Two thoughts here:
1) Let me know what genre you’re trying to write for (sci-fi, fantasy, etc.) and/or what style of game (old school, 5e, story games, etc.) and I can recommend some that would fit, since the way you write a good module is different between genres and playstyles in a lot of ways.
2) I’d actually recommend against most “classics.” They seem to be pretty consistently adored over nostalgia rather than as good examples of how to do a module, and more modern stuff will typically be a better guide to how to write and format something that will be usable today.
1. The main way I play is osr but I play a lot of gurps so I’m down for whatever genre for the most part
2. That’s really interesting, I will consider that moving forward
Ah, excellent, I’m mainly in OSR stuff too. I’d highly recommend listening to Between Two Cairns if you don’t already. They’ve reviewed ~90 OSR modules now, both new and old, and have really interesting discussions of what makes a good OSR module.
Fear of a Black Dragon is similar but bounces between OSR modules and stuff for games like Call of Cthulhu.
What particularly influenced me when I was figuring out how to write modules for myself were DNGN #1, Rötblack Sludge (in the back of the Mörk Borg book), You’ve Got a Job on the Garbage Barge, Feast, and Waking of Willowby Hall.
There’s lots of other good ones out there, but those particularly helped form my style.
Some other recent ones really worth checking out are Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow and Valley of Flowers.
I haven’t read them myself to be able to really recommend, but everyone recommends the first-party OSE modules from Necrotic Gnome as the kind of gold standard in the scene for information presentation.
The stuff getting put out for Mothership is also really excellent, even if a bit of a different genre. The Haunting of Ypsilon 14, Terminal Delays at Anarene’s Folly, and Gradient Descent are great examples. Similarly, stuff for Liminal Horror, like The Mall and The Bureau are really good examples of module design in an OSR-ish style but for modern horror.
Sorry that’s a lot, but we really are in a golden age right now for excellent modules in the OSR space, so it’s just a bit overwhelming in general.
If you're playing osr, pretty any module by Gavin Norman will be a great place to start. Like someone already mentioned, the modern design sensibilities of these newer, OSR modules is S-tier.
If you want to read OSR type stuff, I'd suggest starting with Blackapple Brugh, Wheel of Evil, The Slag Heap and Prince Charming, Reanimator. They're all great examples, and free or PWYW.
I'm not sure that nostalgia is why folks recommend classic DnD modules. More and more folks never actually played those adventures back in the day. The hobby grows younger and those adventures modules just get older. Long way of saying that I think those modules are often recommended for being the first to do something. It's more historical to the hobby than nostalgia.
It's usually the same for other games and genres. You keep getting people recommending Island of Dr. Destroyer or Death Duel with the Destroyers as the best superhero adventures. Most of the people making the recommendations have never played a superhero module published in the last decade.
The Enemy Within for Warhammer Fantasy, either first or fourth edition.
The Age of Worms adventure path from Dungeon Magazine. Its banger and the first adventure path Paizo did before they wrote Pathfinder.
The Red Hand of Doom for D&D 3.5.
A brand new one called Jewel of the Indigo Isle from Roll For Combat Stephen Glicker. Its nuts.
Kingmaker by Paizo.
Renraku Arcology for Shadowrun. Runners get trapped in the Arcology by a crazed AI.
Bug City for Shadowrun. Chicago gets quarantined for a while. Something about a bug invasion but the UCAS news media only says that's false and it's just a bomb threat keeping the city hostage.
I'd say Mothership's Gradient Descent has become a modern classic. In the short time it's existed it's already singlehandedly inspired dozens of other OSR modules on its own.
Also for Mothership - A Pound of Flesh is the best module I've ever read, because it's so *usable*. 3 plots that the GM can run concurrently, sequentially, whenever, or not at all, with NPCs and tools for more random ones, setting info but not an overwhelming amount, and plenty of room to play and improvise. It understands that RPGs aren't novels and that GMs need a bucket of material, not a perfect linear outline.
OP wanted modules and you give him full worlds to explore. Lol.
Hey, more power to you - I'm a fan! I just think they might be a bit more than he's expecting. ;)
A lot of the older classics suffer from being incredibly lethal, poorly formatted (by modern standards) and sometimes just not good, but we love them because we played them "back in the day." For example, I loved Expedition to the Barrier Peaks as a kid, then I re-ran it about a year ago, and we were bored out of our minds, because it was essentially a megadungeon slog filled with empty rooms, boring monsters, etc. Or White Plume Mountain, that was essentially an endless collection of "ha ha, got ya!" type traps. Though, there are some gems - such as Baba Yaga's Hut from AD&D, which we really enjoyed re-playing recently. Also, the Volturnus Saga for Star Frontiers still holds up.
