Best D&D Adventure Designer Ever, Part 3: The Best

Look, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s E. Gary Gygax. 

I’ve written about Gary’s design chops before (...in the article where I suggested he was a Lost Talent). Let’s look at Gary’s TSR career in terms of the three original categories: BREADTH, DEPTH, and ORIGINALITY. I won’t deal with his later work – LA, C&C, Castle Yggsburgh – though there is some very interesting stuff there. I haven’t read enough of it deeply enough. But let’s look at the core modules which really defined (and define, in many ways) the way D&D adventures work.
 
The Phlubs
First, briefly, a few items of his bibliography which don’t make the cut: the subpar Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits (dumped on his favourite artist to actually write, some cool areas and images but basically not very good), WG5 Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure (with Kuntz, fun and silly but not much to it), and the Castle Greyhawk portal treks: EX1 Dungeonland, EX2 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, and WG6 Isle of the Ape. Genuinely interesting but very, very specific (particularly the first two)
 
Breadth and Originality
For Gary, his breadth is also his originality. Where he was brilliantly broad, he was also brilliantly original – what he put out in the late 70s and early 80s is nearly all “The First” of its kind.
 
Gary defined most of the subgenres of adventure we still use. T1 The Village of Hommlet and B2 Keep on the Borderlands are the seminal “home base and nearby dungeon” adventures; S1 Tomb of Horrors is the original funhouse dungeon and Ultimate Test of Player Skill; G1-3 Against the Giants are, individually and as a collection, the original base assaults; the Drow trilogy (D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth, S2 Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and D3 Vault of the Drow) is where the Underdark, the Mythic Deep Underworld, comes into being, really; WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (after a flirtation in G3) articulates the role of the Lovecraftian mythos in D&D; S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth is the classic sprawling dungeon-crawl; S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is the original sci-fi/fantasy mashup; and T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil, for all its (limited) flaws, is the first real published megadungeon, with its only rivals coming from the Judges’ Guild. (Q1, really, is the first proper planar adventure, but I don’t think it’s as canonically definitional as the aforementioned modules.)
 
We might look at a few JG modules and see parallel evolution. We know Ed Greenwood designed a big megadungeon in the 70s – in the first of his great campaigns, I believe, in the Ruins of Undermountain. We obviously know Dave Arneson had his Castle Blackmoor. But we’re talking here about the definition of the genre – and just as Gary undoubtedly had breadth of styles (First dungeon! Base assault! Cavern crawl! Sci-fi! Lovecraftianism! Underdark!), he also had a defining canonical effect. His Castle Greyhawk (never published) and his Temple of Elemental Evil inspired many successors, including, indeed, Undermountain – even where the successors were trying to fill the gap of Greyhawk or the mistakes of the Temple. His brilliance left a shadow even where it burned unevenly.
 
Depth
But the point is that Gary executed a lot of these very well. G1-3 and D1-3 are just very well done, with a lot of depth – the bonus dungeons in the Giants bases, the sheer range of options for handling the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, the clarity and pungency of the terse prose. B2 has the Original Great DMing Advice, and it really is great. You get the picture.
 
I wonder how important it is that the first prolific D&D designer was not just creative and clever and original but also (partly via his editors, I’m sure) actually pretty good at communicating his vision. You can run these adventures at the table. You don’t need, on the whole, to edit them yourselves or do a lot of work (T1/T1-4 is an exception; well worth running, but really needs a little bit of early expansion, and the T2-4 section is worth enriching, especially given the Nodes weren’t published in a finished state). Sometimes those only accustomed to newer material find the old modules under-done, or see them as “very hack and slash”. This is about both expectations and education. Let me briefly explain.
 
As to EXPECTATIONS, if someone is reading a module for the pleasure of reading it, Gygax modules will usually disappoint. A cool idea may appear, but these are terse, sparsely illustrated, and profoundly practical in purpose. If someone thinks, for whatever reason, that tightly-driven Plot Games are the Best Thing, Gygax modules will disappoint, because even in the modules where plot conveniences are offered to connect them to your game, these are fundamentally Location-Based modules (see my series on Location-Based Games for a bit more). Yes, the “plot” may take you through the Giants and Drow series, but the modules themselves are about places in a world, not beats in a movie. You need to come to Gygax expecting location-based modules to actually run at the table. He does both par excellence; in sheer usability, he has been rarely equalled since, perhaps never fully surpassed.
 
As to EDUCATION, frankly, a problem is that plenty of good-faith readers, who want to run something at the table, just won’t get the conventions. Read a book in a foreign language – or better yet, a half-familiar language, like Chaucer’s Middle English – and you will, perhaps, find the whole thing frustratingly familiar yet alien, and impossible to really comprehend. Education is necessary to understand a language, and the conventions of the early modules leave a later generation of reader misreading them – particularly as to the Hack and Slash, Greedy Treasure Hunter interpretations. (S1 Tomb of Horrors is perhaps the ultimate example of this, leading to both bad reactions and bad table experiences. It’s a test for expert player; it’s a Special module, hence the series code. And the module does tell you that!) You have to understand the conventions – and the best guides for the budding Gygaxian DM are B2 and the 1e DMG. Now, the 1e DMG is maybe the worst-organised major D&D book ever, and it’s also the best D&D book ever. So you just got to take your lumps. B2 gives a very clear sense of what sort of game Gygax expected to develop – one of exploration and cunning and, yes, combat. With that education in mind, you will know the short entry in the adventure describing patrol and combat behaviour is not there to enforce a combat routine, but to describe a problem. The problem is that there are guards, next to a trap on the floor – the solution? Well, what do you have? Charm Person? A great scam? An ambush? Drawing the guards on to trap, somehow? Gygax is writing for would-be “professionals” – those who know what they’re doing. So educate yourself, and you’ll know the “content depths” on offer.
 
Gygax also does just realize a lot of things very well and in a way that any reader will understand: the creepy shrines in B2, G1, and G3 are all haunting; the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa is wonderfully alien; B2’s evil surprise is obviously genius from the get-go; the mapping and description in S3, including the guide on making the whole setting fresh and alien to the players (i.e., not describing the whole thing as a spaceship), is just very good technical writing.
 
Conclusion
Gary invented many major genres of adventure, and he executed them so well. It’s an easy choice. He’s the Best.
 
