Remember the D20 boom? And the bust?
Lots of stuff hit the shelves...a few became hits. Many adventures from 3PP were published. I wonder if any of them were memorable and worthy of being remembered.
Do you have a favorite adventure (or supplement) from the D20 boom days? If so, what makes it special?
Necromancer Games' version of Caverns of Thracia is pretty awesome. Jaquays and company expand the module to include more sublevels, and encounters
Quote from: nightlamp;1121385Necromancer Games' version of Caverns of Thracia is pretty awesome. Jaquays and company expand the module to include more sublevels, and encounters
That's a good one. The 3e Wilderlands of High Fantasy box set and player's guide from Necromancer are also awesome and have given me many years of great gaming. I also like Lost City of Barakus, which I think has a 5e version now.
It may seem strange, but DCC's Castle Whiterock is the best published mega-dungeon I've seen. It was released at the end of the d20 era and, thus, never got the attention it deserved.
Quote from: S'mon;1121423That's a good one. The 3e Wilderlands of High Fantasy box set and player's guide from Necromancer are also awesome and have given me many years of great gaming. I also like Lost City of Barakus, which I think has a 5e version now.
Agreed, the Wilderlands box set and Player's Guide are both pure gold!
The Witchfire Trilogy from Privateer Press. Either the individual adventures or the big hardcover collected edition. I have both. Worth every penny.
Lost City of Barakus is a good (if bland) example of a sandbox setup. Most of the old Necromaner supplements were similar.
Betrayer at Asgard from the old Conan D20 line is a very good example of a plot/narrative driven adventure. Had some cool aspects like chases, pcs could accumulate victory points, and at one point they get a flashback to a previous generation and are handed pre-gens to play out what they learn about the last time the main villian got killed.
Mike Mearls "In the Belly of the Beast" was a very good adventure for 2nd level characters. The characters have to ally with a bunch of villainous groups in order to survive.
I'm also fond of some of the Scarred Lands stuff. In particular the Divine and the Defeated and the original gazeteer, which is all you need to run a campaign in the setting.
I've also got some use from the old Conan D20 Ruins of Hyboria book. It doesn't have complete adventures but it does have maps of ruined cities and tombs with basic keys. (The tombs in particular are very useful as they lay out the mundane aspects of the tombs - what each room was originally for - this leaves the GM free to add whatever fantastic latter day elements they like).
Seconding the Wilderlands boxed set. That's probably seen the most use of any of my d20 era collection.
AEG had some good stuff. I remember thinking their book of variant magic systems looked very intriguing. The various systems seemed more like "tweek the core magic system to give a specific flavor" rather than "massively unbalance everything". But I have to admit I never used any of them in actual play, so they could be badly broken for all I know.
Necromancer's Tomb of Abysthor is one of my all time favorites.
The Arcanis setting from Paradigm Press is pretty fantastic. It's multitude of Living Arcanis modules could be a bit uneven, but you can sort the good author/writing teams from the bad pretty quickly and quite a few of them can be found online for free while others were compiled into books by campaign year.
I've given them grief over their attempts to design their own game system in the past here, but it's important to qualify that the attempt was born of apparent necessity rather than desire (i.e. 4E and dropping the OLG for the GSL happened and there was no evidence in 2007-8 that Pathfinder would be able to keep 3.5e as a system alive... so they needed a system that wouldn't be dependent on a no longer supported system or one that could be yanked again). There strength was always in their setting and adventure modules so credit where it's due.
Another vote for Caverns of Thracia. It's still the greatest dungeon of all time (IMO/YMMV); Paul Jaquays was a genius.
Quote from: goblinslayer;1122277Necromancer's Tomb of Abysthor is one of my all time favorites.
I came in to mention that plus
The Crucible of Freya as a lead-in.
The wilderlands set was great, but I dont' remember it much for the adventures. I don't think any D20 adventure was particularly amazing to the point of being as memorable as the classics.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1122729The wilderlands set was great, but I dont' remember it much for the adventures. I don't think any D20 adventure was particularly amazing to the point of being as memorable as the classics.
Red Hand of Doom from WotC.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1122729The wilderlands set was great, but I dont' remember it much for the adventures. I don't think any D20 adventure was particularly amazing to the point of being as memorable as the classics.
Well, I really liked
Bloody Sands of Sicaris and
Forge of Fury.
When I look at my shelves of what I kept from my D20 days, other than the 3.5 core books and the Arcana Evolved books (and more Malhavoc PDFs) I don't have any adventures other than there's no way I'm going to break up my complete run of Dungeon Magazine, so therefor I have a ton of D20 adventures. But nothing from them is particularly memorable. Maybe there's a few other things scattered around, but for the most part, the D20 stuff was sold off (or is being sold off, I still have a few items in my "for sale" pile).
