Agreed. You can definitely see other monsters that were clearly inspired by that design. Mostly, I liked it because the party (& DM) could CHOOSE how "big" of a part of the game this was going to be! A short, one-off dungeon crawl, that the party only stays just long enough to refill all their water supplies and continue their travels out of the desert? Or a freaking large segment (aka "mini-campaign") of the overall campaign? It's all up to the table.
I still have my original B6 The Lost City. I played Basic/Expert D&D in the 80s since the books were so much better written than the AD&D books at the time. I was also given the Basic & Expert boxed sets for my 10th birthday just before the classic red box Moldvay edition was released in 1983. The Lost City was a great module of the time. Very deep and complex dungeon, lots of hooks for further adventures for the DM to flesh out. Definitely one of my favorites.
I'm surprised The Lost City wasn't in the top 10 but this old list was hit & miss anyway. I suspect a lot of people didn't own the module back in the day as I've seen some other old timers say they didn't and were unfamiliar with it. Who doesn't like an injection of Conan-style sword & sorcery though?
One of my favorite classic modules was 1985’s “Where Chaos Reigns”, a time travel adventure where you fix the history of entire world from Stone Age to their modern age of magic, then have your final confrontation against the frikkin’ BORG (6 years before they appear in Star Trek, interestingly enough)
Oh, I absolutely LOVED Where Chaos Reigns! Time Travel? Seeing how "everything" evolved on this other world? Becoming LITERAL figures of myth & legend on said world? What is not to like? Sadly, I never got to play or run it, but I READ it multiple times over the years! (it is just THAT good)
I ran it when it first came out. Yes, it's very much a Scooby Doo thing in its first iteration. Not so much anymore in 5E. The 5E version has factions, intrigue, etc, that the original did not. However, the first version set the stage for, to my memory, the first ever aquatic campaign. Struggling to find a way to make sure everyone could breath underwater was a thing, as was treasure loaded with pearls and silver. It's also the only place, outside of Wave from White Plume Mountain, where any magical tridents existed. Politics and negotiation were key. Lizardfolk were everywhere. And you learned to fear Sahuaghin and Sharks.
Lost City is one of my favorites. And It has tons of creatures, but not necessarily tons of fights. That's because old school D&D used the premise of Reaction Rolls, where, if the GM didn't want to impose a certain encounter style, they would Roll on a Reaction table to see the disposition of the creature. And most of the time, they would be neutral. Also, Basic D&D is a game of exploration where you gain levels by getting treasure. So sneaking your way to the gold and sneaking back out was more rewarding in general than killing everything in your path (and even the fights were brief due to the simplicity of the system and the Morale Rolls, which greatly help the characters stay alive, since not all monsters would fight to the death).
Fun fact - I recently saw an interview with Allen Hammack (the author) and he said he often runs Ghost Tower of Inverness at conventions. Would be cool to have the author run the game.
@@amuppet6678 I sat in one of his game sessions at Rising Phoenix Con back in April. There is nothing like sitting at the table of the author of the adventure, especially one like The Ghost Tower of Inverness. I had the pleasure of sitting at Frank Mentzer’s table at Philadelphia Area Game Expo, back in January. Another bucket list experience.
City of the Spider Queen was one of my favorites of all time and I expanded on it and ran it as a full campaign back when it first came out. A couple of the players that were a part of it still like to tell stories about some of the things their characters did, even to this day.
Definitely loves me some Saltmarsh. I even quite enjoyed the 5e update, mainly for the fleshed out setting. As a relatively lazy DM, I can appreciate when the settings are laid out for me! 😁
I never thought of the old D&D modules as a shared experience thing. Back when I played DND in the 80s I liked modules because you just buy it, read through it and play. Nowadays prepping for your D&D campaign is a hell of a lot of work because the best you have is some books with general information maybe some encounters but you have to figure it all out yourself and glue it together which really is a deterrent to playing because it's a lot of prep time I have to do as a DM. I miss the modules.
I hear you. The softcover modules didn't cost an arm and a leg either. I've only bought 1 5th edition module, Descent into Avernus. It was an epic mess. I had to rewrite it. They should have given me money to take it.
That's literally why they were called Modules to begin with. It was supposed to have been easy to plug and play into your existing campaigns. Now they are an entire campaign setting of their own.
Look at I2 Dwellers of the Forbidden City for the outline of a great adventure series / campaign. It’s just a shell really but it’s got huge potential for repeated sessions.
I can not recommend City of the Spider Queen enough!! For my group's campaign, I converted City of the Spider Queen into 5E. I also made new maps in Inkarnate and DungeonDraft. I replaced the module's abyssal army with an abyssal army led by Eltab, and had a mid-module boss battle in the coliseum with the PCs and "The Hidden" VS Eltab and a handful of custom made "Thralls". The NPCs and creatures in the module are amazing, and my group still talks about it as the best DnD experience they've had.
I remember being fascinated by the 'City of the Spider Queen' adventure when it came out. I still get a kick just looking at the cover. Unfortunately I never run it, and I think now my taste has changed so much that I don't think I would enjoy as much a module so hard and heavy on combat
I actually run this module as the GM. It was difficult because between level 10-15 the stats for monsters become really difficult to manage in 3rd edition. Also, there is a lot of multitemplates (drow+vampire+multiclass+whatever). Also, your party NEEDS a cleric for sure. Today I will run it but skipping many parts for sure.