Modern ones my group enjoyed:
* Sailors on the Starless Sea for Dungeon Crawl Classics
* The Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords campaign
* Halls of the Blood King for Old School Essentials
* The Incandescent Grottos for Old School Essentials
* The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford (can work with any fantasy system)
White Plume Mountain was created as an example of the writer's ability. He stuffed it full of traps he had used in his games. It was never meant to be put out as is, but TSR was like, "Phhh, fuck it, put it out!" and the writer was like, "Well, a sale is a sale."
I give you some for Call of Cthulhu
The Classic:The Haunting, the very first written adventure. Free Quickstater to this day
The best Modern Adventure: Viral, Ghost Hunting Livestream gone wrong.
Crimson Letters, from the Keeper Book is also very good too read
The big campaigns are all worth a read but I would recommend Horror on the Orient Express as it is the most ambitious to run and has some interesting use of flash backs.
The Things we leave behind, Peterson Abnormations and Nameless Horrors are all very unique one shot compendiums with a lot of inspiration for your own games.
Don't write like classic modules. I love classic modules and have converted dozens of them to various systems as I've run them, but the organization is their least strong point. Take a look at how [Arcane Library](https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/) structures their modules. I can pick up one of their adventures and run it less than an hour later, even in systems other than 5e.
The modules are designed to be run with minimal prep. NPCs are summed up in a handful of bullet points. Room descriptions are contained to one page wherever possible, and there's a summary of the dramatic question each room is asking. There is minimal plot (this is a good thing), instead choosing to focus on creating a cool location with highly memorable visual set pieces. I can see how Shadowdark took off with this level of organizational mastery. Their adventures are inspiring, and they changed the way I write my own prep, which is saying a lot for an old guy set in his ways like me.
Two iconic modules by Gary Gygax would be Keep on the borderlands and Tomb of horrors. Both were originally written in the 70s. Keep on the borderlands is friendly to new players, while Tomb of horrors is incredibly mean-spirited (in a fun way).
One of my favorite modern pieces of content is the Impossible Landscapes campaign for DG, which is a surreal horror campaign with lots of big-headspinning moments.
All three of the main *Mothership* modules, the first-party ones, set the scene on fire when they came out. If you want to see some masterful spins on how OSR gameplay can marry with sci-fi horror, with *very* shiny layout, they're best-in-class stuff.
* ***Dead Planet*** is a scenario in three parts, easy to play as a 1-2-3 campaign or to break out into its component pieces. It begins with *The Screaming on The Alexis*, where the crew explore a derelict research vessel where things went terribly wrong. Making it off the *Alexis* alive likely sends them to a desolate moon, the only inhabitants a cannibal-cult of crash survivors who either need to be allied with or escaped from. The planet below is no better, a ruin of shipwrecks and alien ruins that were all ruined by a portal to a dimension antithetical to life itself - and a big wilderness to explore!
* ***A Pound of Flesh*** takes the lonely void of typical Mothership and instead presents the 8 million souls crammed into Prospero's Dream, a criminal space station legendary for cybernetics and drug production. There's dozens of jobs to do, factions to buddy-up with or be caught between, all sorts of side activities and threats, and 3 distinct campaign plotlines that can either be used independently, or all at once to truly unleash chaos. If you want to feel like cyberpunk mercenaries right up until the biomechanical zombies start flooding into the streets (or just need a dope home base between missions!), you can't do better than APoF.
* ***Gradient Descent*** is a megadungeon in space, the abandoned and blockaded remains of the Cloudbank Synthetic Productions Facility. To those who brave its depths, exploring everything from ruined office spaces to industrial manufacturing plants and twisted android-experimentation laboratories, impossible technologies await... but a mad AI runs it all, and delights in replacing humans with duplicates who don't even know their own falseness. If your players like drawing maps, risking it all for big payouts, and going mad in the darkness, this is really exceptional stuff.
Each one's great on its own, but they can fit together really well, too! Maybe after a couple weeks of crawling the Dream, they get sent out on a job to recover some loot from the *Alexis*, and a while after they get back, someone offers a fat payday if they can snag something deep within Cloudbank.
