Due to some ongoing work and personal stuff, I'm currently at a point where I'm going to have to wind down my homebrew campaign. I don't want to stop GM-ing entirely, though, so I'm looking for a published campaign to run. I'm hoping to find something that's pretty much plug-and-play, and this tends to be a good place to ask this kind of question.

Some of my top criteria would be:

--Osr or osr-adjacent: the whole point is to have something easy to run with minimal prep-work
--Maps are a necessity: my group plays on VTT, and the time involved in making maps is a big part of why I'm stopping my homebrew campaign. I've got plenty of generic forest and town maps, but Im looking for something with the dungeons already mapped.
Nothing super famous (Keep on the Borderlands, Castle Amber etc.): Several of my players are old hands, and will probably have already played the classics.
--Geared for OD&D/Basic would be a plus: I'd like to run this with Lamentations of the Flame Princess or some other Basic/BX style game. I honestly don't know how much of a power differential there is between ad&d and Basic characters, but I'd rather not have to do too much stat conversion on the monsters.

So yeah, I'm asking for recommendations. I know the whole adventure path concept burns a lot of Osr people, but I also know there's an old school tradition of mega-modules, so I figure there's probably some good stuff out there.

(Written on my phone, so formatting may be a little bit crap)

Hm, I love Stonehell but I think my top recommendation would be Barrowmaze. Another nice one is Gunderholfen. There aren't really OSR wilderness campaigns, but Rob Conley's Blackmarsh hex crawl is cool. Dragonbane RPG has a cool wilderness campaign with 11-12 adventure sites that could be converted.

I'd say that the first three of Gillespie's megadungeons (Barrowmaze, Forbidden Caverns, of Highfell) all fit well.  They include hex crawling, the home base(s) and plenty of dungeons that can take you from level 1-10 or higher.  Rappan Athuk would work too. 

If you want a sprawling, plane jumping campaign, I recommend City of Brass for Swords & Wizardry.  I'm itching to run it, but we've got other things ahead of it in the queue.  But that really is an adventure path that will take PCs to level 15 or higher and I think it's got some very interesting settings, encounters, and NPCs.

The Dark of Hot Springs Island might work for you.  It's a large hexcrawl area, well fleshed out but with some open areas for you to include your own stuff.  Most of the locations have maps to go with them.  The whole thing is written as setting neutral, and is easily adaptable.

While there are things going on on the island, there really isn't an "adventure path" for the PCs to walk along.

There is a 2nd book, A Field Guide to Hot Springs Island.  It's written as a more in-game tome.  It has journal pages, maps and other things from past adventurers that may offer aid to your current PCs.

Forbidden Lands : Bitter Reach

Forbidden Lands is a OSR like, not a true osr... but Forbidden Lands is all sorts of awesome.... Bitter Reach is fantastic imo, and it is an improvement on the base game. FL at it;'s heart is a hex crawl / base builder and as it is a hex crawl you can populate the map with pretty much anything you like. This means the DM can drop in anything cool they like. Buy an adventure book like The Spire of Quetzel or even anything from other systems and justb see where the player go. It is seriously cool and imo has some of the best emergent story telling I have seen outside of CoC.

Thanks for the recommendations, all.

Quote from: S'mon on May 19, 2023, 05:47:42 PM
Hm, I love Stonehell but I think my top recommendation would be Barrowmaze. Another nice one is Gunderholfen. There aren't really OSR wilderness campaigns, but Rob Conley's Blackmarsh hex crawl is cool. Dragonbane RPG has a cool wilderness campaign with 11-12 adventure sites that could be converted.

I was unaware of it before, but looking at it now, I'm pretty sure the GM for my Hyperborea campaign is actually running us through the Blackmarsh hexcrawl at the moment. At least two of the players from that game are likely to be in the next game I run, so I guess that one's out 

Do you know the name of that Dragonbane wilderness campaign?

Quote from: Persimmon on May 20, 2023, 10:15:41 AM
I'd say that the first three of Gillespie's megadungeons (Barrowmaze, Forbidden Caverns, of Highfell) all fit well.  They include hex crawling, the home base(s) and plenty of dungeons that can take you from level 1-10 or higher.  Rappan Athuk would work too. 

If you want a sprawling, plane jumping campaign, I recommend City of Brass for Swords & Wizardry.  I'm itching to run it, but we've got other things ahead of it in the queue.  But that really is an adventure path that will take PCs to level 15 or higher and I think it's got some very interesting settings, encounters, and NPCs.

