Treasure Tables just posted on the role of published adventures now that Dungeon has gone toes-up, and it got me thinking. Was there much demand for published adventures at my table? Not really, no. That isn’t to say I don’t own any; I own an Eberron adventure, and I got five or six $2 adventures for a birthday or Christmas or something a few years back, but the vast majority of published adventures that I own were torn from the pages of the aforementioned late, great magazine. And really, I don’t use them that much.

But does that mean that they have no place at my table? Hardly. It’s true that I don’t often use published adventures in their entirety, but I frequently use them as springboards for my imagination, allowing me to riff off of them and create my own, somewhat similar but subtly unique, adventures. As I see it, there are basically three types of published adventures that I will buy in the future.

1. A collection of adventures, a la Dungeon. I like the short adventures, not the mega-adventure paths; I like to craft my own adventure paths, and I prefer to use my old Dungeon adventures to mine for material: NPCs, monsters, items, and situations. It seems to me that Dungeon was the perfect format for this kind of adventure; hopefully the online version will offer something similar, though it’s doubtful that I’d actually spend money to subscribe to such a thing.

2. Pack-ins. I love it when games or campaign settings come with introductory adventures, and I do make it a point to use them, at least in part. My first experience DMing Eberron was using The Forgotten Forge, the introductory adventure for that setting, which I then used as a way to get into a modified version of Shadows of the Last War, a published adventure.

3. Mega-Adventures. It’s true that I don’t often use these, and I wouldn’t subscribe to a publication that provided these exclusively, largely because there’s no guarantee that I’d get something I wanted to use. What if I want to run a demon-stomping campaign, and the published path’s focus is on fighting yuan-ti? I’m out of luck. That said, I’ve had my eye on some of the hardcover adventures that WotC has been putting out, in particular Expedition to Castle Ravenloft.

When I want adventures that someone else created, those are the formats that I want them in.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Links, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.