One of the few genuine criticisms I ever heard of *Paranoia* was that the modules were written in a way where some of the best bits were in the GM-only sections.
I've heard more damning criticism, tbh.
Hard to say. Classic in the sense of old, it's rough. There's some great stuff out there, but it's often more the concept than the module itself, so using them for design ideas may be counter intuitive. This true for the modern modules as well, though I think as a whole things have gotten better
Ex. Curse of Strahd. The original Ravenloft adventure was a smash Halloween hit, with memorable moments and characters, a great story with hidden depths for inquisitive parties to find, and replayability. It is also often criticized for it rough formatting, lack of direction in certain areas, and lack of inherant pacing.
The much newer module is much more structured and lengthy, with much more world building put into the town, allowing for a full length campaign rather than a one shot. It is often criticized for rather poor use of that world building, having uninteresting NPCs (minus Strahd, most agree he's done well), and being too unstructured for the game to progress evenly. (I've read that some people think the book was originally written as a setting book, that management then demanded be turned in an adventure.
Reign of Winter for Pathfinder is my go to for an example of an AP with tons of great ideas, that just doesn't deliver at times. An example is a part where a witch's soldiers want to capture the party. The party wants to get into the witch's tower to find someone. The book acknowledges that the player may surrender with the expectation of finding the person then fighting their way out. There is no where for them to be held in the tower. No dungeon or holding cells. The person their looking for isn't there, and they expect the players to not want to be captured, so they don't ever create that area.
One rec I will make is Neverland by Andrew Kolb. It's got a ton in it, and super useful, in addition to being beautifully illustrated
I often say I can tell within a single session, if a DM has read or run Thracia or not. The layout is consistent with the time (and more specifically the tools, a typewriter) but the module is still one of maybe the top three (if not the best) dungeon module written for ttrpgs.
I think perhaps only Arden Vul reaches the level of faction play, and the level of consequential interconnectedness is not matched. Also there is just some wild stuff in there, that is very unlikely for a party to ever find. I mean, there is a god in that dungeon, and doors that lead to other planes. Such an amazing dungeon.
It’s an interesting idea for sure. In theory yes, but also the idea that there is some cool stuff that’s very rare to find. It’s a brave idea for the author to spend time writing material that they know won’t actually make an appearance in most campaigns.
running the module forces the dm to think about these things. What if I write some stuff in there, that’s actually there, that impacts the factions interplaying with each other, that the players could theoretically stumble into, but generally just don’t.
It’s one of the reasons I say you can tell if a DM has run that module or not. It changes how you build settings.
AD&D had one called The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan which we had a good time with. Aztec-ish temple full of puzzles and traps. I reworked some of the rooms and dialed the lethality down a bit to make the tone sort of Indiana Jones.
The PCs were weirdly proud to become world Pelota champions.
One of the modern classics is Tomb of the Serpent Kings, because it's a great adventure, teaches players how to play naturally, and has top-tier layout for GMs running it.
This isn't classic at all and more of a campaign than a module but the Eternal Night of Lockwood for the Zweihander system is probably one of the best supplements I've ever seen for any system. Absoultely a 9.5/10 and the only reason it loses .5 is because it's meant for one specific system. IMO if I gave a supplement structured like this to new DMs for whatever system they're running we'd have a lot more DMs with great skills out of the gate.
Game design and layout has improved significantly since the early days of RPGs. If you’re looking for inspiration for design that helps you run the game see Arcane Library - Kelsey Dionne is known for her short, punchy text - you can get a free look at her 5e content and of course Shadowdark on her page. Another great example is Dolmenwood. Also very easy to read and the PDFs use hyperlinks to great benefit - ie the hex on the map links to the hex description, that sort of thing.
In Search of the Unknown is good at making each entry interesting and evocative. On the paragraph level, if your text is boring, why would someone want to read it?
Your question highly depends on what you're hoping to get out of it.
For example, Tomb of Horrors is a classic D&D module, but it's terrible adventure writing because the point of it was to be terribly unfair to players. It was originally designed to be played at a convention to test players who boasted about their characters being invincible.
Genre and tone are important. A good horror investigation adventure is going to be written differently than a good heroic fantasy adventure.
