Best D&D Adventure Designer Ever, Part 2: The Pack

An Extra Honorary Mention
I should start this entry in the Best D&D Designer Ever competition with an addendum to my last – I actually WILL give Ed Greenwood an Hon Mensh, because I was rather lapse-mindedly putting Ruins of Undermountain in the “campaign setting” category, whilst in fact it contains an 80-page key of Undermountain, plus other detailed locations. Really Greenwood’s best work is usually in the format of gazetteers, which are adventure-adjacent but are not adventures – having some decent seeds and one location map does not an adventure make. Ruins is a proper location module, though, and pretty usable. Whilst I’m at it, SJR1 Lost Ships is a great Spelljammer book which offers 10 detailed adventure outlines and 34 short “adventure ideas” – many of them very good. It’s an indispensable book to run Spelljammer with. It takes Greenwood’s gazetteer skills and unleashes them on a setting which suffered badly from lack of ideas to that point.
 
(Which makes me think I need to give Richard Baker half a nod, too – a career of “actually that’s half-okay” work [Red Hand of Doom, Forge of Fury, Princes of the Apocalypse], plus the incredible SJR5 Rock of Bral, perhaps the best city book published by TSR.)
 
Anyway – between “Into the Forgotten Realms”, Ruins of Undermountain, and Lost Ships, it seems to me Greenwood shows a little breadth and, to a degree, genuine originality. Worth a Mensh, especially bearing in mind every other good adventure seed and map he put to paper.
 
But Who’s Chasing The Best?

I said there were four – or eight – candidates. I’ll explain that momentarily. But how do you qualify for this category?
 
I think extensive breadth, depth, and originality is necessary – not three varied modules and some interesting background material (like Greenwood), nor incredible depth in one area (Gavin Norman or Patrick Wetmore). These designers have provided, in their corpus, a real portfolio of work demonstrating every necessary skill – creativity, organisation, variety, innovative problems, wide interactivity, and so forth.
 
The four members of “The Pack” are: Anthony Huso, Gabor Lux, Carl Sargent, and what I’m calling The UK Crew (Jim Bambra, Graeme Morris, Dave Gallagher, Dave Browne, and Don Turnbull).
 
The Crew
Let’s start with that last entry. The Crew take one entry due to the consistent collaborative nature of their adventures for TSR – Bambra, Morris, and Gallagher wrote one adventure together; Browne and Turnbull wrote three; Morris/Bambra wrote one; Bambra/Gallagher wrote two; Browne, Morris, and occasional member Tom Kirby wrote one; Morris and Kirby wrote one; and Bambra wrote two on his own, whilst Morris wrote five on his own (16 total, to my knowledge). They represent a coherent school of work, largely over the UK and U series, but crossing into several other codes. Situations are often presented quite differently to what we might be used to, with different expectations set; good solutions are often lateral-but-quite-rational. For the purposes of this award, I’m going to highlight 7 of their adventures.
 
The adventure sharing the highest number of the Crew, and to some their best, is B10 Night’s Dark Terror (Bambra/Morris/Gallagher). That particular combination also wrote the 1^st Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying – itself a storied work. There’s a siege with actually good rules, with vivid foes; then a hexcrawl; evocative and spooky locales; a sudden, basically optional city section with a mystery; then a race section; then a Stakes-Heightened faction-playing-off finale in an atmospheric hidden valley, including a final Temple dungeon. All of this is excellently pulled off, and there are several twists and flourishes that are thoroughly “UK”: a hook involving herding valuable horses which descends into the siege; a faction of secret fox-men; strange and bizarre sidequests all over the hexmap; and a plot that unfolds quietly, growing from small-scale confusions and rent-paying-jobs into a civilisation-shaking scheme. The detail throughout is evocative, the range of action is incredible in a shortish B-series module, and the locations and incidents are stellar.
 
This characterises much of the Crew’s work: U1-3 by Browne and Turnbull, the famous Saltmarsh series, includes pirates and ghosts (or are they?) and escalating stakes, ending up underwater in a not-sucky underwater adventure. Very little it as it seems; the investigation encourages lateral thought and exploration; the world is realized. Bambra (not an author on this trilogy, reviewing the modules in White Dwarf), said of U2: "A lot of thought has gone into this module, monsters are not there to be slain, they have personalities and feelings which come across very well." There is a richness here, as in B10.
 
