Best D&D Adventure Designer Ever, Part 1: Introduction and Honourable Mentions

Introduction

“Which is the best D&D adventure ever?” is a good, and fun, question. But what might, in one specific sense, be an even better question is this: who is the best D&D adventure designer ever? When we consider composers and novelists, individual pieces or novels may be our favourites, but there is something to be learned from looking at bodies of work. Which writers are consistently good? What characterizes consistent writers (at least in terms of their “visible remains”)?
 
Some definitions and qualifications and exclusions. I’m looking at three qualities in the careers of these designers: the BREADTH of their good work (how many good adventures?), the ORIGINALITY of their good work (how trailblazing?), and the DEPTH of their good work (how interesting and distinctive and finessed?). I’m excluding non-adventures for clarity’s sake – that is, I am excluding modules which may include “adventure material” but are not developed environments to sit down and play sessions with. This doesn’t negatively affect many of the great designers, honestly – very few made their bones on non-adventure material. The only one who comes to mind is Ed Greenwood, whose best material comes from his old magazine column about monsters and from the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (1^st Edition) and FR1 Waterdeep and the North (his best adventure is in Dragon #95). Finally, I will include a number of “3^rd party writers” on this list – though I cannot pretend to have exhausted Judge’s Guild, Role Aids, the New Old School, and so forth.
 
I somehow feel obliged to salute the many writers who wrote, particularly, for TSR, who will not appear here in any other context – Rolston and Allston and Rabe and Grubb and Findley and Hammack and Rasmussen and the rest. A lot of writers contributed something worthwhile over time – even if it’s just a strangely excellent adventure in Dragon, and nothing more (Sid Fisher, take a bow!) – and even in the comparative hackwork of the mid and late 80s, there was real effort made. Nonetheless, only a few ascend to compete in my rankings.
 
Honourable Mentions
It’s tempting to give honourable mentions to just about every adventure designer who’s written anything I’ve liked. A number of excellent OSR designers fall short of this list by dint of small output (being normal people with busy lives), rather than by lack of quality. But who makes the “long list”?
 
Of the Old School itself, the most obvious candidates are the sub-Gygaxian mainstays – Douglas Niles, Tom Moldvay, and David “Zeb” Cook. Cook co-wrote X1 The Isle of Dread (sandbox Lost World joy) and the excellent OA1 Swords of the Daimyo (necessary for running Oriental Adventures in its original incarnation, really). OA4 Blood of the Yakuza and WGA4 Vecna Lives! certainly have their partisans, too. I have particular affection for his DS1 Freedom, the first D&D adventure I ever properly ran – quite railroad-y, but not wholly, and beautifully imagined. My players loved it. Cook’s strength is relative breadth – 5 1e/2e modules of real interest – but his weakness is the patchy quality. (ADDENDUM: His best, as I am reminded by a reader, is actually I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, an exotic pulpy location-based adventure with snakemen and frogmen and all kinds of craziness.)
 
Moldvay also co-wrote X1, but really gets here on the Gothic strains of X2 Castle Amber and the gonzo oddities of B4 The Lost City – definitely an original and interesting designer. Niles was incredibly proficient – and certainly some people have time for his H1-4 Bloodstone Pass series (I’m less convinced as of now). But he has two surpassing modules – N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God, a perfectly tuned “village adventure”-cum-mystery which turns into a classic dungeon crawl; and B5 Horror on the Hill¸ the ultimate refinement of B1 and B2, taking the best of both and turning them into a coherent and complete module. Niles’ great achievement was the polishing up of previous formats to their ultimate form.
 
The second batch of Hon Menshes is for a representative group of “third party” designers, chiefly of the New Old School, sounding like a circus troupe: Jaquays and Gus and Gavin and Kutalik and Patrick and Patrick. Jaquays wrote somewhat for TSR – both adventures and sourcebooks – but really this Mensh is for Caverns of Thracia and The Dark Tower. Caverns is deep and dense and dark and also wondrous, and Dark Tower is atmospheric as bliminey. Gus L has just written a lot of interesting, usually small, adventures – he offers both sheer breadth, but also a bunch of weird and wonderful contexts, particularly for Anomalous Subsurface Environment...on which note, Patrick #1 (Wetmore) hasn’t written much, and hasn’t published for a long time (we’re waiting on ASE4-5, dude! Force playtest!), but Anomalous Subsurface Environment (3 modules over 2 books) is an incredible setting, with a great megadungeon and a “home city” which serves as its own great adventure setting. The Other Patrick (Stuart) is great for writing fresh and weird stuff (even Fresher and Weirder than Gus or Wetmore). Maze of the Blue Medusa, Deep Carbon Observatory, and Silent Titans are all very different, all very weird, all very compelling – though sometimes suffer from usability issues (even in DCO Remastered).
 