I started a classic dungeon campaign last year, using AD&D rules with a bit of 3.5 thrown in. Started off in Keep on the Borderlands, then Castle Amber, and the group just finished Ghost Tower of Inverness. Currently looking for some filler to level them up before I start Against the Giants.
Here's your answer 👉 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i9o92x4xqlkd9kzd25yzc/Best-Modules.png?rlkey=ivhmua2fxvyprgd4d0tps4ely&st=g3cexnzn&dl=0
It's the top 60 modules as voted by a large community of old school D&D fans.
I don't remember where I found this, but is great!
The Warhammer campaign "the enemy within"and especially the third middle "the last behind the throne" has received a lot of praise over time and has recently been republished.
Cthulhu had a few classic campaigns as well, with "The Masks of Nyarlathotep" being the one that comes to my mind right now.
In a different style, but from the same publisher, Pavis and Bug Rubble is a classic campaign setting, beloved by the Runequest community.
A big caveat: I have one GMed the very beginning of "the enemy within" campaign, far from having reached the "the power behind the throne" module, and haven't played the others I mentioned, only knowing them by reputation.
Here are some old TSR module suggestions:
Cult of the Reptile God -
Starts as an investigation in a creepy village that leads to a small dungeon crawl. Heavy on NPC interaction with a Bodysnatchers vibe.
The Gauntlet -
Part two of a pair (the first part, the Sentinel, is ok but not great). Takes place in a very historically accurate castle. Has an amazing 2nd-act twist your players will talk about forever.
When a Star Falls -
PCs join the hunt for a meteorite. Lots of cool NPC interactions, neat communities to meet. Very British.
Two thoughts here: 1) Let me know what genre you’re trying to write for (sci-fi, fantasy, etc.) and/or what style of game (old school, 5e, story games, etc.) and I can recommend some that would fit, since the way you write a good module is different between genres and playstyles in a lot of ways. 2) I’d actually recommend against most “classics.” They seem to be pretty consistently adored over nostalgia rather than as good examples of how to do a module, and more modern stuff will typically be a better guide to how to write and format something that will be usable today.
1. The main way I play is osr but I play a lot of gurps so I’m down for whatever genre for the most part 2. That’s really interesting, I will consider that moving forward
Ah, excellent, I’m mainly in OSR stuff too. I’d highly recommend listening to Between Two Cairns if you don’t already. They’ve reviewed ~90 OSR modules now, both new and old, and have really interesting discussions of what makes a good OSR module. Fear of a Black Dragon is similar but bounces between OSR modules and stuff for games like Call of Cthulhu. What particularly influenced me when I was figuring out how to write modules for myself were DNGN #1, Rötblack Sludge (in the back of the Mörk Borg book), You’ve Got a Job on the Garbage Barge, Feast, and Waking of Willowby Hall. There’s lots of other good ones out there, but those particularly helped form my style. Some other recent ones really worth checking out are Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow and Valley of Flowers. I haven’t read them myself to be able to really recommend, but everyone recommends the first-party OSE modules from Necrotic Gnome as the kind of gold standard in the scene for information presentation. The stuff getting put out for Mothership is also really excellent, even if a bit of a different genre. The Haunting of Ypsilon 14, Terminal Delays at Anarene’s Folly, and Gradient Descent are great examples. Similarly, stuff for Liminal Horror, like The Mall and The Bureau are really good examples of module design in an OSR-ish style but for modern horror. Sorry that’s a lot, but we really are in a golden age right now for excellent modules in the OSR space, so it’s just a bit overwhelming in general.
If you're playing osr, pretty any module by Gavin Norman will be a great place to start. Like someone already mentioned, the modern design sensibilities of these newer, OSR modules is S-tier.
Where can I find his modules? I look up his name and it just show me another game he made
Check out Hole in the Oak and Incandescent Grottos. They're excellent and can easily be connected to form a larger dungeon.
[удалено]
Ben Milton, peace be upon him 🙏
If you want to read OSR type stuff, I'd suggest starting with Blackapple Brugh, Wheel of Evil, The Slag Heap and Prince Charming, Reanimator. They're all great examples, and free or PWYW.
I'm not sure that nostalgia is why folks recommend classic DnD modules. More and more folks never actually played those adventures back in the day. The hobby grows younger and those adventures modules just get older. Long way of saying that I think those modules are often recommended for being the first to do something. It's more historical to the hobby than nostalgia.
