What is your favorite module/adventure for pre-3E D&D?

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Like the title says, I want to know about the favorite module or adventure you played in and/or ran in any version of D&D prior to 3E. What was cool about it? Is there anything you would change about it? Etc.

I'm asking in hopes of finding something that will work well for my library program, where I am currently using The Black Hack, but I'm also just curious to hear about cool stuff in general.

Thanks!
 
Lee said:
Man, you guys already mentioned 3 of my picks: Treasure Hunt, Eye of the Serpent, and Saltmarsh.

I'll add: Night's Dark Terror. Opinions on it seem mixed, but I enjoyed running it.
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Oh, I like Nights Dark Terror also, though again, I don't think I've run it in D&D, and I think I only actually ran the raid on the manor portion, but the rest of it looks cool.
 
What specifically did y'all like about the modules you're naming?
 
Eye of the Serpent:

The PC(s) start at the top of a mountain having been grabbed by a giant eagle/roc and deposited in the nest. The PC(s) need to make their way down the mountain. There are a variety of wilderness encounters and mini-dungeons (a few rooms each). At the bottom is a larger dungeon. I've used it twice when adventurers were grabbed by rocs and taken to the top of Tada's High Tumulus in two different RuneQuest campaigns (where I didn't use the dungeon at the bottom). I also ran it once using a home brew system. I may have even run at least part of it with D&D, I really don't remember...

Night's Dark Terror:

This has a neat scenario where orcs/goblins raid a small fortified manor which the PCs are spending the night at and they must coordinate the defense. The rest of the module they explore up into the mountains in Karameikos in Mystara. I haven't run any of that but the small dungeons and other encounters look cool.
 
Treasure Hunt: 0-level characters, which I think ought to have been a mainline rule. Adventure on the high seas (kinda)! Cool interior art style. The first 1/4 and the last half are better than the second 1/4, imo.

I think Treasure Hunt is a really solid module to start new players / campaign on.

Saltmarsh: Haunted Mansions and Ghost Ships! OooOOooOoooOooo! It's definitely an "earlier" module, but it's really well done. Another great module to start new players / campaign on.

Honestly, I think Treasure Hunt is "better", but I've run it too many times and would probably rather hit Saltmarsh instead if the opportunity arose.

Eye of the Serpent: Man vs Nature! This is an "escape the <dungeon>" rather than a "raid the <dungeon>" module, which is a neat change. I've only run it once, and the players didn't like it, but I think that may have just been their preferences. I wanted to run a serious game; they wanted beer & pretzels.

Night's Dark Terror: It's interesting, and it's big. It can feel a little bit railroady at some points, but it's certainly not NEARLY as bad as the DL series LOL. It's definitely more of an open-world wilderness adventure than any of the others. Eye of the Serpent is all wilderness, but it's built around branching and merging paths rather than an open map. I would argue that Terror has the best "story" of the four.

Part of me wants to add Horror on the Hill to the list, but it's just not as strong as these four, imo. It's easy to run, and the piranha birds and creepy little old ladies are cool, but it's just kind of... average, most of the time.
 
Lee said:
Treasure Hunt: 0-level characters, which I think ought to have been a mainline rule. Adventure on the high seas (kinda)! Cool interior art style. The first 1/4 and the last half are better than the second 1/4, imo.

I think Treasure Hunt is a really solid module to start new players / campaign on.

Saltmarsh: Haunted Mansions and Ghost Ships! OooOOooOoooOooo! It's definitely an "earlier" module, but it's really well done. Another great module to start new players / campaign on.

Honestly, I think Treasure Hunt is "better", but I've run it too many times and would probably rather hit Saltmarsh instead if the opportunity arose.

Eye of the Serpent: Man vs Nature! This is an "escape the <dungeon>" rather than a "raid the <dungeon>" module, which is a neat change. I've only run it once, and the players didn't like it, but I think that may have just been their preferences. I wanted to run a serious game; they wanted beer & pretzels.

