James Maliszewski's Favorite D&D Modules

Over a year ago I ranked what I consider to be the best Dungeons & Dragons modules of all time, vexed as I was by Dungeon magazine's choices from years before. Since then I've received inquiries about other old school pick-lists, but there aren't many out there, and none that I find very good. James Maliszewski, however, has written wonderful retrospectives of almost all the classic D&D modules, and it's not too difficult to guess how he might rank them if he chose to. So here's me guessing. This is intended as a fun exercise, and in no way an attempt to speak for James. On the contrary, I'm going to let him speak, and him alone: in these guess-rankings, I provide links to his reviews, and cite portions I think most relevant for deriving a plausible ranking scheme. I should note that the "Moldvay trilogy" was particularly hard to keep apart, and I ranked them simply in numerical order at positions 5-7 (B4 at 5, X1 at 6, X2 at 7) -- I can't for the life of me guess how James might favor one of these over the other. I'm pleased that all of these modules find a home somewhere on my top-20 list. (This one is half the size; there's no way I can do a guess-list beyond 10.)

This post is also an homage. James' writings on Grognardia have done so much to remind me of why I loved D&D of the late '70s and early '80s -- and why I detest contemporary editions. I encourage readers to follow the links to his retrospectives, and to check out his entire blog.

(1) Tomb of Horrors. Gary Gygax, 1978. (For levels 10-14) "While it might be an exaggeration to say that this is the greatest D&D module of all time -- though the case could certainly be made -- I think it is fair to say that no other module is a better Rorschach Test of one's gaming sensibilities... It's too hard for many players and it's almost certainly unfair, but neither complaint makes it a bad or indeed unfun module -- quite the contrary... One of the things early D&D borrowed most heavily from wargaming was the notion that one could 'win' a module, which was conceived of in much the same way a wargamer might look at a scenario. Certainly, you can't 'win' a D&D campaign the same way you could win a wargames campaign, but, in a sense, you can 'win' a module and this mindset was commonplace in the old days. To be able to say you'd 'beaten' this module or that was a point of pride and Tomb of Horrors stacked the deck so thoroughly that many D&D players simply could not beat it, especially if the referee got into the spirit of the thing and was as malicious as possible."

(2) Dwellers of the Forbidden City. David Cook, 1981. (For levels 4-7) "One of my favorite D&D modules of all time, if not my actual favorite... This lost city recalls Robert E. Howard's Conan yarns -- no surprise given David Cook has admitted that the city was inspired by 'Red Nails'. Though getting to the Forbidden City is an adventure in itself, with multiple means to enter it and lots of potential allies and enemies along the way, it is within the city that the real adventure begins... It is a world unto itself, one that operates according to the whims of its inhabitants, chief of whom are the yuan-ti snake men... It was easy to make and remake the city to suit my present needs, whatever they were. My personal preference for modules these days are ones that fire my imagination; they give me the bare bones details I need to get started but they don't weigh me down with extraneous details that either get in the way or easily forget in the heat of play."

(3) Vault of the Drow. Gary Gygax, 1978. (For levels 10-14) "It might be an exaggeration to call this the greatest D&D adventure of all time; it might even be an exaggeration to say that it's my favorite D&D module of all time. However, I think it could reasonably be argued that it's the greatest Gygaxian naturalist adventure of all time, for what it presents is a vast subterranean locale -- the Drow city of Erelhei-Cinlu -- brought to darkly beautiful life, from the various feuding dark elf noble houses to their monstrous servitors to their pitiful slaves. It's really an amazing piece of work [and] it's easy to see why the drow made such a profound impression on gamers. What Gygax has done here is present us with an entire evil city to use as our sandbox, pursuing whatever adventures we wished within or without its walls. It's a great example of location-based design and a reminder of what modules were like before the demands of convention play or obsession with 'story' changed their nature forever."

(4) The Village of Hommlet. Gary Gygax, 1979. (For levels 1-3) "I absolutely adore The Village of Hommlet... There are a lot of reasons why this is so, but I think, more than anything, what I like most about it is that it has an ominous, brooding character to it that haunts my imagination. Unlike, say, The Keep on the Borderlands, Hommlet feels like it's a community that sits on the precipice of disaster... I don't know; it's hard to explain. There's just something powerful about this set-up, something that, for me anyway, strikes me as the perfect set-up for a new campaign. I share with Tolkien the conception of history as a 'long defeat' and The Village of Hommlet touches on that theme obliquely -- the notion that each generation must stare Evil in the face and bar the way of its advance, even if it's ultimately just a holding action, for Evil can never truly be defeated in this life... Hommlet inspires in me a lot of feelings and emotions that I find incredibly useful in kicking off an old school fantasy campaign."