My 14-year-old self, playing AD&D in 1979, wondered if I'd still be playing D&D when I was 50. I'm 57 now (almost 58) and I've played pretty much every year since 1979 and currently DM for 3 D&D groups. Whether a module is 'great' depends a lot on how the players and DM played it. A module is like a music score -- it comes to life only when 'played' and just like music, can be re-arranged and enjoyed in many different "styles".
I remember when the original Ravenloft was released. The small group my sister and I gamed with thought it was the greatest thing ever...still kind of do.
Cool! I miss walking into the D&D bookstore and seeing a wall of paperback modules. I sure the favorite of mine and my friends from 40 years ago is here ... the series might be called Against The Slave lords, we just called it the Slaver Series. Against The Giants was fun too.
Of these, "Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh" I had played it when it was pretty new (and I had no real idea of what I was doing!) so it holds a lot of nostalgia value. A few years ago I ran this and some other 1e Mods as an "Epic Old School Campaign" using 5e rules. I think the players enjoyed it more than I did, and I know I loved playing the old school cool adventures! :D ((U1-3; A1-4; G1-3 and I had planned on the D1-3/Q1 modules, too, but we ran out of time :) ))
Being old enough to have played with the red box basic game, I find it interesting how play has changed. The room to room fight the monsters game has become a much more in-depth character game. And while that is much more fun to me, I do love those old adventures.
Tsojcanth and Inverness were two of the first modules I obtained back in about '88 when I was first starting D&D! (I was 11, and would be twelve later that year!) They're still some of my favorites, including for the monsters booklet that was part of Tsojcanth, a "double-book" set that had the adventure in one part, and then monsters and new magic items (like the Lanthorn) in the the second. I have two copies of each now! ;)
These modules were so awesome. Had to make so many new characters back then because my group would get our backsides handed to us so many times! Lol Great fun and good times!
nice to mention assassin knot heard really good things about it i had L1 secret bone hill it was awesome.... one that i really liked though was castanamir's isle C3 it had an awesome door puzzle.
Really surprised to see that, 1 - 30, Dragonlance had such little representation. The 12 modules that made it up were groundbreaking in many ways and, of course, the reverberations of it's legacy is still being felt today.
I never considered the Dragonlance modules terribly good. Yes, top notice art work and story, but, (a) they didn't work without the set characters, (b) the followed books which in D&D is railroading beyond extremes to the point it made DMing hard, and (c) it never felt rewarding to play or DM as the outcome was already known.
I think my personal favorite was B1 In Search of the Unknown. But thats also probably because it was my very first introduction into D&D after finding it in my grandparents closet.
@@Jorphdan certainly wasn't trying to call you out, just trying to help you be thorough. I appreciate that you have been mentioning when things were reprinted. I remember a bunch of the modules you've listed in the first two videos, though a few were new to me. I have run a couple both back in the day, and since coming back in 5e. I have enjoyed most that I've tried. Really love these, and need to catch up on your alternate channel.
Played several of these, loved Assassins Knot. My DM was so good, that one of the NPCs from this adventure kept popping up later in the campaign harrasing us after adventures.
#30 deserves to be much higher in my opinion, but I am a fan of tossing an occasional puzzle, whether a physical one like the chess board or mental ones like riddles. Don't ask how many times I've used a chessboard in an adventure in my DM career. I was raised on chess and chess puzzles from my youth, so in my 43ish years of DMing the answer to "how many" is "a lot". But the ones required for the actual adventure were fairly straightforward while the more convoluted ones were just for side story bits or extra treasures that weren't story required. #28 I liked for the expansion possibilities of the module, which was a hook included in several of the basic modules, including B2, the Keep on the Borderlands which had a mysterious cave opening on the area map but no details of what might lie within. This module fleshed that expansion area out more and made it very interesting. I had quite a few pages of notes on my planned expansion of the module, but then I started focusing on making my own adventures and never ran this one again. #27 is a great and fun module, even if/even though it has Scooby-Doo elements here and there. When presented properly with the right atmosphere it is at its best, but it is fun all around. #25 I really enjoyed this module as I really enjoyed the book it is based on, but it was pretty much the only one of the series that I remember feeling anything about, which is sad. They were all railroad adventures, but they were based on established books so that is to be expected. That might have killed a lot of my excitement over the later adventures. #22 was a great higher level hit and run adventure, with a story that just made it more interesting. Even more so when it got expanded on indirectly in future editions. #21 is one of the better of the third party adventures (probably second or third in my mind. I'm curious to see if my #1 is on this list or not) made for AD&D. A lot of small companies made products that could be used with AD&D and Judges Guild was possibly the most prolific and most successful of them all. I still have over a dozen JG adventures in my collection, but for every one I have there's another on my want list it seems... Looking forward to the next list!
The castle Amber was my fav to play and DM i think.For teaching beginning players to play ,i would use "The creature of Rhyll"module from Dragon magazine #55.It was perfect for new people to learn how to play D&D.
Man...I was really hoping for your opinion and why of your personal favorites and a long form video. But I'm still excited to have a listen to your newest video.
If there is interest in that I'll go ahead and make one. I would be hesitant because I haven't ran many of these published adventures. I still kinda want to rate the 5e adventures best to worst though.
@@Jorphdan I clicked for your opinion too. This list is a little outdated. You pointed me towards 'The dark of hot springs island' so I am curious what else you would recommend.
