranks in Jump instead.

At least she speaks Elven.

Also in this room is The Fountain of Blood, which pings of Transmutation and Necromancy under a Spellcraft check, which is silly because it teleports you places.

Oh, no, my mistake.

It registers as Transmutation and Necromancy because if you use it, and fail a DC 14 Fortitude save, you are transformed instantly into a vampire.

If you're a Lawful Good divine caster and you wade through the blood without blessing either the blood or yourself, you get a -2 circumstance penalty to everything in the rest of the dungeon, which seems fair enough.

This room contains six (false) stone crypts, each of which is covered in intentionally cringy rhyme. The last of the six crypts reads

Memze is a guild mage
Drinks blood cold which is quite strange
Buried here or not with wit
Surprise! You're in a room of...

at which point the GM describes the room flooding with raw sewage, because two rounds after you enter, the trap activates to fill the room. The room fills completely within 24 seconds, and after another 48 seconds, everything inside the room (presumably including PCs) is flushed away to another region.


This room contains a vampire who explicitly addresses the PCs as "living ones", even though at ECL 12 it's possible (although unlikely) you're undead, and there was already a save vs. turning into a vampire.

He's called Syther Cross, and he wields a scythe. He engages in negotiations and conversation for as long as possible, so any other enemies can get into the room. Like everyone else in this dungeon, he wants the macguffin for himself.

Oh, and he's explicitly described and illustrated as wearing a silk-sleeved shirt and wide-brimmed, feathered hat, and they decided to make him a fighter/rogue instead of a bard. Perhaps this is because of his Charisma of 12 and no Diplomacy, which... why is this guy the talking encounter?

Anyway, Syther talks at the PCs and tries to get them to side with him, and if everything goes to crap, the character with the worst name and description so far shows up.

Manco Money Tongue, Male Halfling Vampire Rog6 uses his small size to pretend to be a human child in order to scam potential marks. Which is a decent enough technique, because as a sixth level rogue specialised in disguise he's clearly going to have a great Disguise bonus, right?

I think you can see where this is going.

After the -2 for him not owning a disguise kit, the -2 for him pretending to be a different age category, and the -2 for pretending to be a different race (not to mention any circumstance penalties for pretending to be alive), his effective Disguise bonus is...+0. Possibly -2 if there's a small penalty for impersonating the living.

Manco is hiding out in the same room as Syther, and if attacked, "uses his Tumble skill to attack spell casters and priests." At least he has Tumble +12. Or possibly it's Syther who uses his Tumble skill, which is also +12.

There's also another pressure plate trap nearby, labelled 10a, which as with the previous one will throw the players towards Area 20.

PCs unfortunate enough to move through the yellow archway at the start of the game will find themselves trapped in a room with a Glabrezu with a penchant for dice games (and a completely normal CR1 ghoul with a mildly interesting weapon), both of whom are trapped inside a Magic Circle Against Evil.

The doorway out to the North can be opened by anyone of good alignment, but doing so breaks the circle, at which point the Glabrezu attacks, even though the door isn't connected to the circle and the demon is a gambler and corruptor. His listed motivation is vengeance on Ankoz, so why wouldn't he try to ally with the PCs? He's the only character we've met so far with a high Charisma score!

He can also attack you if you're teleported into the room by the yellow archway, and will fight until he's nearly destroyed and then Plane Shift out.

Wait, what?

If the PCs can teleport in, and he's able to attack the PCs, then this can't be the version of the Magic Circle that has a built-in Dimensional Anchor, so if he's able to Plane Shift, why didn't he do it sooner? Unless this IS the version of Magic Circle that has a Dimensional Anchor, which means the PCs showed up outside the circle and... is this entire CR 15 encounter meant to be him spamming his few ranged SLAs while the party shoots him a lot?

This sounds like a genre of music.

Hidden in this room are a patrol of Vampire Spawn which the PCs shouldn't have too much trouble with.

There are four pump wheels here, and "Turning any of the pump wheels clockwise re-sults unchanged sewage levels in Area 20, however the strength of the current drops by 1/8 relative to the number of pumps turned off." I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, but let's assume the current reduces by 1/8 of its maximum value for each pump turned off, and hope that makes sense when we get to Area 20.

Turning Pump Wheel A clockwise until it stops turns off the hydraulic pressure to the pit traps in Area 4, which might be useful if anything in the entry for Area 4 said anything about what that meant or did. Turning it anticlockwise until it stops increases the sewage depths in Area 20 by 2 feet.

Turning Pump Wheel B clockwise until it stops turns off the hydraulic pressure to the stake traps in Area 7, which automatically disarms the trap. Turning it anticlockwise until it stops increases the sewage depths in Area 20 by 4 feet, and doubles the strength of the whirlpool in Area 22. Hopefully that'll make more sense once we get there.

Turning Pump Wheel C clockwise until it stops turns off the hydraulic pressure to the trap in Area 9, which presumably prevents it from triggering. Turning it anticlockwise raises the depth of the sewage in area 30 by 8 feet, and floods hallways outside areas 5, 12, and 13 to a depth of 3 feet. Notably, there is no area 30.

Turning Pump Wheel D clockwise turns off those pressure plates I mentioned in areas 5 and 10b (except area 10b doesn't exist, so I guess it means 10a), and turning it anticlockwise fills area 20 almost to the ceiling with sewage, quadruples the strength of the whirlpool in area 22, and releases Methaloggot from her imprisonment in area 22.

Since turning the wheels clockwise doesn't reverse the sewage level increases, if we wanted to, we could summon infinite sewage, which might be useful for something I guess?


Hotchka the Medusa has two statues in her lair, and appears to be an archer, which isn't a useful thing to be in an underground or indoor dungeon.

Shia surprise! The "statues" are undead staying perfectly still and done up to look like statues! Unlike Manco, Hotchka has a Disguise score high enough to pull this off.

Her statblock is well-written (apart from the 3.0 skills, but at this point, I've come to realise this is a 3.0 module published as 3.5), and even specifies she can't use her dominating gaze and her petrifying gaze in the same round, and has to choose which to use!

Recall how I mentioned the vampire crocodiles could use Children of the Night to call more crocodiles? Well, surely then it would be reasonable for Hotchka to call snakes.

Why does this matter? Because she has Weapon Finesse (Snakes), which is probably intended to only mean her hair-snakes, but actually means she could beat you to death very effectively with a summoned snake if she had one, and if the GM was feeling silly enough.

The other two vampires in this fight are Cainbry, who is either a half-elf sorcerer or a human rogue depending on if you read his descriptive text or his statblock, and Phryc, a half orc who doesn't speak Orc despite half the other NPCs speaking it and him having a 12 Int.


This is a poorly thought out corridor where the door at the far end moves further away as the party moves towards it. On the other side of the corridor is Area 2, Ankoz' lair, and Area 2 specifies you can get there through this door, so I guess this is meant to be a puzzle room that the book hasn't specified a solution to (if the door starts 80ft away from us, can we walk 80ft towards the door, then only one of us walks back in order to pull the door closer to us)?

You also get random effects if you try to use teleportation magic to leave the corridor, which involve dumping you into an area with a high level monster, into the whirlpool, into a locked burial vault, or out of the dungeon.

It's also not clear if the dilation of space applies in both directions or just one.

This is the real lair of the vampires, where they hide out when they're healing or badly injured. It is guarded by "a quartet of vampire pawn", which I'm guessing are vampire spawn who enjoy human chess.

It specifies that all personal items listed on vampires' statblocks is found here, within their perspective vaults (which I'm guessing are their respective vaults).

Wow, that sure would have been nice to know before I handed their gear out to the players who defeated them! How do the items teleport back there anyway, if the vampires are destroyed rather than turned to mist? Argh!

Aside from that, the vaults also contain a potion of sneaking which no vampire rogue will ever need, a cursed potion of wisdom, and ... a debuffed cloak of arachnida. You know, that item which grants Spider Climb, which all vampires already get for free.

The other fountain spits you out here, and then the blood within it turns into... a vampiric ooze, which is an ooze with the Undead type, a Charisma of 1 (presumably because it's an undead and not an ooze), undead qualities, ooze qualities, the create spawn ability, and an energy drain attack which applies negative levels - if it can hit a level 12 character with its +7 attack bonus - which are only Fortitude DC 9 to remove.

It makes me wonder, would that magic sword the boss has which can apply critical hits to undead allow him to hit this ooze for critical damage, as it also has ooze traits?

Anyway, after you roflstomp the AC 4 ooze with 52 hit points and a -3 Reflex save, the fountain's blood turns to clear water and you can teleport back and forth using it without further danger.

So long as all the pumps in the Eastern Pump House are shut off, if all the wheels here are turned clockwise, the stone block in Area 1 is removed. There's no stone block in Area 1, so they're probably referring to the Wall of Stone which may or may not be there depending on if the party mage passed their Spellcraft roll (they almost certainly did) and their Caster Level check to dispel (which could have gone either way). Turning off the pumps also turns off the whirlpools in areas 22 and 23, as well as "lowering the sewer level to a depth of 4 feet", which is probably referring to the sewage level, and may or may not specifically mean in room 22, who knows.