...Wait. Who’s that running down the aisle to the ring? IT’S BRUCE R. CORDELL! AND HE’S GOT A STEEL CHAIR!
 
Bruce R. Cordell
It’s the Dakotan Doombringer, the Young Gun, the Anarchist himself, Bruce R. Cordell. In the Dark Days of the Rebellion, as Lorraine and Skip reigned in terror, as nearly everything TSR published – even objectively cool stuff like Dark Sun – was turgid and unusable at the table (just see what Lorraine did to our boy Dougie Niles – the Maztica box set is...ugh)...a great white hope arose.
 
Cordell was 27 or 28 when his first module came out. The Gates of Firestorm Peak was published in 1996, and Cordell published 13 modules in the course of five years (1996-2000). What if I told you that at least 9 of those 13 were great modules (I note here that some people like Die Vecna Die! and Reverse Dungeon as well, but I won’t be including them)? What if I told you that Bruce originated important strands of D&D lore and adventure design in that period? What if I told you he designed the best official high level adventure ever? What if I told you he wrote an actually good 3^rd Edition adventure? (He also wrote the first 4^th Edition adventure, H1 Keep on the Shadowfell, but his blade was not keen by then, and his enemies did not cower; there are moments of brilliance in H1, but it’s not particularly good.)
 
Gates of Firestorm Peak
Cordell started his book career with the module that introduced the Far Realm into D&D – not just the general Lovecraftian weirdness that Gary so loved, but something/somewhere very close to the actual Lovecraftian mythos. Firestorm Peak (5^th-8^th Level) is...well, it has a 67-room Duergar fortress to storm as a taster. Hope you like fighting enlarged dwarf skeletons! And a dozen Carrion Crawlers! And an honest-to-goodness garrison, with tactics, and an extreme desire to terminate you. I won’t pretend this is a roleplaying-heavy section of module, though it certainly is a test of exploration skills (there are a lot of traps...). Not everything has to be (I’m looking over at Giants, Drow, and S1). This is a full-on, utterly chaotic war. There’s a commercial reason for this – the module was meant to showcase the Player’s Options line – but frankly, this is true D&D. One of my fondest memories of running the game was my players storming the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa with Svirfneblin allies, releasing and arming dozens of slaves, and then rampaging their way out.
 
But wait, there’s more. Beat the Duergar and you go into the Twisted Caverns, where, uh, the Far Realm is manifesting...and if you receive healing at all there’s a percentage chance of your body warping?!? You start to lose your temper and go insane due to the eldritch energies?! You might start losing Wisdom if you dare to sleep in the Caverns? And all of this is FEEDING the bizarre beasts inhabiting this region? Yes, it’s a dungeon crawl section – but one with legitimate overtones of Call of Cthulhu. And it’s not playing. You might end up permanently mutated. If you lose all your Wis “temporarily” you end up insane – give your sheet to the DM. The party falls into cycles of rage against each other more or less as long as they’re in the Caverns – I hope you like losing half your HP to your friends! (That might sound bad to you, but think of this way: it’s not PVP combat. It’s the DM unleashing the full evil of this module, and an excellent motivation to go and close the Vast Gate unleashing this madness, exacting vengeance upon the wicked as you go.) Then you have the warrens of the Troll mutates, seemingly thousands of Gibberlings, and Deepspawn, and, and, and...
 
Oh, but you can befriend the Myconids here. Cordell will never leave you without a friend. Even when you’re in this mind-twisting hellscape. Wait. You can befriend the lost Duergar too? (Cordell does smirkingly note that they won’t know you butchered their friends.)
 
Now it’s time to beat the boss. Oh wait there’s a Living Wall – made up of one of the adventurers you’re here to rescue. Time to cut her open! Then there’s an uh, Neh-thallgu with seven donor brains...you get the idea. There’s some weird and new monsters here, and they will leave their mark on you.
 
And then there’s the Inner Sanctum, which is just full of stuff. Great loot, a Djinni you can contract who only opens worldgates, a functioning and interactive planetarium, and then there’s Madreus and his legion of underlings ready for the last fight. Beat the bad guy, close the gate. Simple fun – as long as you’re still sane by this point.
 
Illithiad and Sahuagin Trilogies
Five of the six books of Cordell’s Monstrous Arcana trilogies are good: All three Sahuagin books (Evil Tide, Night of the Shark, and Sea of Blood), and two of the Illithiad trilogy (Masters of Eternal Night and Dawn of the Overmind). Illithids are much cooler here than in even Night Below, and the Sahuagin have never been equivalently realized.
 
Shark-men are cool, but they’re even cooler when the designer pulls of multiple successful underwater adventures (has anyone else even pulled off one?). And there’s a Ghost Ship that’s actually cool! That’s really an investigation section, too. There are base assaults, investigations, a section where you go Undercover Brother as shark-man slaves, and an inverted temple made of pearl with a god-warped High Priestess who’s turning into an eel. Oh, eel-men are behind it all. Ugh. Eel-men, even worse than shark-men.
 
And it’s executed well! You can read this stuff! Cordell is much wordier than Gygax, but it’s usable still.
 
I don’t really know what to do say about the Mindflayer adventures. I mean, it’s actually hard to summarise what’s going on in them. The first (weak) entry starts with, uh, the sun in your gameworld starting to dim. Why? Better do this, then that, then some other stuff, and then, uh...
 
Visit a Mind Flayer ringworld and stop the schemes of a mad engineer involving alternative universes? And you can lose?!?!?
 
Low-Level Adventures
Wait, you thought that was the punchline? No, not even. Brucey could write good low-level adventures. The mid-level adventures in Firestorm Peak and the trilogies are the sweet spot for designers. It’s low and high level adventures that struggle to impress – there are loads of low-level adventures, and most of the *good* ones are workmanlike at best.
 
But Cordell has two bona fide good low-level adventures, and both are not just good, well-executed things, but cool. The Shattered Circle (1^st-3^rd Levels) sends your PCs into a pseudo-Underdark complex with spider-people which actually demands exploration and skill. Ah, there’s a flooded section! Work it out. And you can turn the spider-people against each other. It’s fine for low-level adventures not to be tedious and slightly insulting (“Oh, go kill eight bandits, you suckers!”). Gary got this: there’s a Drow running a front operation for, uh, Zuggtmoy! That’s your first dungeon. There are like seventy tribes of humanoids in some crazy caves. Not one tribe, but a billion tribes. Bruce gets the same principle. It needs to be cool or weird.
 
