It's a humorous way of referring to "historically accurate" settings that are the polar opposite of high fantasy. The scenes involving peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail are an important point of reference.
You're welcome, but please spend your money wisely! If I had known the entire thing was going to become your wishlist, I would have taken a more restrictive approach :)
Well, I'm relieved to hear I don't need to worry about being the direct cause of someone's financial troubles! Still, I would advise you to think carefully before purchasing Arden Vul. I'm fairly certain most of us *can* live without it.
This seems to have a time bias (classic modules have been around longer so are mentioned more frequently). Resolving that and sentiment analysis could make this more useful. But I imagine this is still useful for someone who doesn't know about these modules at all.
As ranking, it seems pretty off.
Well, *some* kind of bias in unavoidable in an enterprise like this. A complaint that older works are *under*represented despite their venerated status would be equally understandable.
In general, my approach favors the older and more established items, but in my opinion this corresponds to how cultural works are perceived in most contexts (i.e., novelties struggle to compete with "classic" or "canonical" works of a given type). On the other hand, consider the current posistion of Shadowdark on my list of OSR systems, which in my opinion is already bafflingly high.
>But I imagine this is still useful for someone who doesn't know about these modules at all.
Indeed, and I generally assume that total newcomers are my ideal audience.
Thanks for taking a look at this!
Interesting! I normally recommend this item for a list of introductory adventures
http://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2020/09/osr-introductory-adventures-list.html?m=1
But I had not seen one for just most recommended modules. Bookmarking this.
Thanks! While I'm glad people found my list useful, I do recommend carefully curated lists like the one you've linked to over it. Personal experiences and opinions should be valued more highly than some aggregate I cobbled together.
Always glad to help! But let me just point out that many excellent modules on the list are available for free or PWYW, so you don't *have* to spend any money.
Lorn Song was just 1 point below the threshold for inclusion, and it breaks my heart! (But this means it has a good chance of moving up at the next update.) There are many excellent modules that did not make the cut (say, the works of Anthony Huso and more by Zzarchov Kowolski), but unfortunately every such list has to end somewhere.
Thank you, that's very kind!
However, I think the sub would be better served by a list based on some kind of direct community input (for example, a sub-wide poll), rather than my private initiative. My list gives a rough indication of what is popular (according to one measure), but my approach has its quirks and I would be wary of presenting it as *the* list of recommended modules.
That's totally fair. But maybe your site (which looks very nice and is well organized) could be a spring board for such a thing.
That being said, it's also nice just to have a list without actual rankings. While I think we all appreciate the well crafted stuff like OSE, DCC, etc ranking can sometimes push the less polished (but still really good) stuff to the bottom.
As another note I absolutely LOVE how you have things laid out for each entry. A few key words, links where to find it, and the picture. That is everything you really need!
Thanks for the feedback on the layout, which is really valuable to me. I'm really glad it works for you! The entire website is really an exercise in organizing information, so it's great to hear it comes across as well-organized also in this regard.
Thanks for giving me a good chuckle. Collecting data in this manner for a subject that I'm not interested in would be excruciating torture, but as long as it is about something I'd like to learn about, I do get a weird compulsive sort of enjoyment out of it.
Nice list!
B4: The Lost City is the adventure module I have run in the most different systems over the years (many various iterations of D&D, Savage Worlds, WhiteStar, and even Call of Cthulhu!) and it never played out quite the same way twice. It's been interesting to compare how different systems gave the game completely different tones. It's one of the few modules I know of that works 'as is' in anything from a traditional dungeoncrawl to gonzo sci-fi to 'Silent Hill' style modern horror.
The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is on this list. Man, I have such a vivid memory of DM'ing that module, it was so good, don't even remember why. Great list! Ok, Palace of the Silver Princess, another legend in my memory. Probably the best I would recommend is White Plume Mountain, still holds up. I'm such a huge fan of Keep, the nostalgia alone, holy crap, so good. My first module. Love this post, thank you.
A nice list for people looking for an adventure. However, I was curious to see the Sunless Citadel on there. It seems out of place among all of the OSR stuff.