Before they started Castles & Crusades, Troll Lord Games made a series of d20 adventures set in their world of Aihrde. One I remember fondly is Heart of Glass. It's sort of a combination minisetting and adventure. The setting is a run down coastal city and the adventure features a mcguffin (the titular heart of glass) and a sect of assassins, among other things.
Quote from: GameDaddy;1122751... Forge of Fury.
Rich Baker.
Quote from: S'mon;1122733Red Hand of Doom from WotC.
Rich Baker.
And the best 4E adventures? Rich Baker.
Of course, WotC retrenched him and kept Mike "OGL Spambot" Mearls.
I remember our group had fun with the first 3 Freeport modules (Madness, Terror, Death? Anyway, an escalating title sequence). But then, I was a bit of a Mythos fan.
Green Ronin iirc.
Quote from: Scrivener of Doom;1122799Rich Baker.
Rich Baker.
And the best 4E adventures? Rich Baker.
Of course, WotC retrenched him and kept Mike "OGL Spambot" Mearls.
Also the man behind Primeval Thule. I ran Forge of Fury a couple times. I am currently running Thule, Red Hand of Doom, and Princes of the Apocalypse - by Rich Baker.
Tomb of Abysthor - Not quite a megadungeon, but at 6 levels, close enough. Jaquay-esque layout, colourful and thematic encounters.
Red Hand of Doom - Proof that not all scripted adventures suck. RHoD is epic done right.
Lost Kingdoms: Mesopotamia - Badly marketed as a historical sourcebook, when really it was an outstanding sword and sorcery lost ruins sandbox.
Vault of Larin Karr was a cool little sandbox campaign/mega-adventure. Necromancer Games, I believe?
My favaorites include some of the early titles from Necromancer Games (although I was less impressed with Rappan Athuk):
- Wizard's Amulet/Crucible of Freya
- Tomb of Abysthor
- Demons & Devils
- Vault of Larin Karr
Other d20 modules that I still return to from time-to-time include:
- Three Days to Kill by John Tynes for Atlas Games
- Dark Chateau by Rob Kuntz (part of the Castle Zagyg series, TLG)
- Dark Druids by Rob Kuntz (TLG, but later reprinted as AD&D stats by Chaotic Henchmen)
- Black Ice Well (Monkeygod, who also had several other good adventures)
- "The Watchers" series of solo thief adventures from Wyvern's Claw Design were also excellent
- Erik Mona Greyhawk work in Living Greyhawk ("River of Blood" and "As He Lay Dying"), and "The Whispering Cairn" (along with the rest of "The Age of Worms")
- Wolfgang Baur's Open Design books, in particular Castle Shadowcrag, Empire of the Ghouls, and Arabian Nights
Allan.
Quote from: Haffrung;1122947Tomb of Abysthor - Not quite a megadungeon, but at 6 levels, close enough. Jaquay-esque layout, colourful and thematic encounters.
Red Hand of Doom - Proof that not all scripted adventures suck. RHoD is epic done right.
Lost Kingdoms: Mesopotamia - Badly marketed as a historical sourcebook, when really it was an outstanding sword and sorcery lost ruins sandbox.
Red Hand of Doom works really hard to avoid being a railroad. I saw a good deal of divergance from the default without harming the core story at all - quite the reverse. It is excelently done with the timeline and victory points system.
Necromancer Games produced most of my favourites.
- The Tomb of Abysthor is a six-level dungeon that is just large enough to feel vast, but just small enough not to wear out its welcome. It has a lot of fun navigation possibilities, strong factions, and altogether well-made encounters. This is the most fun we have had with a published d20 module.
- Rappan Athuk has since been reissued numerous times, but the first version is the leanest (the others start to become too much of a good thing). With the first two installments, you have a charismatic, difficult-as-hell megadungeon where you can send your players to obtain some rare item, seek some kind of wisdom, or defeat a great evil. And die. Die a lot of times.
- The Vault of Larin Karr is one of the purest realisation of what is now called a "sandbox campaign" (and it helped define the term in its time). You get a small valley, its communities, its adventure sites, its underworld, and all of this is linked together in both physical and relational ways. High level of craftmanship.
- The Crucible of Freya is a good intro module that starts campaigns with a bang.
- Raise the Dead was plain fun - a collection of scenarios to use when your players need someone raised, but aren't powerful enough yet. Some of it is a bit on the meaner side.
These are the standouts; most of their line was good to excellent, but the modules written by Clark Peterson & Bill Webb are what defined "Third edition rules, first edition feel". Granted, I think Bill was running OD&D all along, and others did the conversion for him. :cool:
I was favourably impressed by the
Freeport modules, although more for the setting than the scenarios. Cthulhu + pirates + D&D, and it works like a charm. On the weirder side,
The Scarred Lands was a visionary take on modern D&D - a land ravaged by titans, and still trying to recover from the devastation. There were a lot of highly specific d20 settings which are rather neat (e.g.