And then there is Sunless Citadel (1^st-3^rd Levels), the first (?) 3^rd Edition adventure. Look, this has some 3^rd Edition nonsense. 2^nd Edition had decadence; 3^rd Edition had soullessness. I know which I’d choose. Everything has Encounter Levels attached, the stats are daggers to the eyes, etc. But the complex has a good map, and there are just layers: loads of different monsters, organically placed (Quasits and Mephits in the first section of the complex); there is Meepo, beloved Kobold who can get you by the whole Kobold layer (and it must be said, only rarely was even Gary so explicit about the possibility of bypassing enemies by friendship); there’s a Goblin tribe for a more traditional crawl/assault; and then there’s the excellently sinister Gulthias Tree and its dark fruit and fell Twig Blight spawn. Evil plants are underused (and the Gulthias is superior to the Kampfult, atmospherically).
 
Bruce wants you to enjoy being a 1^st level chump. He doesn’t want to give prizes away too early – but he wants you to stay for the big stories. How many official designers from, say, 1985-2014 could that be said of? Greenwood, Richard Baker, Carl Sargent, Lisa Smedman? Who else? How often do you read a late ‘80s or ‘90s or ‘00s module – not just low-level ones, but really any – and think “wait, they actually play D&D and they like it”?
 
Bruce Cordell somehow wrote a half-score great modules in that era of darkness, and wrote two intro modules to stand against the best. Intro modules are hard, because they need to be accessible to new players, fun, easy to read for the DM, and so forth – and actually, for all the awful 3e guff, Sunless Citadel is an example of a basically fairly easy module, parsing-wise. Compare the key to the map. Describe stuff to your players. See what they do. Repeat, until they enter into legend, or die in shame.
 
Entering Into Legend
On which note – what about Return to the Tomb of Horrors, guys? This is a whole campaign, and the first bit is, you know, good. Then the second bit – “The Black Academy” – is suitably cool. You can steal the necromancer clothes but they’re evil. You proceed by...well, doing something you never ever should. It’s not always well-organised, but the first few sections are cool. Deadly, weird, baroque. Cordell does baroque well.
 
Then there’s...Moil, the City that Waits. Chills yet?
 
Oh yes, you beat Acererak before, but can you beat him in his lair in the interdimensional city of Moil?
 
Wait, sorry, first you need to go find some stuff in the original Tomb of Horrors. Which is included in facsimile form. Oh, great. Guess I’ll die, then!
 
And then you go to the City That Waits. Wanted to hunt a Lich in an M.C. Escher painting? Towers rise from nothing and to a lightning storm; perspective fails the eye; what is close and what is far? And there are just so many scenes, man. Follow the trail of a previous adventurer – sit at the table he hauled to the window of a ruined bar, as he looked out over this otherworldly realm, this ex-city, this living monument to death. Free pre-historic thieves from magic mirrors! Try to avoid their inevitable betrayal! Find out what a Brine Dragon is.
 
And this is all a location – not a railroad, but a series of locales, an epic Impossible City, a final proving ground for great players.
 
It’s not even Acererak’s lair. Which, of course, contains one last Grinning Green Devil Face.
 
Conceptual Density
Is it a Bryce term? Basically, Cordell has Conceptual Density. Shark-men but there’s a ghost-ship but the shark-men have an underground arena but their base is actually in an inverted spire made of pearl but really the plot is the work evil eel-men. It’s kobolds wait it’s goblins wait it’s an evil tree wait it’s an evil priest. Oh the sun is going out but there is this shell game but wait there are sleigh-riding illithids racing you to an archaeological dig but what’s in the dig BUT A SPACESHIP and then you go to a ringworld but you can befriend all the grimlocks and then it turns out the plot involves inverting the multiverse. Liked one Tomb of Horrors? How about three Tombs of Horror(s)? AND A CITY THAT HAS NO TOP OR BOTTOM.
 
You get the idea. Just idea after idea after idea. It’s like Si King writing everything on coke. (Bruce, get help if you need it.) There is glory in Cordell’s work. It seems bottomless, and reaching beyond the lightning clouds of Moil. Even the fadeout after Sunless Citadel dims not the glory; the Muse sat for him for the apportioned Quarter-Score Years, and has returned whither she came.
 
Bruce Cordell was made for 2^nd Edition – which sounds strange, given his open “plots” full of rich ideas, great treasure, and plural solutions are the opposite the standard 2^nd Edition fare. 2^e was at its best, really, in presenting cool settings for DMs to actually write. Some of its best adventures were weird leftovers or rewrites of a previous era (e.g. the heartbreakingly diminished FRQ1 Haunted Halls of Eveningstar or that magnificent high-level headscrew S5 Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga, or indeed Night Below, which I believe was written in part years before it was published). But Cordell meets the moment: 2e is baroque and overdone and full of crazy stuff, and he says – what if I designed some actual adventures for this, rather than novels or print-pap?
 
The Actual Conclusion
I don’t think I can say Bruce Cordell is a better designer than Gary Gygax.
 
I can’t say it.
 
But I can think it.

Location-Based Games, Part 3: But What About Gold? WHAT ABOUT GOLD?

Okay, okay, let’s talk about the gold itself. Here’s the basic headline: gold gives players agency. I’ve already hinted at this at various points in the preceding, but it’s worth considering further.
 
Gold in D&D should basically function like money in our own lives: it gives a wider capacity to act and decide than when we lack it. I get that we go to fantasy to escape reality, but however you run your table, you’ll be giving players agency or taking it away, one way or the other. A good table provides real choices and real agency, and real choices are best made in a “predictable” or regular universe. I, of course, don’t mean predictable in the sense of dull or rote – I mean predictable in the sense that there are known rules.
 
Basically, a general principle in good RPG play, especially in D&D, is that there are rules, however few. Players make decisions in the context of those rules. Good DMs do not throw wrenches into that (and nor do they protect players from those rules – the rules create incentives AND consequences).
 
Gold is a form of predictability. You go to dungeons or wherever to get gold; that gold, being fungible, gets turned into other stuff...other decisions. Want new armour? Spend gold! Want a castle? Spend gold! Want to hire specialist henchmen? Spend gold!
 