Night's Dark Terror: It's interesting, and it's big. It can feel a little bit railroady at some points, but it's certainly not NEARLY as bad as the DL series LOL. It's definitely more of an open-world wilderness adventure than any of the others. Eye of the Serpent is all wilderness, but it's built around branching and merging paths rather than an open map. I would argue that Terror has the best "story" of the four.

Part of me wants to add Horror on the Hill to the list, but it's just not as strong as these four, imo. It's easy to run, and the piranha birds and creepy little old ladies are cool, but it's just kind of... average, most of the time.
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Horror on the Hill does have something going for it that the other BD&D modules don’t: it has both.
 
AsenRG said:
Can I pitch Magician's House? It's got a DCC edition that I should pick eventually...but I've read the Lark Fantasy edition, and the adventure is just excellent IMO. It's also hard to preview without heavy spoilers, though...
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/274519/The-Magicians-House-DCC-edition

Also, Scourge of the Demon Wolf was nice in play, though henchmen are very much advised, I feel...and they should be in any old-school game:grin:!

Best of all, both are created by forum regulars:angel:!
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I'll allow it. Neither are chronologically pre-3e but in the spirit of older games.
 
Keep on the Borderlands: nostalgia, it was my first and cemented my love of sandboxes.

Barrier Peaks: zany lunacy, bonus points if they get the ship chunk to launch again.

And... some hex crawl on an island that I'm blanking on. We spent a hellacious amount of time on some giant wasps or bees or such, trying to tame them or weaponize them after they really harshed us up.
 
Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. Combines wilderness exploration, wargame-style mass combat, exploration of a creepily atmospheric dungeon, and an Easter-egg bonus section that most players will never find but those who do will have an experience with a true sense of wonder that they’ll likely be taking about and puzzling over long after the fact.

This was the last module Gygax wrote before he got permanently distracted by extra-curriculars (Hollywood wheeling & dealing, acrimonious divorce, ownership/control disputes, bad novels) - several modules were published later under his byline but they were all either recycled older material, heavily influenced by co-writers, or both - and IMO it’s the fullest, most developed expression of his creative vision for (A)D&D. It’s a real shame that he didn’t write 3 or 4 more like this one.

Edit: only thing I’d change is that there are a couple errors on the dungeon map
 
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There's a wondrous and weird quality, I think, about the "Golden Age Gygax" modules: G1-3, D1-3, T1, S1, S3, S4, WG4, WG5. The authorial voice is singular. There are no 'railroads'. You get the sense from them what Gygax's vision of the AD&D "world" involved: lots of danger, great wonders that easily can be missed by players (no sense that every party has to "encounter everything"), colourful foes and NPCs, player-focused challenges, encounters best avoided (no assumption that all encounters must be surmountable), and so forth. Echoes of Vance, Leiber, and Howard resound.

Of the lot I agree with T Foster that Tharizdun is the best. It's really a work of art. It's also the most 'Lovecraftian' of Gygax's modules (although the Lovecraftian area can be missed quite easily by an impatient or unlucky party).

Gygax's stuff aside, I had great fun back in the day with N1 (Cult of the Reptile God) and S1 (Secret of Saltmarsh). Both have investigative elements and some enjoyable twists.

Also, I always liked UK2, UK3, and UK4 -- they had a lot of interesting and, in the case of UK4, quite original ideas. I never got to run them but I'd like to some day. (A few years ago I contemplated created a campaign world based on the 'UK' modules called 'Ukrasia'.)
 
Eye of the Serpent and Night's Dark Terror already having been mentioned then I will add a third good outdoor explore.

L1 The Secret of Bone Hill
It has a central village for the players to stay in then gives encounters for the areas around the village. There is no real plot or large dungeons but it is a solid base in which to locate other adventures.
 
Gonna have to lead with Night's Dark Terror even though others already mentioned it. Ran it a number of times and it plays like a charm with its flavoural Slavic setting. It gently moves from more linear to sandbox play, it was intended to be a teaching module for newer GMs, and a surprisingly (for the time) Lovecraftian climax. When I got back into rpgs years later this was my first purchase on pdf at Drivethrurpgs.

B10_Night's_Dark_Terror.jpg

Isle of Dread is my favourite of the Cook/Moldvay classic series of modules. Another sandboxy adventure with a pulpy, weird fantasy flavour. Again, one I ran a few times as a kid and teen.