I ran a poll in a massive AD&D facebook group a few years ago to find out what the fans thought was the best... the results were somewhat different to the Dungeon Magazine article, which was a lazy exercise in industry back slapping. Summaries of the results are in a series of 4 videos on my youtube channel.
As in... Jorphdan: In-vern-ess Scotland: In-ver-ness Mind, The Ghost Tower of Inverness was written by Alabama native Allen Hammack. There is an Inverness in the Birmingham area of Alabama so maybe that's how locals pronounce Inverness in that part of the world. Given how Birmingham is pronounced in the US compared to how Birmingham is pronounced in the UK, In-vern-ess might not be so surprising 🙂
Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and Assassin's Knot deserved higher ratings IMHO. Absolute classics. Ghost Tower was a pretty silly adventure and unlike White Plume didn't have incredibly cool artifacts to steal... er... return to their rightful owners.
Of these I have only played The Ghost Tower of Inverness. It was, like, 15 years ago, and it was converted into 3.5e, but it was kinda cool and unexpected (although I don't remember much, and I think the DM abridged it a bit). Still very much old-school in difficulty.
A few comments on some of these from someone playing since 1979. Ghost Tower - great adventure and this year at GameHole Con I got to play in a 5e module called “Return to the Ghost Tower of Inverness”. It was run by the original author of Ghost Tower and was a lot of fun. The Lost City - one of favorites back in the day. So open and you could let your imagination run wild. I believe Moldvay used some inspiration from the Conan story “Red Nails” in developing it. There is a 5e conversion by Goodman Games that is very good. Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh - the whole U module series is fantastic but U1 is the best. Dragonlance - I never got into any Dragonlance back in the day. I had friends who did but I’m just now coming to DL and reading the novels etc… Mostly in prep for the 5e DL. City of the Spider Queen - OMG, this one needs to be higher up! Fantastic adventure. Forgotten Tenple of Tharizdun- this ranks in my personal top 10 and sets in motion a lot of darker D&D lore. It can be absolutely brutal on PC’s and can easily end in a TPK. S4 - another that I think needs to be higher.
I played through coty of the spider queen as a teenager. Well kind of the dm modified our adventure quite a bit because he read the series and the drizzt books. I didnt find out he had adapted a module until after we finished
6:30 Dragons of Despair was the first module I ran where the players decisions culminated in the adventure ending way to quick. The players had been hauling around a maul of the Titans (random loot drop) and three of them held the maul over the open well at the top, where the dragon sleeps at the bottom. I made them all roll. 2 nat 20's and an 18 to drop it with some accuracy. Doing the maths later... Even if they I rolled almost all ones, with fall dmg, the dragon would have still died. Lol I have never been so frustrated & proud of my players @ the same time lol
most fun I had was running Barrier Peaks (and probably the "Giant" series)- the players didn't have the slightest idea wtf was going on in Peaks due to my somewhat misleading/vague description of the situation :)
Still can't believe Tsojcanth was this low. Not even counting the debut of Iggwilv and the Demonomicon, the inclusion of an utterly MASSIVE 32-page addendum with monsters (Xeg-Yi! Dao and Marid! Motherf**king GRAZ'ZT!!!!), magic items, and spells made this module practically a sourcebook - and let's remember, this was at a time when the ENTIRETY of D&D sourcebooks was PH, DMG, MM and FF and most modules had maybe a couple of weapons or a small selection of new monsters. Yes, it was later made redundant by most of its new content showing up in MM2 and UA, but at the time of its release all of that additional content made it far more than just a module.
I would seriously suggest you have a watch of the video by YeOldeGeek called "The Greatest AD&D Modules Ever" which discusses this Top 30 list found in Dungeon magazine #116. I would have to agree with Ye Olde Geek, the Dungeon magazine article was really a marketing back-slapping exercise. Have a watch of his four-part "The Greatest AD&D Modules Ever" series for perhaps a better rundown of popular (which doesn't really mean "best") modules.
There was a lot of grumbling when this list was put out. A lot of great adventures scored lower than they should have been or were left off entirely. There were also a lot of mediocre adventures which made it on there. My test for whether or not an adventure is truly great is if people still run the adventure years after it was first released. If an adventure crosses over into new editions of the game, you know its good. My picks from this list are: B4 Lost City, U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, WG4 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and Dark Tower. All of these could/should be in the top 15.
Interested to see the next video in this but can’t figure out how to get there. The linked video is listed as private and there isn’t another in your home page. Great video though!
Dragon's of Despair was an interesting adventure as written but the PCs are basically just expected to attack the fortress and then wander from room to room killing everything which is kind of same old same old. I did a full conversion (taking it out of the Dragonlance Setting though this could work in Dragonlance). Once the PCs get into the Fortress there are all these woman slaves who more or less have the run of the place. PC goal is to start and aid a massive slave uprising (the men are all in the mines below the fortress). DM needs to make mechanics for an uprising and plan out what all the bad guys do when the slave revolt begins. PCs disguise themselves as woman and can pretty much investigate the majority of the fortress (with some stealth skill checks they can get almost everywhere) and must devise a plan on where and how to start the slave revolt and where they will move in the complex to support that slave revolt based on all the information they have. I gave my players a really big map of everything they had explored and they spent pretty much a whole session working out their plan before it turned into a huge climatic battle to see how that worked out in the following session. This works well here because the PCs kind of need to be on both sides of the fortress at once... the woman are concentrated on one side but the males need to be freed from the mines on the other. The PCs can split the party or try and beat the clock (the bad guys learning of and reacting to the revolt) to try and resolve this conflict.
thanks for this video. I do not always agree with the fun side of certain modules but I respect the choice of the team of "wise men of the dungeon". I can't wait to see the rest, to know the title of the winner and to see the proportion of modules that make up my collection. On this one, I have seven; which is an honorable average, it seems to me. Goodbye !