Now – of course – there are other ways of characters getting these things. They could chance upon such things. They could declare that they will research something or use their streetwise skills to identify a source. Sometimes this will be a good way for a decision to be made by a PC. But a risk is run by relying upon DM-designed occurrence, particularly – it reduces player agency and increases DM fiat, and whilst that has its place, a location-based game (ironically?) is much more about character choice than the average “character driven” plot-fest. Plot-driven games often emphasize character background, big motifs, and so forth – but are much less character-centred, in reality, than a game which gives characters resources and lets them do what they want.
 
So the purpose of gold in location-based games, after giving characters one location-based means of Level advancement (particularly if the best treasure is well hidden and requires careful searching), is to give players agency in how they affect the world. Setting aside various Gold=XP equivalences, let me just list a few ways gold can be used to offer player agency:
 
Shopping: A catch-all for all “I go to a vendor and get something I need”. This does not include specialist, commissioned items – see below. But whether the vendor is a human in Waterdeep or a slug-man in the habitable gullet of a star-leviathan, cash lets players choose the things they want. D&D by default has a certain wargame-like accounts nerd emphasis, and inventory is part of that. It doesn’t have to be – but it’s in the genetics. It need not be the case that this stuff hobbles the exploratory game – in fact, inventory-keeping emphasize the difficulty and the achievement of exploration. At any rate, there is agency to be had in what equipment is bought and so on. Furthermore, when characters need expensive and complex things, yes, fetch quests can come in – but so, frankly, can going to the right merchant in some crazy place and paying cold hard cash. The cash is not an unromantic removal of magic from the story – it’s the result of real achievement, and the payoff for player risk.
 
Strongholds: The most obvious traditional cash-sink, especially in the training-less Basic rules. The assumption about high-level play in Basic and 1e is that the point of characters is to run domains. This drifts out in 2e, except in Birthright, and this is, honestly, a shame. Tastes vary, sure, but a truly world-shaping character will soon enough assert dominance, whether intentionally or accidentally. Stronghold rules give shape to that. They also represent an objective for which characters can fundraise – money is needed so adventures are had. Strongholds are expensive (EXAMPLES). Strongholds, incidentally, are really only fully functional in a game where the map matters – in a plot-driven game one supposes the DM may deign to have them attacked, but there is no organic reality to the Stronghold. It is attacked because the DM wants it so; it is not attacked because it is relevant or natural within the world.
 
Followers: My 5^th Edition parties pick up followers just like my other tables. In fact, in practical terms, they tend to have more – partly as a result of greater advancement, but also the needs and style of the players. In some cases followers (of the henchman or retainer variety) might join characters out of real story reasons – the slaves my party rescued from the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa largely joined them and now work as retainers. However, even here money will be needed to feed and clothe them, and for other followers up-front fees will be necessary too. (Porters do not go into the jungle without you paying a fairly hefty premium in case of their death, for instance.) As characters advance in ability and responsibilities, they will often want assistants, and money is necessary for that. Not only that, but gold, being fungible, allows for a wide range of choices in this area. Plot-granted NPC allies are gifts of the DM, even if they are organic; gold-granted allies are a result of pure player agency.
 
Research: This covers both PC research and the use of Sages. Sages are an important and expensive class of NPCs in the default 1e world – want to know something? Pay for it! Those sages can be independent or retainers, but the extra costs associated are independent of that. They will need books, assistants, and perhaps even special tools and materials. A PC Wizard researching and transcribing their own spells requires special inks and vellum, and perhaps even special candles to read arcane texts by. (Wizards in my 5e games spend less on training for XP and more on transcription from spellbooks they discover, so this is dual purpose.)
 
Ploys: Your players may want to run a big con or infiltrate an enemy base or charter a Spelljammer or something else entirely in the course of their adventures. They will identify a problem; they will decide they want to solve it; and players with gold will use that gold to expand their range of options. This could scare the cautious or straitened DM, but this is in fact a good thing. Players tend to respect the game world more the more they can influence it and interact with it. They tend to be more destructive and less engaged the less they can do so. Giving your players multiple options when solving a problem is good; putting the agency for creating those options in their hands is often even better. Gold facilitates this via its fungibility.
 
Items: Finally, special items are costly, even in a (coherent) Haughty Fantasy world. You’re an 11^th-level Paladin and want the sacred smiths of your Order to forge a blessed hammer from some starmetal you found? Great! But that will cost money, either to you or someone else. You’ve got the starmetal – but the magical materials needed to make an intense enough flame to melt it cost money, and the specialist inscribed tools require money, and the smiths require sustenance, and the Order may itself expect a big donation unless there is some pressing strategic need. You are sworn to poverty, after all! But of course gold allows the Paladin to choose a different path – say, to research fallen monasteries of the Order, and outfit a company to go salvage magic items from one, thereby providing blessed weapons by a different route. Gold is agency. The player decides this – the DM does not.
 
Conclusion
The general point is probably clear. In the first of these posts, gold-as-XP gave PCs a reason to engage with the world as a location, rather than wait passively for a story to be given to them.  But gold plays a bigger role in the campaign than providing incentives to engage with the world: it offers specific agency to the players, by letting them choose how they play the game without relying upon DM intervention. Gold being a significant factor in the game provides a certain degree of predictability to the procurement of a lot of things – perhaps not the finest or most impressive or strange items, certainly not the most loyal and heroic retainers, but most other things can be bought and sold, for the right price.
 
It also creates – if the economy in the game is functional – opportunity cost that is, in many ways, more interesting than the classic “pick between going to A or B in this timed situation”. Does a player want a stronghold or to research a new complex spell? What sort of expensive ploy is going to be undertaken to deal with the Cultists of Elemental Fire and their planar base? Sages are expensive and no use in combat – but is it worth attaching one to the party long-term? You get the idea.
 
I have already answered the old canard that Gold-as-XP pushes players into greedy, sociopathic games – in fact, I think players are more likely to be destructive when the world is not open and where advancement comes via ticking off story or combat goals. Similarly, an emphasis on a Gold economy does not tend, in my experience, to make players less focussed on the game, but more so, because they have more ways in which to influence the world. The existence of a gold economy makes the world more open, because gold can be turned into basically anything else.
 
The virtuous cycle, then, is: Gold-as-XP (and similar) incentivises players to engage actively with the world; the players also end up with Gold; Gold gives players agency, encouraging them to engage creatively with the world and open it further up; spending Gold means the players need more Gold, so they go to locations to get it...
 