I suspect the players I have in mind for this would prefer a wilderness or travel-based campaign to a megadungeon, so I'm going to have to put those lower on the list. City of Brass looks interesting though. I'll have to give it a read-through. S+W is B/X based, right, so the power-scale should map well to another B/X based game?

Quote from: rgalex on May 20, 2023, 12:00:13 PM
The Dark of Hot Springs Island might work for you.  It's a large hexcrawl area, well fleshed out but with some open areas for you to include your own stuff.  Most of the locations have maps to go with them.  The whole thing is written as setting neutral, and is easily adaptable.

That does look promising. The lack of stats would be a mark against it, but I like the maps a lot. Adding it to the list.

Quote from: Summon666 on May 20, 2023, 12:26:28 PM
Forbidden Lands : Bitter Reach

Forbidden Lands is a OSR like, not a true osr... but Forbidden Lands is all sorts of awesome.... Bitter Reach is fantastic imo, and it is an improvement on the base game. FL at it;'s heart is a hex crawl / base builder and as it is a hex crawl you can populate the map with pretty much anything you like. This means the DM can drop in anything cool they like. Buy an adventure book like The Spire of Quetzel or even anything from other systems and justb see where the player go. It is seriously cool and imo has some of the best emergent story telling I have seen outside of CoC.

Another cool one I hadn't heard of. It'd be a lot of conversion work, but If I like it maybe I'll consider going over to the Forbidden Lands rules.


Does anyone have any experience with Art of the Genre's Folio adventures? One of the things I had on my list for consideration was their Roslof Keep Campaign, I was also looking at Unsound Methods' The High Moors and The Oneiric Highlands campaign settings, if anyone is familiar with those. 

Swords & Wizardry is derived from OD&D so it's essentially a mid-point between AD&D and B/X.  But it's quite streamlined and easy to pick up.  They used to have a free pdf, but I'm not sure they still do that.  They just funded a new version in KS.

Quote from: ForgottenF on May 20, 2023, 02:26:38 PM
Do you know the name of that Dragonbane wilderness campaign?

It's the Misty Vale campaign in the Dragonbane core rules box - currently only in PDF https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/418106/Dragonbane-Core-Set?

If you're considering Forbidden Lands I'd say definitely get Dragonbane, it has FL influence but is still a traditional RPG. I find FL's hardcore approach and its Year Zero Engine system a bit intimidating, DB is very very easy to learn and play, my players love it. 

My Misty Vale campaign http://simonyrpgs.blogspot.com/2023/02/dragonbane-starter-rules.html
My Dragonbane Xoth Sword & Sorcery game (NSFW) https://simonyrpgs.blogspot.com/2023/03/sword-sorcery-cultures-for-dragonbane.html

Xoth (xoth.net) has a ton of adventures across thousands of miles and is great for sprawling S&S adventure. Dragonbane does wilderness survival really well (influenced by FL) so it's a great fit.

Quote from: ForgottenF on May 20, 2023, 02:26:38 PM
Does anyone have any experience with Art of the Genre's Folio adventures? One of the things I had on my list for consideration was their Roslof Keep Campaign, I was also looking at Unsound Methods' The High Moors and The Oneiric Highlands campaign settings, if anyone is familiar with those.

I own the 5e version of The High Moors and would love to run it, but my players preferred the pitch for the Runewild.

To vent just my critiques-after-studying of the High Moors:

• The hexcrawl takes place in an area very separate from the rest of the world, and rather sparsely populated / keyed - there are an awful lot of empty hexes, and not a lot of random events to flavour them with. I might try to shrink things.
• Practically speaking, it's weeks/months travel from hexcrawl to civilisation and back, which makes OSR-style training beyond the level present in the tiny base town difficult.
• There are some ticking plots from NPCs which don't seem to integrate well with the schedule of the campaign - if you don't put everything in suspended animation when the players step away, by the time the players can go to civilisation and return to the area of play once or twice, some world-shattering events will be unstoppable.
• Several of the more important locations seem to be gated by finding one particular key / hint in one particular other area, or in the worst case, three keys, hidden in three different areas, without IIRC any guidance to finding them. Or the "best" outcome on the confrontation with the big bad evil guy is only available through doing the one exactly right thing which is only hinted at by one entry on the random encounter table...

All that said, I want to run the setting, and I probably wouldn't add much to it (whereas I've added half a dozen OSR adventures to the Runewild) - but those are the conceptual issues I'd be wrestling with during campaign prep.

Chiming in to say, "thank you," to any and all that drop some info here as I'm hankerin' to do something with an OSR clone and a published campaign myself; that's what I appreciates about all of ya.