Top 3 Greyhawk Adventure Modules
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- Опубліковано 22 лис 2024
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Someone should find the lawyer that stole Gygax’s company from him and make them pay.
LOL you click baited me Joe. Well done! I approve of your picks, all of them...
In my last campaign my players went through The Lost City, Against the Reptile God, The Isle of Dread and The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun all solid modules. The ones that stick out to me from actually playing through back in the day are The Keep on the Borderlands, White Plume Mountain and Tomb of Horrors.
I'd have to go with:
T1 Village of Hommlet
L1 Secret of Bone Hill
U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh
All provide an extensively detailed starting area and interesting adventure locations.
I'm partial to I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, too, because there's so much to do & explore, with plenty of room for expansion.
The thumbnail is hilarious.
Good stuff. I never tire of hearing about Greyhawk. S4 is my favorite.
Gary gygax really transformed the world. All our great video games came from DND
Great choices. I tend to agree with your commentary about each.
My choices would be:
1: B2 Keep on the Borderlands
2: G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief
3. A2 Secret of the Slavers Stockade.
Favourite notables not mentioned (because you asked for 3) include: N1 Against the Reptile God, B4 The Lost City, and L2 The Assassins Knot. And T1 Hommlet of course (but I have never run or played it.) X1 Isle of Dread, too.
These modules are not perfect. Far from it. But they have the spark of perfection within them. They have something about them that invite all manner of possibility.
I'm going to have to give it some thought, but you picked three very good candidates.
My top 3 where
Dark clouds gather
Expedition to the barrier peaks
Night's dark terror
I love Dark Clouds Gather, and Night's Dark Terror looked great when I read through it
Hommlet is ok... but I prefer L1 Secret of Bone Hill as you get a lot more area to work in and add your own stuff. It's the same formula as Hommlet but so much more.
Top 3 1e modules? This is harder than the 2e list because there are so many great ones. I'll start off with GDQ1-7 (G3 is my favorite of this favorite!). Then T1-4: I know a lot of old grognards like us are dissapointed with it, but if you tweak it a little, it is a great starting point for a campaign (and I've done just that at least half a dozen times) and the Village of Hommlet is the archetype for small town fantasy settings. Then can I say Frank Mentzer's R1-4? Aquaria is not in the Flanaess, but it is on Oerth. Boy, that was tough. Honorable mention to S3 for the great book of illustrations to show the players (can I squeeze that in?)
Great job as always. One thing I would like to see in a future video would be your tips on bringing Greyhawk to a group of brand new 5E players. what modules would you dig up from your collection, any of the new stuff you would recommend, where you would start in greyhawk, what races and classes would you not allow and why. not so much out of personal choice but out of what you would objectively think would and wouldn't work.
Have you seen my 5E Greyhawk books? I have a whole series of free downloads on the blog (under "Free Resources"). It has 5E write-ups for deities, monsters, races, classes, etc.
My favorite DM:
1) Tomb of Horrors
2) Sinister Secret of Salt marsh
3) White Plume Mountain
My favorite as a Player back in the day:
1) Tomb of Horrors
2) Steading of the Hill Giant Chief
3) White Plume Mountain
I remember the three mega modules, the Temple of Elemental Evil, Against the Slaves Lords, and Against the Giants. I must have run a two dozen parties through. Maybe a dozen make it to the Slavers, and of the half dozen which made it to through the giants and drow, only one made it to Loth's plane. Closest we got was just outside her Spider ship. Good times. I miss that after 2e, combats took so long that adventures like those really couldn't be run.
1. G1 - The Steading of the Hill Giants
2. T1 - Village of Hommlet
3. C1 - Hidden Shrine of Tomoachan
Literal LOL at the Puppets prank.
The field is narrow here, since most of the Gygax-era modules do not have strong ties to the setting. So I can’t dispute T1’s top spot, and D3 and S4 are very defensible choices as well as classic (if flawed, as you note) adventures. I would nominate WG4, though. Gary wrote a more memorable dungeon than S4’s and introduced an evil hyper-deity almost entirely through hint and suggestion (while making it distinct from his OTHER hidden evil mystery deity). That mystery was so tantalizing multiple designers since have tried to fill in its details.
(If only WG4 had had art by the TSR staff, I think it would be much more appreciated.)
T1, G1, and N1.
Great video!
I loved T1 back in the day for all the reasons you mention though I, as others may have mentioned, preferred L1 as a starting location for new adventurers. For a while I combined the two, with Homlett being a nearby inland village that owed fealty to Restenford, but T1 quickly (and unfairly) fell into disfavor with me after the supermodule T1-4 came out as I didn't like the lack of cohesion or playability of the T2-4 parts and they ended up polluting T1 in my mind.
If I had to pick a top three TSR AD&D Greyhawk modules, it would include S2: White Plume Mountain (probably in the top spot, simply because when I think of what module makes me happiest it always comes to mind) as it was a great amount of fun and unexpected challenges and I was so happy I knew my prime numbers 😀, S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks as it was an unexpected concept for a "dungeon crawl" which made it a lot of fun, plus giving me monsters such as froghemoth and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing that completely would throw off players, and L1 for its super sandbox situation.