Or, to put it a different way: Make your games about geography and economics, and you will get great stories.

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.

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.

ADVENTURE: Dolmenwood - Lakeside Lair of the Barrow-Bogeys (2nd-4th Levels, Basic)

I've finally finished formatting and "neat-mapping" (in a very amateurish fashion) the material for a Dolmenwood adventure I've run in my campaign. It's a two-level (plus annexe) barrow with 13ish rooms. There's some factional play between different wights in the barrow, some neighbouring Jack o' Lanterns, and the eponymous Barrow-Bogeys, as well as a lot of stuff to mess around with, and three new Monsters: the Glitter Bug, the Giant Woodlouse, and the Fungal Bat. I used it as the home of the Barrow-Bogeys who are tormenting the Baker near Prigwort.

This has had one run-through, with my players covering about half of the material (which I find around normal). I suppose this technically means it's in "Beta", so if you do run it and have feedback, please get in touch, as I'd love to improve it as a community resource.

Find it here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1z-Ufbzcbz49X2itna1gydZZxmVw0GWb_?usp=sharing. Mulch on!

 

Location-Based Games, Part 2: Textured Worlds, and 5th Edition D&D

An Analogy: Scenes vs Moments, Connected to Location Design

Have you heard of the contrast in analysis of film and TV between “scenes” and “moments”? I mostly know it as an explanation for Zack Snyder films are overdramatic and silly (don’t tell anyone, but I’ve enjoyed some): the guy is a commercial director, and he’s always looking for the cool moment, the epic shot, the payoff. He wants the “moments”, but won’t pay in “scenes”. Scenes are where stakes are raised, promises are made, characters are endeared to the audience. A character you don’t know dying rarely affects you – a character who has been a constant, warm presence dying at the hands of the villain “puts the heel over”, to use wrasslin’ slang. People buy the villain as an evil piece of work because someone they care for has been killed by him.

Scenes don’t need to be boring – they shouldn’t be! But they are lower-key. They are, hopefully, beautiful and well-made stone blocks which build up the greater edifice. They form the base for the statuary and a background for the fine pillars of the building. They are absolutely necessary; they have quality of their own, and they make the big things matter and give them a context. To put it differently: there cannot be a payoff without stakes, and stakes need to be put on the table clearly and carefully.

How does this connect to location design in D&D? Put another way: why are so many 5e dungeons (and equivalents) linear or semi-linear, with branches that don’t connect to each other, whilst many or most Glory Day 1e products, and the best of the Old School Renaissance, rely on complex, inter-connected locations? Is it just that 5e is terrible?

That would be an ungenerous conclusion. It is rather that the locations exist in the two “typical” games for different reasons: in 1e, Basic, etc, they exist for exploring and interacting with; in 5e, they usually exist to hold a villain or a maguffin or the target of a rescue. They exist, that is, for a payoff. You go to the dungeon to finish the bit of story associated with it, and get your Story XP/Milestone. A branch might exist within the dungeon to hide a magic item, or a side quest – it’s an optional thing you can add on. But the location exists for the cool final battle, or the detailed puzzle, or whatever. It can involve compelling play – but it is not a compelling location. That is, it may include good moments, but it is not designed to include good scenes.

Now, of course, a bad “dungeon for exploration” can be boring, with no payoff at all. I’m certainly not saying the location-based game shouldn’t include hooks, goals, objectives, and so forth. The point is that they are achieved by exploration and roleplaying (and, indeed, when appropriate, combat) – not by finding the right Cinematic Backdrop and completing the dramatic task thereupon.

Someone might say “but my game is all killer, no filler; I don’t want these scenes you mention”. Your prerogative – but your game might be a Zack Snyder film.

But anyway, what about my game? If I’m going to cast doubt on your methods, I owe you an explanation of my own.

 

Controversial Excursus: Learning to Build Worlds from World of Darkness

Actually, wait, let’s go down memory lane. How did I end up preferring Location-Based D&D to the usual modern Story-Based style? My first two D&D campaigns were 4^th Edition, and initially very linear; the other main campaign I had run, Deadlands, was a “story of the week” sort of thing. Again, fairly linear.

A few things shifted what I was doing: engaging (accidentally) with a few Old-School or Old-School-leaning D&D outlets (including, for the latter, Matt Colville; this is relevant because it led me to include Reavers of Harkenwold in my then-current 4e campaign, and Reavers is actually a very decent basis for a good adventure), and, well, running a game of Werewolf: the Apocalypse.

Yes, World of Darkness taught me how to run Old School D&D. I’m sorry, guys.

How? Well, because this setting I built from the ground-up was textured. The locations, and different potential enemies and obstacles, were detailed. Why? I needed them to be. I needed to inhabit the world so I could make the storytelling experience rich and real for my players. Now, the campaign was still semi-linear – there were missions the players were given – but the manner of solving them was very open. In fact, in practical terms, it was a modified form of the Connected Location Story mentioned above. There were locations to investigate – in whatever order wanted. I wanted the world to be open.

It was an incredible amount of effort. I enjoyed it, at least. But the important lesson was: investment in the world makes the world plausible. An interactive world makes the world interesting. My 4e games probably hadn’t consistently displayed those qualities – I’d been more interested in the plot than the world. My White Pine Caern game broke that – and is still one of my proudest achievements as a GM, even though it wasn’t a very good game in a lot of ways.

 

Exploring Chult: A 5^th Edition Location-Based Campaign

Read this section for a working example of this kind of game.

My main D&D game – weekly, sometimes twice weekly, for 2 and a half years now – is a 5^th Edition game. This might surprise, given I mostly write Old School material, but it’s because when I worked at a gameshop I ran the RPG night and people wanted to play 5^th Edition. (I also run a fortnightly Dolmenwood game using Old School Essentials, and have two monthly Old School campaigns on Covid Hiatus – Temple of Elemental Evil in 1e, and Anomalous Subsurface Environment using a Basic hack, likely to be updated to Old School Essentials when we resume.)

The game: Exploring Chult, a vast development of Tomb of Annihilation, the 5e Tomb of Horrors/Dwellers of the Forbidden City. I redeveloped a lot of the material in there, researched historic stuff on Chult, added my own material, added in Huso’s jaw-dropping Night Wolf Inn. But really the biggest change: “plot”, and how players get XP.