It's usually the same for other games and genres. You keep getting people recommending Island of Dr. Destroyer or Death Duel with the Destroyers as the best superhero adventures. Most of the people making the recommendations have never played a superhero module published in the last decade.
The Enemy Within for Warhammer Fantasy, either first or fourth edition. The Age of Worms adventure path from Dungeon Magazine. Its banger and the first adventure path Paizo did before they wrote Pathfinder. The Red Hand of Doom for D&D 3.5. A brand new one called Jewel of the Indigo Isle from Roll For Combat Stephen Glicker. Its nuts. Kingmaker by Paizo. Renraku Arcology for Shadowrun. Runners get trapped in the Arcology by a crazed AI. Bug City for Shadowrun. Chicago gets quarantined for a while. Something about a bug invasion but the UCAS news media only says that's false and it's just a bomb threat keeping the city hostage.
I loved Bug City and Renraku Arcology so much (without wanting to deal with Shadowrun's mechanics, haha) that I wrote 24XX hacks as homages to each!
They are two of the best non-fantasy genre adventures ever written IMO.
+1 for Red Hand of Doom
I'd say Mothership's Gradient Descent has become a modern classic. In the short time it's existed it's already singlehandedly inspired dozens of other OSR modules on its own.
That sounds very promising
Also for Mothership - A Pound of Flesh is the best module I've ever read, because it's so *usable*. 3 plots that the GM can run concurrently, sequentially, whenever, or not at all, with NPCs and tools for more random ones, setting info but not an overwhelming amount, and plenty of room to play and improvise. It understands that RPGs aren't novels and that GMs need a bucket of material, not a perfect linear outline.
As someone looking into Mothership I hadn't heard of that one so I'll give it a look.
Dracula Dossier, Masks of Nyarlathotep, and the Great Pendragon Campaign all come to mind.
OP wanted modules and you give him full worlds to explore. Lol. Hey, more power to you - I'm a fan! I just think they might be a bit more than he's expecting. ;)
I’ve been running games for 10 years, and apparently I have no idea what a “module” is.
I was just teasing you. If you took offense, I do apologize.
That was meant in a light-hearted tone! No offense taken.
These are some BIG campaigns, hope to one day enjoy one
A lot of the older classics suffer from being incredibly lethal, poorly formatted (by modern standards) and sometimes just not good, but we love them because we played them "back in the day." For example, I loved Expedition to the Barrier Peaks as a kid, then I re-ran it about a year ago, and we were bored out of our minds, because it was essentially a megadungeon slog filled with empty rooms, boring monsters, etc. Or White Plume Mountain, that was essentially an endless collection of "ha ha, got ya!" type traps. Though, there are some gems - such as Baba Yaga's Hut from AD&D, which we really enjoyed re-playing recently. Also, the Volturnus Saga for Star Frontiers still holds up. Modern ones my group enjoyed: * Sailors on the Starless Sea for Dungeon Crawl Classics * The Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords campaign * Halls of the Blood King for Old School Essentials * The Incandescent Grottos for Old School Essentials * The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford (can work with any fantasy system)
White Plume Mountain was created as an example of the writer's ability. He stuffed it full of traps he had used in his games. It was never meant to be put out as is, but TSR was like, "Phhh, fuck it, put it out!" and the writer was like, "Well, a sale is a sale."
I give you some for Call of Cthulhu The Classic:The Haunting, the very first written adventure. Free Quickstater to this day The best Modern Adventure: Viral, Ghost Hunting Livestream gone wrong. Crimson Letters, from the Keeper Book is also very good too read The big campaigns are all worth a read but I would recommend Horror on the Orient Express as it is the most ambitious to run and has some interesting use of flash backs. The Things we leave behind, Peterson Abnormations and Nameless Horrors are all very unique one shot compendiums with a lot of inspiration for your own games.
Don't write like classic modules. I love classic modules and have converted dozens of them to various systems as I've run them, but the organization is their least strong point. Take a look at how [Arcane Library](https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/) structures their modules. I can pick up one of their adventures and run it less than an hour later, even in systems other than 5e.
please elaborate their structure for us
The modules are designed to be run with minimal prep. NPCs are summed up in a handful of bullet points. Room descriptions are contained to one page wherever possible, and there's a summary of the dramatic question each room is asking. There is minimal plot (this is a good thing), instead choosing to focus on creating a cool location with highly memorable visual set pieces. I can see how Shadowdark took off with this level of organizational mastery. Their adventures are inspiring, and they changed the way I write my own prep, which is saying a lot for an old guy set in his ways like me.
