Day 19 — Favourite Published Adventure
Too many to come up a single title. Choose from among the following:In Search of the Unknown — The first adventure I ever played in, and still one of the best step-by-step guides to creating and running a classic dungeon crawl.
Tomb of Horrors — An adventure I loved so much as a player that I rewrote it twice.
Slave Lords — The original four adventure modules A1–A4: Slave Pits of the Undercity, Secret of the Slavers’ Stockade, Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords, and In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords. Taken as a whole, the Slave Lords series is a perfect example of how narrative and dungeon crawling don’t have to be antithetical, and about how even the most straight-up adventures can make use of intrigue, mystery, and the unexpected to create compelling game story.
And in a break from this being an all-D&D award show:
Twilight’s Peak — Adventure 3 for the original Traveller system, Twilight’s Peak remains probably the single best adventure I’ve ever played. The scenario is a multilayered mystery whose every stage introduces more mystery, and which eventually draws the characters into the deepest secrets of the Traveller milieu. This melange of history, legend, and investigation is something that any number of Call of Cthulhu games have done in the long years since. But for me at the time, Twilight’s Peak was a wake-up call for understanding what kind of story and character development an RPG adventure could pull off.
(Archive post from the personal blog.)