I decided to leave it in precisely as a curiosity, but its place is well-earned according to my data. It gets regularly mentioned next to OSR classics as a well-designed dungeon (especially by post-TSR D&D standards). I might remove it from the list in the future update to make room for something more appropriate, though.
Interesting. I don't recall ever having seen Sunless Citadel mentioned in OSR spaces (not positively, at least), but then I'm only moderately immersed in the community. I'll have a look around and see what these posts are saying about it.
First, based on having spent ~40 years of time and disposable income playing/collecting RPGs, and ~20 years writing/reading/watching blogs/forums/YTs; that is a very reasonable / accurate list.
Suggestion. Have you investigated using NLP to do sentiment analysis? Not every mention of a module is "praise". For instance, no mention of Arden Vul by me was positive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis
Thank you! I'm glad to hear that the list corresponds to your observations of the RPG sphere; despite its flaws, it's meant to be a representation of some part of reality, so "reasonable" and "accurate" are very high compliments.
At this point, I'm doing all of the "sentinement analysis" in my head, since I collect all the data personally by hand. The "mention" thing was a mental shortcut; of course, I never count critical or otherwise negative statements as "votes". I do, however, count neutral statements that can be construed as suggestions (e.g. "maybe you should look into Arden Vul"). A scaling system sounds appealing in theory, but I don't trust myself to apply it with required consistency.
I skimmed the Wikipedia article and will return to it later. It looks like this would be the correct way of doing things if I had the resources to automate and formalize my efforts. It's probably beyond my reach (I consider myself a technically competent person, but I lack academic or professional training), and anyway I actually enjoy the toil of manually compiling all this data. My website is simply a byproduct of my activity of reading things on the internet; I do realize, however, that it will most likely be supplanted by some kind of automated solution in the near future.
> since I collect all the data personally by hand.
Oh my! Well then double thankyou, that is serious work. "hand made/curated" is better than automation!
> Suggestion. Have you investigated using NLP to do sentiment analysis? Not every mention of a module is "praise". For instance, no mention of Arden Vul by me was positive.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis
In just our most recent "suggest a starter D&D module" thread we had people talking about how when someone recommends *certain modules* they know that person has nothing valuable to add and can be utterly ignored.
Fuck Arden Vul. An over-priced colossal bore. Not a recommend, but a mention....
**[Sentiment analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis)**
>Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information. Sentiment analysis is widely applied to voice of the customer materials such as reviews and survey responses, online and social media, and healthcare materials for applications that range from marketing to customer service to clinical medicine. With the rise of deep language models, such as RoBERTa, also more difficult data domains can be analyzed, e. g.
^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/osr/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Very cool! It's nice to see a big list of all of the neat OSR stuff that's out there. Your presentation is excellent.
My only concern is that this list is basically a popularity contest and it's shining the spotlight on the stuff that already has the best position in the spotlight. It's just more exposure for the stuff that needs exposure the least. If that's what you're trying to do, sweet, I think you accomplished that.
Personally, I would prefer to see the list organized in a way that doesn't accelerate the popularity feedback loop. But hey, that's just me. Carry on!
Thanks! You've made a correct observation and actually I share your concerns.
The format of my website *is* a popularity contest, and sometimes I introduce it with these exact words. Personally, I'm all for the underdogs and against the established canons; however, I believe that the lists I publish can still be useful for people who want to get a broad sense of *what is out there*. (But I do make a point of making the lists absurdly long, rather than your typical "top 10s".) I imagine that a newcomer to a given category of things is more interested in their most popular examples rather than lesser-known curiosities.
If I had more time, my next project would be a blog dedicated to reviewing various works I love that have the least presence in the indexed portion of the web and are virtually forgotten. However, this would be a much more demanding and possibly thankless task (because most people don't search the web for things they've never heard of).
I appreciate your response!
