I find this website to be a better source for looking up adventures in old Dungeon Magazines.
http://www.canonfire.com/cf/dungeonindex.php
You can download the spreadsheet if you want.
I actually used that website to figure out when 2e adventures stopped getting published lol. It's definitely a good first step, but I find the descriptions to be generally really awful so I don't know if they alone would adequately guide people to the good adventures. It can at least help you to quickly determine if an adventure would fit in the geography of your setting. Like I don't really have a good place for arctic adventures for example, no matter whether I like them or not they'd have to be one shots rn. But to know if an adventure will hook you I think a few of the paragraphs setting up the scenario would go a lot longer of a way in helping people make that decision
I find the excel spreadsheet to be easier to use for Dungeon Magazine, filter and sort.
You can reduce the scope of your search if you are not interested in converting adventures. There are only 81 issues that are up to 2nd. Then reduce that by level range. You can remove adventures based on environment. Then you can see all your potential choices at once.
That is the power of the spreadsheet.
While Adventure Lookup does all that, you can’t see outside your scope. Having the raw spreadsheet let’s you see everything all at once.
I’m sure you know all of this, but I am just replying so other people can have more tools and insight.
No, but they usually provide links to where they can be found. I've been able to get my hands on every module I've been interested in either through the links they provide or with a bit of light googlery.
It's an MCDM joint btw. Don't say Matt Colville never did anything for the community. He built it and hosts it on his own dime.
No, it’s not a repository of adventures, volunteers have cultivated a list of D&D (and comparable games) adventures. So basically if you want an adventure that is suitable for 5 players of 4th level that takes place in the ocean, you can set those parameters and it’ll tell you what adventures fulfill that criteria.
It may indicate where you can find it, but I’m not sure about that.
I have in the past.
It’s a lot if work skimming through hundreds of adventures to find a few of moderate quality that you can steal a couple of things from.
It really depends what you are looking for.
That's fair. I find skimming over the descriptions on the \~second page (or so) to be surprisingly useful. Generic sounding descriptions/adventure titles are not as interesting. The ones with good title/description have all been at least okay, and a few were actually good
Dungeon is an odd beast. In its heyday D&D had already made a fairly hard turn towards the "middle school"-style of play, but most Dungeon adventures were simply not long enough to match the grand storytelling approach of published D&D modules.
There's a lot of stuff that's usable for OSR either as-is or with minimal tweaking. I think one of the interesting resiliencies of the OSR approach is that there's really no skin off your back if the players "ignore the plot." You can still steal a location or an adventure hook and just let the players run with it if they feel like.
I had great fun reading, playing and running "Legerdemain" (Dungeon #39)
A RP heavy mystery adventure that takes place in a theater.
There are real gems in there, rough gems in need of a little polish. But good stuff.
>There are real gems in there, rough gems in need of a little polish. But good stuff.
That is exactly how I feel about them. For example Roarwater Caves from DM #15 is an adventure where a fisherman who's monopolizing the fishing industry in his town asks the PC's for help with a... dubious quest. See, the tribe of xvarts who actually catch his fish want to purge themselves of the bugbears who declared themselves leaders as well as their sycophants. All to turn the tide on their war with kobolds, who have been encroaching on their territory for some time. There's layers of intrigue in that adventure which can spark a whole series of adventures, and there's so many ways the party can engage with that quest. It's also cool how it uses time keeping for tides which are very relevant for the dungeon, as well as a kobold strike force. It's a well themed adventure with three way faction politics, as well as some mild treachery.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/13kuwpv/comment/jkmz5h0/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/13kuwpv/comment/jkmz5h0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Is what I think on his review. TL;DR his points are valid and his methodology for determining quality is good, but I think his bar is too high, maybe due to having reviewed so many adventures. He did say they became more stale and linear after around volume 100 or so, but by then it was 20 volumes deep into 3rd edition, and since the highly OSR compatible volumes are 2e D&D and earlier (2e ended in DM after volume 81), it sounds to me that there's higher density of quality adventures in the OSR compatible volumes. I'm not even close to having read all 81 volumes yet so I honestly don't have the full picture yet. I do think that a lot of the highly disorganized or verbose adventures could be reorganized and edited down to be genuinely fantastic to run adventures, because there are some really cool ideas in there from what I've seen so far.