The lost temple of Tharizdun also has one notable feature - it put a lightsaber into AD&D 😀 An item called the Wand of Force. ruclips.net/video/q0ROIm_pVrA/видео.html
Nope didn't recognize any of those dungeon designers. Enjoyed Ghost Tower. Assassins Knot was a failed attempt at creating a murder mystery. Needed an experienced DM to actually make it work. Cult of the Reptile God does the same thing but way better . Not sure what Leonard got wrong in this one. It seemed to be all red herrings. We spent days in that stupid Tavern in Garotteton ESPING on everyone who came in there. I've never been in a tavern where so little information was ever discovered. We finally in desperation castled up with the Restenford Princess but she was still mystically slain and we left the Spindrift/Lendore Islands never to return. Supremely unsatisfying. Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh was great and deserves to be higher. Lots of fun, great playability. Notoriety Scale? Honestly? Doesn't the DM just do this. Dragons of Despair was terrible. Cover is awesome. Apparently it is the least railroady of the Dragon modules. Cause we found it to be a boring railroad mess where nothing we did mattered. But cool cover. Cool dragon. Played the one never another. Lost Caverns deserves a higher rank. Great module and a great overland adventure. We did it in one massive 10 in the morning till 2 in the morning session. Great fun. Dark Tower is top ten as is Caverns of Thracia.
Nothing from 4e or 5e would make the list imo. If you include OSR products you can easily fill this list out. You would be spoiled for choice from 31 to 50. On this list The Lost City is a favourite of mine. I still have the original on my shelf.
100% for B4 Lost City- The illustration of Zargon is the heart of D&D for me.
Agreed. You can definitely see other monsters that were clearly inspired by that design.
Mostly, I liked it because the party (& DM) could CHOOSE how "big" of a part of the game this was going to be!
A short, one-off dungeon crawl, that the party only stays just long enough to refill all their water supplies and continue their travels out of the desert?
Or a freaking large segment (aka "mini-campaign") of the overall campaign? It's all up to the table.
The Lost City. I never get tired of running it in different systems.
I still have my original B6 The Lost City. I played Basic/Expert D&D in the 80s since the books were so much better written than the AD&D books at the time. I was also given the Basic & Expert boxed sets for my 10th birthday just before the classic red box Moldvay edition was released in 1983. The Lost City was a great module of the time. Very deep and complex dungeon, lots of hooks for further adventures for the DM to flesh out. Definitely one of my favorites.
It’s B4. 🤗 B6 is the Veiled Society.
I have and like both. Got that mixed up.
The Lost City is an underrated masterpiece
I'm surprised The Lost City wasn't in the top 10 but this old list was hit & miss anyway. I suspect a lot of people didn't own the module back in the day as I've seen some other old timers say they didn't and were unfamiliar with it. Who doesn't like an injection of Conan-style sword & sorcery though?
One of my favorite classic modules was 1985’s “Where Chaos Reigns”, a time travel adventure where you fix the history of entire world from Stone Age to their modern age of magic, then have your final confrontation against the frikkin’ BORG (6 years before they appear in Star Trek, interestingly enough)
Oh, I absolutely LOVED Where Chaos Reigns!
Time Travel? Seeing how "everything" evolved on this other world? Becoming LITERAL figures of myth & legend on said world?
What is not to like?
Sadly, I never got to play or run it, but I READ it multiple times over the years! (it is just THAT good)
Such a cool adventure and I'm absolutely stunned that the Ord (I think that was the Borg guy's name?) have never been used for much after this!
That is an amazing module, and I loved the art throughout. A shame I never got to run it.
One of my favorites. I'd argue the entire CM series is pretty solid.
The Saltmarsh adventure sounds like a Scooby-Doo plot
I ran it when it first came out. Yes, it's very much a Scooby Doo thing in its first iteration. Not so much anymore in 5E.
The 5E version has factions, intrigue, etc, that the original did not.
However, the first version set the stage for, to my memory, the first ever aquatic campaign. Struggling to find a way to make sure everyone could breath underwater was a thing, as was treasure loaded with pearls and silver. It's also the only place, outside of Wave from White Plume Mountain, where any magical tridents existed. Politics and negotiation were key. Lizardfolk were everywhere. And you learned to fear Sahuaghin and Sharks.
And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for this meddling comment.
Pretty much
@@DaveThaumavore OLD MAN JENKINS??
@@EmeraldTG it was him the whole time. So obvious in hindsight.
Lost City is one of my favorites.
And It has tons of creatures, but not necessarily tons of fights. That's because old school D&D used the premise of Reaction Rolls, where, if the GM didn't want to impose a certain encounter style, they would Roll on a Reaction table to see the disposition of the creature. And most of the time, they would be neutral. Also, Basic D&D is a game of exploration where you gain levels by getting treasure. So sneaking your way to the gold and sneaking back out was more rewarding in general than killing everything in your path (and even the fights were brief due to the simplicity of the system and the Morale Rolls, which greatly help the characters stay alive, since not all monsters would fight to the death).