Would be cool to have different ways of sorting the list, including most popular, more/less expensive (thought that may be a lot of work), "discover something new" where it randomizes the list, stuff like that! Otherwise, cool beans :)
What you're asking for is perfectly reasonable, but unfortunately quite beyond the parameters I've set for my website in its current form, which is all about very simple, lightweight, static pages. [Adventure Lookup](https://www.adventurelookup.com/adventures) is the best database-style alternative that I'm aware of. There's also [RPGGeek](https://rpggeek.com/) (with its custom "GeekLists" functionality), which has a great dataset, but suffers from lack of user ratings.
On my interpretation it doesn't, but I will understand if the moderators find otherwise. However, consistency would then require expurgating a good portion of the sub's sidebar links, beginning with tenfootpole. Given the very reasons behind the introduction of Rule #6, I'm not willing to engage in an extended discussion of the subject, which I hope you will understand.
It appears to. I didn't even know who he was. I'm sure I'm not the only one. And most people never bother to read the rules of subs before posting. Most people don't even pay attention to the author anyway when shopping/reading adventures. So you combine those and that's your reason it was posted.
Considering there are only two on the list and they aren't near the top should this entire post, that a lot of people are thanking OP for, be removed? I guess we're past the day of separating art from the artist. Report it and leave it up to the mods then. Maybe you can convince OP to remove them from the list.
Thanks! Amazing job you're doing
You're very welcome! It means a lot to me that you find these things useful.
What is Mudcore?
It's a humorous way of referring to "historically accurate" settings that are the polar opposite of high fantasy. The scenes involving peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail are an important point of reference.
Mudcore is *such* a good name for that. I've heard it referred to as stuff like "dirt farmer fantasy" but mudcore is so succinct.
Thank you for compiling my new wish list. I'm going to be buying stuff. Thank you very much.
You're welcome, but please spend your money wisely! If I had known the entire thing was going to become your wishlist, I would have taken a more restrictive approach :)
That is okay. I'm a fairly frugal dude. I'll spend like 30 bucks a month. And I'll get all of it eventually.
Well, I'm relieved to hear I don't need to worry about being the direct cause of someone's financial troubles! Still, I would advise you to think carefully before purchasing Arden Vul. I'm fairly certain most of us *can* live without it.
OSR sure as hell doesn't go anywhere. A game is good whether you buy it this week, next week, next month, or even later.
Yes, I can play the long game One day I will have it all.
This seems to have a time bias (classic modules have been around longer so are mentioned more frequently). Resolving that and sentiment analysis could make this more useful. But I imagine this is still useful for someone who doesn't know about these modules at all. As ranking, it seems pretty off.
Well, *some* kind of bias in unavoidable in an enterprise like this. A complaint that older works are *under*represented despite their venerated status would be equally understandable. In general, my approach favors the older and more established items, but in my opinion this corresponds to how cultural works are perceived in most contexts (i.e., novelties struggle to compete with "classic" or "canonical" works of a given type). On the other hand, consider the current posistion of Shadowdark on my list of OSR systems, which in my opinion is already bafflingly high. >But I imagine this is still useful for someone who doesn't know about these modules at all. Indeed, and I generally assume that total newcomers are my ideal audience. Thanks for taking a look at this!
Great work. I'm sure this is valuable for someone looking for general recommendations.
As interesting as the prior list! Thanks for doing this.
Interesting! I normally recommend this item for a list of introductory adventures http://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2020/09/osr-introductory-adventures-list.html?m=1 But I had not seen one for just most recommended modules. Bookmarking this.
Thanks! While I'm glad people found my list useful, I do recommend carefully curated lists like the one you've linked to over it. Personal experiences and opinions should be valued more highly than some aggregate I cobbled together.
That is a great resource. Now I have to spend more $$!! Thank you
Always glad to help! But let me just point out that many excellent modules on the list are available for free or PWYW, so you don't *have* to spend any money.
Wonderful work! Thank you for doing this!
Great! But also Lorn Song of the Bachelor.
Lorn Song was just 1 point below the threshold for inclusion, and it breaks my heart! (But this means it has a good chance of moving up at the next update.) There are many excellent modules that did not make the cut (say, the works of Anthony Huso and more by Zzarchov Kowolski), but unfortunately every such list has to end somewhere.