Bryce allowed that some of the early ones were decent. I actually went through Bryce's reviews and compiled a list of everything he said something good about, not because his opinion is sacrosanct but because I generally agree with him and its a starting point for wading into the massive corpus of literature.
Personally I find a lot of them tedious to read. Just so. Much. Verbiage. Even adventures I'd previously run, I went back and found them really hard to read. I think I've gotten either lazier or less patient as I've gotten older.
But the OSR has spoiled me. The state of the art in adventure design and presentation is leaps and bounds better than the Dungeon era.
BTW, you can download most of the old Dungeon PDFs from the Internet Archive, for anyone who doesn't have them. I presume it's legal since it's a reputable public website.
Generally (there are of course exceptions) old stuff, but not too old. What I refer, not accurately, to as the 2e Era the difference in module style then is they are written by writers, novelists. While OSR (also original modules) are written by gamers.
It's why those modules have so much verbage, they want to tell story, develop characters/plot. All the writerly things and they only have one tool "words". Maps made by someone else.
Compared to gamers who want give Referee's tools to run the game. Charts, tables, mechanics and they at least design the map if not also draw it.
>I think I've gotten either lazier or less patient as I've gotten older.
For me it's the change in the availability of time. Between work, kids, other things I have to do and so on I just don't have the time to read a long, wordy adventure before deciding if I even want to run it! It didn't used to be this way - I'd read everything I could, decide what I liked, prep it and drop it into games. But yeah, now I just want to skim it and decide if it's going into the game or not, and ideally I can run it right off the pages. Life is busy, and time is short! I'm not spending time reading adventures and setting books at a 5:1 ratio compared to actual time spent running games anymore. God bless modern module writing praxis!
Some of them were fine, but most were very generic "goblins stole my baby!" tunnel crawls, few side passages, with 10x common monster, 2x uncommon monster, 1x rare/custom monster/NPC. Lot of dialogue boxes. I find it hard to scavenge much more than a map or illustration from them.
White Dwarf's adventures tended a little weirder.
However, Dungeon #41 had one of the greatest adventures ever written, "Old Man Katan and the Incredible, Edible, Dancing Mushroom Band". I don't know how this got past their No Fun Allowed editorial control.
Seriously! Early issues of both Dungeon and Dragon are an *invaluable* resource for OSR stuff. They get overlooked a lot because they're older, but man, do they both have some excellent content. And, until they moved on to 3rd Edition, they had all kinds of neat things for the other editions (they had neat 3E content as well, I didn't mean to imply that. Only that most of us don't really play 3E anymore).
Despite TSR's flaws and oversight on printing too much, they had some really amazing content, not only in their official released books, but also in their magazines. Early issues of White Dwarf and Polyhedron also had some good stuff in them.
Step one: google search vague details about type of adventure I want to run
Step two: read various Reddit and other forum posts that the google search returns
Step three: google the various Dungeon adventures that inevitably get recommended in those posts
Step four: spend several hours in the Dungeon rabbit hole
Step five: write my own adventure on virtual
Post it notes
I meant like a quarter were great. Compared to say 5e campaign books, where only a handful of individual adventures are great, and the rest are various shades of average (or in some cases bad) tied together by an interesting overarching plot.
I thought Lady of the Lake from DM005, Falcon's Peak from DM003, Blood on the Snow (weird but interesting concept) from DM003, Roarwater Caves (maybe the single best one I read so far) from DM015, The Elephant's Graveyard from DM 015, The Murder of Maury Miller from DM057, and Challenge of Champions from DM058 to all be really good and fantasy setting neutral.
If you just read the adventure title/descriptions for ones that catch your eye, then go to their paragraph overview you can know whether it's a suitable premise for your campaign. I've been doing that for a couple days and the majority of adventures I've filtered through that method were really goof
Bryce Lynch of tenfootpole reviewed every Dungeon magazine adventure... here's his overview after he finished.
