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I am going to take a few moments to talk about different types of adventures:


For an idea of what type of adventure modual that I will buy lots of I would like to direct WOTC to Goodman games dungeon crawl classic advetnures line that it published for 3.x. Generally, they were nice adventures that could be played in 2-3 sessions, that focus on intersting combats, villians, and treasure. They are easily adaptible to drop into a big campaign, or could be linked together as a long compaing in themselves. 3.x had some great adventures as well. Their line of what I call the "blue adventures," since each adventure was published in a blue paperback cover, and staple bound, were excellent. each one covered about 2 levels of play, and they each stood on their own as an independant adventure but still offered advice on how to link a commen thread between them all, so you could run a level 1-20 campaign out of them, and I did :D It was three years of awsome DnD in college. They also varried and mixed it up a bit with some adventures being dungeon crawls, wilderness adventures with mystery, urban adventures with evil cults, underdark adventures with drow, durger, and other creatures, and extra planer adventures. 

The first adventure was "sunless citidale" fighting pesky goblins and the plot of an evil druid drying to create an army of throny poisonis twig monsters and ends with the players defeating the druid, and destroying an evil undead tree that is spawning the twig monsters with fire. The thing is, the whole dungeon is a lost citidale swallowed up by the earth, and was once occupied by a cult that worshiped Ashaderalon the great red dragon, and the evil tree actually grew out of a steak that was used to kill the leader of the cult, who had turned himself into a vampire so that he could live long enough to see Ashaderalon's return. Well, destroying the tree meant destroying the steak, and so the vampire came back to life, heads off to "Heart of night fang spire," his citdale that the players will later assult at level 10. Inebetween these two adventures are others, one is an urban adventure, one is a neat wilderness adventure with a mystery thrown into the mix, and adventures after "Heart of nightfang spire" include underdark adventures, extra planer adventures, and of course ends with the players having to fight Ashadarlon at level 20. 

These were great fun, and they were nice and cheap, being paper back, black and white, and stable bound. I much prefer adventures like this instead of a 35 or 40 dollar hard back mini campaign of tomb of horrors. 3.5 also had at least one adventure, "the demon gates of something something...." which was cool. It was more of the folder type style that Keep on the shadowfell is, but it also had a mini players book, with prestige classes and back ground info, and feats to help tie the players into the story. With next using things like "themes," I would think that the bigger adventures taht they publish could offer such booklets with new themes for players to use to help get them involved with the story. 

"The shackled city" is a different kind of adventure that I also loved. It was one big book with a level 1-20 campaign. I earned the reputation of killing pcs off left and right in this game, even though all I did was play the modual as was, and earned the nick name "DM O-Dead." Having 12 players running around the lava tubes beneath Cauldren City looking for a hobgoblin vampire was quite a blast. I hope a few of these make it into publication for DnD next.

Then there are the shorter adventures, but are super deadly. Tomb of horrors being most famous, this adventure type is remembered with fondness but, at the same time, you would not want your standard game to   a tomb of horros adventure. Other great "your going to die, get used to it" adventures was "The Crypt of The devil Lich" by goodman games and "Rappanathuk: Dungeon of Graves" by sword and sworcery. Have not really seen DnD make adventures like this (although Heart of Nightfang Spire gets pretty close). I would like to see DnD create a new "dont use your own characters, use the pre gens cause you will just cry if you take your own tenth level party in here" tomb of horrors type adventure for DnD next.

Along with the deadly dungeons mentioned above, I would like to see a DnD mega dungeon. The only mega dungeons I know of right now are castle white rock by good man games, dungeon of graves by sword and sorcery, AEG's worlds largest dungeon, and another sowrd and sworcer called "escape fron Zelbars maze" or, something like that. I know they have an undermountan book coming out for 4th ed (which I will be getting, love undermountain!), but undermountant to me was never a true mega dungeon, as it was "here is some big maps and a general idea of what the dungeon is, but you have to fill in the details" To me, a megadungeon is tons of maps, all detailed out with encounters, and covers at least 5 levels of play. I would like to see DnDN have its own, offical DnD mega dungeon!

Finally, the sand box adventures. things like keep on the boarderlands. Generally, these have a town or base of operations, some interesting areas to explore, with a main dungeon detailed. I would like to see a right and proper sand box game as a box set, with nice poster map that players can look at, a dm eyes only map, details of the area, and a few dungeons/adventures deatailed. It seemed like in 4th ed, DnD starting creating sandboxes without the detailed adventure section. For example, Hammerfast and, there was another one of a ruined city, dont remember what that was called. These are really cool as they give you an interesting setting and bits to get your imagination going, and help in outlining possible campaign ideas. But they would be even better if the locations on the maps were detailed out. For example, one place was called something like citidale of the fire opal gem. That sounds awsome yet, nothing else is offered about it in the hammerfast book. If those locations on the map had detailed dungeon descriptions I would be much more tempted to use them.

Any way, thats my rant on adventure products. I hope there are lots of adventures, and lots of varity of adventures in DnDN!










 

Good to see some megadungeon love.

I'm going to go  a step further than others have, and come right out and say WotC owes it to itself (to say nothing of the memory of the man without whom we wouldn't have this game to discuss) to try and get the original, authentic Castle Greyhawk into print after all these years. Greyhawk Ruins is pretty good but not even close to being the real deal. Gail Gygax is very much interested in getting this out to the public in some form, and the best way to do that is with WotC's participation.

I don't know the Gygax family or have any other inside information so perhaps anything I say should be taken with a grain of salt, but this honestly seems like a win-win scenario for everyone concerned to me.