There is no plot – or rather, the campaign did not start with strong hooks, NPC questgivers, and timeframes enforced on the characters to go and find the Tomb itself and do stuff there. The plot incentives in the hardback book have been excised completely. Instead, Chult is a fallen empire with colonial powers exploiting the wealthy fragments; it is full of amazing and mysterious locations; there are various powers and factions in play, both “civilised” and definitively not.

Players get XP chiefly from six main things, in order of importance:

A.    Training: Characters have to spend gold to receive XP for training (1gp=1xp, or 1gp=2xp for Night Wolf Inn members training at the Inn). To ascend beyond 3^rd Level, a character has to train for a number of weeks, even if they have achieved the XP requirement in other ways.

B.     Exploration: Characters receive XP for discovering heretofore undiscovered (by them) locations. Minor random encounter locations might be worth 25xp; easy-to-reach “keyed locations” might be worth 100xp; important locales 300xp; the biggest, most inaccessible places might be worth 500xp or more. This adds up more than you might think, especially in the first “tier” of play (though I will simply increase Exploration XP for even stranger, harder-to-reach locations as we go - what’s Arcadia worth to you?).

C.     Combat: This is variable in value. I have a flat “XP by number of HD” system – not linear, but not very lucrative, and with no modifications for ability (e.g. 900xp for a 10HD monster). HD in 5e are very misleading anyway. At any rate, this makes some combats really worthwhile – e.g. particularly challenging “boss fights” with few henchmen or allies near at hand. On the other hand, Shrine of the Kuo-Toa was not very XP-heavy for the party, because they (intelligently!) recruited an army in various ways for the job, alongside a stealth element. Their reward: earning allies who could help guide them escape the Underdark, lots of gold, and magic items.

D.    Spell Transcription: A form of training, but just for spell-users – this covers both actual transcription, as by Wizards, but also ceremonies of prayer and meditation, as for Druids or even Warlocks. (Characters only have access to Player’s Handbook spells by default; everything else has to be found.)

E.     Real Estate: Buying property, and building Strongholds – 2gp=1xp.

F.      Miscellany: Ceremonies/charity/donations (1gp=1xp), carousing and apparel (each 1gp=1xp). Only donations really matter here. I might rebuild the carousing system to make it more generous but with complications.

You’ll notice that I’ve added a form of “Story XP”, that is, XP based on non-combat, non-gold accomplishments – Exploration XP – but there are two things to note: first, that it is location-based, not plot-based; and second, that it very loosely mirrors the concept of reaching different levels in the dungeon. The further “in” the characters get, the higher their XP rewards – exploration and risk-taking is encouraged to accumulate XP.

My players pick what their stables of characters do – they’ve been given dozens of hooks and rumours, and explore what they want. The story has emerged from that. The pirate Bard wants to build a pirate empire; the Lawful Good Paladin (of, it turns out, Ubtao; it’s a long amnesiac story) wants to rebuild the Empire of Chult, under the rightful heir; the Wizard is mostly interested in an arcane stronghold and unlocking secrets. They have chosen their “plot(s)”. To gain power to achieve their aims, they need to go and get money and adventure deeper in to the world, defeating monsters along the way.

We’ve spent about 9 months on a three-way split in the party – one group, led by the Lizardman Druid, went to a coastal settlement where he was sold as a hatchling. They explored the jungle hinterland from whence his egg was probably stolen, and got involved in a civil war between Lizardmen confederations. They earned XP, of course, for the exploration, the combat, and in future for any training from the gold – but they also achieved “story” goals that weren’t enforced, but organic. They sided with the less-destructive Lizardfolk, and stopped the Bad Guy Chief getting more powerful (but there was a discussion about whether or not to intervene – and them not intervening would have been fine, though with different consequences – as it is, two PCs died). Helping the weaker confederations coincidentally helps the Lizardman’s Stronghold, located at the northern edge of the jungle areas where the Lizardmen live – now he has lots more allies. And he found out more about his own background.

Another group (the least progressed of the three, due to work schedules) is led by the crusading Paladin, and has slain the ex-Queen of Chult, now a Medusa, before heading to the Holy City of Mezro, ruined over a hundred years ago in the Spellplague. There’s a colonial presence there (which infuriates him) and many mysteries. I’m very, very excited about this one – but I don’t require anything from it. I am, here, merely the World Spirit, observing developments, political and otherwise, with intent interest.

The final group headed off to Lantan, off the coast of Chult, where in a remote coastal area a flood had revealed the Deep Carbon Observatory. The Warlock’s patron had communicated she wanted him to go there; eventually it became clear she wanted an item. After many travails, this party lost the item and failed to defeat the rival party that had dogged their steps (though those guys didn’t get the item either). Chastened, accepting temporary defeat, the players asked where they could go to research the particular item, and also tapped their contacts in the Night Wolf Inn for help. The natural answer for research, anyway, was Candlekeep: not in Chult at all. And so off they’ve gone, to a new section of the Realms, which I’ve had to rapidly develop, build hooks into, offer different paths, and so forth. I don’t know how much material they’ll use – I don’t overdevelop, but I try to know where they’ll go based on their most likely decisions.

I’ve long loved this campaign, but in a funny way, I’ve loved Exploring Chult most – conceptually, not in terms of a particular location or cool event - when my players decided, just recently they needed to just go somewhere else in the Realms (for legitimate, story reasons – because they want the item, not because I’ve required them to, but because for various reasons their characters want it). The world, it turns out, is limitless and full of surprises, even for me. This is a direct result of a “plotless”, location-based campaign. That’s the purpose of gold in the game. Whole worlds of possibility, unconstrained by imaginary dramatic requirements.

In the final part of the series I’ll talk about what the gold itself – what does it accomplish? Aside from its uses for XP, what does gold do in the game?

Location-Based Games, Part 1: Clarifying the Purpose of Gold in Dungeons and Dragons

This is retreading old ground, but it’s ground worth retreading, for my own sake if nobody else’s. What is the purpose of gold in D&D? Or – to put it a different way – why was gold so important in early editions of the game?