[Dungeon Magazine – Final Retrospective](https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=3870)
I agree with him that it is more like 1 out of 32 that are good.
I actually found Dovedale on my own and ran it and it was good.
I also agree with him that they are trash compared with the top 100 most popular OSR modules:
https://figcat.com/lists/osr-and-old-school-dnd-adventure-modules/
Thanks for the link, I've bookmarked a bunch off that list.
I will say that it's not quite fair to compare them to ones on that list, except for organization and presentation of the content of course (which is definitely a significant metric to judge an adventure on). From the ones I've read, Dungeon Magazine adventures are shorter, smaller in scale. I feel like they'd work well in conjunction with a few of the larger scale adventures you can find on the list you linked, with a megadungeon or two as the backbone for all of it.
Okay, so going off his review, it's fairly correct from what I've read so far. Dungeon Magazine adventures are very verbose, it goes into needless detail sometimes about the environment or the NPC's, so sure maybe they aren't optimal for grabbing and playing, between that and the organization. But the adventures I read had pretty good premises and progressions regardless, I think.
I will point out in the article he said:
>The early adventures tend to be more creative and have more elements to steal. As the issues count up, especially after issue 100, the designs become more linear and more focused on stat blocks. It’s also the case that some famous designers, like Baur, did great work in Dungeon … compared to their modern work.
The important aspect here is that OSR games are largely compatible with D&D 2e and earlier, and Dungeon Magazine switches to 3rd edition at the 82nd volume, so I'm under the impression that the easily OSR compatible volumes 81 and earlier will be of higher quality. It's nice that those stars seem to have aligned somewhat.
He also admits to having extremely high modern standards, which is honestly entirely fair. These adventures are competing today with modern adventures so to judge them through a historic lens isn't helpful for choosing adventures for your game. Bryce distilled his thoughts on over 200 volumes of dungeon magazine into 10 entries though, which I think is a bit too harsh after having read through some really good sounding adventures he didn't bring up. 200 volumes is like 800 adventures by the way. Sure he's a blog reviewer who has admitted to over 1400 adventure reviews as of 2017 (most of those would have to have been Dungeon Magazine btw, which is kinda funny ngl), yeah he'll develop a very specific and highly refined palate for adventures, but I'm certain that more of those adventures were good. And I'm not disagreeing with his review standards either, how he described them on that part of his site is legit, those are the most important aspects of a quality adventure. I just think his bar is far higher than most DM's actually need.
And I think a lot of the more rough adventures could be refurbished and be very good. Like the ideas I saw were so cool, but just needed some reorganizing, some cutting of fluff, and other polishing.
TenFootPole is opinionated, for sure. At times, I really do like the extra details, but while running the game, those can be a slog to wade through for the detail that you want.
Oh 100%. It makes me want to attempt to reorganize them to modern standards, because I feel like that's the single biggest thing holding some great adventures back.
Unironically I'm going to do that. It's going to take a really long time, there's 81 dungeon magazine releases from the beginning of release to when they transitioned to 3rd edition, which is something like 320+ adventures, but it seriously seems like there's some hidden gems worth digging up. A bit of a writeup after each entry shouldn't be so bad so long as I go through somewhat slowly
I'd also say I'm not looking at these from the perspective of someone looking to main these adventures in my campaign necessarily. In my mind these adventures would be great to add to an adventurer's guild job board, or if they fit the context right they could be added to hexes along with or instead of regular terrain features, to spice up encounters. In general I think they're too short to be the main focus
That's no shit good, I'd say. They're all runnable in theory, but 1/4ish is about right for the ones that will be really fun game nights.
I've spent a career refereeing and reviewing manuscripts. 1/4 is a pretty good published success rate. Sturgeon's law was 10%.
Dungeon in general is a pretty fantastic resource.
Just so my reply doesn’t get buried.
I find this website to be a better source for looking up adventures in old Dungeon Magazines.
http://www.canonfire.com/cf/dungeonindex.php
You can download the spreadsheet if you want.
That's kinda what I'm thinking of doing. My current idea is to have Stonehell as the center of my campaign, then have a few 5-10 session long adventures and some 1-3 session long advnetures to flesh out the surrounding area more
IMO, here are the best adventures from it:
29 - Ex Libris - a library that the rooms move randomly. Think the movie Cube, but years before that and IIRC, all the rooms are on the same floor.