The Lost Tower of Inverness was a great adventure, we had a lot of fun playing it back then. We also really enjoyed the Giants 3 adventure series.
Fun fact - I recently saw an interview with Allen Hammack (the author) and he said he often runs Ghost Tower of Inverness at conventions. Would be cool to have the author run the game.
@@amuppet6678 I sat in one of his game sessions at Rising Phoenix Con back in April. There is nothing like sitting at the table of the author of the adventure, especially one like The Ghost Tower of Inverness.
I had the pleasure of sitting at Frank Mentzer’s table at Philadelphia Area Game Expo, back in January. Another bucket list experience.
City of the Spider Queen was one of my favorites of all time and I expanded on it and ran it as a full campaign back when it first came out. A couple of the players that were a part of it still like to tell stories about some of the things their characters did, even to this day.
Definitely loves me some Saltmarsh. I even quite enjoyed the 5e update, mainly for the fleshed out setting. As a relatively lazy DM, I can appreciate when the settings are laid out for me! 😁
I haven't played seriously in almost 30 years, but this video brought back some great memories, and made me wish I could get back into gaming.
No better time than the present to seek and find what was lost
While caverns was cool and Salrmarsh was great, the Ghost Tower has a special place in my heart as the first great Wizard puzzle tower.
I never thought of the old D&D modules as a shared experience thing. Back when I played DND in the 80s I liked modules because you just buy it, read through it and play. Nowadays prepping for your D&D campaign is a hell of a lot of work because the best you have is some books with general information maybe some encounters but you have to figure it all out yourself and glue it together which really is a deterrent to playing because it's a lot of prep time I have to do as a DM. I miss the modules.
I hear you. The softcover modules didn't cost an arm and a leg either. I've only bought 1 5th edition module, Descent into Avernus. It was an epic mess. I had to rewrite it. They should have given me money to take it.
That's literally why they were called Modules to begin with. It was supposed to have been easy to plug and play into your existing campaigns. Now they are an entire campaign setting of their own.
Great starting video about the classics of old school D&D.
I've been a DM for over 40 years, and am running my current group through Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh for the first time ever. VERY excited.
Im designing my own module. I was always a fan of the sandbox adventures like isle of dread.
Look at I2 Dwellers of the Forbidden City for the outline of a great adventure series / campaign. It’s just a shell really but it’s got huge potential for repeated sessions.
Look at The Dark of Hotsprings Island and “Neverland” for some modern hex crawls that have amazing ideas and formatting.
I can not recommend City of the Spider Queen enough!!
For my group's campaign, I converted City of the Spider Queen into 5E. I also made new maps in Inkarnate and DungeonDraft. I replaced the module's abyssal army with an abyssal army led by Eltab, and had a mid-module boss battle in the coliseum with the PCs and "The Hidden" VS Eltab and a handful of custom made "Thralls".
The NPCs and creatures in the module are amazing, and my group still talks about it as the best DnD experience they've had.
I'm looking to do the same as soon as the current campaign I'm running winds up.
Any suggestions for resources for the 5e conversion?
I remember being fascinated by the 'City of the Spider Queen' adventure when it came out. I still get a kick just looking at the cover. Unfortunately I never run it, and I think now my taste has changed so much that I don't think I would enjoy as much a module so hard and heavy on combat
Think so too. I loved the style the idea and the one eyed clericess from Kiaransalee. But I think today my players won´t like such an adventure.
I actually run this module as the GM. It was difficult because between level 10-15 the stats for monsters become really difficult to manage in 3rd edition. Also, there is a lot of multitemplates (drow+vampire+multiclass+whatever). Also, your party NEEDS a cleric for sure. Today I will run it but skipping many parts for sure.
My 14-year-old self, playing AD&D in 1979, wondered if I'd still be playing D&D when I was 50. I'm 57 now (almost 58) and I've played pretty much every year since 1979 and currently DM for 3 D&D groups. Whether a module is 'great' depends a lot on how the players and DM played it. A module is like a music score -- it comes to life only when 'played' and just like music, can be re-arranged and enjoyed in many different "styles".
Great video as always Jordan! Keep up the good work!
The original Ravenloft will always be my favorite. That being said, Curse of Strahd is amazing.
I remember when the original Ravenloft was released. The small group my sister and I gamed with thought it was the greatest thing ever...still kind of do.
Cool! I miss walking into the D&D bookstore and seeing a wall of paperback modules. I sure the favorite of mine and my friends from 40 years ago is here ... the series might be called Against The Slave lords, we just called it the Slaver Series. Against The Giants was fun too.
Loved it - don't forget Queen of the Demonweb Pits that was the supposed final leg of that series.
@@Ellis_Hugh I ran the whole series - took ages (I heavily modded it and made the monsters time reactive) but the players loved it
I’ve used “The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh” as a location in one of my games and it was a good bit of fun!
Of these, "Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh"
I had played it when it was pretty new (and I had no real idea of what I was doing!) so it holds a lot of nostalgia value. A few years ago I ran this and some other 1e Mods as an "Epic Old School Campaign" using 5e rules. I think the players enjoyed it more than I did, and I know I loved playing the old school cool adventures! :D
((U1-3; A1-4; G1-3 and I had planned on the D1-3/Q1 modules, too, but we ran out of time :) ))
Being old enough to have played with the red box basic game, I find it interesting how play has changed. The room to room fight the monsters game has become a much more in-depth character game. And while that is much more fun to me, I do love those old adventures.