(5) The Lost City. Tom Moldvay, 1982. (For levels 1-3) "The city's connection to pulp fantasy is readily apparent, as it presents a decadent subterranean civilization of great antiquity in the thrall of a foul alien being, whom many worship as a god. The player characters are flung headlong into this civilization, which is riven with factions and secret societies, each of which has its own plots and goals... What Moldvay did here is nothing short of remarkable. He presented us with a mini-sandbox campaign setting that reminds me both of Howard's 'Red Nails' and Paul Jaquays's The Caverns of Thracia... I can't stress enough how inspirational I found this module when I first read it. Even now, I consider it the best thing Moldvay ever wrote and one of the great adventures of the Golden Age... It presents no story; it's almost pure location and so much of that location is left to the referee to develop for himself... I find it a pity that it was Hickman's epic storylines that carried the day rather than Moldvay's evocations of pulp fantasy like this one... The Lost City is an overlooked masterpiece."

(6) The Isle of Dread. David Cook & Tom Moldvay, 1980. (For levels 3-7) "If the purpose of published modules is as much to provide a model for inexperienced referees as to provide a ready-made adventuring locale, then The Isle of Dread is certainly one of the most influential modules I've ever read... and I can't even begin to count how often I used it in my old campaign. One of the primary reasons I love it is because it's an archetypal location-based module, a format I prefer above all others. There's an exceedingly thin plot to The Isle of Dread: the PCs find a treasure map and, if they elect to pursue its instructions, find themselves on a far-off tropical island filled with all the Lost World staples -- primitive natives, monstrous wildlife, inhospitable terrain, ancient evils, and wealth galore... Even with all the encounters included in its pages, there are many areas that receive no attention whatsoever, allowing the referee plenty of room to incorporate his own ideas... I'd love to see modules like this again."

(7) Castle Amber. Tom Moldvay, 1981. (For levels 3-6) "With its Erol Otus cover, Castle Amber has a phantasmagoric, fever-dream quality [and] remains a good example of an approach to fantasy gaming that has largely been lost, at least among gaming publishers nowadays. It combines literary allusion, hallucinatory imagery, and deadly whimsy to produce a challenge for all but the most clever players. Even better, it combines a dungeon -- Castle Amber itself -- with the mini-sandbox setting of Averoigne, thus making it a useful teaching tool for referees looking for advice on how to combine the two styles of old school play into a unified whole. And all in 26 pages! How many modern adventure modules can compare?... As a kid of 12, I found Castle Amber a tad disturbing... There are many evil people inside Castle Amber, and their actions are objectively evil according to almost any moral compass, and yet, somehow, they come across not so much as evil as bored. On some level, that strikes me as much worse than if they they behaved as they do because they actively wished ill upon their victims."

(8) Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Gary Gygax, 1980. (For levels 8-12) "I am sympathetic to those who don't want chocolate in their peanut butter when it comes to fantasy gaming. I occupy a weird middle place in this dispute... Instinctively, I'm part of the camp that sees sci-fi and fantasy as two separate genres of imaginative fiction. I'm also hyper-rationalist and prefer that my settings 'make sense,' which is to say, that I can explain how and why everything works the way it does, even if my explanations resort to the fantastic to do so. Having spaceships and lasers in a setting with gods and magic takes some heavy lifting to explain; it can be done but it's often more work than I prefer to undertake, so I avoid it. Nowadays, though, I have come round... [to] a better understanding of the hows and whys of what some might see as genre mixing... Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is an excellent romp and a time capsule from an age before the demands of marketing narrowed our sense of what was and was not 'fantasy'."

(9) The Keep on the Borderlands. Gary Gygax, 1979. (For levels 1-3) "Although I contend that The Village of Hommlet is the greatest exemplar of Gary Gygax's remarkable skills as a designer of [beginner's level] adventure modules, I recognize that this is a minority opinion. There's a peculiarly large contingent of gamers who dislike Hommlet, a sentiment I find baffling. Far more gamers, if asked to choose their favorite Gygax-penned module, would choose The Keep on the Borderlands, a touchstone for an entire gaming generation in a way that the better-crafted Hommlet is not... This isn't to denigrate Keep, and there's no denying that there's something extraordinarily primal about it. Gygax was always very good at setting a scene and the scene he sets in this module is a potent one: a lonely bastion of Law, defending the Realm against the creeping hordes of Chaos. In many ways, that's the most archetypal description of Dungeons & Dragons ever written. It sums up the game very succinctly."

(10) Descent into the Depths of the Earth & Shrine of the Kuo-Toa. Gary Gygax, 1978. (For levels 9-14) [Descent] "When I was a younger man, I would have ranked Descent into the Depths of the Earth as one of my favorite D&D adventures. I had a lot of fun using it in days of yore and there are a number of set pieces it includes, such as the lich who has cast over 600 magic mouths in his cavernous lair..." [Shrine] "The Shrine of the Kuo-Toa isn't as good as Vault of the Drow, but it's still very good. It presents a well-realized locale that inspires as much as it describes. There can be little question why, like the drow, the kuo-toa are remembered as among the most interesting antagonists D&D ever placed in the path of adventurers. I am frankly grateful that, more than three decades later, this module remains one of the only places where the kuo-toa are discussed at any length. Unlike the drow, there's still mystery associated with them and I'm sure that contributes greatly to my liking of this module, one of Gary Gygax's finest creations."