The other two members of this group, like Wetmore, are basically (not wholly) One Setting Men. Chris Kutalik has written the various Hill Cantons modules (Slumbering Ursine Dunes, Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, Misty Isles of the Eld¸ and What Ho! Frog Demons, plus the sort-of-module Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid) – acid fantasy with a lot of organic comedy, a funky setting, great “escalation” mechanics, where if you cause chaos, magical chaos is sure to follow. Kutalik has five good modules – so he has some breadth – and he’s somewhat innovative with his escalation mechanics. There’s definitely depth, too. He just misses the higher tiers by a whisker.
 
Gavin Norman is the editor of the premiere Basic D&D retroclone, Old School Essentials, but for our purposes is the co-author of the Wormskin ‘zines (which include one full adventure), and the associated standalone Dolmenwood adventures The Weird That Befell Drigbolton and Winter’s Daughter. He’s written a few other modules – most notably the very good The Hole in the Oak – but it’s on Dolmenwood his design reputation rests at this point. The zines are full of gameable locales (that is, micro-adventures), and the adventures are very varied – from a Timed Adventure in Drigbolton, to a traditional dungeon crawl in the Abbey of St Clewd, to an odd but great hybrid of settings and moods in Winter’s Daughter. Gavin is an expert on depth, being very very good at realizing a setting in different modulations over his ‘zines and modules.
 
The final group of Hon Menshs is the “Uh, Somewhat Qualified Mentions”: Tracy Hickman, James Raggi, and Chris Perkins. I honestly believe all three men belong on this list (as, perhaps, does Tracy’s regular collaborator, his wife Laura) – but I think they all need whopping qualifications.
 
Hickman has originality, for good and bad, on his side – the dungeon plotting in DL1 Dragons of Despair and I6 Ravenloft is groundbreaking. He could write solid adventures – I3 Pharaoh and Ravenloft are both broadly very interesting modules. (Some like B7 Rahasia too.) But his influence on D&D adventure design was largely malign – even DL1 is pretty much a “dramatic” railroad, let alone the rest of that series, and Ravenloft has some of the same problems. His two most famous modules are archetypal of the decadence-turning-to-rot of mid-80s TSR.
 
Raggi has designed a number of interesting or compelling modules – Tower of the Stargazer, Better Than Any Man, Death Frost Doom, and The God That Crawls, amongst others, depending on taste – but that word, taste, really is key. Even the easiest of these modules – Stargazer – is at points perhaps rougher and crueller than many quite ruthless DMs will want. The others are often heavy on world-changing events, escalation mechanics, and Frankly Nasty Stuff. There’s definitely an acquired taste here.
 
Finally, Chris Perkins, Narrative Lead on Fifth Edition and lead designer of most Fifth Edition modules. He’s been writing since Dragon took submissions from random kids (like Chris Perkins!). He’s never written a categorical classic. Frankly, his published output with Wizards is basically all too much long and bloated. But...But...it’s basically actually quite interesting. It ranges from the solid (Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, an Undermountain reboot, or Curse of Strahd, which has a bunch of good locations in a crappy campaign structure) to the heavily dysfunctional but full of good stuff (Out of the Abyss, which flirts with brilliance in the Underdark, or Storm King’s Thunder, which has a lot of very usable setting stuff in a dysfunctional plot-driven campaign). At one point, at least, he’s hit on Actually Really Good: long sections of Tomb of Annihilation (particularly in the Tomb itself) are really very good. The caveats on Perkins are twofold: one, that the modules are bloated and only half-usable; and two, that he is nearly always leading a team of collaborators, so it’s hard to know which of the brilliant bits are his and which aren’t. I would say, however, that his influence on Fifth Edition design has been at worst “ambivalent” – perhaps Mearls is the more important influence back to a more creative play style, but Perkins is the one who’s done the heavy lifting on adventures throughout, and the adventures are on the whole better than in Third or Fourth.
 
That’s it for the Noble But Distant Competitors. Next time, we’ll move on to “The Pack” – the four (or eight, it’s complicated) designers who run The Best close, in my view.