Isle_of_Dread.jpg
 
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Most of my favorites have already been mentioned (Saltmarsh, Keep on the Borderlands, Secret of Bone Hill, Night's Dark Terror), but I'll add what is probably my all-time favorite lower level adventure: The Halls of Tizen Thune (from White Dwarf #18). A number of low level parties ended up using this as a base once they cleaned it out and figured how to deal with the shadow dancers. A more modern module I really like is the free The Hyqueous Vaults (published in 2017 or so for the 10th anniversary of OSRIC).
 
Telok said:
Keep on the Borderlands: nostalgia, it was my first and cemented my love of sandboxes.

Barrier Peaks: zany lunacy, bonus points if they get the ship chunk to launch again.

And... some hex crawl on an island that I'm blanking on. We spent a hellacious amount of time on some giant wasps or bees or such, trying to tame them or weaponize them after they really harshed us up.
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X2? Isle of Dread?
 
Gosh, there are a lot of really great ones.

Of the classic era modules, my favorite to play or run are: T1, B1, B2, B4, G1, G2, G3, D1, S1, X2. Obviously too many to elaborate on, but several are mentioned above by others.

I would also add that there are many, many great dungeons created recently but for pre-2E D&D and it's OSR variants (which I consider all functionally indistinguishable). In my experience, Barrowmaze and Rappan Athuk are maybe the top of the heap, but everything by Greg Gillespie is great. He has become a controversial figure around here, but for reasons I consider completely irrelevant and stupid (apparently he isn't everyone's favorite professor at his school, and that is somehow supposed to influence how much I enjoy playing his amazingly dense, varied and creative mega-adventure modules?). The strong suits of all of these is that they are billed as 'megadungeons' but really they are entire sandbox environments that you can explore and evolve endlessly, starting from and ending at any power level.

Another great option are the truly amazing things being published by our Hungarian fellow travellers at Echos from Fomalhaut. Castle Xyntillan is the densest expression of what he's up to (a fun house dungeon, but wildly creative and beautifully produced). His masterpiece is Helveczia, a boxed set that presents a really interesting, dense setting anchored in a fantasy take on late medieval Alpine landscapes. It is pitched as its own game (which I'm not crazy about, just in general), but you can think of it as just an old school D&D setting with no problems at all.
 
I2: Tomb of the Lizard King

Played through it twice separated by a number of years. Each time, completing it felt like an accomplishment. Returning from the mission felt like returning as heroic badasses, rather than as a bunch of thugs returning to a town to fence the stolen loot or just petering out at the end like other modules did.
 
Bunch said:
X2? Isle of Dread?
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Likely. Alas I won't have time/access to check fully fir a day or three. It was a long time ago that played, play remembers differ from readings, and I haven't read the old modules in a few years so some of thrm blend a bit.
 
Akrasia said:
There's a wondrous and weird quality, I think, about the "Golden Age Gygax" modules: G1-3, D1-3, T1, S1, S3, S4, WG4, WG5. The authorial voice is singular. There are no 'railroads'. You get the sense from them what Gygax's vision of the AD&D "world" involved: lots of danger, great wonders that easily can be missed by players (no sense that every party has to "encounter everything"), colourful foes and NPCs, player-focused challenges, encounters best avoided (no assumption that all encounters must be surmountable), and so forth. . . .
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Interesting to me (who rarely hears things about Gygax that I'm excited about) that those are things I very much like and do/did in my campaigns too.

Is there an efficient way to browse summaries or pick these up in PDF - some compilation or something?
 
Skarg said:
Interesting to me (who rarely hears things about Gygax that I'm excited about) that those are things I very much like and do/did in my campaigns too.

