Zachary “The First” asks: Who Makes The Best Adventure Modules? I was about to comment, but then the text just kept on growing...
Who Makes The Best Adventure Modules
I’m a Paizo adventure path and modules subscriber, and I really like the quality of their paper, their art, their maps, and so on. I do find the adventures a bit hard to run. Important stuff I need to look up during the game is either found in the introduction, or with the NPC, or in the setting info in an appendix, and I faintly remember reading it, and... I don’t like it. They seem a bit over-engineered to me at the moment.
While I like the Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) by Goodman Games in theory, I’ve found that at the table, the modules often turn into a hack and slash fest. Sure, I’m the DM, and it’s my fault. But there’s just something missing, or maybe too much info to support simple combat and not enough info to support other solutions or gameplay. Often adventures have an interesting background but no obvious way to learn about it in-game unless the DM adds it himself. I therefore conclude that these modules [WhatIsAffordance afford] a type of game play that I don’t enjoy much at the table.
Between the two, I find myself turning to Goodman Games’ adventures every now and then, extracting elements and using them in my own games. This works quite well since most of what I need to do is reduce the number of combat encounters. Everything else stays the same. At the same time, I find myself turning to Paizo modules when I want to run an all-day one-shot, and I find myself playing and running the adventure paths because it just “promises” so much fun... Whether it will work out in the end, I’ve yet to find out. Both Shackled City and Rise of the Runelords are still ongoing.
What really worked well for me are the Necromancer Games’ modules. I really enjoyed running *Crucible of Freya* as my first D&D module in years when we started playing again, and I absolutely loved *Vault of Larin Karr*. There was not too much text, so I never felt like I had to really dig into the text. I felt free to improvise at the table. At the same time there was enough background and things to discover in-game, fun situations and multiple plot hooks to get players involved. It was good fun.
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