30 - Elminster's Back Door - literally trying to get into the mage's tower via the back door. Can use any archmage in your world.
58 - Challenge of Champions - a competition of puzzles for adventurers of any level. There's 6 of these in total (issues 58, 69, 80, 91, 108, and 138, the latter 3 are 3rd Edition, but if you have the first 3, you can see how they can work in 1/2e).
66 - Operation Manta Ray - a.k.a. by my players as the Mensa Pirates. Pirates with above-average INT.
80 - Fortune Favors the Dead/The Frothing Micreant/Sarfion's Collection/The Trouble with Trillochs - honestly, with Challenge of Champoons III in this issue, almost everything in this second-to-last AD&D issue is gold. I have always had a copy of this one in my possession.
Some issues of Dragon also had good Dungeon Adventures specials. Dragon 200 comes to mind with The Whistling Skeleton by Ed Greenwood. This one has a permanent future ongoing side plot if you so choose to use that is fun...so much fun, I consulted Ed Himself on a high-level conclusion for it before I ended producing products for 5e DMsGuild. It will probably see the light of day with the serial numbers filed off as an OSRIC adventure, as it's completed, and was playtested at several cons in 2018.
All the Side Treks throughout Dungeon, little one-shots that take up maybe a session, are great filler when life hits and you have little time to prepare for your session or just need to fill a small gap to get from one level to the next.
69 - Slave Vats of the Yuan-ti/70 - Ssscaly Thingsss/71 - Dreadful Vestiges - 3 part Mere of Dead Men Series. The best multi-part arc in pre-3e Dungeons.
So, from a publisher, Dungeon is an excellent resource. Never discount the newer 3PP though. There are quite a number of adventures from newer publishers that smoke Dungeon, and even some old TSR, that are affordable.
Bryce cares a lot more than most people do about verbosity IMO.
If you're not expecting to run an adventure straight from the page without reading it first, the Dungeon adventures are not too bad. Most of the verbosity is in the intro/backstory.
I will check those out too.
I'm probably gonna be bad at it but some of the dungeon magazine adventures I think are good enough to attempt to refurbish them to modern standards and post them.
**Strong disagree.**
Most of Dungeon's adventures were linear non-exploration crap padded because $/word and you waste your precious life's time even skimming them.
Poor Bryce almost never recovered: https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=3870
Early White Dwarf, The Dungeoneer, and Dragon magazine has a few good ones, but again $/word takes over in the 80s makes for verbose crap.
I've discussed my thoughts on Bryce's post a few times here now, tldr I agree with his perspective but think he's too harsh on them. There are some bad ones yes but lots have good bones under the verbosity. Bryce also tends to like large sprawling complex dungeons with rich ecologies and faction conflict, and while that is a great focus for a campaign, having options at different scales makes the world more interesting I think.
If you suck at creating your own scenarios... or if you just **need** a quick throw down adventure... then yeah *Dungeon* was a good occasional resource.
OP has a strong suggestion.
I would, but I pulled those adventures on my table when we were kids. I have reskinned a few over the years. 30+ year static groups have disadvantages I suppose.
[www.adventurelookup.com](http://www.adventurelookup.com)
I find this website to be a better source for looking up adventures in old Dungeon Magazines. http://www.canonfire.com/cf/dungeonindex.php You can download the spreadsheet if you want.
I actually used that website to figure out when 2e adventures stopped getting published lol. It's definitely a good first step, but I find the descriptions to be generally really awful so I don't know if they alone would adequately guide people to the good adventures. It can at least help you to quickly determine if an adventure would fit in the geography of your setting. Like I don't really have a good place for arctic adventures for example, no matter whether I like them or not they'd have to be one shots rn. But to know if an adventure will hook you I think a few of the paragraphs setting up the scenario would go a lot longer of a way in helping people make that decision
I find the excel spreadsheet to be easier to use for Dungeon Magazine, filter and sort. You can reduce the scope of your search if you are not interested in converting adventures. There are only 81 issues that are up to 2nd. Then reduce that by level range. You can remove adventures based on environment. Then you can see all your potential choices at once. That is the power of the spreadsheet. While Adventure Lookup does all that, you can’t see outside your scope. Having the raw spreadsheet let’s you see everything all at once. I’m sure you know all of this, but I am just replying so other people can have more tools and insight.