Testament, for Biblical-era roleplaying), and a far cry from the cynical cash grabs which ended up damaging the reputation of 3rd-party stuff, but many of these are probably better off with a non-d20 system.
Quote from: S'mon;1122817Also the man behind Primeval Thule. I ran Forge of Fury a couple times. I am currently running Thule, Red Hand of Doom, and Princes of the Apocalypse - by Rich Baker.
I've been meaning to have a proper look at Thule. I really want to run a 13th Age campaign but don't like the included world. I've been digging into Midgard a bit as a possible alternative but also want to take a close look at Thule simply because of the Rich Baker connection.
Quote from: Haffrung;1122947(snip) Lost Kingdoms: Mesopotamia - Badly marketed as a historical sourcebook, when really it was an outstanding sword and sorcery lost ruins sandbox.
We've been looking at a Dark Sun campaign and I cannot help but think how so much of this would be perfect for Athas with minimal adaptation.
Quote from: Scrivener of Doom;1123084I've been meaning to have a proper look at Thule. I really want to run a 13th Age campaign but don't like the included world. I've been digging into Midgard a bit as a possible alternative but also want to take a close look at Thule simply because of the Rich Baker connection.
Yeah, I have 13th Age and I like Thule a lot better than the default world. Some of the Thule Icons are maybe a bit iffy for 13A, though it's nice they include them in every version of Thule as it makes for good PC background. I especially like the good mortal icons like Orethya the Last Hero of Imystrahl, and the Sage of Atlantis Hyar Thomel.
I was going to post, but realized I'd just be repeating what grodog and Melan said. The Bill Webb modules that originated from his TSR D&D games were my favorites. I think the first module of the Rappan Athuk series was pretty good, but I wasn't as impressed with the later additions. Also agree with Melan on Green Ronin's Freeport and setting books like Testament. Their Black Company setting book was interesting, too, although I would never run it (or others like Testament) with 3E, these days.
Quote from: Scrivener of Doom;1123084I've been meaning to have a proper look at Thule. I really want to run a 13th Age campaign but don't like the included world. I've been digging into Midgard a bit as a possible alternative but also want to take a close look at Thule simply because of the Rich Baker connection.
We've been looking at a Dark Sun campaign and I cannot help but think how so much of this would be perfect for Athas with minimal adaptation.
Scarred Lands is good for 13th Age. Just use gods and titans as icons. You want the original gazetteer or campaign setting however, not the awful Onyx Path redo.
Freeport seems to have been very well remembered. I never ran it myself, or even read it, that I recall.
Quote from: S'mon;1123092Yeah, I have 13th Age and I like Thule a lot better than the default world. Some of the Thule Icons are maybe a bit iffy for 13A, though it's nice they include them in every version of Thule as it makes for good PC background. I especially like the good mortal icons like Orethya the Last Hero of Imystrahl, and the Sage of Atlantis Hyar Thomel.
Interesting.
I also love how the narratives work so well as expanded backgrounds - and backgrounds, of course, are fundamental to the 13A skill system.
Quote from: TJS;1123110Scarred Lands is good for 13th Age. Just use gods and titans as icons. You want the original gazetteer or campaign setting however, not the awful Onyx Path redo.
Thanks for that suggestion. I will give that a look at some point - and avoid Onyx Path as you suggest. I must admit, I thought deities worked really well as icons in my Realms game, especially if you have access to the 2E trilogy that began with Faiths & Avatars as the manifestations suggested in there are often really good suggestions or models for using icon dice in play.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1123170Freeport seems to have been very well remembered. I never ran it myself, or even read it, that I recall.
I think it's mostly the setting concept, more than anything else: swords-n-sorcery with piracy and Cthulhu-ish elements and serpent-men. It probably didn't hurt that those early Freeport adventures hit at the very beginning of the d20 boom and had excellent Brom cover art. The adventures, themselves, aren't that special when stripped of the "Freeport fluff."
Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;1123229I think it's mostly the setting concept, more than anything else: swords-n-sorcery with piracy and Cthulhu-ish elements and serpent-men. It probably didn't hurt that those early Freeport adventures hit at the very beginning of the d20 boom and had excellent Brom cover art. The adventures, themselves, aren't that special when stripped of the "Freeport fluff."
A lot of the same stuff that made Fighting Fantasy's Port Blacksand so memorable, then...
That's a fair comparison (although Blacksand is ultimately better). It is a good hive of scum and villainy to conduct adventures in, and that takes Freeport's utility beyond the core adventure scenarios which helped define it.
It's hard to beat Blacksand. Except maybe Lankhmar!