This area is filled with holy symbols, (which are specifically different from unholy symbols in 3.5 and, undead don't really like them, so what's that about?) ornate decoration, tapestries, and so on.

The important item here is the Mirror of Abyssal Damnation, which "instantly replace[s the characters] with chaotic evil clones of themselves" if they look in it, DC 20 Will save negates. Individuals with chaotic evil alignment don't get replaced for some reason.

The character affected is sucked into the Abyss, except it's only their soul which is sucked into the abyss, except also a clone body "bearing arms and equipment that is an exact duplicate of that which their other form bore" appears, so who knows where their body goes or why it doesn't affect people who are already CE if it's a soul-stealing effect and not an alignment-changing one. If you kill the clone, the victim gets a second save to "find their way back to the mirror portal and escape".

There's also a coffin here where Ykthool sleeps, but he's not here at the moment. If you investigate the coffin, you get hit by a Blade Barrier trap, and once the blades go away you can see the coffin contains some magic items and, if you look inside the lining, "20lbs. of grave dirt, valued as a spell component to necromancers and certain sects of priests". Sure, I guess.


The entrance to the Shrine of Thanatos contains a trap which deals 1d4 negative energy levels, which aren't a thing.

The shrine itself contains an 11-foot statue of someone who is "perhaps an elf". Ykthool is also there, and has a statblock which doesn't quite work but is closer to working than a lot of the other vampires'. His listed tactic is to use Slay Living on an enemy cleric (who'll save or be immune), paladin (who'll save or be immune), or wizard.

The ambiguously-Elven statue is an animated construct which only gets 10ft reach despite being eleven feet tall and wielding a size appropriate trident.

After these two are defeated, characters find a platinum bowl at the altar, and if a good aligned character chooses to fill it with blood, everyone is teleported to area 24 with no save.

No part of the listed strategy of the NPCs in this room includes Dominating a good-aligned character to bleed into the bowl. So, this almost certainly won't ever come up.

The place the vampires keep their slaves, and their treatment of said slaves, is as horrible (and explicit) as one might expect, so I won't go into too much detail about that.

What I will discuss is Ayissa, the human (or elf, depending on whether you believe the flavour text or her statblock) sorceress here who is usually level 10, but currently drained to level 2. She's willing to join the party if they rescue her and fix the Level Drain, but if they don't, she "merely teleports to her home".

Let's just check her spell sheet... of course she doesn't have any means of teleportation, and even if she did, she couldn't use it if the party don't agree to heal her, because she's been drained to level 2.

There's also another reference to Manco's leet disguise skills here; if he's forced to flee in a previous encounter, he tries to Dominate Ayissa into claiming he's her little brother and needs to be rescued to. Again, he can't actually pull this off, especially against a level 12 party.

We also find out about the platinum bowl from the previous area being able to teleport people to area 24.

Here it is, the Area 20 we've heard so much about!

...it's just a river of sludge which you can drown in. That's it. If you fall in and fail a DC 12 Fortitude save, you contract Filth Fever, which at level 12 means the cleric has to memorise a slightly different set of spells tomorrow.

This is the prison of Methaloggot the Fouler, who turns out to be an old Black Dragon. Her spells include Mel's acid arrow, which presumably summons Scary Spice, because the only other conclusion is that the acid-breathing dragon wasted a precious sorcerer spell slot on a spell which lets it shoot acid.

In order to destroy the Altar of Filth, one must first cast clean, which doesn't exist, then bless, then create water, then simultaneously casting remove curse and dispel magic, which nobody is going to figure out by trial and error. Don't worry though - if for some reason someone rolled up a bard for the vampire dungeon, they're eligible to make a DC 27 Bardic Knowledge check to get this information. This is explicitly the only method of figuring it out, with the exception of the legend lore spell, so if you're a Knowledge cleric who took 15 ranks of Knowledge (Religion) hoping to find out the secrets of the Dark Gods, you have no idea because you don't get Legend Lore until next level, whereas the Bard has a decent chance of producing a dirty limerick about the Altar of Filth's weaknesses.

Just like with Area 20, this is a single paragraph for each area with absolutely no information about what happens if the strength of the whirlpool has been octupled by adventurers playing with the water pipes. I'd guess that the 6d6 crushing damage people take from failing the DC 30 Swim check turns into 48d6 damage, but who knows at this point?

Sangre, and Ankoz if he still lives (he doesn't, because he can't actually teleport) are here as the boss fight. Sangre is a 13th level Rogue/1st level Ranger, and the only character so far who appears to have any ranks in Diplomacy. He wears a +4 Headband of Intellect, which makes his Intelligence score of 12 - so, 8 without the headband, 6 before becoming a vampire - an... interesting choice for a rogue. Especially a rogue without a racial penalty to Intelligence. Killing him gets you about 50,000 gold in currency and gems, and his sword, which is almost certainly useless to you because there are easier and better written ways to hit undead with stuff at level 12.

There's also a single scroll of Teleport which teleports you back to Room 1, but doesn't dispel the wall of stone, because one of the other rooms you could have found has a way to remove it.

Duff
2020-11-18, 08:16 PM
I think you're being a little harsh here Socksy. A halfelf speaking orcish instead of elvish is an interesting quirk
AND
A talking encounter because the NPC likes to talk rather than because they're good at it is fine!




That's it.

No other quibbles.


I did say a little harsh


Also "Vampire Pawn", maybe they know they're minions?
Maybe they're actually seagoing crustacions (similar to the crocodiles)
Or were they bought, 2nd hand and heavily discounted?
Perhaps they make blue movies?

King of Nowhere
2020-11-18, 08:20 PM
However, the original Scourge of the Slavelords is a good module in my opinion, other than that it requires the PCs to be railroaded into getting captured (and losing almost all gear) not once, but *twice*.

well, it's not a module but a fps videogame, but far cry 5 railroads you into getting captured 11 times!

Lord Torath
2020-11-18, 09:23 PM
Also "Vampire Pawn", maybe they know they're minions?
Maybe they're actually seagoing crustaceans (similar to the crocodiles)That would be "prawn", not "pawn". :smallwink:

Batcathat
2020-11-19, 02:17 AM
I think this thread has made reading snarky reviews of bad modules my new favorite hobby.


This room contains six inexplicably-Vampiric crocodiles in a twelve foot deep pool, each of which gets a hilarious DC 9 Dominate attack and the ability to create Vampire Spawn but only out of other crocodiles.

Clearly this is for when the lich gets bored (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0541.html).


Why does this matter? Because she has Weapon Finesse (Snakes), which is probably intended to only mean her hair-snakes, but actually means she could beat you to death very effectively with a summoned snake if she had one, and if the GM was feeling silly enough.

Now I kinda want to make a character that specializes in snakes. Snake whip, snake club, throwing snakes... the possibilities are endless.

LibraryOgre
2020-11-19, 09:11 AM
Now I kinda want to make a character that specializes in snakes. Snake whip, snake club, throwing snakes... the possibilities are endless.

In 2e, due to some mind-blowingly eccentric reading of the rules for Animal Friendship, a DM allowed a player to make the Squirrel Master, who had 16 squirrels per level for Animal Friends, which he used as a swarm attack.

comicshorse
2020-11-19, 09:26 AM
In 2e, due to some mind-blowingly eccentric reading of the rules for Animal Friendship, a DM allowed a player to make the Squirrel Master, who had 16 squirrels per level for Animal Friends, which he used as a swarm attack.


Talk about an over powered build :smallsmile:

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Doreen_Green_(Earth-616)

LibraryOgre
2020-11-19, 09:41 AM
Talk about an over powered build :smallsmile:

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Doreen_Green_(Earth-616)

This is before Doreen became a well-known character, but, yes.

DrMartin
2020-11-20, 10:08 AM
I think we have yet to touch rock-bottom.

let me try:

Empty Threats, an adventure for Chtulhutech.

The GM is instructed to pick a victim among the PCs. The victim will be abducted, no matter what - the GM is encouraged to use every tool in their toolbox to make sure that this happens. The abducters don´t have stats but they would not really be relevant, as they are considered to have perfect knowledge of the victim´s habits and routine and can plan the perfect abduction.

The victim has been chosen, in universe, at random - so there is not even the chance that the characters would even have a hint to prepare for it.

I´m going to gloss over what happens to the victim after the abduction, and what the victim has to witness being done to the other people who have been abducted, but know that if is inhumane, gross, unnecessarily graphic, orrifying and degrading it is included.

Meanwhile the rest of the party will try to find their missing companion, right? the module says that whatever they try, it fails. The kidnappers have studied medicine and criminology for years, so you see, it´s impossible to find them. Not even an impossibly hard roll - they just cannot succeed, no matter how clever they are. Until they get ther lucky break, in the form of a mysterious phone call, that tells them where the victim has been taken.

They get there and can free the victim. The module says that the villains should make it back to their hideout when the party is there to free their companion, but otherwise leaves it up to the GM what happens - they are not given stats, and they are not a treat in a direct confrontation. There is some more handwavey description of what happens if the PC give chase if the villains flee, call the authorities, etc.