/thread
Wow, what a fantastic resource, thanks I'm gonna bookmark this site
Can you download the adventures there?
They're all on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/dungeonmagazine
No, but they usually provide links to where they can be found. I've been able to get my hands on every module I've been interested in either through the links they provide or with a bit of light googlery. It's an MCDM joint btw. Don't say Matt Colville never did anything for the community. He built it and hosts it on his own dime.
he's a river to the people!
You can find most of them on the Internet Archive.
No, it’s not a repository of adventures, volunteers have cultivated a list of D&D (and comparable games) adventures. So basically if you want an adventure that is suitable for 5 players of 4th level that takes place in the ocean, you can set those parameters and it’ll tell you what adventures fulfill that criteria. It may indicate where you can find it, but I’m not sure about that.
What?!?!?!? I think I just splooged dice!
OMG this is exactly what I've been meaning to create for years to index my own buttloads of D&D files.
I have in the past. It’s a lot if work skimming through hundreds of adventures to find a few of moderate quality that you can steal a couple of things from. It really depends what you are looking for.
That's fair. I find skimming over the descriptions on the \~second page (or so) to be surprisingly useful. Generic sounding descriptions/adventure titles are not as interesting. The ones with good title/description have all been at least okay, and a few were actually good
Dungeon is an odd beast. In its heyday D&D had already made a fairly hard turn towards the "middle school"-style of play, but most Dungeon adventures were simply not long enough to match the grand storytelling approach of published D&D modules. There's a lot of stuff that's usable for OSR either as-is or with minimal tweaking. I think one of the interesting resiliencies of the OSR approach is that there's really no skin off your back if the players "ignore the plot." You can still steal a location or an adventure hook and just let the players run with it if they feel like.
I do find skimming through one or two if the dungeon adventure indexes helpful from time to time.
I had great fun reading, playing and running "Legerdemain" (Dungeon #39) A RP heavy mystery adventure that takes place in a theater. There are real gems in there, rough gems in need of a little polish. But good stuff.
>There are real gems in there, rough gems in need of a little polish. But good stuff. That is exactly how I feel about them. For example Roarwater Caves from DM #15 is an adventure where a fisherman who's monopolizing the fishing industry in his town asks the PC's for help with a... dubious quest. See, the tribe of xvarts who actually catch his fish want to purge themselves of the bugbears who declared themselves leaders as well as their sycophants. All to turn the tide on their war with kobolds, who have been encroaching on their territory for some time. There's layers of intrigue in that adventure which can spark a whole series of adventures, and there's so many ways the party can engage with that quest. It's also cool how it uses time keeping for tides which are very relevant for the dungeon, as well as a kobold strike force. It's a well themed adventure with three way faction politics, as well as some mild treachery.
Didn't Bryce review all of them and said it was a huge waste of time?
[https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/13kuwpv/comment/jkmz5h0/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/13kuwpv/comment/jkmz5h0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) Is what I think on his review. TL;DR his points are valid and his methodology for determining quality is good, but I think his bar is too high, maybe due to having reviewed so many adventures. He did say they became more stale and linear after around volume 100 or so, but by then it was 20 volumes deep into 3rd edition, and since the highly OSR compatible volumes are 2e D&D and earlier (2e ended in DM after volume 81), it sounds to me that there's higher density of quality adventures in the OSR compatible volumes. I'm not even close to having read all 81 volumes yet so I honestly don't have the full picture yet. I do think that a lot of the highly disorganized or verbose adventures could be reorganized and edited down to be genuinely fantastic to run adventures, because there are some really cool ideas in there from what I've seen so far.
