OSR This tells me OSR is alive and well.

[CapnZapp]

Grown ups being disappointed with Harry Potter for this stuff is the same as them being mad at The Phantom Menace: It wasn't for you.

Counterpoint: the problem with the prequel movies isn't that we're grown up, it's because it's crap.

On the other hand, Harry Potter is excellent, though not directed at us grown ups.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

GDQ is kinda like the Caves done right to me - disparate environments that come alive in the DM's hands. The Vault of the Drow really does deserve its high praise - although the series as a whole does not deserve the top spot in that Dungeon poll. Saltmarsh, Desert of Desolation, Tomb of the Lizard King, hell, even Castle Amber work better overall for me.

I will always carry a torch for the madness that is X2.

Castle Amber might not be the best designed module, but it embodies a madcap sense of wonder. I have run it for modern teens, and it draws them in completely.

(That said, the very last bit, the tomb with the guardians? That is kinda meh, and I have re-done it. In addition, you can really do a lot with the sketch of Averoigne if you choose to)

 

[overgeeked]

I will always carry a torch for the madness that is X2.

Castle Amber might not be the best designed module, but it embodies a madcap sense of wonder. I have run it for modern teens, and it draws them in completely.

(That said, the very last bit, the tomb with the guardians? That is kinda meh, and I have re-done it. In addition, you can really do a lot with the sketch of Averoigne if you choose to)

How do you change that encounter?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

How do you change that encounter?

So, the issue is that the ultimate end is ... heck, I guess I should put this in spoilers?

Spoiler

The Tomb of Stephen Amber.

It's basically a series of monsters/trap encounters. It's anti-climatic, in the sense that it's literally just "guardians" to fight. Given the absurd difficulty of them (and inability to avoid them), if the party makes it through, and gets Stephen Amber, he has a ring of four wishes and will use it to bring dead PCs back to life.

It's anticlimactic given that it's pretty much a straight railroad of fighting, which ... is a bummer, given how entertaining the rest of the module is. I have made a different, greatly expanded tomb, which allows players to do more than just hack their way through.

Again, I can understand why they did it- the modules had limited space, and there is already so much in there. But I prefer to alter the ending.

 

[Gus L]

I will always carry a torch for the madness that is X2.

...

I've always found it interesting, but I don't especially like Castle Amber (I like B2 and G1 more for example) ... I think it's an interesting effort though and well worth a read. It is different and it does some neat things but the whole of it feels very directed and a bit forced. It's also (and this is a common issue with mid level adventures where exploration threats just aren't threatening anymore) rather scene based and a bit combat centric.

You mention the end of it, and I think that as written it sort of presages a lot of the issues with current WotC adventures. Basically when you have a climax and an intended ending it's easy to end with a battle, because the results are very fixed...characters win or die. Amber can't really manage to be open ended as written though so it gets stuck - I see similar problems with Ravenloft for similar reasons (they are both portal adventures...hmmmm....), but find Ravenloft somewhat more charming as it's such a shift to campy horror tropes and always felt a bit more open ended despite typical Hickman cruelties in it.

 

[darjr]

I will always carry a torch for the madness that is X2.

Castle Amber might not be the best designed module, but it embodies a madcap sense of wonder. I have run it for modern teens, and it draws them in completely.

(That said, the very last bit, the tomb with the guardians? That is kinda meh, and I have re-done it. In addition, you can really do a lot with the sketch of Averoigne if you choose to)

I find that end of X2 is uninspiring too. I've put different things there. A crashed spaceship was one I really like but sadly the campaign fell apart before we got there.

 

[Mark Hope]

I find that end of X2 is uninspiring too. I've put different things there. A crashed spaceship was one I really like but sadly the campaign fell apart before we got there.

That is a super cool idea!! I haven't run X2 in years (although I ran it loads back in the day) and was thinking of busting it out again. Might have to nick this idea

The first time a party completed it, we had three dead PCs by the end, with a fourth turned into a fly. One of the survivors used three of the wishes to resurrect the three dead PCs, squashed the fly and gave it to the party wizard to use as a spell component, then used the final wish to grant himself a winged warhorse. Being the drunken teenagers we were at the time, this seemed wholly in keeping with the feel of the adventure

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

Levels 4-7, have not been especially popular for OSR releases, and especially in the late-OSR period and the present are fairly rare as published work from the OSR tends toward levels 1-3 for a variety of reasons.

I'd really like to see more mid and high level stuff for B/X in modern osr. Everything seems to be written under the assumption the party is level 1, dies in a single hit, and has no money. Even hexcrawls, which as supposed to be Expert level adventuring, are frequently published for levels 1-3 instead of 4+.

I guess its likely that lots of parties are gonna spend the majority of their time in the low level treadmill trying to level than actually being an established, high level party to want to buy the adventure?

 

[Willie the Duck]

I have complicated feelings about B2.

I will start by saying that I do have incredibly fond feelings about it because of nostalgia. And I think that it does a good job of setting up the "canonical" idea behind a lot of OSR- the base, the wilderness, the "dungeon."

But there's two major problems with it.

A. From a structural perspective, the Caves of Chaos will be entirely dependent on the DM's choices. If the DM runs it as "every room is separate, and doesn't react to what happens next door, and things don't change over time," then it is just an example of the most rote and boring dungeon crawl.