Paltry rewards are given, the end.

This is not an adventure, this is (at most) a backstory setting the mood for the setting. No chance to avoid abduction, no chance to solve the mistery before the lucky break, no meaningful confrontation at any stage.

LibraryOgre
2020-11-20, 11:30 AM
I think we have yet to touch rock-bottom.

let me try:

Empty Threats, an adventure for Chtulhutech.


...that is an amazingly large sack of horse**** masquerading as an adventure.

Xervous
2020-11-20, 01:00 PM
...that is an amazingly large sack of horse**** masquerading as an adventure.

To be fair it’s cthulutech.

comicshorse
2020-11-20, 01:03 PM
As soon as I read Cthultech I was expecting this :





I´m going to gloss over what happens to the victim after the abduction, and what the victim has to witness being done to the other people who have been abducted, but know that if is inhumane, gross, unnecessarily graphic, orrifying and degrading it is included.

King of Nowhere
2020-11-20, 02:14 PM
The kidnappers have studied medicine and criminology for years, so you see, it´s impossible to find them.

this is where it hits rock bottom for me. anyone who's ever studied anything for years will know limited that concept it.
i mean, those game designers have studied how to write a module for years, it's impossible for them to make a crappy one, isn't it?

by the way, if the players cannot do anything, what are they supposed to do with the module besides answering the mystery call?

Batcathat
2020-11-20, 02:25 PM
by the way, if the players cannot do anything, what are they supposed to do with the module besides answering the mystery call?

Indeed. There's padding an adventure with meaningless busy work and then there's literally not being able to do anything meaningful at all (yet somehow it's even worse for the kidnapped character, who presumably can't even try to do anything but getting grossed out).

DrMartin
2020-11-20, 02:44 PM
The module makes a concession that an extremely clever and resourceful victim could escape their cage - no further details on how this could come to pass though.

Just to give an idea of the level of resourcefulness this requires: the cage is too small for standing up or laying down, laced with barbed wire all around, made of steel, and locked with a 4 digit padlock that locks itself for 20 minutes if the wrong code is punched in 3 times in a row. The captors shock the victims with a stungun before taking them out of the cage. The victim is of course naked. More thought has been put into this setup than in the rest of the module.

if somehow the victim manages to get free, the GM should have that coincide with the group finding the hideout and helping the victim out.

The rest of the party, on the other hand, can try what they want, but any avenue of investigation will just fail. They don't know that, of course, so they are still supposed to try to rescue their friend.

As I said, rock bottom!

Batcathat
2020-11-20, 03:39 PM
So the character who pretty much can't do anything in-character is technically allowed to accomplish something while the characters who have endless possibilities in-character aren't allowed to actually accomplish anything? Man, this is an impressive combination of screwing everyone over in and out of character.

Quertus
2020-11-21, 09:05 AM
Actually, other than the fact that apparently the module writer doesn't understand basic concepts like "agency" or "understanding", my personal "rock bottom" here is that they think that an understanding of *medicine* will help them get away with an abduction. :smallconfused: :smallamused:

Or maybe we're being too hard on them. Maybe this is a pure *role-playing* module, where the point of the setup isn't actually *engaging* the setup, it's role-playing what your characters *do* and *feel* in that setup.

Yeah, that's it.

Unavenger
2020-11-21, 10:43 AM
my personal "rock bottom" here is that they think that an understanding of *medicine* will help them get away with an abduction. :smallconfused: :smallamused:

Uhm?

Understanding human physiology and how to drug someone safely are absolutely gonna be important if you want to abduct someone without them waking up in the middle of the kidnapping attempt? Like, this module is... bad. But I don't see how medical knowledge helping you kidnap someone is a particularly smoothbrained moment.

Saint-Just
2020-11-21, 11:00 AM
Uhm?

Understanding human physiology and how to drug someone safely are absolutely gonna be important if you want to abduct someone without them waking up in the middle of the kidnapping attempt? Like, this module is... bad. But I don't see how medical knowledge helping you kidnap someone is a particularly smoothbrained moment.

DrMartin's description seems to imply that the module states that knowledge of medicine is among the factors that will allow them to get away with kidnapping (or to be undetectable in general). Your example demonstrates that it is technically true, but I do not see people normally using "it allows X questionable activity to be undetectable" as equivalent to "it allows X questionably activity to happen".

But that's arguing semantics about the text I have not seen.

Tanarii
2020-11-21, 12:55 PM
Or maybe we're being too hard on them. Maybe this is a pure *role-playing* module, where the point of the setup isn't actually *engaging* the setup, it's role-playing what your characters *do* and *feel* in that setup.
Sadly, there are far to many module writers and even renowned RPG designers that believe this kind of thing.

Quertus
2020-11-21, 01:02 PM
Yeah, it being stated as the "logic" behind "why the PCs cannot possibly find the kidnappers" makes no sense.

They have Druid "traceless step"? They have a ShadowRun cleansing spell? They are Vecna-blooded? I can at least see *why* someone would (wrongly) believe that it would be *impossible* for anyone to find the missing PC.

But "I know karate, you can't find me"? Lol nope.

Unavenger
2020-11-22, 07:23 AM
I still think that "A knowledge of medicine will help you get away with kidnapping, potentially avoiding leaving as much evidence as is needed to track you down" is the least weird thing out of all the weird things that have been brought up about the module, even if it's a little questionable how much it would help.

Quertus
2020-11-22, 12:14 PM
Sadly, there are far to many module writers and even renowned RPG designers that believe this kind of thing.

Really? :smalleek: I was being facetious; I wasn't aware that there were beings who grokked role-playing, but not Agency, let alone that they might have any prominence.


As soon as I read Cthultech I was expecting this :

So, are there any (3rd party?) Cthultech modules which might be suitable for younger audiences?


I still think that "A knowledge of medicine will help you get away with kidnapping, potentially avoiding leaving as much evidence as is needed to track you down" is the least weird thing out of all the weird things that have been brought up about the module, even if it's a little questionable how much it would help.

I could buy "highly knowledgeable in *forensics* and *forensic medicine*" and "the target was knocked out by drugs" as a set of criteria that would greatly increase the difficulty of advancing certain avenues of evidence.

But that does nothing about the tracking device I have implanted in each pilot, or the security cameras, or the tire tracks, or witnesses, or…

So telling me that my mom (who is a nurse) went along, therefore the crime is unsolvable? Yeah, no.

King of Nowhere
2020-11-22, 07:33 PM
So telling me that my mom (who is a nurse) went along, therefore the crime is unsolvable? Yeah, no.

Plot twist! your mother is the kidnapper!
and that's why you can't discover it: would you ever suspect your own mother? :smallbiggrin:

MoiMagnus
2020-11-23, 04:52 AM
This is not an adventure, this is (at most) a backstory setting the mood for the setting. No chance to avoid abduction, no chance to solve the mistery before the lucky break, no meaningful confrontation at any stage.

For me, it looks like

"I improvised a scenario for my gaming session, in which I abducted the cleverer PC that started to feel too invulnerable to my taste. I've constantly added new protections to his cage as he was trying to get out, because I wanted him to be saved by the others (he still eventually managed to get out in the end).

The others did not get a lot of good idea, and failed at their few good ideas, so I had to give them a mystery call to guide them to the solution at the end of the session.

Now, since I'm paid to write a module, I just need to write down this plot and ensure the PCs cannot deviate from it, otherwise I would need to ... gasp ... give stats to my NPCs."

Eldan
2020-11-23, 07:27 AM
So, are there any (3rd party?) Cthultech modules which might be suitable for younger audiences?


I seeeeeriously doubt it. Cthulhutech, despite being an interesting idea in theory, is very open about taking inspiration for its tone from... certain anime.

Quertus
2020-11-23, 04:00 PM
Now, since I'm paid to write a module, I just need to write down this plot and ensure the PCs cannot deviate from it, otherwise I would need to ... gasp ... give stats to my NPCs."

Because, if you give stats to your NPCs, then your PCs might want to *gasp* pull off a successful abduction of their own!

Giving these NPCs stats would be like giving the players actual target numbers, or rules! We can't have that. :smalltongue:


I seeeeeriously doubt it. Cthulhutech, despite being an interesting idea in theory, is very open about taking inspiration for its tone from... certain anime.

Huh. OK, how about a "not *just* giant robots" game / system that might be kid-friendly? There's definite interest in giant robots (Battletech), and in magical things… does adding in "age-appropriate" return the empty set? I was going to research Cthulhu tech, but I guess that's a fall.

The Glyphstone
2020-11-23, 08:15 PM
Mutants and Masterminds had a Mecha source book, and is as kid friendly as any d20 system can be. But thats more of a generic cop-out than a specialized system.

Eldan
2020-11-24, 03:00 AM
Because, if you give stats to your NPCs, then your PCs might want to *gasp* pull off a successful abduction of their own!