My favorite module is still B1: In Search of the Unknown. It was there in my Holmes boxed set, and it is where I learned how to DM and how to create future adventures. It's Greyhawk-adjacent depending on what material you use, but it isn't AD&D (though I suppose it is also AD&D-adjacent based on some of the notes within) so I didn't put it on the above list.
S4 has the coolest cover
So... top 3 post Greyhawk Wars modules/adventures next?
Not a bad idea...
Ask and ye shall receive, Antony. Check out the latest video. :-)
WG4 Forgotten temple of Tharizdun is my number 1
I absolutely love S4 myself! Lots of old school modules that I loved: N1, U3, UK6, T1-8, C1, A4, I1, S3, S1. I rather liked D1 more than D3 in that series, but since I started reading Lovecraft, recently I have a much greater appreciation for D2...
Picking just three... wow, that's a tough call. As you can tell from my list above I kind of like modules where the environment is part of the challenge, and would probably go with UK6, A4, and S1. But if you asked me tomorrow I'd probably pick a different three :-P
N1 is very good with the timing and events happening with or without the PCs - revolutionary for its day
I love the use of Puppets, but that one is not on the list of the best, which of course are: U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God.
Sold all my old D&D stuff off but kept the Greyhawk, modules and boxed sets.
A1.I had all the G/D/S modules back in the day, but had no chance of running them properly
(I take it that the single sentence you refer to as explaining the G and D modules is in the House Eilservs description.)
You take it correctly.
The point of the early Gygax modules was to play. The storyline was sort of extraneous. So, 7-page long modules were better made than 400 page newer "adventure paths" made today: No fluff.
I dig that opening music! 😁 Oh I always like against the cult of the reptile God. I've played it in its original setting, I've used it in the forgotten realms my own setting. I've also used the village map, with my own made up story.
Honorable Mention for Secret of Bone Hill, who's with me?
I like to discribe TOEE as a Beautiful Mess. You have to research and study it so you can understand it and understand what you will never understand and then rework it. It's like a Ferrari that's been 3/4 built with the other parts laying around. But some of those parts are from a Ford Taurus. good luck.
My party is around 4th level characters and we're playing Dnd5. Is it still ok to play the "Village of Hommlet" ?
In all honesty your party would probably be way overpowered for the moat house. You might do better to Use Hommlet strictly to set things up and then skip directly to Nulb and the Temple.
@@GreyhawkGrognard Ok understood; I'll just put a tarrasque in the moat house then, problem solved :)
@@Satori2046 Goodman Games are doing a 5e version for Village of Hommlet/ToEE very soon. Your 4th-level PCs would still probably be too powerful for the intro dungeon, but I'll be interested to see what changes they make to the Temple.
goodman-games.com/blog/2020/04/24/announcing-temple-of-elemental-evil-as-6th-volume-in-our-original-adventures-reincarnated-line/
Goodman Games have done a 5E conversion of T1-4 if you are feeling like splashing out the cash and they have added lots to Nulb so it feels as complete as Homlett. Alternatively, several 5E conversions are available on PDF online for Homlett and the whole of T1-4. I always felt you need to put in loads of subquests in Homlett which was always the thing that let it down (IMHO) as for any newbie DM there are no plot hooks - there is very little reason to get you to the Moathouse. I ran it as a 14 year old and being totally inexperienced it was a disaster, and it put me off DMing for a couple of years. I still love Homlett though as it is so flavourful - it contains the undiluted essence of D&D. I agree with Grognard that the Temple is a bloated affair - and the boss at the end makes little sense to the Elemental Evil!
Do the modules you make fit in Greyhawk (i assume they do, i just started Greyhawk andcwant all the content i can get lol)
They are set in the World of Greyheim. It would definitely be possible to fit them into Greyhawk. Ahem.
Cool
I don’t use modules but have played a few, at conventions but can’t remember the names
Bah! you didn't tell us what sentence sums it all up in "Vault of the Drow'!!!! Now I have to spend the day searching. lol
It's in the description of House Eilservs (p. 19 in the original). "An attempt to move worship of their deity [the EEG] into the upper world, establish a puppet kingdom there, and grow so powerful from this success that their demands for absolute rulership no longer be thwarted, was ruined of late, and the family is now retrenching."
@@GreyhawkGrognard Ahhh thank you! I was digging through it all straining my brain trying to guess. It's weird, I haven't played that module since I was about 18 (I'm 50 now) but I would have bet money before reading that, that it was all about Loth trying to come to the surface and establish outposts. My bad! :P
@@pentegarn1 Exactly! And that's the big problem. Even later authors building on it didn't realize what it was *really* about.
Why do you pronounce drow "dro"?
That's just how we pronounced it back in the day. Both ways of pronouncing it are correct.
just ran my group through the lost caverns of tsojcanth i converted it over to use 5e system
Ha he pronounced Drow properly…. Rhymes with toe…
You, sir, pronounce drow correctly. Not drow as in cow, but drow as in crow!