1. Ruins of Undermountain - No surprise here!
Ok, so it's more a mega-dungeon/mini-setting within a setting than an adventure. But I still count it because even using just the 70+ rooms detailed in the original box set, it's just sheer amazement and magic! There's just so much amazing, creative material there. Many of my all-time favorite and most memorable adventures were run there. There's nothing else out there like it. There is enough room for almost infinite growth and expansion. It can be tailored to PC levels with little work. As terrifying and deadly as it can be, my players (even those who lost characters in the Deepest Dungeon of Them All) were excited as hell each time we went back. I'd love to have a campaign set in the FR that focused almost exclusively on a long-term Undermountain adventure. 2. City of Skulls - A Greyhawk adventure, I've run it twice. Both times were extremely fun and extremely memorable. It introduced a new mechanic called notoriety. The players must break into the city of Iuz on a rescue mission. As they take out bad guys and are spotted by others, they gain notoriety and therefore become targeted by increasingly powerful groups of NPCs. Both times it was a major challenge, and quite tense and exciting. I think the design of the adventure is sheer brilliance - perhaps one of the best crafted adventures ever. Players will not bully their way through this adventure even with high level characters! The players must be smart. This is a real thinking-person/role-player adventure. To me it brings the feeling of games as described by Gygax and Kuntz, where the players were tested more so than the characters. Great gamers will do well though they will be sorely tested. Good gamers will be grateful to survive and accomplish their goal. Mediocre or poor roleplayers will die here. This one runs better, the better your gamers are. The better gamers the players are, the more fun and exciting it will be.
3. Nightmare Keep - One of my all time favorite adventures and my favorite FR adventure next to Undermountain. Perhaps due to some serious nostalgia to a large degree, but I loved it! With this particular adventure module, all I need do is take it off the shelf and read it and it brings back warm and exciting memories. It was quite a challenge for the players, who at first underestimated it. They still refer to it as "that goddamned bug adventure" (you'd have to read it to understand). But they loved it, despite all their moaning and complaining and nasty references to it. It has a damned powerful villain, interesting traps, a good back-story, and was really fun to run the characters through.
4. Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth - It's been so long since I last ran this adventure that I forget most of the details. Of all the 1E adventures I ever ran though, this one was the best. So much going on, so challenging, so many cool magic items and spells and monsters. I get excited just thinking about running it again!
5. Temple, Tower and Tomb - This mini-adventure of 3 parts was one of a series of short 2E adventures that came out relatively late in the 2E era. It wasn't anywhere near as grand in scale as Undermountain, or as challenging as Nightmare Keep or as well written and designed as City of Skulls. But it was fun. Each and every time I ran it. The adventures were small but relatively well written. It had a certain appeal or feeling that's hard to describe. But having run it several times, each time was memorable and interesting. I think this one is so overlooked! I originally picked it up as a source of ideas to steal from. Instead, I was intrigued enough to run it and the first time I ran it I realized just how good it was. I ran it several times afterward and each time it was just as fun and exciting. This one may come down a lot to a mix of personal taste, nostalgia, and just good luck with having the right players at the right time, but at least in my experience it all came together perfectly, and more than once.
6. Throne of Bloodstone - Look, let's be honest. This adventure is a joke. It's pathetic. A city of 10,000 zombies and 100 liches and 12 demiliches or something along those lines? A tarrasque? Numerous demon lords (the PCs will encounter most of the major demons in the MM, including Orcus, Demogorgon, Pazuzu, Tiamat, etc.). It's absurd. In the extreme. And silly as hell at times ("St. Sollars" and his ridiculous Texas accent? Sigh.
). Written for characters of up to 100th level , the design is juvenile at best - throw a lot of really, really powerful monsters at the PCs, and when that doesn't work, throw even tougher monsters in even greater numbers at them. Like the city of 10,000 zombies and 100 liches and a dozen demiliches. It reads like something I'd expect an inexperienced, very poor newbie of a DM with little to no design skills or creativity to write. It's like reading an adventure written by someone who just doesn't get it...the kind we all roll our eyes at and laugh at. Like one of those "My DM sucked so bad that..." stories. But you know what? When I ran it with my biggest and best FR setting playing group, it was an absolutely crazy-fun roller-coaster ride of excitement and insanity! Sure, I tweaked it a bit and ignored some of the excessively stupids parts (St. Sollars speaking like a rodeo clown from Texas, etc). But my god, the crazy shit that went on! Oh, the party was powerful, sure! Definitely the highest level group I've ever run (the entire party was between 25th and 50th level with the average being around 35th). That particular campaign became a super-powered Monty Haul campaign, although one very long time gamer who started in the very earliest of 1E days admitted that it was still balanced and challenging and fun. When the guards at the door are 10th level anti-paladins, you know you're in crazy land. So this adventure worked. It just made sense. And it turned out to be fun and challenging and exciting and memorable. Who would have thought?
I'll think about rounding out my Top Ten tomorrow.