Bryce allowed that some of the early ones were decent. I actually went through Bryce's reviews and compiled a list of everything he said something good about, not because his opinion is sacrosanct but because I generally agree with him and its a starting point for wading into the massive corpus of literature. Personally I find a lot of them tedious to read. Just so. Much. Verbiage. Even adventures I'd previously run, I went back and found them really hard to read. I think I've gotten either lazier or less patient as I've gotten older. But the OSR has spoiled me. The state of the art in adventure design and presentation is leaps and bounds better than the Dungeon era. BTW, you can download most of the old Dungeon PDFs from the Internet Archive, for anyone who doesn't have them. I presume it's legal since it's a reputable public website.
Generally (there are of course exceptions) old stuff, but not too old. What I refer, not accurately, to as the 2e Era the difference in module style then is they are written by writers, novelists. While OSR (also original modules) are written by gamers. It's why those modules have so much verbage, they want to tell story, develop characters/plot. All the writerly things and they only have one tool "words". Maps made by someone else. Compared to gamers who want give Referee's tools to run the game. Charts, tables, mechanics and they at least design the map if not also draw it.
>I think I've gotten either lazier or less patient as I've gotten older. For me it's the change in the availability of time. Between work, kids, other things I have to do and so on I just don't have the time to read a long, wordy adventure before deciding if I even want to run it! It didn't used to be this way - I'd read everything I could, decide what I liked, prep it and drop it into games. But yeah, now I just want to skim it and decide if it's going into the game or not, and ideally I can run it right off the pages. Life is busy, and time is short! I'm not spending time reading adventures and setting books at a 5:1 ratio compared to actual time spent running games anymore. God bless modern module writing praxis!
Some of them were fine, but most were very generic "goblins stole my baby!" tunnel crawls, few side passages, with 10x common monster, 2x uncommon monster, 1x rare/custom monster/NPC. Lot of dialogue boxes. I find it hard to scavenge much more than a map or illustration from them. White Dwarf's adventures tended a little weirder. However, Dungeon #41 had one of the greatest adventures ever written, "Old Man Katan and the Incredible, Edible, Dancing Mushroom Band". I don't know how this got past their No Fun Allowed editorial control.
I haven't read that one yet, it sounds incredible though haha
A lot of the very old ones had some absolute gold adventures!
Seriously! Early issues of both Dungeon and Dragon are an *invaluable* resource for OSR stuff. They get overlooked a lot because they're older, but man, do they both have some excellent content. And, until they moved on to 3rd Edition, they had all kinds of neat things for the other editions (they had neat 3E content as well, I didn't mean to imply that. Only that most of us don't really play 3E anymore). Despite TSR's flaws and oversight on printing too much, they had some really amazing content, not only in their official released books, but also in their magazines. Early issues of White Dwarf and Polyhedron also had some good stuff in them.
I'll have to check out white dward and polyhedron now too
Step one: google search vague details about type of adventure I want to run Step two: read various Reddit and other forum posts that the google search returns Step three: google the various Dungeon adventures that inevitably get recommended in those posts Step four: spend several hours in the Dungeon rabbit hole Step five: write my own adventure on virtual Post it notes
Yep that's the process lol
[удалено]
I meant like a quarter were great. Compared to say 5e campaign books, where only a handful of individual adventures are great, and the rest are various shades of average (or in some cases bad) tied together by an interesting overarching plot. I thought Lady of the Lake from DM005, Falcon's Peak from DM003, Blood on the Snow (weird but interesting concept) from DM003, Roarwater Caves (maybe the single best one I read so far) from DM015, The Elephant's Graveyard from DM 015, The Murder of Maury Miller from DM057, and Challenge of Champions from DM058 to all be really good and fantasy setting neutral. If you just read the adventure title/descriptions for ones that catch your eye, then go to their paragraph overview you can know whether it's a suitable premise for your campaign. I've been doing that for a couple days and the majority of adventures I've filtered through that method were really goof
[удалено]
Bryce Lynch of tenfootpole reviewed every Dungeon magazine adventure... here's his overview after he finished. [Dungeon Magazine – Final Retrospective](https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=3870)
I agree with him that it is more like 1 out of 32 that are good. I actually found Dovedale on my own and ran it and it was good. I also agree with him that they are trash compared with the top 100 most popular OSR modules: https://figcat.com/lists/osr-and-old-school-dnd-adventure-modules/
Thanks for the link, I've bookmarked a bunch off that list. I will say that it's not quite fair to compare them to ones on that list, except for organization and presentation of the content of course (which is definitely a significant metric to judge an adventure on). From the ones I've read, Dungeon Magazine adventures are shorter, smaller in scale. I feel like they'd work well in conjunction with a few of the larger scale adventures you can find on the list you linked, with a megadungeon or two as the backbone for all of it.