Is there an efficient way to browse summaries or pick these up in PDF - some compilation or something?
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They’re all available in pdf (and most in print) from DriveThruRPG. You can/should probably skip S1 (Tomb of Horrors) which was written very early on (1975) for a very specific purpose - as a test for players bragging how tough their characters were to see how good their problem-solving skills actually were - and run as the first “official” TSR-sponsored D&D tournament at Origins I, but is an artificial nonesuch environment that is really not like anything else he ever wrote (with one exception - his post-TSR adventure Necropolis is effectively a massively expanded and contextualized reboot of the Tomb of Horrors concept set in Fantasy Egypt). But the others are all very good and of a piece with each other stylistically and game-philosophically and very much worth reading and playing.
 
Also, the Age of Dusk blog has done detailed and thorough reviews of all of them that are well worth reading. He’s not an old relic grognard (like me) but rather someone who came up through later stuff and was viewing all of them for the first time with fresh eyes but still recognizing their quality.
 
Gygax was a master at describing cool, fantastical locations. I really like the descriptions of the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa D2 and Cave K in B2. Oh and the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun which sadly I have never gotten the chance to run!
 
Brock Savage said:
Gygax was a master at describing cool, fantastical locations. I really like the descriptions of the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa D2 and Cave K in B2. Oh and the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun which sadly I have never gotten the chance to run!
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He described several cool fantastical locations in his novels as well. Alas, they’re all surrounded by boringly mundane plots, flat, generic and unsympathetic characters, and a bunch of really awful, excruciatingly tin-eared dialogue.
 
Two modules hold a special place in my heart: I6 Ravenloft and S2 White Plume Mountain. Ravenloft just had a great story and setting. It was almost more a mini-campaign than a single adventure module. There were so many things you could do within the confines of that module. Just a great, fun retelling of the classic vampire story. White Plume Mountain was the best funhouse style dungeon I ever played. The rooms and challenges were interesting and varied and really required you to think outside the box in order to succeed.
 
My kneejerk answer is B2 and X1. Partially for nostalgia reasons, but also because between the pair they serve as a very solid introduction to dungeon crawling, wilderness adventuring and straight wilderness hex crawling. I've played both many, many times.

As for more recent stuff that I've really liked, I thought that Death Frost Doom for LotFP was excellent. Well written, evocative, playable, and with some neat little flourishes and design touches and no wasted space. I also quite like the trilogy for LL of Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Fever Dreaming Marlinko, and Misty Isles of the Eld. They are very well written and match my taste for slightly oddball and oldschool gonzo feel. I also enjoyed that the cultural background for the shared setting is Slavic/Russian.
 
My favourite Gygax modules are Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, Vault of the Drow and the relatively underrated The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror.

The first two are fantastically imaginative and bizarre. Vault of the Drow is really a city adventure, something I always enjoy.

The last I highly recommend if you're a fan of Lewis Carroll. It is tough as nails but also actually funny in play without having to burlesque it, something hard to pull off in a module.
 
We didn't tend to use published adventures. Even when we did they were usually just a jumping off point so tended to deviate pretty quickly making it hard to know what was actually written and what just happened.

I've been through The village of Homlet and Temple of Elemental Evil a couple times over the years, but due to the above it was different each time. I'd have to list that as my favorite though being the only one other than Against the Giants (early modules only) that really stands out to me today. Always loved looking at the covers though.
 
Toadmaster said:
We didn't tend to use published adventures. Even when we did they were usually just a jumping off point so tended to deviate pretty quickly making it hard to know what was actually written and what just happened.
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That is very interesting for me... In other boards i have already started a discussion on this point a so i am going to to here as well!

Re to the original question, my heart is with Castle Amber without any doubt! This is for two reasons: the author, Tom Moldvay, is the best author i found in the industry! Secondly, the module is based on a giant of the fantasy literature, CA Smith: his works are simply great!
 
UK 2 The Sentinel and UK 3 The Gauntlet, two linked adventures inextricably linked to AD&D.

I ran UK 1 Beyond the Crystal caves for my friends using RQ3 where they played idiot evil goblinoids in what was probably our funniest ever roleplaying experience
 
PrivateEye said:
My favourite would be The Halls of Tizun Thane from White Dwarf 18 back in 1980

You can read a review Here

I still think it’s one of the best modules ever written
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As soon as you mentioned WD I figured it was probably an Albie Fiore adventure. Would be great if there was a reprint compilation of his work for White Dwarf.
 
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