Tsojcanth and Inverness were two of the first modules I obtained back in about '88 when I was first starting D&D! (I was 11, and would be twelve later that year!) They're still some of my favorites, including for the monsters booklet that was part of Tsojcanth, a "double-book" set that had the adventure in one part, and then monsters and new magic items (like the Lanthorn) in the the second. I have two copies of each now! ;)
These modules were so awesome. Had to make so many new characters back then because my group would get our backsides handed to us so many times! Lol Great fun and good times!
nice to mention assassin knot heard really good things about it i had L1 secret bone hill it was awesome.... one that i really liked though was castanamir's isle C3 it had an awesome door puzzle.
Really surprised to see that, 1 - 30, Dragonlance had such little representation. The 12 modules that made it up were groundbreaking in many ways and, of course, the reverberations of it's legacy is still being felt today.
I never considered the Dragonlance modules terribly good. Yes, top notice art work and story, but, (a) they didn't work without the set characters, (b) the followed books which in D&D is railroading beyond extremes to the point it made DMing hard, and (c) it never felt rewarding to play or DM as the outcome was already known.
The Lost CIty reminds me of a Fafrd and Grey Mouser story
I think my personal favorite was B1 In Search of the Unknown. But thats also probably because it was my very first introduction into D&D after finding it in my grandparents closet.
The Lost City was also redone by Goodman Games. Great video
Oh yeah it was! I missed that goodman-games.com/store/product/original-adventures-reincarnated-4-the-lost-city/
@@Jorphdan certainly wasn't trying to call you out, just trying to help you be thorough. I appreciate that you have been mentioning when things were reprinted. I remember a bunch of the modules you've listed in the first two videos, though a few were new to me. I have run a couple both back in the day, and since coming back in 5e. I have enjoyed most that I've tried.
Really love these, and need to catch up on your alternate channel.
Played several of these, loved Assassins Knot. My DM was so good, that one of the NPCs from this adventure kept popping up later in the campaign harrasing us after adventures.
Which npc was it?
I know some folks who are huge fans of the Pharaoh series, Nights Dark Terror, and Caverns of Thracia
#30 deserves to be much higher in my opinion, but I am a fan of tossing an occasional puzzle, whether a physical one like the chess board or mental ones like riddles. Don't ask how many times I've used a chessboard in an adventure in my DM career. I was raised on chess and chess puzzles from my youth, so in my 43ish years of DMing the answer to "how many" is "a lot". But the ones required for the actual adventure were fairly straightforward while the more convoluted ones were just for side story bits or extra treasures that weren't story required.
#28 I liked for the expansion possibilities of the module, which was a hook included in several of the basic modules, including B2, the Keep on the Borderlands which had a mysterious cave opening on the area map but no details of what might lie within. This module fleshed that expansion area out more and made it very interesting. I had quite a few pages of notes on my planned expansion of the module, but then I started focusing on making my own adventures and never ran this one again.
#27 is a great and fun module, even if/even though it has Scooby-Doo elements here and there. When presented properly with the right atmosphere it is at its best, but it is fun all around.
#25 I really enjoyed this module as I really enjoyed the book it is based on, but it was pretty much the only one of the series that I remember feeling anything about, which is sad. They were all railroad adventures, but they were based on established books so that is to be expected. That might have killed a lot of my excitement over the later adventures.
#22 was a great higher level hit and run adventure, with a story that just made it more interesting. Even more so when it got expanded on indirectly in future editions.
#21 is one of the better of the third party adventures (probably second or third in my mind. I'm curious to see if my #1 is on this list or not) made for AD&D. A lot of small companies made products that could be used with AD&D and Judges Guild was possibly the most prolific and most successful of them all. I still have over a dozen JG adventures in my collection, but for every one I have there's another on my want list it seems...
Looking forward to the next list!
Big fan of the lost caverns of tsojcanth!
The castle Amber was my fav to play and DM i think.For teaching beginning players to play ,i would use "The creature of Rhyll"module from Dragon magazine #55.It was perfect for new people to learn how to play D&D.
Man...I was really hoping for your opinion and why of your personal favorites and a long form video.
But I'm still excited to have a listen to your newest video.
If there is interest in that I'll go ahead and make one. I would be hesitant because I haven't ran many of these published adventures. I still kinda want to rate the 5e adventures best to worst though.
@@Jorphdan I clicked for your opinion too. This list is a little outdated.
You pointed me towards 'The dark of hot springs island' so I am curious what else you would recommend.
I ran a poll in a massive AD&D facebook group a few years ago to find out what the fans thought was the best... the results were somewhat different to the Dungeon Magazine article, which was a lazy exercise in industry back slapping.
Summaries of the results are in a series of 4 videos on my youtube channel.
Checking it out!
You mentioned Monte Cook, but not Zeb. I, good sir, am outraged. OUTRAGED, I say!
Jk, love the content, keep it up.
City of the Spider Queen has many cool characters and strange situations - definitely one of my favorites!
Jorphdan - Salt Marsh and Assassins Knot are my favs from this list, mostly because I played both.
As a Scot your pronunciation of 'Inverness' was very painful Jorphdan!
As in...