Giving these NPCs stats would be like giving the players actual target numbers, or rules! We can't have that. :smalltongue:



Huh. OK, how about a "not *just* giant robots" game / system that might be kid-friendly? There's definite interest in giant robots (Battletech), and in magical things… does adding in "age-appropriate" return the empty set? I was going to research Cthulhu tech, but I guess that's a fall.

Might have a look at Lancer, then. Haven't played it, but it does seem to be going a bit for that combination of Eldritch aliens and mechs, though quite action heavy.

Alternatively, Eclipse Phase technically has mechs too.

DrMartin
2020-11-24, 02:43 PM
Some adventures of Chtulhutech aren´t horrible. Most of them are, though. And even if leaving out the gross side dressing of carnal violence, racism, mysoginy, body horror etc that is present in most of the writing, they are bad because most of them give you no real chance to do anything meaningful, in a 90´s metaplot kind of way, while some of them won´t let you to do anything *at all* like the one I summarized above.

I´m going from memory, but most of them are at the human (investigator) or super-human (tagers, which are like eldritch guyvers) level - can´t recall adventures with mechas. But maybe is just some defense mechanism in my braincells :)

It´s a shame the game´s mechanics are bleh and the writing is so gross, because the setting idea is great and the art is really good. The mecha design was also to my likings - too bad the mechanics were really bland. The stats of the mechas didn´t support what they were supposed to do in-universe, for one (as in mech X was developed as a counter to mech Y...except the rules didn´t agree with those statements, almost never, at all).

The mechas were given point costs too, to make it more like a skirmish game than an rpg - as if the system didn´t suffer already enough from a core concept too thinly diluted already.

I would second the suggestion to try Lancer - magic exists in the setting, even though the mechanics for it are left quite blank in a "you can fluff your character signature abilities as magic, if you like, sure" - unless that has changed lately, I haven´t checked the product line in quite a while. But magic aside the mecha design is great.

Dragonmech is a setting for dnd 3.5 where the dwarves build giant robots (one is as big as a city) to defend against creepy moon dragons. hell yeah.

Adeptus Evangelion takes the system of dark heresy and tries to give you teenage existential drama with giant robots.

The mecha genre really forces you to ask what aspects you wanna focus on though: the pilots and their relationships, the mecha and the balttes? It´s hard to find something that does both.

DataNinja
2020-11-24, 08:55 PM
I would second the suggestion to try Lancer - magic exists in the setting, even though the mechanics for it are left quite blank in a "you can fluff your character signature abilities as magic, if you like, sure" - unless that has changed lately, I haven´t checked the product line in quite a while. But magic aside the mecha design is great.

The magic (which is mostly just parallel-dimension math demons) is not an integral part of any adventure, and so can pretty much be ignored as background noise if you want. So, don't need to worry about that, if you just want mechs smashing at people in even the default setting. It's a tight series of rules, and is a lot of fun to play. Even if you refluff it. (I have a friend who ran Lancer refluffed as magical girls, and it went amazingly well, apparently.)

Eldan
2020-11-27, 09:25 AM
And it's by the guy who made Kill Six Billion Demons, so the art is excellent too. (If you like the style.)
https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*lj03JTbhWV9RAJf5EmPlmw.jpeg

Quertus
2020-12-10, 07:28 PM
So, it looks like Ed Greenwood produced *at least* two more published modules: The Endless Stair, and Haunted Halls of Eveningstar.

Has anyone ever played / read either, to know if they're as bad as Halls of the High King?

Lord Torath
2020-12-11, 08:20 AM
I loved the cover for the Endless Stair. I think I looked through it, but it would have been decades ago, and I can't remember anything about it. Have to see if I can track it down.

I am unfamiliar with Haunted Halls.

Edit: Huh. Looking at the actual cover, it's not as interesting as I thought: DTRPG has the PDF available (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17133/CM8-The-Endless-Stair-Basic)

Tanarii
2020-12-11, 09:53 AM
So, it looks like Ed Greenwood produced *at least* two more published modules: The Endless Stair, and Haunted Halls of Eveningstar.

Has anyone ever played / read either, to know if they're as bad as Halls of the High King?

The Endless Stair is really bad. Largely because it's a basically a low level dungeon crawl scaled up to BECMI's companion level, which is when you're supposed to be dominion shaking events.

It'd be like if 1e onwards never included dominion rules and people just kept sticking the dungeon raiding paradigm for 20+ levels.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-11, 10:00 AM
It'd be like if 1e onwards never included dominion rules and people just kept sticking the dungeon raiding paradigm for 20+ levels.

What, do you mean to imply that D&D rules haven't gotten strictly better with each new edition? Perish the thought! :smalltongue:

Tanarii
2020-12-11, 02:15 PM
What, do you mean to imply that D&D rules haven't gotten strictly better with each new edition? Perish the thought! :smalltongue:
Not for me. But for the majority, they seem to deliver what they clearly want. Not just D&D, but general media and entertainment shows that people want a zero to superhero but repeating the same general theme of experiences. They get all bent out of shape when the theme takes a dramatic left turn. Theyd rather start over with a different "character" in a different theme, even ahen its just one they're observing passively.

I blame storytelling. But I do that anyway, so nothing new there. :)

King of Nowhere
2020-12-11, 04:02 PM
Not for me. But for the majority, they seem to deliver what they clearly want. Not just D&D, but general media and entertainment shows that people want a zero to superhero but repeating the same general theme of experiences. They get all bent out of shape when the theme takes a dramatic left turn.

not in my experience. when people get powerful, they generally start looking at the big picture. they get involved in politics and power games, they change the world. they don't make the same dungeon crawls, just with bigger numbers.

then again, there are several videogames that are exactly that: the same dungeon crawls, just with bigger numbers. and they are quite popular. i don't know if it is a majority, but it certainly is a significant segment

Vahnavoi
2020-12-11, 04:02 PM
You should actually blame people playing D&D wrong. Because people were playing D&D with stupidly high level dungeon crawling characters way back when Gygax & Co were still in charge of the game, and Gygax & Co specifically called them out and said, effectively, that "this comicbook superhero nonsense is not what we made the game for, please stop".

The modern state of the game is very much a result of inmates running the asylum: people who were fans of a particular non-standard way of playing D&D eventually took over and made their way of playing it standard.

Quertus
2020-12-13, 04:29 PM
I loved the cover for the Endless Stair. I think I looked through it, but it would have been decades ago, and I can't remember anything about it. Have to see if I can track it down.

I am unfamiliar with Haunted Halls.

Edit: Huh. Looking at the actual cover, it's not as interesting as I thought: DTRPG has the PDF available (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17133/CM8-The-Endless-Stair-Basic)

Well, I found a review that said that it (Haunted Halls, IIRC) felt weird to have a level 20 Wizard (NPC, presumably) in a low-level module, so that much, at least, is consistent with Halls of the High King.

I just don't want to shell out money - not even $5 - for a mediocre module. Only for one that's good, or one that's so hilariously bad that people can enjoy me roasting it.

Talakeal
2020-12-13, 05:19 PM
So, it looks like Ed Greenwood produced *at least* two more published modules: The Endless Stair, and Haunted Halls of Eveningstar.

Has anyone ever played / read either, to know if they're as bad as Halls of the High King?

I have played haunted halls.

Its pretty boring honestly, just a small dungeon crawl with nothing really dramatic to hook you in and it just kind of stops with no narrative climax.

icefractal
2020-12-13, 10:49 PM
The modern state of the game is very much a result of inmates running the asylum: people who were fans of a particular non-standard way of playing D&D eventually took over and made their way of playing it standard.But to be fair, that's not for no reason.

Dungeons are by their nature restricted, but that restriction makes it easy to GM in a fairly high-agency way without needing to heavily improvise. The players shrink themselves to mouse-sized, sneak past the monster, and crawl through the small vent that was there for decoration? No problem, let's have a look at the map, and ... there we go, they're in B7 now. They scare the crap out of the monster and now it's running away and yelling for help? Easily handled, just take a look at what the nearby rooms are and who's in them. Because the environment is bounded and limited, you can have the entirely of that environment ready in advance for however they choose to approach it.

Now make the jump to dominion-level play, and - holy ****, the complexity just skyrocketed. You're dealing with an entire world - factions, cities, populaces, trade, politics, discoveries, and it's all changing over time. That's going to take a fair amount of well-organized information and a good ability to improvise. And if you try to short-cut it, you can end up with a sparse railroad full of meaningless choices that actually has less agency than the dungeon crawls did.

Now I'm not saying this is fruitless. It can be done, and it's great when it's done well, far better than a dungeon crawl IMO. But it's not just an "easy next step", it's going from novice to master-level GMing.

And does the game help you with this? Not very much. For the dungeon crawling, you get lots of advice, lots of rules, lots of examples and pre-made material. Then you graduate to dominion-level play, and you get a lot of "the details are left as an exercise for the reader". There's advice, but it's advice that assumes you've significantly "leveled-up" as a GM. Which some people do, but it's not automatic. How many times driving to the grocery store before you become able to successfully outrun the police in a high-speed freeway chase?