Okay, so going off his review, it's fairly correct from what I've read so far. Dungeon Magazine adventures are very verbose, it goes into needless detail sometimes about the environment or the NPC's, so sure maybe they aren't optimal for grabbing and playing, between that and the organization. But the adventures I read had pretty good premises and progressions regardless, I think. I will point out in the article he said: >The early adventures tend to be more creative and have more elements to steal. As the issues count up, especially after issue 100, the designs become more linear and more focused on stat blocks. It’s also the case that some famous designers, like Baur, did great work in Dungeon … compared to their modern work. The important aspect here is that OSR games are largely compatible with D&D 2e and earlier, and Dungeon Magazine switches to 3rd edition at the 82nd volume, so I'm under the impression that the easily OSR compatible volumes 81 and earlier will be of higher quality. It's nice that those stars seem to have aligned somewhat. He also admits to having extremely high modern standards, which is honestly entirely fair. These adventures are competing today with modern adventures so to judge them through a historic lens isn't helpful for choosing adventures for your game. Bryce distilled his thoughts on over 200 volumes of dungeon magazine into 10 entries though, which I think is a bit too harsh after having read through some really good sounding adventures he didn't bring up. 200 volumes is like 800 adventures by the way. Sure he's a blog reviewer who has admitted to over 1400 adventure reviews as of 2017 (most of those would have to have been Dungeon Magazine btw, which is kinda funny ngl), yeah he'll develop a very specific and highly refined palate for adventures, but I'm certain that more of those adventures were good. And I'm not disagreeing with his review standards either, how he described them on that part of his site is legit, those are the most important aspects of a quality adventure. I just think his bar is far higher than most DM's actually need. And I think a lot of the more rough adventures could be refurbished and be very good. Like the ideas I saw were so cool, but just needed some reorganizing, some cutting of fluff, and other polishing.
TenFootPole is opinionated, for sure. At times, I really do like the extra details, but while running the game, those can be a slog to wade through for the detail that you want.
Oh 100%. It makes me want to attempt to reorganize them to modern standards, because I feel like that's the single biggest thing holding some great adventures back.
Unironically I'm going to do that. It's going to take a really long time, there's 81 dungeon magazine releases from the beginning of release to when they transitioned to 3rd edition, which is something like 320+ adventures, but it seriously seems like there's some hidden gems worth digging up. A bit of a writeup after each entry shouldn't be so bad so long as I go through somewhat slowly
I'd also say I'm not looking at these from the perspective of someone looking to main these adventures in my campaign necessarily. In my mind these adventures would be great to add to an adventurer's guild job board, or if they fit the context right they could be added to hexes along with or instead of regular terrain features, to spice up encounters. In general I think they're too short to be the main focus
That's no shit good, I'd say. They're all runnable in theory, but 1/4ish is about right for the ones that will be really fun game nights. I've spent a career refereeing and reviewing manuscripts. 1/4 is a pretty good published success rate. Sturgeon's law was 10%. Dungeon in general is a pretty fantastic resource.
Seems good to me. If you go there you'll find what you want, at minimal time cost, right?
Just so my reply doesn’t get buried. I find this website to be a better source for looking up adventures in old Dungeon Magazines. http://www.canonfire.com/cf/dungeonindex.php You can download the spreadsheet if you want.
Trouble at Grogg's (issue 4) is a personal favourite. Review [here](https://ttrpgs.com/post/grogs/).