Jorphdan: In-vern-ess
Scotland: In-ver-ness
Mind, The Ghost Tower of Inverness was written by Alabama native Allen Hammack. There is an Inverness in the Birmingham area of Alabama so maybe that's how locals pronounce Inverness in that part of the world. Given how Birmingham is pronounced in the US compared to how Birmingham is pronounced in the UK, In-vern-ess might not be so surprising 🙂
Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and Assassin's Knot deserved higher ratings IMHO. Absolute classics. Ghost Tower was a pretty silly adventure and unlike White Plume didn't have incredibly cool artifacts to steal... er... return to their rightful owners.
Of these I have only played The Ghost Tower of Inverness. It was, like, 15 years ago, and it was converted into 3.5e, but it was kinda cool and unexpected (although I don't remember much, and I think the DM abridged it a bit). Still very much old-school in difficulty.
Lost city was rereleased as part of Goodman Games OAR line for 5e
Hahahahaha no
Love vids on all adventures
Salt marsh and the one with tasha seemed really cool to me. I wonder if some of these are modules for the gold box game engine.
A few comments on some of these from someone playing since 1979.
Ghost Tower - great adventure and this year at GameHole Con I got to play in a 5e module called “Return to the Ghost Tower of Inverness”. It was run by the original author of Ghost Tower and was a lot of fun.
The Lost City - one of favorites back in the day. So open and you could let your imagination run wild. I believe Moldvay used some inspiration from the Conan story “Red Nails” in developing it. There is a 5e conversion by Goodman Games that is very good.
Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh - the whole U module series is fantastic but U1 is the best.
Dragonlance - I never got into any Dragonlance back in the day. I had friends who did but I’m just now coming to DL and reading the novels etc… Mostly in prep for the 5e DL.
City of the Spider Queen - OMG, this one needs to be higher up! Fantastic adventure.
Forgotten Tenple of Tharizdun- this ranks in my personal top 10 and sets in motion a lot of darker D&D lore. It can be absolutely brutal on PC’s and can easily end in a TPK.
S4 - another that I think needs to be higher.
We went to different schools together
@@seanfaherty I’m confused….LOL
@@codingwithculp you like all the same modules as I do
Great video thank you
Assassin's Knot basically got me into OSR
I played through coty of the spider queen as a teenager. Well kind of the dm modified our adventure quite a bit because he read the series and the drizzt books. I didnt find out he had adapted a module until after we finished
6:30
Dragons of Despair was the first module I ran where the players decisions culminated in the adventure ending way to quick. The players had been hauling around a maul of the Titans (random loot drop) and three of them held the maul over the open well at the top, where the dragon sleeps at the bottom. I made them all roll. 2 nat 20's and an 18 to drop it with some accuracy.
Doing the maths later... Even if they I rolled almost all ones, with fall dmg, the dragon would have still died. Lol
I have never been so frustrated & proud of my players @ the same time lol
How exactly? The Maul does triple damage against inanimate objects, not sleeping dragons.
most fun I had was running Barrier Peaks (and probably the "Giant" series)- the players didn't have the slightest idea wtf was going on in Peaks due to my somewhat misleading/vague description of the situation :)
I owned/played all but The Dark Tower. My favorite from this list would be Dragons of Despair.
Still can't believe Tsojcanth was this low. Not even counting the debut of Iggwilv and the Demonomicon, the inclusion of an utterly MASSIVE 32-page addendum with monsters (Xeg-Yi! Dao and Marid! Motherf**king GRAZ'ZT!!!!), magic items, and spells made this module practically a sourcebook - and let's remember, this was at a time when the ENTIRETY of D&D sourcebooks was PH, DMG, MM and FF and most modules had maybe a couple of weapons or a small selection of new monsters. Yes, it was later made redundant by most of its new content showing up in MM2 and UA, but at the time of its release all of that additional content made it far more than just a module.
I would seriously suggest you have a watch of the video by YeOldeGeek called "The Greatest AD&D Modules Ever" which discusses this Top 30 list found in Dungeon magazine #116.
I would have to agree with Ye Olde Geek, the Dungeon magazine article was really a marketing back-slapping exercise. Have a watch of his four-part "The Greatest AD&D Modules Ever" series for perhaps a better rundown of popular (which doesn't really mean "best") modules.
Would you ever consider making a video on Elminster and his place in the Forgotten Realms?
I have stayed away from characters like him and Drizzt but maybe now is the time!
Wasn't the ghost tower mentioned in Wrath of the Dragon God?
There was a lot of grumbling when this list was put out. A lot of great adventures scored lower than they should have been or were left off entirely. There were also a lot of mediocre adventures which made it on there. My test for whether or not an adventure is truly great is if people still run the adventure years after it was first released. If an adventure crosses over into new editions of the game, you know its good. My picks from this list are: B4 Lost City, U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, WG4 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and Dark Tower. All of these could/should be in the top 15.
I ran a poll a few years ago in a big Facebook group - over 500 fans of the game votes. S4 came 1st.
@@yeoldegeek71 Hey Old Geek! I subscribe to your channel. I loved your videos covering the list and the adventures that didn't make it on.
@@chrishall5440 Thanks Chris :)
Seth Skorkwosky has reviewed some of these here on RUclips. You can check out his AD&D playlist for some gems. We’ll worth a watch.
Very good boy 👍
Here is the link to the song in the Dragon lance module. if you want to hear it
6:47
ruclips.net/video/49rgomEZkA4/видео.html
Interested to see the next video in this but can’t figure out how to get there. The linked video is listed as private and there isn’t another in your home page. Great video though!
Releases tomorrow!
The title of "Ghost Tower of Inverness" is a bit strange. Inverness is a city in Scotland.
