Dungeons and Dragons, "The Best 3e Adventure"

Standard Introduction

            I have been writing about Dungeons and Dragons semi-regularly this year and in the course of writing those I found a 30-day blog challenge.  As I have done those a couple times before it seemed remiss not to jump on this one.

            If you want here is a link to my 30-day challenge on Disney Movies, here is a link to my 30-day challenge on Video Games, and here is a comically out of date 30-day challenge on Movies (it is old and the writing is rubbish).

Day 27- Favorite Adventure

            This is going to be a short entry.

            I had a subscription to Dungeon magazine and enjoyed reading it and breaking up the individual encounters and maps, but I rarely if ever ran an entire mission as presented.  The adventures tended to be meat grinders.

            Published adventures always seem to be much harder than advertised, I guess when you write rules for a living you worry about not providing a meaty enough challenge, and then you decide to get super clever.  The problem with that, is that guys like me who only run a game once a week are less able to deal with “clever”.  Hence why I need to pull these things apart into more digestible chunks.

 

I wonder if this thing qualifies as iconic?
Do you recognize it without reading the next paragraph that tells you what it is?

            My favorite adventure in theory is “The Shackled City”.  This full 20 level campaign gives you a really interesting giant city around which all the action turns and a whole cadre of supervillains working toward an interesting goal.

            “The Shackled City” did so well that (I get the impression) it is regarded as the best thing Dungeon magazine produced for 3^rd edition, and it gave so many credibility points to the magazines publishers (Paizo) that they had the clout to release “The Age of Worms,” the other best adventure ever for 3^rd edition (though far less lauded).

            Those adventures doing so well (and Wizards of the Coast leaving Paizo holding the bag in regards to 3^rd edition ending and Dragon and Dungeon magazine being canceled) left Paizo in a position to create Pathfinder.  The Pathfinder books were a continuation of the 3^rd edition rules that were so well produced art and supplement wise, that they threw 4^th edition on the ash heap of history.  Pathfinder is still going, while 4e was replaced by 5e two years ago.

            That is right, “The Shackled City” was so good, it could be given some credit for 4^th edition being a failure.

Coming Tomorrow

            Tomorrow I am going to talk about The Craziest thing to happen outside of the Game.

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