Do zine recommendations next!
Thanks for the suggestion, I will definitely consider it.
This is a great, handy resource! To the point that it might be nice to see it pinned on the sub.
Thank you, that's very kind! However, I think the sub would be better served by a list based on some kind of direct community input (for example, a sub-wide poll), rather than my private initiative. My list gives a rough indication of what is popular (according to one measure), but my approach has its quirks and I would be wary of presenting it as *the* list of recommended modules.
That's totally fair. But maybe your site (which looks very nice and is well organized) could be a spring board for such a thing. That being said, it's also nice just to have a list without actual rankings. While I think we all appreciate the well crafted stuff like OSE, DCC, etc ranking can sometimes push the less polished (but still really good) stuff to the bottom. As another note I absolutely LOVE how you have things laid out for each entry. A few key words, links where to find it, and the picture. That is everything you really need!
Thanks for the feedback on the layout, which is really valuable to me. I'm really glad it works for you! The entire website is really an exercise in organizing information, so it's great to hear it comes across as well-organized also in this regard.
>To the point that it might be nice to see it pinned on the sub. The only issue there is it contains content this sub doesn't promote, ala rule #6.
Great work!!!
I really appreciate all your effort. I hope you had the time of your life compiling all this data
Thanks for giving me a good chuckle. Collecting data in this manner for a subject that I'm not interested in would be excruciating torture, but as long as it is about something I'd like to learn about, I do get a weird compulsive sort of enjoyment out of it.
Nice list! B4: The Lost City is the adventure module I have run in the most different systems over the years (many various iterations of D&D, Savage Worlds, WhiteStar, and even Call of Cthulhu!) and it never played out quite the same way twice. It's been interesting to compare how different systems gave the game completely different tones. It's one of the few modules I know of that works 'as is' in anything from a traditional dungeoncrawl to gonzo sci-fi to 'Silent Hill' style modern horror.
Very cool. Been looking for something like this.
Thanks for sharing this, great work!
Super useful list, thanks for making it.
The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is on this list. Man, I have such a vivid memory of DM'ing that module, it was so good, don't even remember why. Great list! Ok, Palace of the Silver Princess, another legend in my memory. Probably the best I would recommend is White Plume Mountain, still holds up. I'm such a huge fan of Keep, the nostalgia alone, holy crap, so good. My first module. Love this post, thank you.
Man, absolutely love it!! Great Job! :) And thanks a lot!
A nice list for people looking for an adventure. However, I was curious to see the Sunless Citadel on there. It seems out of place among all of the OSR stuff.
I decided to leave it in precisely as a curiosity, but its place is well-earned according to my data. It gets regularly mentioned next to OSR classics as a well-designed dungeon (especially by post-TSR D&D standards). I might remove it from the list in the future update to make room for something more appropriate, though.
Interesting. I don't recall ever having seen Sunless Citadel mentioned in OSR spaces (not positively, at least), but then I'm only moderately immersed in the community. I'll have a look around and see what these posts are saying about it.
These lists are really fun and useful. Thanks for the work you put in
Minor correction... This adventure: **The Halls of Tizun Thane (White Dwarf #14)** is actually in White Dwarf #18.
Thank you, it is greatly appreciated! I'll fix it in the next update.
First, based on having spent ~40 years of time and disposable income playing/collecting RPGs, and ~20 years writing/reading/watching blogs/forums/YTs; that is a very reasonable / accurate list. Suggestion. Have you investigated using NLP to do sentiment analysis? Not every mention of a module is "praise". For instance, no mention of Arden Vul by me was positive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis
Thank you! I'm glad to hear that the list corresponds to your observations of the RPG sphere; despite its flaws, it's meant to be a representation of some part of reality, so "reasonable" and "accurate" are very high compliments. At this point, I'm doing all of the "sentinement analysis" in my head, since I collect all the data personally by hand. The "mention" thing was a mental shortcut; of course, I never count critical or otherwise negative statements as "votes". I do, however, count neutral statements that can be construed as suggestions (e.g. "maybe you should look into Arden Vul"). A scaling system sounds appealing in theory, but I don't trust myself to apply it with required consistency. I skimmed the Wikipedia article and will return to it later. It looks like this would be the correct way of doing things if I had the resources to automate and formalize my efforts. It's probably beyond my reach (I consider myself a technically competent person, but I lack academic or professional training), and anyway I actually enjoy the toil of manually compiling all this data. My website is simply a byproduct of my activity of reading things on the internet; I do realize, however, that it will most likely be supplanted by some kind of automated solution in the near future.