I've used the map from "Dragons of Despair" several times.
how long does the dark tower take to run? would it go well in calimshan?
I liked the frontier forts of kelnore. A generic set of adventures set in the wilderness.
The Lost City is great.
For Saltmarsh --
Do a double rug pull
...
Vampirates
lost caverns was my favorite
The Dark Tower by Goodman Games doesn't match the picture in the video. Seems to be a paperback single volume at the link. No 5e adaptation mentioned.
Correct that's the original drive thru PDF. The remake is still in Kickstarter mode. Not available yet
I think it's time for Jorphdan to make a new list for adventures published after that original article.
For sure its The Lost City, i can not count the number of times i have used that or parts of it over the past 30 years in campaigns.
Dragon's of Despair was an interesting adventure as written but the PCs are basically just expected to attack the fortress and then wander from room to room killing everything which is kind of same old same old.
I did a full conversion (taking it out of the Dragonlance Setting though this could work in Dragonlance). Once the PCs get into the Fortress there are all these woman slaves who more or less have the run of the place. PC goal is to start and aid a massive slave uprising (the men are all in the mines below the fortress). DM needs to make mechanics for an uprising and plan out what all the bad guys do when the slave revolt begins.
PCs disguise themselves as woman and can pretty much investigate the majority of the fortress (with some stealth skill checks they can get almost everywhere) and must devise a plan on where and how to start the slave revolt and where they will move in the complex to support that slave revolt based on all the information they have.
I gave my players a really big map of everything they had explored and they spent pretty much a whole session working out their plan before it turned into a huge climatic battle to see how that worked out in the following session.
This works well here because the PCs kind of need to be on both sides of the fortress at once... the woman are concentrated on one side but the males need to be freed from the mines on the other. The PCs can split the party or try and beat the clock (the bad guys learning of and reacting to the revolt) to try and resolve this conflict.
Where's the love for Red Hand of DOOM?!
If the list does not include Frank Prosser’s home brew I gotta tell you you missed a couple. I’m sure we all
Know a few great home brewers
nice!
Didn't Goodman Games also re-release The Lost City?
I think so!
I think it includes the other levels included in the Spanish version but not the English version.
The Goodman version adds more stuff at the end which was left open in the original (not unusual for modules of that day).
“Dad? What’s a magazine?”
ruclips.net/video/7Xxn0jeJluw/видео.html
😂
I loved the Lost City but I don't remember it being mapped in 3d
thanks for this video.
I do not always agree with the fun side of certain modules but I respect the choice of the team of "wise men of the dungeon".
I can't wait to see the rest, to know the title of the winner and to see the proportion of modules that make up my collection.
On this one, I have seven; which is an honorable average, it seems to me.
Goodbye !
I’m trying to click the 20-11 video but it says it’s private :,0
Releases tomorrow!
@@Jorphdan oh thank you ^v^
I played 50 percent of the modules and I still have them.
Thumbs up for Oskar!
yeeah!!!
👍 for Oskar
The lost temple of Tharizdun also has one notable feature - it put a lightsaber into AD&D 😀
An item called the Wand of Force.
ruclips.net/video/q0ROIm_pVrA/видео.html
I played Inverness. Not very memorable for me. I owned Tsojcanth and Tharizdun. Never got to play them. I hope to run Saltmarsh.
Just so you know, the link you've put in for 20-11 is private.
Yep should be live now!
Nope didn't recognize any of those dungeon designers. Enjoyed Ghost Tower. Assassins Knot was a failed attempt at creating a murder mystery. Needed an experienced DM to actually make it work. Cult of the Reptile God does the same thing but way better . Not sure what Leonard got wrong in this one. It seemed to be all red herrings. We spent days in that stupid Tavern in Garotteton ESPING on everyone who came in there. I've never been in a tavern where so little information was ever discovered. We finally in desperation castled up with the Restenford Princess but she was still mystically slain and we left the Spindrift/Lendore Islands never to return. Supremely unsatisfying. Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh was great and deserves to be higher. Lots of fun, great playability. Notoriety Scale? Honestly? Doesn't the DM just do this. Dragons of Despair was terrible.
Cover is awesome. Apparently it is the least railroady of the Dragon modules. Cause we found it to be a boring railroad mess where nothing we did mattered. But cool cover. Cool dragon. Played the one never another.
Lost Caverns deserves a higher rank. Great module and a great overland adventure. We did it in one massive 10 in the morning till 2 in the morning session. Great fun.
Dark Tower is top ten as is Caverns of Thracia.
First?
Nice! :D
4:04 A dwarf named "Gilmi"? Seriously?
Lost City and Tsojcanth should be rated much higher. They are campaigns not an adventure.
89th?
Anyone remember Temple of the Frog?
You should look at Masks of Nyarlypoteph for call of cthulhu. It's the best rpg module ever
I have plans to convert this to a 7th Sea campaign. I just need to find the time & players. I'd expect it to take a couple of years to finish.
Come on CM1 Test of the Warlords....
300xp
Nothing from 4e or 5e would make the list imo. If you include OSR products you can easily fill this list out. You would be spoiled for choice from 31 to 50.
On this list The Lost City is a favourite of mine. I still have the original on my shelf.
I think some 4e stuff, I would love to include OSR and Pathfinder for the top 50!
Did you just not have or include Dungeon Magazine adventures? Many were better than these on the list.
He didn't make the list, he said in the video