So I'm not surprised a number of people would stick to the kind of game they can run well, even though I agree that dominion-level play is cool and that dungeon crawling to infinity makes levels kind of pointless.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-13, 11:15 PM
But to be fair, that's not for no reason.

Dungeons are by their nature restricted, but that restriction makes it easy to GM in a fairly high-agency way without needing to heavily improvise. The players shrink themselves to mouse-sized, sneak past the monster, and crawl through the small vent that was there for decoration? No problem, let's have a look at the map, and ... there we go, they're in B7 now. They scare the crap out of the monster and now it's running away and yelling for help? Easily handled, just take a look at what the nearby rooms are and who's in them. Because the environment is bounded and limited, you can have the entirely of that environment ready in advance for however they choose to approach it.

Now make the jump to dominion-level play, and - holy ****, the complexity just skyrocketed. You're dealing with an entire world - factions, cities, populaces, trade, politics, discoveries, and it's all changing over time. That's going to take a fair amount of well-organized information and a good ability to improvise. And if you try to short-cut it, you can end up with a sparse railroad full of meaningless choices that actually has less agency than the dungeon crawls did.

Now I'm not saying this is fruitless. It can be done, and it's great when it's done well, far better than a dungeon crawl IMO. But it's not just an "easy next step", it's going from novice to master-level GMing.

And does the game help you with this? Not very much. For the dungeon crawling, you get lots of advice, lots of rules, lots of examples and pre-made material. Then you graduate to dominion-level play, and you get a lot of "the details are left as an exercise for the reader". There's advice, but it's advice that assumes you've significantly "leveled-up" as a GM. Which some people do, but it's not automatic. How many times driving to the grocery store before you become able to successfully outrun the police in a high-speed freeway chase?

So I'm not surprised a number of people would stick to the kind of game they can run well, even though I agree that dominion-level play is cool and that dungeon crawling to infinity makes levels kind of pointless.

And not only that, the type of player who was excited about dungeon crawling and the type of player excited about 4x-style domain management don't overlap well. So you've got this hard (and quite arbitrary) break between two very different styles of game.

Those that loved the first part aren't necessarily enthused about the second--it feels like it'd be better for the characters to just retire and become NPCs so they can go back and do what they love with new characters. Which cuts out half the game.

Those that love the second part aren't necessarily enthused about the first, so for them the whole first part drags on (or they'd rather just skip it entirely). Which cuts out half the game.

To play it "as designed", you need people who are
* interested in both parts
* willing to wait a really long time before getting there
* capable of almost complete self-direction.

And that's rare.

Really, I find most Appeals to Gygax to be rather meaningless at this point. He's been out of the game in any substantial way for 35 years, more than a large chunk of the playerbase has been alive, and decades more than they've been playing. Lots of his decisions and designs were, well, part of their time and don't really fit with the game as it's developed. History is not destiny--the game is not bound by the decisions of its creators many editions ago. D&D 5e (and even 3e, let alone 4e) are not Gygax's baby any more. They've left the nest, had kids of their own, and even grandkids. The only thing worse IMO are Appeals to Tolkien.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-12-14, 12:30 AM
And not only that, the type of player who was excited about dungeon crawling and the type of player excited about 4x-style domain management don't overlap well. So you've got this hard (and quite arbitrary) break between two very different styles of game.

Those that loved the first part aren't necessarily enthused about the second--it feels like it'd be better for the characters to just retire and become NPCs so they can go back and do what they love with new characters. Which cuts out half the game.

Those that love the second part aren't necessarily enthused about the first, so for them the whole first part drags on (or they'd rather just skip it entirely). Which cuts out half the game.

Thing is, there wasn't an arbitrary break between dungeon crawling and domain management in AD&D, because domain management-style play happened from level 1 even in a very dungeon-crawl-centric campaign.

Obviously PCs weren't running kingdoms or anything like that, but three big assumptions about early dungeon crawl play were that (A) you didn't just have a constant party of 4-6 PCs heading into a dungeon all by their lonesome every session, the party might have torchbearers and porters and other hirelings with them on some or all dungeon delves, (B) it was common to have larger parties where either all the PCs were around the same level and players would alternate PCs for different adventures, with the other PCs doing their own thing in the background, or the PCs would be of very different levels and the higher-level ones would play Gandalf for a gaggle of lower-level ones, and (C) there was an expectation that the party started off in a safe Town (city, hamlet, fortress, or whatever other bastion of civilization) and got to the dangerous Dungeon (underground city, crypt, ruin, etc.) by going through moderately-dangerous Wilderness (forests, deserts, caves, etc.) and then back again when they needed to rest up, chunking up a campaign into distinct adventures.

So when a party reached name level, got handed a keep and some land, and started playing Logistics & Dragons, they may have gotten a big step up in social standing, quality of accommodations, number of minions, and so forth but there was an expectation that the party had been (A) dealing with a good number of NPC hirelings and proto-henchmen at once, (B) having PCs rotate between "dungeon stuff" and "other stuff" on different adventures, and (C) cultivating a "home base" and getting used to dispatching characters from said home base to carry out concrete tasks throughout the early game already, so none of that stuff was qualitatively new to them, just quantitatively so.

The transition to 3e did remove the "Poof, have a keep and some minions" thing from individual classes, but it didn't remove that from the game, it just genericized it among all the classes, the same way the 2e class-specific Thief Skills, Fighter Weapon Specialization, and Nonweapon Proficiencies subsystems turned into the 3e universal skill and feat subsystems. On top of still being able to deal with hirelings--which is much less common in many 3e games but still definitely an option--3e PCs can pick up Leadership at 6th and Landlord at 9th and go hog-wild with A&EG and SBG to focus on domain management if they want to, and that's on top of the various PrCs that focus on leading minions and establishing bases and such and the many ways to start on crafting, minionmancy, and the like at lower levels than in AD&D.

So right up until 4e, not only was there not as hard at pivot at mid-levels as you're portraying but it was downright easy and expected to mix the two gamestyles at all levels to some degree. Further, the desire to keep doing that didn't vanish with 4e, far from it; a large part of the "monsters are built totally differently than PCs and 'summoning' and 'animation' are just reflavored combat powers, and that sucks" outrage at the time was due to no longer being able to do the whole minionmancy thing anymore either by recruiting NPCs or by summoning/animating/enthralling some of your own, and a good chunk of the "treasure parcels are an overly rigid way to handle wealth and rituals aren't worth spending money on due to the rigid wealth curve, and that sucks" complaining was due to no longer being able to spend money on fancy fortresses/vehicles/mounts/etc. or the kinds of noncombat magic that would facilitate creating/buying those things.

Your concern is definitely valid about 5e, if only because there's a big gaping hole where the domain management rules should be and so (A) anything along those lines is going to be extensive homebrew and (B) all the new players coming into the game thanks to Critical Role and such aren't going to expect that sort of thing in their games, so moving from basic adventuring to anything resembling domain management would be a sharp, unexpected, and likely unwanted pivot. But wanting to continue dungeon-crawling at high levels because there's nothing else supported in the rules is quite different from wanting to continue dungeon-crawling at high levels because one is sticking one's fingers in one's ears and is ignoring everything else in the game but dungeon-crawling.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-14, 12:38 AM
I've read those early rules. And if that expectation was there anywhere outside of OD&D, it was very well hidden. No such thing as a core part of 2e, at least in the core books.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-12-14, 01:26 AM
I've read those early rules. And if that expectation was there anywhere outside of OD&D, it was very well hidden. No such thing as a core part of 2e, at least in the core books.

It was much more evident in 1e, with the default expectation of "the PCs will definitely have hirelings" showing up throughout the DMG in various contexts, e.g.:


The special figures cast for ADVANCED DUNGEONS 8 DRAGONS add color to play and make refereeing far easier. Each player might be required to furnish painted figures representing his or her player character and all henchmen and/or hirelings included in the game session.


Each player character will automatically expend not less than 100 gold pieces per level of experience per month. This is simply support, upkeep, equipment, and entertainment expense. These costs are to be deducted by the Dungeon Master automatically, and any further spending by the PC is to be added to these costs. Such expense is justified by the "fact" that adventurers are a free-wheeling and high-living lot (except, of course, for monks). Other miscellaneous expenditures by player characters encompass such things as additional equipment expense for henchmen or hirelings, costs of hirelings, bribes, [...] any taxation or other levies [and] any contributions to the player character's religious organization.


EXPERT HIRELINGS [are] those which are typically employed at such time as the character in question has an established stronghold. Common, standard hirelings are basically the usual craftsmen or laborers taken on by lower level player characters.
[...]
Employment Of Standard Hirelings: This requires the location of the desired individual and the offer of work. If the employment is for only a few days, there will be no real difficulty in locating individuals to take on the job. If the offer is for long term employment, only 1 in 6 will be willing to accept unless a small bonus is offered - a day's wage is too small, but double or treble that is sufficient to make 3 in 6 willing to take service.
[...]
Soldiers can be hired, but not captains, lieutenants, or serjeants. They recognize hazardous duty, and the cost per day is the same as per month. The supply of such men-at-arms willing to work day-to-day is strictly limited, so if the PCs lose them adventuring, more will not be likely to be found.