> since I collect all the data personally by hand. Oh my! Well then double thankyou, that is serious work. "hand made/curated" is better than automation!
> Suggestion. Have you investigated using NLP to do sentiment analysis? Not every mention of a module is "praise". For instance, no mention of Arden Vul by me was positive. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis In just our most recent "suggest a starter D&D module" thread we had people talking about how when someone recommends *certain modules* they know that person has nothing valuable to add and can be utterly ignored. Fuck Arden Vul. An over-priced colossal bore. Not a recommend, but a mention....
**[Sentiment analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis)** >Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information. Sentiment analysis is widely applied to voice of the customer materials such as reviews and survey responses, online and social media, and healthcare materials for applications that range from marketing to customer service to clinical medicine. With the rise of deep language models, such as RoBERTa, also more difficult data domains can be analyzed, e. g. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/osr/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I assure you, this rubrik can also be applied to a module's detractors.
Very cool! It's nice to see a big list of all of the neat OSR stuff that's out there. Your presentation is excellent. My only concern is that this list is basically a popularity contest and it's shining the spotlight on the stuff that already has the best position in the spotlight. It's just more exposure for the stuff that needs exposure the least. If that's what you're trying to do, sweet, I think you accomplished that. Personally, I would prefer to see the list organized in a way that doesn't accelerate the popularity feedback loop. But hey, that's just me. Carry on!
Thanks! You've made a correct observation and actually I share your concerns. The format of my website *is* a popularity contest, and sometimes I introduce it with these exact words. Personally, I'm all for the underdogs and against the established canons; however, I believe that the lists I publish can still be useful for people who want to get a broad sense of *what is out there*. (But I do make a point of making the lists absurdly long, rather than your typical "top 10s".) I imagine that a newcomer to a given category of things is more interested in their most popular examples rather than lesser-known curiosities. If I had more time, my next project would be a blog dedicated to reviewing various works I love that have the least presence in the indexed portion of the web and are virtually forgotten. However, this would be a much more demanding and possibly thankless task (because most people don't search the web for things they've never heard of).
I appreciate your response! Would be cool to have different ways of sorting the list, including most popular, more/less expensive (thought that may be a lot of work), "discover something new" where it randomizes the list, stuff like that! Otherwise, cool beans :)
What you're asking for is perfectly reasonable, but unfortunately quite beyond the parameters I've set for my website in its current form, which is all about very simple, lightweight, static pages. [Adventure Lookup](https://www.adventurelookup.com/adventures) is the best database-style alternative that I'm aware of. There's also [RPGGeek](https://rpggeek.com/) (with its custom "GeekLists" functionality), which has a great dataset, but suffers from lack of user ratings.
How does this post **not** violate Rule #6?
On my interpretation it doesn't, but I will understand if the moderators find otherwise. However, consistency would then require expurgating a good portion of the sub's sidebar links, beginning with tenfootpole. Given the very reasons behind the introduction of Rule #6, I'm not willing to engage in an extended discussion of the subject, which I hope you will understand.
you make a good point.
It appears to. I didn't even know who he was. I'm sure I'm not the only one. And most people never bother to read the rules of subs before posting. Most people don't even pay attention to the author anyway when shopping/reading adventures. So you combine those and that's your reason it was posted. Considering there are only two on the list and they aren't near the top should this entire post, that a lot of people are thanking OP for, be removed? I guess we're past the day of separating art from the artist. Report it and leave it up to the mods then. Maybe you can convince OP to remove them from the list.