In the average good Fifth Edition campaign – motivated players, talented and committed DM – my experience is that gold serves, at best, two functions (at least after the first level or two): buying magical items and plate armour, and, under the influence of Matt Colville, building strongholds. Yet in some published 5e adventures, there is almost excessive gold – for what purpose? And in others, none at all – and so what if the players do want to build a stronghold? This betrays the inconsistent design philosophy of 5e – is it a game about fantasy worlds, or fantasy storylines? (You may not know what I mean by that, but we’ll get back to it.)

I’m going to consider a few uses of gold in early editions, and then seek to draw out the deeper purpose of gold in those editions. This is going to lead to a discussion of how Located-Based Games/Campaigns work, and how I run my 5^th Edition game in a way that emphasizes gold and locations.

Various Purposes of Gold
Gold-as-XP

Perhaps most (in)famously, early editions – particularly OD&D, 1^st Edition, and the Basic versions – rewarded XP on the basis of gold retrieved from the dungeon. This is easy to decry (Gary even answers complaints in the 1^st Edition DMG!), but I’ve long thought the abstraction makes more sense than it people sometimes say: the XP reward is not for the loot per se, but the proof of puissance in excavating it. If you were able to take such treasure against such great challenges, then you must be mightier and wiser than before. Combat XP (in 1e, but especially in Basic) isn’t considerable – so loot retrieved is the measure of success. The deeper you delve and the more dangers you defeat, the mightier you become. This isn’t, however, a way of spending gold, but earning it – gold matters, but achieving this goal just leaves you with, well, gold. What is it spent upon? Well:

Hirelings and Henchmen

The henchmen who are closest to your character will want their cut, and your hirelings will need their pay (and if you’ve brought 3 henchmen and 10 hirelings to the dungeon, that’s plenty of money).

Sages, Hired Spellcasters, and Research

In 1^st Edition, at least, if you want to know something obscure or complex – an enemy’s weakness, a way of creating a new spell, and so forth – you had to spend time and money on it, either by hiring someone, or doing the work yourself. You need gold for either, to one degree or another. (You need time, too, but that’s a different resource for a different post).

Specialist Equipment and Magical Items

Though the very earliest editions think less in terms of “you can go and buy a magic item on every street corner”, such a thing may be possible, and certainly the enchantment of such items, or the creation of magical scrolls, can be paid for. Specialist equipment, too – as per the example of plate armour above, but more exotic things, too – needs gold.

Training

In 1e, as you hit higher levels, you need to spend time and money training, rather than automatically levelling up. To really hone your skills, you need the right equipment and perhaps the right trainers, or if you are Magic-User or Cleric, the right environs and magical or miraculous resources for study. All that costs gold.

Strongholds and Armies

The most obvious gold sink is the stronghold, costing 10s of thousands of gold to build, staff, and so forth. Your castellan will need soldiers, equipment, and even siege equipment to defend your holdings; your sage will need a tower library; your Pegasus will need a special aviary-stable. All these things must be paid for.

Tax

A suggestion from the 1e DMG – if you have so much money, you bet your suzerain wants some.

 

Is this economy unnecessary?

Now of course, if you don’t want strongholds, or research costs, or hirelings, or whatever, then gold has little monetary use. That's largely true in newer editions of the game. If you want players to advance via achieving official story goals, then it has little heuristic use for XP. Take it as a given that if this is your angle, then the purpose of gold in your game is fairly null.

But why do multiple editions of the game include a fairly detailed system which requires gaining gold, and then gives multiple ways in-game – many of them valuable and important, if not essential – of spending it? Is it just a weird emphasis on realism? Or perhaps a personal obsession with gold that has bled over into the game?

When you consider the original format of the Lake Geneva game run by Gary Gygax – and the dynamic of most early adventure modules, from the mid 70s to the mid 80s – the real reasons become more apparent.

The Adventurers go into the Dungeon. They are called 1^st Level Adventurers at first because they descend to the 1^st Level of the Dungeon. Why have they gone there? Because they are rapscallions and rogues, or idle dreamers seeking glory, or mages looking for resources so they can research spells, or perhaps even princely exiles seeking resources to reclaim their own. Dungeons – ruined castles, temples full of strange animal-men, crashed spaceships (well, just that one time) – are full of portable goods to make your dreams come true. The Adventurer descends so he might ascend, and become as mighty a man as the Baron, or as famous a wizard as the Archmage. Resources are needed.

So the key mechanic mentioned above – Gold-as-XP – is vital because it creates a virtuous feedback loop based on the game’s premise. The players explore, and are rewarded for exploring. The game is about the locations – the world, and the challenges therein. The world is explored, and the players benefit from it. The mechanic for encouraging this exploration is that as areas are explored or cleared, and treasure removed (including fiendishly hidden treasures of unimaginable worth – requiring real skill to find!), characters become more mighty.

Now the typical critical response to this, in my experience, is this: “Well, yes, and that may be very fun for those who want it; I do not. That’s a very barebones and unexciting thing, surely? Go down, solve puzzles – I can barely do the Beginner Sudoku! – and haul out treasure. Where’s the story? Where’s the wonder?”

Well, oh critic – and you are a  generous and gentle critic, because I hear some fellows call such a game “outmoded” or “primitive” on top of the rest – the answer is simple: the world should be full of wonder, and full of potential stories. This is evidenced by both the glory days of Basic, 1^st Edition, and the best 3^rd Party material from that era, and the best of the Old School Renaissance. There are dozens of modules where the basic assumption is Gold-as-XP, and the settings are funkier, stranger, more exciting, more pregnant with story and fascinating interplay, than any Wizards 5e adventure (and a couple of those are even good, to be clear!).

Is this accidental? Is this a strange mismatch – the setting is great, but the mechanics are primitive or really intended for a different sort of game? No. The key thing to realize is what Gold-as-XP (and equivalents – I’ll discuss that below) incentivises, and what Story/Combat XP incentivises.

 

Story-Based and Location-Based Games

Put it this way: if the DM exclusively awards XP (or Milestones - *shudders*) based on achieving goals in the Story, or for killing monsters, what will players do? They will seek to achieve the goals the DM sets, or kill the monsters they come into contact with. The typical “official” 5e format mixes the two, with Story XP and Monster XP, though plainly the Milestone is the preferred advancement system (this explains why sometimes Wizards adventures don’t seem to have enough XP to advance characters – they weren’t playtested like that so no-one noticed). Milestones and Story XP reward doing things the DM tells you are worth doing; monster XP, where it is the dominant type of XP, rewards you for killing things.