From time to time player characters will manage to capture or otherwise have in their power characters of higher than 2nd level. This in itself is of no consequence, but what if the player character then makes an offer of henchman status to the other character!
[...]
2. If the non-player character is from two levels lower to two levels greater than the player character, the NPC will consider only offers of becoming a temporary hireling or an associate for 1-4 weeks or adventures/undertakings.


In general the monster population will be in its habitat for a logical reason. The environment suits the creatures, and the whole is in balance. Certain areas will be filled with nasty things due to the efforts of some character to protect his or her stronghold, due to the influence of some powerful evil or good force, and so on. Except in the latter case, when adventurers (your player characters, their henchmen characters, and hirelings) move into an area and begin to slaughter the creatures therein, it will become devoid of monsters.


Whenever personality conflict occurs, the sword will resist the character's desires and demand concessions such as:
1. removal of associates, henchmen, hirelings, or creatures of alignment or personality distasteful to the sword
Because 1e and 2e were so closely compatible and had basically the same rules and expectations for hirelings, a lot of groups continued to play the same way as they did in 1e. But that aside, there are still plenty of hirelings-as-default mentions in the 2e DMG as well:


Casting a spell to reveal a character's alignment is just as offensive as asking him directly. This is the sort of thing that starts fights and ends friendships. Hirelings and henchmen may decide that a player character who does this is too distrustful. Strangers often figure the spell is the prelude to an attack and may strike first.


Before moving on, the DM will make sure he has a clear idea of not only what theplayer characters are doing, but also what actions any hirelings and henchmen are taking. Once he has a clear view of everything that's likely to happen, the DM can overrule any announced action that violates the rules (or in the case of an NPC, is out of character).


This method of determining initiative is the same as that given earlier, except that each PC, NPC, and monster involved in the fight rolls and then modifies his own initiative. This gives combat a more realistic feel, but at the expense of quick play.

To players, it may not seem like too much for each to roll a separate initiative die, but consider the difficulties: Imagine a combat between six player characters (each controlled by a player) and five hirelings and henchmen against 16 hobgoblins and five ogres (all of which must be rolled by the DM).


Just how often do player characters sell those potions and scrolls they find? Cast in a sword +1? Unload a horn of blasting or a ring of free action?

More often than not, player characters save such items. Certainly they don't give away one-use items. One can never have too many potions of healing or scrolls with extra spells. Sooner or later the character might run out. Already have a sword +1? Maybe a henchman or hireling could use such a weapon (and develop a greater respect for his master). Give up the only horn of blasting the party has? Not very likely at all.


Sooner or later, all players are going to discover the value of henchmen. However, knowing that henchmen are useful and playing them properly are just not the same.
[...]
There is no set time at which a player character acquires a henchman. Running a player character and a henchman together is more difficult than just a player character alone. Not every player will be ready for this at the same time, so the DM should control which players get henchmen and when. Wait until the player has demonstrated the ability to role play his own character before burdening him with another. If the player does not assume at least some of the responsibility for role-playing the henchman, the value is lost.

Neither is there a set way to acquire a henchman. The DM must use his own judgment. Since a henchman is a friend, consider those things that bind friends together. Being treated as equals, helping without expecting reward, trust, kindness, sharing secrets, and standing by each other in times of trouble are all parts of it.
Granted, there wasn't any sort of "Hey, if you're gonna go dungeon-crawling, you should get a bunch of hirelings!" guidance in the PHBs that I recall, but AD&D was very big on the player-DM information split, so that's no surprise; the PHB doesn't say anything about alignment languages (aside from one reference in the 1e assassin class description) or morale rules either, but those are significant aspects of planes-hopping adventures and mass combat scenarios respectively.

Using hireling and henchmen from low levels was something players were expected to figure out on their own in their first few campaigns and apply with later characters or something a more experienced player was expected to teach newer players, in the same way that players were expected to figure out the quirks of fireballs and lightning bolts after those spells blew up in their faces or figure out monster weaknesses after dying to them a few times, but it was no less common and widespread for being implicit rather than explicit.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-14, 05:13 AM
Really, I find most Appeals to Gygax to be rather meaningless at this point. He's been out of the game in any substantial way for 35 years, more than a large chunk of the playerbase has been alive, and decades more than they've been playing. Lots of his decisions and designs were, well, part of their time and don't really fit with the game as it's developed. History is not destiny--the game is not bound by the decisions of its creators many editions ago. D&D 5e (and even 3e, let alone 4e) are not Gygax's baby any more. They've left the nest, had kids of their own, and even grandkids.

Hard disagree.

First, I don't think you understood why I brought up Gygax & Co. When Tanarii made a statement about how they "blame storytelling" or when icefractal is giving an explanation for why people might have preferred extended dungeon crawling instead of moving on to domain rules, they are making statements of history, and fairly well-documented, recent history at that. It can be shown the sequence of events and reason for why things happened was different from what it is claimed, and so any conclusions or predictions based on incorrect vision of the past are suspect.

Second, the people who carry rights to the IP aren't always good game designers, the game design is actively impacted by corporate and franchise-maintaining concerns, in addition to aforementioned problem of inmates running the asylum where the designers might be fans of particular way of playing the game to detriment of others. All this means means that designing and maintaining something like D&D is, at this point, a massive game of Chinese whispers. There are rules in the game - from concrete single mechanics and concepts like magic missile to entire subsystems like alignment - which persist in editions after Gygax only because Gygax put them in the earlier editions, only explained poorly because people after Gygax omitted the reasoning why. There are also rules that got dropped between editions for no clear reason.

It has nothing to do with "history is destiny" and everything to do with the simple observation that old editions where Gygax was present had useable stuff that got lost in transition. It's why old editions are still played and why there is an entire design movement, in OSR, founded on going back to the old editions and extrapolating on those.

D&D is not unique in this regard. We could be having this discussion about almost any RPG system that's had multiple iterations, and ten thousand computer programs as well. Strict linear improvement across editions is closer to an exception than a rule.

Quertus
2020-12-14, 08:12 AM
I have played haunted halls.

Its pretty boring honestly, just a small dungeon crawl with nothing really dramatic to hook you in and it just kind of stops with no narrative climax.

Reading reviews, it looks like it had the uninteresting bad parts (like OP NPCs), but not the interesting ones.

I guess I'll check out reviews of the endless stairs.


I've read those early rules. And if that expectation was there anywhere outside of OD&D, it was very well hidden. No such thing as a core part of 2e, at least in the core books.

2e Charisma stat had "maximum number of henchmen" and "loyalty modifier" in its table.

So, yeah, henchmen are there from the beginning, before you even get to "race" or "class".

Tanarii
2020-12-14, 09:34 AM
You should actually blame people playing D&D wrong. Because people were playing D&D with stupidly high level dungeon crawling characters way back when Gygax & Co were still in charge of the game, and Gygax & Co specifically called them out and said, effectively, that "this comicbook superhero nonsense is not what we made the game for, please stop".

The modern state of the game is very much a result of inmates running the asylum: people who were fans of a particular non-standard way of playing D&D eventually took over and made their way of playing it standard.
Gygax was a cranky old war gamer grognard even when he wrote the rules. Even Armesom a& Co "played D&D wrong" by his standards. But if you'll note, that's exactly what I did. The game changed because everyone wanted to play D&D "wrong". Very few people wanted to play it "right".

And that's normal. People want Final Fantasy and Dragonball Z and Heroes and Simpsons and Wheel of Time. The media is replete with it. In video games devs like it because it's easy to program. In TV writers like it because it's easy to write and retains viewers. In books, ditto, easy and retains readers.

Glorthindel
2020-12-14, 10:39 AM
Granted, there wasn't any sort of "Hey, if you're gonna go dungeon-crawling, you should get a bunch of hirelings!" guidance in the PHBs that I recall, but AD&D was very big on the player-DM information split, so that's no surprise; the PHB doesn't say anything about alignment languages (aside from one reference in the 1e assassin class description) or morale rules either, but those are significant aspects of planes-hopping adventures and mass combat scenarios respectively.

Using hireling and henchmen from low levels was something players were expected to figure out on their own in their first few campaigns and apply with later characters or something a more experienced player was expected to teach newer players, in the same way that players were expected to figure out the quirks of fireballs and lightning bolts after those spells blew up in their faces or figure out monster weaknesses after dying to them a few times, but it was no less common and widespread for being implicit rather than explicit.

I think that is what has caused hirelings to become progressively marginalised as the game has gone on. Sure, there is plenty of refences to them, but they have never been front-and-centre. It is very easy to overlook those references, and not even notice what they are implying. I have played a lot of Hackmaster, and the rulebook has a whole chapter on henchmen, outlining their various types and their benefits, and our hackmaster party has never left a protege position unfilled, and packs the party with hirelings as needed. In AD&D the references are far more oblique.