On the other hand, if the DM runs it as a dynamic place, the low-level adventurers can easily and quickly be overwhelmed and killed.

B. From a modern perspective, there's ... well, there's an issue involving "women and children," if you know what I mean. It wasn't until I pulled it out to review and run for the aforementioned teen group that I noticed this ... and then I couldn't unsee it. I am not judging others, by the way, but I realized that there was no way I could run that adventure for that group without re-writing those parts, and I chose not to run it.

I have a third issue:
C. Each of the 3 civilians you end up (potentially) encountering in the wilderness/dungeon -- the hermit, the cleric (who might be interested in accompanying the party), and the woman in the prison cell (who turns out being a medusa) -- all betray the party. This communicates to players that betrayal is inevitable, leading into the TSR 'killer DM' motif, along with removing an interesting game loop of 'should we try working with this group/creature?'

When I ran this module again recently I had each of the 3 randomly be 25% malevolent , 25% beneficent, and 50% self-serving/self-preservation-focused (actual behavior situation-dependent). The hermit rolled beneficial and became a hapless sidekick character to the party. The Chaos Priest stayed evil and attacked the party at the worst possible time (happening to attack the hermit). The Medusa* just wanted to escape, and only fought when they started preventing that after they freed her.*who, given the PC level, turned into a Mary Jane-inspired dryad-creature with a venus-flytrap head instead of snakes and made PCs 'stoned' instead of petrified.

 

[Gus L]

I'd really like to see more mid and high level stuff for B/X in modern osr. Everything seems to be written under the assumption the party is level 1, dies in a single hit, and has no money.

I think this IS the OSR to a degree. That is at least the mid and later periods of it. The aesthetics of both gonzo and grimdark coming to dominate and the real emergence of ultralight system design are both tools to play short high lethality campaigns and sessions. I see this as a response to a couple things that can be summed up as:

The interaction actual mechanics of early D&D-like systems and typical material conditions of play.

That is to say the claims about campaign play first made by Gygax in Strategic Review about 10 hour sessions, 2-3 times a week and campaigns lasting 5 years are simply not feasible for the majority of RPG players. It happens sure, and it worked for a lot of OSR people back when we were kids on Summer vacation too a degree... but I think that the actual higher level content in D&D has to an extent always been either: tournament based, largely aspirational, or accepting of the "Monty Haul" style advancement that Gygax was complaining about as he attacked the West Coast style back in the first year of Strat Review.

The way most people who were really building the OSR in 2012 - 2020 played was in fewer sessions and shorter sessions then the mythic standard, maybe it always has been. This was accelerated by the introduction and dominance of online play. Part of me sees blog and G+ OSR ... the "Renaissance" phase of the OSR that really grew it and popularized it - as opposed to the forum phase of which had a smaller, largely older, hobby shop and long-term campaign base.

Online sessions tend to be shorter (2-4 hours usually) due to the very real "zoom fatigue effect" and while allowing for regularity and more sessions of play also allow for a less consistent player base. I note that the longest OSr campaign I ran the "First" HMS Appollyon campaign ran for maybe three years of weekly and bi-weekly sessions and two PCs who were almost every session reached 8th level, though I believe one of them also played in some other settings from time to time [My forever gratitude to Chris H. and Eric B. - two unsung OSR heroes who play/played in everyone's game they can and always made it better]. The one I played in the longest was four years, again almost weekly with high PC death rates and I had the highest level PC at the end - a 7th level thief who knew when to be an absolute coward (and gained levels faster then the rest).

So my point here is that "high level" play is rare outside the tournament and pre-gen situation and I think it always has been. I mean I once played a PC from 1 - 36th level in BECMI, but I started that at age 11 and well... corners were cut and dice fudged.

Now... there's a second issue.

Assuming you do have a campaign of open world sandbox adventures...
Assuming you have been playing long enough to get the party to "lowest high level" - say 8th level...

How much will they have learned about the world? How well fit into the setting will their interests be? All of those things make it very hard to just drop someone else's content in. This is especially hard as oldschool D&D has been (I think accidentally in a way) adding tools for characters to elide and avoid dungeon risks since day one. At 8th level a good dungeon adventure is a very very hard thing to write or run at least as anything but scene based. If you are running a scene based game it's likely to be intrigue, diplomacy and such - near domain game hijinx with factions, gods and npcs that the party knows and has an involvement with for many sessions. As a designer I can't write that scenario for you in a useful way. I don't think anyone can. Higher level adventures need to be vague enough that the specifics of the setting (even a published one) can be written into the campaign of the referee using it - and it's hard to keep them interesting while making them vague enough to be adaptable.

A tournament module with pre-gens though - Heck ya! I think it would be cool if more people went into adventure design from this perspective honestly. Say a 20 session 8th level adventure that itself becomes a sort of mini-campaign with baked in setting and pre-gens.

[Standing on Soapbox]
I'd like to see more adventures of all kinds really! More innovation in kinds of adventures! Please stop writing hacks and clones people - we need more adventures and you can put your setting ideas, even your hacks and new classes into one!
[Stepping Off]