What won’t happen in such a game? Well, of course, a good version of such a game may be more flexible than that sounds, but essentially, such a game will often inculcate two forms of negative player behaviour: (1) passivity and a lack of initiative, and (2) an assumption that combat is really the main part of the game (even if other parts of the game exist, too). Monsters exist to be killed – usually in fair, balanced fights, because otherwise it’d be too hard to get XP. (Ironically, Story XP/Milestoning does mitigate this somewhat, by removing the reward – but equally, if players feel too passive or unable to really affect the direction of the game, Murder Hoboism becomes much more likely. Story XP is also, I think, harder to calculate, but that’s a different discussion.)

What sort of behaviour is incentivised by Gold-as-XP? Well, not killing monsters, generally – though there might be some XP there, the objective is to get the loot. So what do you with monsters? Avoid them, negotiate with them, or – if necessary – coming up with an insane plan to trap or kill the horde you definitely can’t beat in a fair fight but have to get past. The monsters are an obstacle, not the objective.

Again, “the DM’s Story” is much less important. The players go places they hear have gold; that, of course, is something the DM locates, but note the difference. The emphasis is on a location the DM creates, not a story. Locations are much, much more amenable to player agency than pre-written stories – such stories have beats, big moments, and endgames. Even a talented, flexible DM must retain some strong guiderails to ensure the players enjoy the product on offer. (Indeed, it would be a bad DM who incentivised the pursuit of a plotline and then made it half-impossible to really follow.) Locations exist to be wrecked, rebuilt, reformed – with new factions in charge, perhaps including the player characters.

This form of location-based game does not need to revolve around one dungeon (the so-called “megadungeon”). It can certainly be a city-state, or even a world – there can be many dungeons, and “dungeons” (bank vaults, Prince’s Palaces, merchant Jammers in the Phlogiston, inter-connected wilderness areas, and so forth). The breadth of the world is up to the DM – and, bluntly, it will require more work than most pre-written, story-driven adventures.

Story in Location-Based Campaigns

But, you might say: “Yes, the location may be wonderful and weird, and I get the incentive mechanism, and I can see why some of that play would be fun – I love talking to NPCs, and this stuff about building a stronghold sounds good. But what about story? I like the sense of higher stakes, of big issues players must deal with, and so forth.”

That’s quite a reasonable point – but again, a location-based game can do that. It just frames the matter differently. There are three general ways “Story” can be identified in such campaigns, on a spectrum:

A.    The Fully Emergent Story. Good examples: Castle Greyhawk itself from what we can tell, Jaquays’ JG102 The Caverns of Thracia, and Patrick Wetmore’s Anomalous Subsurface Environment. There are factions in the location; there are curios and toys and weird things; there are amazing places to explore. The story is what happens when you throw a party into this tenuous equilibrium. Now, even here there may be other moving pieces – in Anomalous Subsurface Environment, other adventuring parties and outside factions also enter the dungeon and begin to mess around, and events happen as time passes (though, interestingly, time passes tracking when characters level.) The epic story will consist of how you broached peace between two factions at war, how you defeated your rivals, and how you barely escaped the hellish mock-city of the Grubmen.

B.     The Unfolding Mystery Story. Good examples: Patrick Stuart’s Silent Titans, Chris Kutalik’s Hill Cantons (especially “Beet for the Beet God” in What Ho, Frog Demons), and arguably Gygax and Mentzer’s Temple of Elemental Evil (perhaps more so in Gygax’s original tabletop game than in the final module). It may be that the game starts with a mystery that engenders exploration – in Silent Titans, a band of mismatched strays caught from across time and space end up in a bizarre version of Chester and the Wirral, and don’t know why.  Alternately, it may be that events begin to spin out of control as the players progress on their merry explorations. That’s certainly the case in Hill Cantons, where different actions ramp up (or occasionally calm down) the Chaos Index (or Beet Infection Index, or even the Anti-Chaos Index). Weird stuff happens – sometimes very bad weird stuff – as those indices move. The strange, acid fantasy environment of the Cantons means that player actions shape reality more than they intend; a mechanic models that. Or again, it may be that the characters unearth some evil plot or strangeness whilst exploring – such is the case in Temple of Elemental Evil. The epic story emerges from the exploration of the mystery, one way or another – the mystery and strangeness that emerges in the game from the nature of the location.

C.     The Connected Location Story. Good examples: Gygax’s GDQ1-7, Carl Sargeant’s Night Below, what I can make out of Tony Huso’s World of Adummim homegame (I recommend his various published modules from that game, incidentally). The basic principle here is that “someone” other than the characters is acting to shape the world. They have a foe, whether they know it or not. Now I’m on dangerous ground here – sometimes these stories have formal “plots”, and sometimes they don’t. They can certainly be mistaken for a more typical modern game, with connected setpieces. But there is a world of difference between Gygax’s Giants and Underdark series, say, and the assumptions in Lost Mines of Phandelver or Out of the Abyss (both interesting 5e adventures from Wizards). In GDQ characters do travel between a number of Giant holdings, and thence into the Underdark through a variety of locales – they uncover an evil plot, and because the plot is happening in time, and not paused for the players, most characters will desire to investigate it. The assumption is that the plot will be opposed – but nothing in the material absolutely requires it, if the DM is willing to develop the material. But assuming the characters try to stop the plot, they still must explore a series of six (or seven, including the subpar Queen of the Spiders module) locations, which are not setpieces waiting to happen, but emergent environments, where beings live and work, with guard routines, secret ways in, potential allies within, and so forth. Because XP will still come from gold with combat on the side, and gold is still needed for all the purposes listed above (as GDQ is a 1e series), adventure play itself will still be on the Gold-as-XP model – cunning, interaction, exploration, strategy. Notably, Night Below – a 2e adventure, in an era where raw combat or story XP had become the standard – does reintroduce Gold-as-XP as an optional rule. The story, at any rate, in this subtype, comes from the interaction of the characters with some other active force – but, vitally, this force is to be dealt with in traditional locations, not cinematic encounters.

You can see that these are all campaigns with story, though of different types. Yet none of them, when you read them, seem very much like most of the dungeons or evil bases or whatever in more modern modules. (All are vastly more textured and open than even the best 4^th Edition location adventure, Madness at Gardmore Abbey.) Why is this? I’ll look at that in my next post.