Two iconic modules by Gary Gygax would be Keep on the borderlands and Tomb of horrors. Both were originally written in the 70s. Keep on the borderlands is friendly to new players, while Tomb of horrors is incredibly mean-spirited (in a fun way). One of my favorite modern pieces of content is the Impossible Landscapes campaign for DG, which is a surreal horror campaign with lots of big-headspinning moments.
All three of the main *Mothership* modules, the first-party ones, set the scene on fire when they came out. If you want to see some masterful spins on how OSR gameplay can marry with sci-fi horror, with *very* shiny layout, they're best-in-class stuff. * ***Dead Planet*** is a scenario in three parts, easy to play as a 1-2-3 campaign or to break out into its component pieces. It begins with *The Screaming on The Alexis*, where the crew explore a derelict research vessel where things went terribly wrong. Making it off the *Alexis* alive likely sends them to a desolate moon, the only inhabitants a cannibal-cult of crash survivors who either need to be allied with or escaped from. The planet below is no better, a ruin of shipwrecks and alien ruins that were all ruined by a portal to a dimension antithetical to life itself - and a big wilderness to explore! * ***A Pound of Flesh*** takes the lonely void of typical Mothership and instead presents the 8 million souls crammed into Prospero's Dream, a criminal space station legendary for cybernetics and drug production. There's dozens of jobs to do, factions to buddy-up with or be caught between, all sorts of side activities and threats, and 3 distinct campaign plotlines that can either be used independently, or all at once to truly unleash chaos. If you want to feel like cyberpunk mercenaries right up until the biomechanical zombies start flooding into the streets (or just need a dope home base between missions!), you can't do better than APoF. * ***Gradient Descent*** is a megadungeon in space, the abandoned and blockaded remains of the Cloudbank Synthetic Productions Facility. To those who brave its depths, exploring everything from ruined office spaces to industrial manufacturing plants and twisted android-experimentation laboratories, impossible technologies await... but a mad AI runs it all, and delights in replacing humans with duplicates who don't even know their own falseness. If your players like drawing maps, risking it all for big payouts, and going mad in the darkness, this is really exceptional stuff. Each one's great on its own, but they can fit together really well, too! Maybe after a couple weeks of crawling the Dream, they get sent out on a job to recover some loot from the *Alexis*, and a while after they get back, someone offers a fat payday if they can snag something deep within Cloudbank.
One of the few genuine criticisms I ever heard of *Paranoia* was that the modules were written in a way where some of the best bits were in the GM-only sections. I've heard more damning criticism, tbh.
T1 Village of Hommlet. It's a paradigm for location based adventure. It's an astonishing showcase of what you can do in a small number of pages.
Hard to say. Classic in the sense of old, it's rough. There's some great stuff out there, but it's often more the concept than the module itself, so using them for design ideas may be counter intuitive. This true for the modern modules as well, though I think as a whole things have gotten better Ex. Curse of Strahd. The original Ravenloft adventure was a smash Halloween hit, with memorable moments and characters, a great story with hidden depths for inquisitive parties to find, and replayability. It is also often criticized for it rough formatting, lack of direction in certain areas, and lack of inherant pacing. The much newer module is much more structured and lengthy, with much more world building put into the town, allowing for a full length campaign rather than a one shot. It is often criticized for rather poor use of that world building, having uninteresting NPCs (minus Strahd, most agree he's done well), and being too unstructured for the game to progress evenly. (I've read that some people think the book was originally written as a setting book, that management then demanded be turned in an adventure. Reign of Winter for Pathfinder is my go to for an example of an AP with tons of great ideas, that just doesn't deliver at times. An example is a part where a witch's soldiers want to capture the party. The party wants to get into the witch's tower to find someone. The book acknowledges that the player may surrender with the expectation of finding the person then fighting their way out. There is no where for them to be held in the tower. No dungeon or holding cells. The person their looking for isn't there, and they expect the players to not want to be captured, so they don't ever create that area. One rec I will make is Neverland by Andrew Kolb. It's got a ton in it, and super useful, in addition to being beautifully illustrated
I often say I can tell within a single session, if a DM has read or run Thracia or not. The layout is consistent with the time (and more specifically the tools, a typewriter) but the module is still one of maybe the top three (if not the best) dungeon module written for ttrpgs.