Add to that the fact that their need is directly related to how hard the DM pushes the players, and how he runs the game, and how the hobby has changed over the years:

- If your party of four can rock every encounter why would you waste your gold on extra bodyguards you don't need?
- If dead characters are replaced with brand new characters at the same level as the rest of the party, you don't need to drag a protege around behind you sucking up a percentage of the xp to give you a decent-level replacement if your main character bites it.
- If the DM isn't applying the light rules you don't need a designated torchbearer.
- If equipment wear/repair rules are being left out, you don't need a party smith to keep your gear in top condition.
- If the DM isn't requiring the party to bring rations and sufficient water, or making the players keep track of ammo and encumberance, they don't need that wagon and donkey (and wagon driver, you aren't skipping Animal Care/Training tests on controlling that donkey, right) and the guards to protect it from wandering monsters, which the DM probably isn't rolling for either anymore, while the main party is down the dungeon.

Rightly or wrongly, the sections of the game that most call for hirelings, are the sections that have been progressively sidelined in later editions - ironically because a lot of players deem those details boring, which to an extent they are, which perhaps is why they were meant to be paying a hireling to do them in the first place.

awa
2020-12-14, 02:02 PM
The power level also make hirelings less useful, in 1st or second edition a hireling may be useful in a fight, but by third edition a level 1 commoner is going to be a liability quick. The relative power difference between a pc and a regular guy is much large and occurs much faster.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-12-14, 10:25 PM
Add to that the fact that their need is directly related to how hard the DM pushes the players, and how he runs the game, and how the hobby has changed over the years:

- If your party of four can rock every encounter why would you waste your gold on extra bodyguards you don't need?
- If dead characters are replaced with brand new characters at the same level as the rest of the party, you don't need to drag a protege around behind you sucking up a percentage of the xp to give you a decent-level replacement if your main character bites it.


The power level also make hirelings less useful, in 1st or second edition a hireling may be useful in a fight, but by third edition a level 1 commoner is going to be a liability quick. The relative power difference between a pc and a regular guy is much large and occurs much faster.

This is very true, and I think the whole 3e meme about "every adventuring day should consist of exactly 4 even-CR encounters" (which is not at all what the DMG says about encounter construction, but a lot of forumites have only played games, not run them, or have run them without reading through the quite excellent DMG sections on encounters because they know how encounters are "supposed" to work) is a big part of it. That misconception can easily lead groups to ignore hirelings entirely after 1st or 2nd level, and since the first two levels are when the party is the most strapped for cash they might just skip that entirely.

Whereas if the party is actually going by the guidelines, even commoner or expert hirelings can be helpful against the 30% of Easy or Easy If Handled Properly encounters the party should be running into until 3rd or 4th level or so, and the followers one gets from Leadership (normally ignored in forum discussions in favor of the cohort, except when one needs to crew a ship or otherwise throw warm bodies at a problem) can be very useful in combat up to 10th level or thereabouts if one has a high enough Leadership score to get 5th- and 6th-level followers by then.

And of course there's the fact that even commoners can be force-multiplied by the right party composition. A few campaigns ago I had a party that included a White Raven-focused warblade, an Inspire Courage-focused bard, and a buff-focused transmuter, and when they needed to deal with some particularly nasty beasties the party would routinely head to the nearest town, hire a dozen or two Warrior 1 soldiers, buff them up to a ridiculous extent, and stomp all over the opposition.


Rightly or wrongly, the sections of the game that most call for hirelings, are the sections that have been progressively sidelined in later editions - ironically because a lot of players deem those details boring, which to an extent they are, which perhaps is why they were meant to be paying a hireling to do them in the first place.

It's a real shame that that part of the game isn't appreciated. I'm fortunate to currently have a group that does appreciate those things--my last campaign was very heavy on the Logistics & Dragons side, with 200+ NPC followers being used for constructing and fortifying a settlement, building ships, clearing and farming the land, and so forth, and each of my players had "their" NPCs that they named and directed and did all the math for--but I've definitely seen and played with ones that find anything outside of combat boring and I think they're really missing out.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-12-14, 11:35 PM
But one big thing those extra bodies to is slow things down tremendously. 1e and even 2e were much more quick to resolve things, with much lighter, easier stat blocks. From 3e on, every additional body increases the load by a significant amount. If you said "here, run these 30 extra commoners", I'd tell you to get out. The same thing happens with summoning--even if the summoner is fast about it, it exponentially slows down everything.

Plus the cascading logistics usually require a spreadsheet to track. And for many players (myself included), I'd rather not fly a spreadsheet at any level.

What hirelings offer to a game of D&D is really IMO not worth the extra effort. And they force the story into very particular molds. Believe it or not, modern D&D doesn't actually do much no-plot dungeon delving. Which is really all that having mass quantities of meaningless hirelings along helps with. Modern D&D plays much more like an idealized special-forces squad or a SWAT team game (at low levels). Lean, mean, get in there, kick butt, get out. Playing Logistics and Spreadsheets just doesn't fit very well in that style.

History is not destiny. Trying to add back in that style of play into a modern game doesn't fit the style that most DMs are looking for. Heck, it didn't fit how most DMs and players played back then. Maybe because it really only worked for Gygax's table?

icefractal
2020-12-15, 01:50 AM
Yeah, I mean, even as someone who likes the concept of domain-level play and enjoys some logistics stuff, I'm not going to bring followers into a fight, nor would I really want to even if the mechanics favored it more. 3.x fights are already too slow. If I were playing a game with simpler mechanics, I'd rather enjoy the faster fights than re-slow them by adding a couple dozen participants.


It can be shown the sequence of events and reason for why things happened was different from what it is claimed, and so any conclusions or predictions based on incorrect vision of the past are suspect.I'm not sure what you mean here? I'm aware that earlier editions mentioned domain-level play as a thing, I've played them. But knowing that it exists doesn't make someone able to run it well! And the amount of both guidance and pre-made content for domain-level play has always been much less than what there is for dungeon-crawling.

TBF, I should clarify that I'm not talking about "domain level play as a framing device", where the bulk of the real-time at the table is still dungeon crawling and your domain is just the incentive for why you need yet more gold after that last haul put you in drinking money for life. That's fine, but it's still just dungeon crawling IMO. The ideal I'm looking for is that the domain-level stuff (including interactions that are part of that, not logistics-only) actually occupies the majority of focus during the gaming session - and maybe that's never been widely done, IDK.

vasilidor
2020-12-15, 02:15 AM
As someone who has played a summoner who spammed summon monster a lot, I can totally confirm the slowing things down. while everyone else had their turns, I had to preroll actions and adjust things as the battlefield changed.
now there are scenarios in which having summon monster can actually speed things up, but it requires some buy-in by players and game masters before hand. If the game master likes throwing large number of minions at the players you can use the summoned monsters to hold them back and allow the pc's to engage the big bad guys, placing the conflict between minions to the side and resolving it by quick contested dice rolls once each round while the main action goes on.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-15, 04:50 AM
I'm not sure what you mean here? I'm aware that earlier editions mentioned domain-level play as a thing, I've played them. But knowing that it exists doesn't make someone able to run it well! And the amount of both guidance and pre-made content for domain-level play has always been much less than what there is for dungeon-crawling.

What I mean is that there's no evidence I know of that the first people playing dungeon superheroes over at CalTech in the late 70s did it because they found domain-level or wilderness-level play difficult. We know these people pre-existed Deities and Demigods published in 1980 because Gygax talked about these people in his comments of why Deities & Demigods was the way it was. B/X and BECMI, the gameline that explicitly split "basic" dungeon crawling stuff from "expert" wildnerness and domain management, came later than these people and was successful for 10 years before being supplanted by later editions (counting international translations, Basic and Expert sets were more successful than 2nd Edition AD&D).

Silly Name
2020-12-15, 06:24 AM
While I agree that the lack of dominion rules from later editions is a big hole in the ruleset that should be filled, I don't think people who ignored that part of the game were playing "wrong".

The game has changed a lot, with extra emphasis being placed on character and stories and roleplay - which isn't to say that OD&D or AD&D didn't have that, but rather there's been an obvious shift in how the game is perceived -, and dominion management doesn't appeal to every sort of player and playgroup, nor it's necessarily a good fit for the kind of campaign they've decided to play.

Heck, a lot of modern games feature very little actual dungeon-delving!

But the bottom line is that if you want to play D&D because you want to play as heroes/adventurers who venture into ancient ruins and strange locales looking for gold and glory, it's not a given that you want to "graduate" to managing a kingdom. I think the rules for that should still be there because it makes sense for high-level characters to attract a following, create a base of operations, etc, but it shouldn't be something that's considered the right and proper way to play the game once you get at a certain level.

Quertus
2020-12-15, 10:45 AM
I tend to automate a lot, so saying "the Hill Giant takes 27 damage" takes the same amount of time, regardless of whether my Fighter or my hoard of the undead is dealing that damage.

(Actually, the Fighter takes more time, as I'll actually roll physical dice for him.)