The final selection of Crew adventures to consider is from the UK series (like the U series, from TSR (UK)). UK4 When A Star Falls, by Morris, is not quite as good as some of the others listed here, being somewhat linear, but the plot is refreshingly odd – killing a new weird monster accidentally unveils a nascent civil war in an order of sages! – and the locations are distinctive (Clockwork Svirfnebli base! Derro lair!). UK6 All That Glitters... again sets up what feels like a new situation – wilderness adventures leading through undermountain tunnels of a lost civilisation...but not at all Underdark-y, not at all traditional, with a number of mysteries that remind me of Caverns of Thracia or even of Tekumel or S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Finally, UK1 Beyond the Crystal Cave is a rescue adventure in a sort-of-faery land where, uh, it turns out you shouldn’t really kill anything, and thorough exploration and negotiation across the map is the key to the whole thing. Often considered the best UK module (except B10, for that module’s partisans), it inverts a lot of player expectations and calls upon real player skill.
 
These adventures are rich in fresh, original locations, unusual plot hooks, mysteries, and good NPCs. There is breadth in the type of situation presented, and depth of realization (in B10, UK1, and U1, particularly). Apart from B10, it perhaps never feels as if the Crew transcend the merely Excellent, but the sheer volume of good, original work earns a place here.
 
Gabor Lux
Much the same can be said of OSR designer Gabor Lux. Gabor is immensely productive, and productive of good, gameable work. (There are ‘90s and ‘00s TSR/WOTC designers who produced no wholly good, gameable module despite writing a half dozen or more!)
 
Aside from a score of standalone modules – whether stray or in Echoes from Fomalhaut – Lux has also, in recent years, presented three campaign settings including detailed adventure material: Erillion and City of Vultures, in Echoes, and the hardback Castle Xyntillan.
 
Erillion is a Celtic island. There’s a lot of wilderness exploration, and Haughty Fantasy (if I am allowed to consume Gabor’s work in my genre definition) – vanilla high fantasy spun new. A typical Lux trope – cities of thieves with vast catacombs – recurs across the island, touching all but (I think) two of his adventures in the setting. The cities of Baklin (a standalone supplement), Gont, and Tirwas all have such catacombs, and the two ruined manors presented (which are quite distinct from each other) both have pretty serious mini-dungeons attached.
 
(Another trope that comes up again and again is absolutely savage encounters, only managed or avoided by the wisest players: dark slopes which eventually become traps of infinite sliding, high-level vampires casting fireball, that sort of thing. This is almost an issue of taste, as I noted in my last number re Raggi – but there is less active misanthropy here, and more a rich, strange, often horrendous world.)
 
City of Vultures does have a wider setting attached, but is largely a detailed, decaying “Oriental” city, with vast catacombs (of course), plots of intrigue and politics, and many strange, pulpy locales. CoV draws heavily on pulp – it’s a Conan city, really.
 
Xyntillan is probably his masterpiece so far. An 18-area megadungeon with over a hundred rooms, including a wilderness demiplane, a lich, vampires, Nessie(s), plenty of dungeon space, and, oh, the Holy Grail. It’s strange; it’s rich; it has a lot of sleeping princesses (and other French fairy tale figures). It rewards deep exploration – it’s fun for a session, but there are so many mysteries, only gradually revealed. That makes it “hard”, like a lot of Lux’s work. This is open, welcoming – and ruthless.
 
Lux draws on many sources for his work (Celtic legend, French fairy tales, Robert E. Howard, etc), though that breadth can sometimes be masked by his auteur-like style. Lux has a style – and it is original, it’s OD&D cranked up to 21/10 with a whole distinctive Hungarian twist. I think there are greater heights to be scaled by Lux; only Xyntillan is a totally “surpassing” work to this point. There’s some reason for quiet confidence, though, that he will surpass even that in due time.
 
Carl Sargent
Carl Sargent is basically known for three good modules – two very respectable and interesting B modules (B11 King’s Festival and B12 Queen’s Harvest), and, well...Night Below. B11 is functional (perhaps nothing more), and better than many contemporary modules. B12 is actually pretty good, with multiple dungeons, all of them interesting.
 
But man, Night Below. Night Below is a campaign module. You start as 1^st Level peons in some hick county, and you end deep in the Underdark fighting PSIONIC SEA GODLINGS in GREAT SHABAOTH on the SUNLESS SEA.
 