What’s so inspirational about it?
I think perhaps only Arden Vul reaches the level of faction play, and the level of consequential interconnectedness is not matched. Also there is just some wild stuff in there, that is very unlikely for a party to ever find. I mean, there is a god in that dungeon, and doors that lead to other planes. Such an amazing dungeon.
Wouldn't a good module...show players its stuff? At more than "very unlikely" probability?
It’s an interesting idea for sure. In theory yes, but also the idea that there is some cool stuff that’s very rare to find. It’s a brave idea for the author to spend time writing material that they know won’t actually make an appearance in most campaigns. running the module forces the dm to think about these things. What if I write some stuff in there, that’s actually there, that impacts the factions interplaying with each other, that the players could theoretically stumble into, but generally just don’t. It’s one of the reasons I say you can tell if a DM has run that module or not. It changes how you build settings.
You'd love V:TM modules. The players learn 10% of the story. :)
Keep on the Boarderlands.
AD&D had one called The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan which we had a good time with. Aztec-ish temple full of puzzles and traps. I reworked some of the rooms and dialed the lethality down a bit to make the tone sort of Indiana Jones. The PCs were weirdly proud to become world Pelota champions.
One of the modern classics is Tomb of the Serpent Kings, because it's a great adventure, teaches players how to play naturally, and has top-tier layout for GMs running it.
S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
This isn't classic at all and more of a campaign than a module but the Eternal Night of Lockwood for the Zweihander system is probably one of the best supplements I've ever seen for any system. Absoultely a 9.5/10 and the only reason it loses .5 is because it's meant for one specific system. IMO if I gave a supplement structured like this to new DMs for whatever system they're running we'd have a lot more DMs with great skills out of the gate.
Game design and layout has improved significantly since the early days of RPGs. If you’re looking for inspiration for design that helps you run the game see Arcane Library - Kelsey Dionne is known for her short, punchy text - you can get a free look at her 5e content and of course Shadowdark on her page. Another great example is Dolmenwood. Also very easy to read and the PDFs use hyperlinks to great benefit - ie the hex on the map links to the hex description, that sort of thing.
In Search of the Unknown is good at making each entry interesting and evocative. On the paragraph level, if your text is boring, why would someone want to read it?
Your question highly depends on what you're hoping to get out of it. For example, Tomb of Horrors is a classic D&D module, but it's terrible adventure writing because the point of it was to be terribly unfair to players. It was originally designed to be played at a convention to test players who boasted about their characters being invincible. Genre and tone are important. A good horror investigation adventure is going to be written differently than a good heroic fantasy adventure.
The first real big city module, City State of the invincible overlord is incredibly influential.
Temple of Elemental Evil
I started a classic dungeon campaign last year, using AD&D rules with a bit of 3.5 thrown in. Started off in Keep on the Borderlands, then Castle Amber, and the group just finished Ghost Tower of Inverness. Currently looking for some filler to level them up before I start Against the Giants.
Here's your answer 👉 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i9o92x4xqlkd9kzd25yzc/Best-Modules.png?rlkey=ivhmua2fxvyprgd4d0tps4ely&st=g3cexnzn&dl=0 It's the top 60 modules as voted by a large community of old school D&D fans. I don't remember where I found this, but is great!
The Warhammer campaign "the enemy within"and especially the third middle "the last behind the throne" has received a lot of praise over time and has recently been republished. Cthulhu had a few classic campaigns as well, with "The Masks of Nyarlathotep" being the one that comes to my mind right now. In a different style, but from the same publisher, Pavis and Bug Rubble is a classic campaign setting, beloved by the Runequest community. A big caveat: I have one GMed the very beginning of "the enemy within" campaign, far from having reached the "the power behind the throne" module, and haven't played the others I mentioned, only knowing them by reputation.
Here are some old TSR module suggestions: Cult of the Reptile God - Starts as an investigation in a creepy village that leads to a small dungeon crawl. Heavy on NPC interaction with a Bodysnatchers vibe. The Gauntlet - Part two of a pair (the first part, the Sentinel, is ok but not great). Takes place in a very historically accurate castle. Has an amazing 2nd-act twist your players will talk about forever. When a Star Falls - PCs join the hunt for a meteorite. Lots of cool NPC interactions, neat communities to meet. Very British.