Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Best Pre 1990 beginner module?

Jim at Flame Princess asks which is the best Beginner Module. In his rules he asks for only one and just as important why.

I don't know if there really just one. The comments show most of the results congregate around four modules

B1 Search into the Unknown
B2 Keep on the Borderland
T1 Village of Hommlet
U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh

I think all four are equally good in different ways.
Jeff has an excellent summary in this comment. I especially like the Scoody Doo reference.

Jeff Rient said...
Young or adult players? New or experienced DM? I see at least 4 possible ideal starter modules.

young players, new DM = Search for the Unknown (great advice for DMs)

young players, experienced DM = Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (every kid needs to learn the lessons taught by Scooby Doo)

adult players, new DM = Hommlet (superior social environ, simple but challenging dungeon)

adult players, experienced DM = Keep (multidimensional, open-form social, dungeon and wilderness)








4 comments:

Tom Allman said...

That's funny, I was running Keep on the Borderlands for my 11yr. old nephew and friends and they had no idea why they should loiter in a tavern in between adventures. I totally agree with the suggestions, good luck finding them.

Aaron E. Steele said...

You mean someone has not retro-cloned these adventures?

Anonymous said...

Palace of the Silver Princess taught me how to Role Play. With no player with any experience at all in our starting group in the 80's I had a hard time understanding the Roleplaying concept. The programmed start to PSP made us all realize how we were supposed to play this radical new game.

tegeus

The Great Vegatable said...

not to derail the topic but...

I was wondering if you were ever going to restart the "making a fantasy sandbox" set of articles.
A few months ago, i read it to try to get advice on how to make my own, and it certainly gave me the most amount of help out of ALL the other articles i read on the interwebz. Its really great to learn about this as a newbie GM.