But look, the end sounds good. What about the rest? The hick county (Book 1, The Evils of Harranshire) is GREAT. It’s basically a sandbox with a “plot”, which can be turned into a decent timer/escalation without much effort. The sandbox itself has...well, it’s a 64-page module, and it has more good adventures and locations in it than most 240-page Wizards products now. (And this is only a third of Night Below!) There are a bunch of mini-adventures in the Gazetteer section, 4 starting adventures and side-treks, and 2 major dungeons (both of which have average map designs but very good “encounter” design and capacity for messing around with). The adventures are interesting, too: restrain a village boy who’s coping with being a werebear (but also there are some Orcs wandering in the same area)! There’s some Goblins in a weird flooded area...who you can negotiate with to solve the problem! Two-headed dogs haunting the moors! Bandits who are kidnapping people for nefarious purposes! For a 1^st-5^th Level adventure, this both packs in a lot of content, and puts it together well.
 
Book 2, The Perils of the Underdark (5^th-10^th Levels), leads on from one of the dungeons in Book 1. It’s considered the weakest part of the module, in that it can feel like a slog, and that it’s semi-linear (Sargent does not, in general, utilised heavy looping at either dungeon or Underdark Wilderness levels; this is mostly less of a problem than it sounds, but is a struggle in Book 2). I should say that this is fixable – if you’re running a 15-level campaign, you can afford to put in the two hours of prep to rework the Book 2 Wilderness map and come up with good random encounter procedures. (Throw in Patrick Stuart’s Veins of the Earth for inspiration.) The actual locales/mini-dungeons are mostly good, and all interesting. The centrepiece here, though, is the Kuo-Toan City of the Glass Pool, which is basically a sprawling infiltration and base assault mission, with a Social Collapse Points mechanism which measures how chaos you’ve caused. Excellent stuff.
 
Book 3, The Sunless Sea (10^th Level+), is the Deep Wilderness. There’s a Great Cavern with the Aboleth city. But also...there are Fire Giant pilgrims who you might need to fight! And a demon raiding party and a wicked Enchanter and renegade Illithids...who...wait...is this right? You probably want to negotiate with them? Oh, okay! I mean, you can just kill them too. And there’s a shrine to Tharizdun and an Ixzan lair and some sweet little Myconids being bothered by a delusional Drow (Otryl Erys...hmm) and mind-dominated Stone Giants who can be freed...
 
That’s half the book. That’s not even Great Shabaoth itself. Ever wanted to storm a fortress full of Ixzans, Derro, Kuo-Toans, Mind Flayers, Dominated adventurers from the Surface, Devils...and also beings you can befriend and aid and bring to your side? And you need to break the defensive magic so you can get to the Big Boss Aboleth (40HD, 300hp, to give you a very slight sense of the challenge).
 
That’s three good modules in one. Sargent doesn’t have great breadth, comparatively, but the richness of his imagination, and the incredible finesse in many areas of Night Below – particularly the City of the Glass Pool and the Great Cavern – earn him an indisputable place amongst the greats.
 
Anthony Huso
The last member of the Pack is Anthony Huso, sometime novelist, and great populariser of 1^st Edition AD&D amongst the Rising Generation (he’s why I got into playing 1e; in fact, he ran my first ever 1e session).
 
Anthony has published, in one form or another, 9 modules. All are good. All are creative. Many break new ground. Most are executed very well. That’s some catalogue; he very nearly reaches the top category, for me. But let’s go through his work, going by level.
 
HU4 Zjelwyin Fall is for 1^st-3^rd Level characters. It’s a burglary of Lich’s resting place in the Astral Sea. Yes, you read all of that right. The gimmick involved for why low level characters are going is great, the puzzles are great, the emerging mystery is satisfying, and the treasures are...wow. (Great risk-reward mechanism involved at the end.) Very usable, too.
 
The Dreaming Tower is a 1^st level adventure published on his blog (and is accordingly rough in format; it’d need a bit of prep to make usable). PCs end up with deeds to a ruined local defensive fortification, but need to clear it out. The location has 34 locations over four levels, plus a wilderness area (with a 1% chance on the Random Encounter table of a Hill Giant!). There’s a mystery here – what happened? Why is the place like it is? And there are morlocks and a Fly Devil and a Minor Artefact and Boots of Planeswalking...and perhaps Crypts beneath and further adventure. This is a low-level adventure done right. Not trivial or dull, but rich, full of great treasure and mystery and antagonists (who maybe you can speak to).
 
