Favourite Published Adventure?

[Steerpike]

I'm in a curious mood. Obviously we're mostly homebrewers and world-builders here, but do you guys have any favourite published adventures? Have you actually run them, and if so, how did they go?

[Hibou]

I ran Expedition to Undermountain some years ago in a more-or-less canonical version of the Forgotten Realms - the only major difference that I can remember being that Halaster Blackcloak wasn't actually dead. We only managed to get through a few areas of the dungeon (but 5-6 character levels). I recall that adventure/campaign being a lot of fun. Even though it was Forgotten Realms and therefore absolutely balls-to-the-wall-insane with regards to the magic level and density of overly-powerful monsters hanging around, I think it was the best out of that series of super modules because of how much it gave you to do, the variety of difficulty levels that it could accommodate, and how easy it was to tweak to add stuff. If you can find a second-hand copy at a good price, I'd actually recommend it for a random romp sometime. It shouldn't be too hard to translate to Pathfinder.

[Steerpike]

Very cool. Was there anything in particular in terms of its content that stood out, like good setpieces or locations or factions?

[Hibou]

Very cool. Was there anything in particular in terms of its content that stood out, like good setpieces or locations or factions?

I can't remember that much about it, other than there was lots and lots of connectivity - the Underdark, all kinds of odd little settlements, and lots of nifty little subsections that were mostly fleshed-out. The ones that weren't gave enough ideas to expand on what was already there.

[sparkletwist]

The Tomb of Horrors!

I won't pretend that it is anything resembling "balanced" or "fair" (or even "well designed") but it is the epitome of the crazy oldschool Gygaxian death dungeon, and, because of that, it has its place. I've run it twice, both times with Fate, which added some mechanics and smoothed over the lethality, but kept the emphasis on rules-light problem solving. It was pretty fun.

[Kindling]

I might be running CoC's Masks of Nyarlathotep soon for some friends. I made an abortive attempt at it a couple of years ago where we only ever played 2 sessions in the end, but I've read through it numerous times and I'm excited to give it another go and try to immerse the players into the mythology of it - something that I feal takes longer, with slow reveals and so on, than the couple of sessions we managed last time. Sure, it's pulpier than a Cthulhu story maybe "should" be, but I feel like that's half its charm.

I'm also still in love with the idea of trying to run The Enemy Within using the original WFRP1e rules for some reason. I once read someone describe that campaign as "let's run a Call of Cthulhu game in our fantasy setting" so maybe that's what appeals to me - I feel like with a published module I'm looking for stuff I couldn't easily invent myself, and that kind of mystery/investigation thing feels much harder work for me to come up with than some swashbuckling action stuff.

Similarly, I'm also into adventures that do dungeon-crawling interestingly because oddly, seeing as it's such a core part of the hobby, I don't often tend to think in terms of dungeons myself when I come up with stuff! So Maze of the Blue Medusa, Death Frost Doom, things like that. I don't get to game much/at all nowadays so I haven't actually run any of these, but I'm very interested in them from reading them through.

[Weave]

It's probably not the best answer, but the Serpent's Skull series from Pathfinder. It's actually a notoriously bad adventure path, perhaps even the worst they've published, lacking detail, having some pretty railroady sections, and otherwise feeling incomplete. The reason I liked it so much was that it really just provided a framework that my players and I could build upon, so we could fill in those cracks. It had some frustrating moments, certainly, but ultimately we turned the AP from an adventure about discovering and conquering a hidden lost city in the vein of El Dorado, into subsequently protecting the indigenous people who exist there and betraying the government that funded their expedition, which wasn't at all part of the adventure but very fun. Unfortunately we did not get to finish the last two books of the six part series, but it was a memorable adventure nonetheless.

If anyone was curious, the first book is by far the best one we played and it nosedives pretty hard after that.

I think I'll throw in Sunless Citadel as well, from 3.0 D&D. It was my very first adventure and it was run when we had very little understanding of the rules but it endeared its way into my memory as a fun dungeon crawl.

[sparkletwist]

Pathfinder adventure paths are usually kind of railroady, but the locations described therein are sometimes worthwhile in their own right. One that comes to mind for me is the town of Sandpoint. I'm not exactly a fan of Rise of the Runelords; I haven't read most of it and I didn't really enjoy most of what I did read. However, Sandpoint is a fun, fleshed-out little town that can be used as the base for all kinds of adventures, and I played a short adventure (like three sessions or so, I think) based in the town but otherwise having nothing to do with the adventure path that it came out of, and that was fun.