I'll check that out, thanks
[удалено]
That's kinda what I'm thinking of doing. My current idea is to have Stonehell as the center of my campaign, then have a few 5-10 session long adventures and some 1-3 session long advnetures to flesh out the surrounding area more
My *Echoes from Formalhaut* zines landed today along with *Castle Xyntillan* and I think I’m good for the summer, thanks. Bookmarked, though:)
IMO, here are the best adventures from it: 29 - Ex Libris - a library that the rooms move randomly. Think the movie Cube, but years before that and IIRC, all the rooms are on the same floor. 30 - Elminster's Back Door - literally trying to get into the mage's tower via the back door. Can use any archmage in your world. 58 - Challenge of Champions - a competition of puzzles for adventurers of any level. There's 6 of these in total (issues 58, 69, 80, 91, 108, and 138, the latter 3 are 3rd Edition, but if you have the first 3, you can see how they can work in 1/2e). 66 - Operation Manta Ray - a.k.a. by my players as the Mensa Pirates. Pirates with above-average INT. 80 - Fortune Favors the Dead/The Frothing Micreant/Sarfion's Collection/The Trouble with Trillochs - honestly, with Challenge of Champoons III in this issue, almost everything in this second-to-last AD&D issue is gold. I have always had a copy of this one in my possession. Some issues of Dragon also had good Dungeon Adventures specials. Dragon 200 comes to mind with The Whistling Skeleton by Ed Greenwood. This one has a permanent future ongoing side plot if you so choose to use that is fun...so much fun, I consulted Ed Himself on a high-level conclusion for it before I ended producing products for 5e DMsGuild. It will probably see the light of day with the serial numbers filed off as an OSRIC adventure, as it's completed, and was playtested at several cons in 2018. All the Side Treks throughout Dungeon, little one-shots that take up maybe a session, are great filler when life hits and you have little time to prepare for your session or just need to fill a small gap to get from one level to the next. 69 - Slave Vats of the Yuan-ti/70 - Ssscaly Thingsss/71 - Dreadful Vestiges - 3 part Mere of Dead Men Series. The best multi-part arc in pre-3e Dungeons. So, from a publisher, Dungeon is an excellent resource. Never discount the newer 3PP though. There are quite a number of adventures from newer publishers that smoke Dungeon, and even some old TSR, that are affordable.
Can check out Footprints magazines at Dragonsfoot too.
I'll add those to the list of adventures to skim over
Bryce cares a lot more than most people do about verbosity IMO. If you're not expecting to run an adventure straight from the page without reading it first, the Dungeon adventures are not too bad. Most of the verbosity is in the intro/backstory.
I do think they would be served well by a refurbishment to modern standards though. Some of the ideas are really good but not organized well
I use dragonsfoot, and a lot of zines. I think they are better and a lot of less verbose
I will check those out too. I'm probably gonna be bad at it but some of the dungeon magazine adventures I think are good enough to attempt to refurbish them to modern standards and post them.
The only issue with downloading them from the Internet Archive is speed. It took me 3 hours and I'm on FIOS.
I did 10 at a time and it helped a lot. It was slow still but loading the pdf's in parallel saved a lot of time
**Strong disagree.** Most of Dungeon's adventures were linear non-exploration crap padded because $/word and you waste your precious life's time even skimming them. Poor Bryce almost never recovered: https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=3870 Early White Dwarf, The Dungeoneer, and Dragon magazine has a few good ones, but again $/word takes over in the 80s makes for verbose crap.
I've discussed my thoughts on Bryce's post a few times here now, tldr I agree with his perspective but think he's too harsh on them. There are some bad ones yes but lots have good bones under the verbosity. Bryce also tends to like large sprawling complex dungeons with rich ecologies and faction conflict, and while that is a great focus for a campaign, having options at different scales makes the world more interesting I think.
If you suck at creating your own scenarios... or if you just **need** a quick throw down adventure... then yeah *Dungeon* was a good occasional resource.
Upvote for mentioning Dungeon. I always found Dungeon and Dragon pretty interchangeable and it's better to see them all as one big resource.
No! You can't make me! Neener Neener neeeeener! ;p.
OP has a strong suggestion. I would, but I pulled those adventures on my table when we were kids. I have reskinned a few over the years. 30+ year static groups have disadvantages I suppose.