Re: 10 Best Classic D&D Adventures That D&D 2024 Should Bring Back

On Tue, 25 Feb 2025 10:57:10 +0100, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/24/2025 6:13 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

But like I said, the adventures weren't really meant to be sold. They
were used to get people into stores, either to play in an in-store
event, or find a group there. And once you were there, you'd of course
want to buy something, even if it was the sourcebook for the campaign
you were currently in.
 
I'd rather WotC created its own full-length, well-written modules...
but still better the Adventurers League fluff than rehashing old
adventures.

>
Well, but aren't those just the equivalent of the old RPGA modules
(which also never got sold properly and in a lot of cases are really
hard to get nowadays... not that it's worth getting them in the first
place in a lot of cases I noticed)
>

Yeah, pretty much.

My point wasn't that they were good adventures, just that WOTC is (or
was? Somebody give me some updates about whether WOTC is still doing
Adventurers League stuff) still making adventures in addition to its
occassional splat and fluff books. They aren't entirely relying on
fan-works to fill in the gaps.


And also that I wish they'd expand from that to match the TSR era.

Well Dragonlance was the goose that was laying golden eggs. They even
moved that to a different system at one point (Saga?) which was supposed
to be better for the structure of the adventures as opposed to DND
modules. I think the intention was to spin that off from DND as much
as possible to get other people interested.

Yeah, like I said, TSR milked the poor franchise to death.
"Dragonlance" worked because (amongst other reasons) it was an epic
story that had a very definitive arc. The entire gameworld was built
to support that arc, and trying to expand the world beyond that just
didn't work very well. The later adventures were all rather awful and
silly.

(Saga, which was heavily card-based, seemed to be TSR flailing about
trying to create an RPG system that could compete with "Magic the
Gathering". Despite its failures in the RPG market "Dragonlance" still
had a lot of cachet --mostly thanks to its novels, which were
amazingly popular-- and from what I can tell it was picked more to
push SAGA than revitalize Dragonlance (although the latter was a hoped
for benefit too). From what I can remember, the change in system
alienated more fans than it attracted though.

(My opinion was that SAGA was arguably a good fit for Dragonlance,
since SAGA was a more narratively-based system that was more in tune
with the romantic fantasy of the franchise... but the writing was
awful, the authors attempts to expand the setting were awful (oh look,
Takhisis is back), and I generally didn't care for the mechanics of
the new game anyway. Neat that TSR was trying to push the series
forward... but it really just needed to leave the story lie where it
was. Not every story benefits from seeing what happens past the
"happily ever after".)