Palace Vulre (4^th-6^th levels) is another blog adventure. 24 rooms on one level, an old Elven ruin inhabited by gribblies. There’s a Riddle – Tony is very big on puzzles and riddles, but they are rarely annoying.
 
HU3 The Mortuary Temple of Esma (5^th-7^th Levels) is a ruined three-level temple with a skeleton army led by a mighty warrior, and a green dragon ruling over a tribe of Bullywugs...ON THE TOP LEVEL. My players accidentally met with Ssendam, Lord of Madness here, via the Bullywugs’ summoning idol. The lower levels get increasingly unpleasant and corrupted and mind-bending, revolving around the Cult of the Prince of the Undead, which has broken in and infected the place. The magic items here are great, including one of Tony’s Ten Rings of Immortality, a magical whip called “The Sky Splitter”, a dragon egg you can hatch, and the Haunted Gossamer Tunic of the Nythian Empire (which, uh, killed one of the PCs in my campaign via System Shock...but he got better). METAL.
 
The Silver Temple is a blog adventure, which Anthony used to intro his players to 1e – they were mid-level Evil characters storming the base of a Good order. It’s got a looping map, great base defence plans for the Good guys (that is, the Oppo), and is just a very cool gimmick. Very specific, though – working best, I suspect, as it was initially used, as a one-off intro.
 
HU5 Geir Loe Cyn-Crul (9^th-13^th Levels) is also fairly specific – 103 rooms in Giantish ruins, full of Bad Stuff, and equally full of cool magic and interactive puzzles...all leading to the Throne of the Gods. It’s specific in the sense that it suits particular kinds of parties much more than others – it’s combat-heavy, and very sprawling. But it’s an excellent execution of that idea.
 
HU2 The Fabled City of Brass (12^th Level+) is one of the best modules ever written. Certainly in the top 5 “high level” modules ever. What are even Efreet scared of? The Planar Empire that once ruled from the City of Brass (a lord of whom ended up as the Lich in Zjelwyin Fall...). Very little gimping, just a vast ruined baroque city full of insane dangers, great beasts, and even greater, more insane treasures. Over 100 locations on a city-ship-island floating in Elemental Fire, full of defensive measures still half-functioning. Oh, and Yaghuth, Demon Prince of Time. That’s all before considering the treasure and wonders which you go here to loot: Astral Chimes for travelling the Astral Plane, the incredible Codex of the Infinite Planes, the rather disgustingly organic Velvet Gun...and Ehlissa Amooyan’s Bejewelled Nightingale, a much superior soup-up of the DMG Artefact. The City of Brass is so dangerous you need PCs who aren’t gimped. But the stuff here...worth the risk. THERE IS AN ENTIRELY NECESSARY INDEX OF MAGIC ITEMS.
 
HU6 The Dream House of the Nether Prince (14^th Level+) is EVEN MORE METAL than the Mortuary Temple. Go and look up the cover. 137 rooms of Orcus’ palace in the Abyss, and you’ll need everything for this party. I don’t really know what to say to explain this, except it ends with it turning out that Orcus has manipulated EVERYTHING SO FAR so the PCs will assist him in defeating...Demogorgon. So. Uh.
 
But what about HU1, you ask? The Night Wolf Inn...well...is it an adventure? I mean, actually, undoubtedly it is, on two bases: one, it involves detailed maps for the Inn itself, and all its dangerous, crazy corners. But also...it’s a whole campaign. There is a campaign-spanning mystery here to solve, spread across an inter-Planar Adventuring Guild headquarters, where the rooms (like in Mr Ben!) are magical portals. There are organisation issues, and you’ll need to develop the magical Rooms themselves, but ultimately that’s the price of initiation. Would you journey to the City Buried In The Stars and solve its secret? Travel to innumerable demiplanes and even to the Heavens themselves? This is the module.
 
Anthony has written low-level dungeon crawls – and low-level planar adventures. He’s published Actually Good high level adventures. And he’s published the best framing device for a campaign ever put out there. With time, perhaps, he will ascend the final height.
 
But who shall he meet there? Find out next time.