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-12-15, 07:49 PM
What hirelings offer to a game of D&D is really IMO not worth the extra effort. And they force the story into very particular molds. Believe it or not, modern D&D doesn't actually do much no-plot dungeon delving. Which is really all that having mass quantities of meaningless hirelings along helps with. Modern D&D plays much more like an idealized special-forces squad or a SWAT team game (at low levels). Lean, mean, get in there, kick butt, get out. Playing Logistics and Spreadsheets just doesn't fit very well in that style.

History is not destiny. Trying to add back in that style of play into a modern game doesn't fit the style that most DMs are looking for. Heck, it didn't fit how most DMs and players played back then. Maybe because it really only worked for Gygax's table?

I wasn't talking about trying to add anything back into 5e (and, frankly, don't really care what people do with 5e at all). The original two posts I was responding two were claiming that there was a major shift from nearly-pure dungeon crawling to nearly-pure domain management in AD&D, and I was pointing out that that wasn't at all the case because there was lots of both happening at all levels.

And it wasn't just at Gygax's table. Talk to basically anyone who started playing at the height of TSR AD&D and you'll hear about all the hirelings and keeps and so forth; I started playing 1e in the gap between TSR's fall and WotC's acquisition and that playstyle was still going strong even then. There's a reason that all the popular OSR games include domain management to some degree and that there were so many third-party 3e books about it (not many good books, granted, aside from Mongoose's Book of Strongholds & Dynasties, but they were certainly asked-for and well-received).

The part about 3e was there to point out that people often act like there was this sharp divide between AD&D with its flocks-of-henchmen dynamic and 3e with its "fantasy SWAT team" dynamic and so the game has "moved on" from domain management ever since, but in fact despite 3e not having any sort of explicit marker of changing playstyles built into the classes all of that low-level domain management stuff is still in the game and not just "around" but even more fleshed-out than in AD&D (which had no equivalent of the SBG or the DMG2 business rules or the like). It can be played as pure fantasy special forces from 1st to 20th, but you can play AD&D that way too, and in neither case does that say anything about the game is actually designed, how most groups actually play it, and what resources for Logistics & Dragons are actually available in each.


The ideal I'm looking for is that the domain-level stuff (including interactions that are part of that, not logistics-only) actually occupies the majority of focus during the gaming session - and maybe that's never been widely done, IDK.

In fact it has! The Birthright setting for AD&D revolving very heavily around domain management stuff, as the basic assumption of the setting is that all of the PCs are "blooded" nobles (members of noble families with magical bloodlines who can do special domain-level magic that commoners can't) and that they're focused on growing their kingdoms and slaying enemy nobles Highlander-style to steal their kingdoms and blood magic and so on. The "C" in "BECMI" stands for the Companion set, which revolved almost entirely around domain management, mass combat, realms-shaping magic, and the like. Both were quite popular back in the day, though sadly they were only Dark Sun and Ravenloft popular and not Greyhawk or FR popular and so they had small production lines and weren't officially ported to 3e and later.


The game has changed a lot, with extra emphasis being placed on character and stories and roleplay - which isn't to say that OD&D or AD&D didn't have that, but rather there's been an obvious shift in how the game is perceived -, and dominion management doesn't appeal to every sort of player and playgroup, nor it's necessarily a good fit for the kind of campaign they've decided to play.

See, a lot of people try to explain the de-emphasis of domain management over the years with "Well, there's more focus on the story now so obviously people want to ignore everything outside of the PCs," but that makes very little sense when most of the classic stories that inspired D&D involve both massive clashes of armies and the protagonists being nobles or rulers of one sort or another (LotR has several nobles in the party Fellowship and tons of large battles, the Chronicles of Narnia has the PCs Pevensie children all being kings and queens after leading several battles for the fate of Narnia, Conan led armies and became a king, Elric was an emperor and led troops, and so on and so forth) and Dragonlance, the setting that everyone uses as the example of D&D pivoting from scenario-focused campaigns to plot-focused campaigns, is a setting of constant large-scale wars and politicking by influential organizations like the Solamnic Knights and Orders of High Sorcery are very influential.

So while D&D has in general moved from domain management being the default to domain management being optional to domain management being essentially unsupported, there's little evidence that that has anything to do with any sort of roleplay vs. rollplay issue; rather, it likely owes a lot to later-edition marketing (3e was pitched as the "Back to the dungeon!" edition and 4e stomped all over everything that people liked in prior editions) and technical changes like the way adventure modules have been written over time, the increasing length and complexity of combats, and similar.


I tend to automate a lot, so saying "the Hill Giant takes 27 damage" takes the same amount of time, regardless of whether my Fighter or my hoard of the undead is dealing that damage.

(Actually, the Fighter takes more time, as I'll actually roll physical dice for him.)

Likewise. I routinely run combats with dozens of NPCs/monsters involved on both the PC and enemy sides, and it's easier than ever now that all the rolls can easily be scripted to save time. Combine that with minionmancer PCs being on top of decision-making and dice-rolling for their man(c)y minions, and large combats aren't nearly as time-consuming and cumbersome to run as it's often portrayed to be.

Azuresun
2020-12-17, 05:34 AM
See, a lot of people try to explain the de-emphasis of domain management over the years with "Well, there's more focus on the story now so obviously people want to ignore everything outside of the PCs," but that makes very little sense when most of the classic stories that inspired D&D involve both massive clashes of armies and the protagonists being nobles or rulers of one sort or another (LotR has several nobles in the party Fellowship and tons of large battles, the Chronicles of Narnia has the PCs Pevensie children all being kings and queens after leading several battles for the fate of Narnia, Conan led armies and became a king, Elric was an emperor and led troops, and so on and so forth) and Dragonlance, the setting that everyone uses as the example of D&D pivoting from scenario-focused campaigns to plot-focused campaigns, is a setting of constant large-scale wars and politicking by influential organizations like the Solamnic Knights and Orders of High Sorcery are very influential.

Even in most fantasy fiction where the main characters end up as being politically important, those elements usually don't replace adventuring personally, while they're on-camera. After Conan becomes ruler of Aquilonia, the stories usually still involve him having to deal with assassins or usurpers personally. After the Penvensies becomes rulers of Narnia, the story skips forward over decades of ruling to the point where they return to Earth. After Aragorn becomes king of Gondor, he personally fights in the battle of the Black Gate and then his character is effectively retired. Most of Elric's story happens after he abandons the throne--and even before then, he's still dealing with most of his problems with his own skills and powers.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-12-17, 11:44 PM
Even in most fantasy fiction where the main characters end up as being politically important, those elements usually don't replace adventuring personally, while they're on-camera. After Conan becomes ruler of Aquilonia, the stories usually still involve him having to deal with assassins or usurpers personally. After the Penvensies becomes rulers of Narnia, the story skips forward over decades of ruling to the point where they return to Earth. After Aragorn becomes king of Gondor, he personally fights in the battle of the Black Gate and then his character is effectively retired. Most of Elric's story happens after he abandons the throne--and even before then, he's still dealing with most of his problems with his own skills and powers.

This is true (and of course domain management doesn't replace adventuring in D&D either; name-level AD&D characters have to keep clearing monsters and looting dragon hoards to pay taxes and such to retain their positions, and even BECMI Immortals at their lofty heights of power and perspective tend to get their hands dirty more often than not), but my point was that those characters all do end up as (or try to become, or try to avoid becoming) rulers, and what they do (or wish they could do, or can't bring themselves to do) with that authority both on-screen and off- is still a major part of all those characters' narrative arcs.

So characterizing a shift away from domain play as being due to "emphasis being placed on character and stories" doesn't make any sense when you can flesh out characters more and tell more stories by detouring into domain play for a level or three than by sticking with the same ol' dungeon crawling for an entire campaign and when most of the thematic and setting influences of D&D would have been shallower and poorer stories/series/mythoi if they'd avoided the topics of Aragorn's reluctance to become the King of Gondor or Elric's views on rulership and succession or the entire Game of Thrones or the like. If that were the actual cause--rather than, as I said, being almost entirely due to mechanical and metagame/marketing changes rather than character- or plot-related reasons--you'd expect to see more involvement of titles and politicking and grand ambitions and so forth, à la Pendragon and Burning Wheel and other "high Medieval" RPGs, not less.

MoiMagnus
2020-12-21, 04:53 AM
Yeah, 5e has plentiful of artisan tools, but is weirdly lacking any skill (or tool-like proficiency) related to domain management.

Bohandas
2021-01-06, 02:23 AM
Relevant

https://www.enworld.org/threads/example-from-the-worst-tsr-adventure-module-s-ever-published.148566/

Quertus
2021-01-06, 10:44 AM
Relevant

https://www.enworld.org/threads/example-from-the-worst-tsr-adventure-module-s-ever-published.148566/

Indeed, highly relevant.

I'll need to check these other modules out for comparison.

Lord Torath
2021-01-06, 12:26 PM
Indeed, highly relevant.

I'll need to check these other modules out for comparison.B9, Castle Caldwell is pretty bad, too. Phineas and Ferb used the "secret door" phrase to try to bring a mummy to life in Are You my Mummy? (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188326/). Of course, they also mispronounced it.