I played Quagmire in the 80s. I liked the sunken city and rhino hunting. The adventure gave me a love of lizard men, which I immediately wanted to play - and soon got to! As a DM a decade ago, I recognized the slog and only ran the best parts.

Building a giant spire in a swamp feels like a bad idea no matter what else is going on.

I’ve heard both negative and positive things about this module. I enjoy wilderness exploration-type adventures, especially ones set in swamps, and there are very few Expert adventures of this kind, so I bought it and I’m looking forward to DMing it.

I have not GMed Quagmire, and I admit that I just only skimmed through it. The feeling I get is that the cities themselves are very half-baked, with most of the attention of the module on the travel part. Basically, they wrote the travel part and then realized that they were running out of time and pages, and threw the rest together in a hurry. No doubt it can be mined for good ideas, but yeah, it needs more fleshing out. That being said, Journey to the Rock holds a special dislike for me, and I think I would prefer this module to that one. At least here there seems to be good ideas that can be developed further. But yeah, the escort mission should be at least ten times as many people (so 420, if not more), and the travel to the new city should be the important travel part, not the getting to Quagmire. Add some interesting NPCs and interpersonal drama and it might be very fun to play.

I remember reading a blog post about this module which claimed there was a lot of Executive Meddling with it. Sounds as if there was a germ of a good idea here, but it got ruined in the edit. And of course it all got ret-conned a few years later by the Princess Ark!

Quagmire is one of my favourites! The Sunken City, Lizardmen. My players enjoyed this one!

It needed work but Quagmire was ok. Journey to the Rock and The Endless Stair were simply awful as I recall.

I never went into modules, but I've heard that CM8, The Endless Stair, was the worst!

I've owned this module for decades. I've played it once and DM'd it exactly twice. I ultimately found that I had to do too much doctoring and railroading to keep it interesting though so I started harvesting parts of it for use in my homebrew campaigns (all in Mystara). There are a few nice gems if you read it through.

Giggedy

1 gp to cross a river may be affordable to adventurers, maybe, but comparing it to average prices for lodging and food, it does seem very overpriced.

I had planned to run this, but the other dm decided to jump settings as he couldn't keep what little of his campaign straight because of his critical role obsession. Shame really his original campaign was miles better, but he genuinely was incapable of running even the one shots his campaign had devolved into.

It was kind of meh.... Today I can appreciate the potential but it would need a lot of work to make it more engaging. That means expanding the cities and the population, creating interesting NPCs. Maybe come up with an infamous pirate ship in the area. But back in the 80s I mostly played adventures as written. And there is not too much to gain there that way.

I loved this module, one of the first i ever bought. Sorry it didn’t work for you :-(

I'm unfamiliar with this one in particular, but I am very familiar with the absurd logistic elements in a lot of BECMI and AD&D modules... How were like 42 people holding out against 600 lizardmen? That's wild to me🤣 It sounds like one writer wanted to make a sandbox and somebody over their head said: "no it needs a linear plot, and the deadline is 3 days from yesterday btw"

DMing in the 80s I picked this one up. After reading thru, I determined never ever to run it. So boring. Lost City, Castle Amber, Horror on the Hill, Ravenloft, now those were adventures.

Sounds cool but poorly executed. Just from what you reviewed I could make a fun adventure out of it. Maybe 10 sessions, levels 3-6

I don't like tropical adventures because everyone should just die of malaria or yellow fever. Plate & padded armor is too hot and heavy for the tropics, but who cares about dehydration, right? I was totally unfamiliar with X6 before watching our review, but you made it sound like a gem in the rough. You compared it to some real classic pioneering adventure modules. I think it is now more recognized this stuff is really hard to write and needs review, play-testing, and editing.

I think a series of 'worst ever modules' sounds like a fun idea - but, like all 'knowingly ironic humour' the joke would wear thin rather quickly. Then you'd be left with just some bad modules.

Modules should be good by themselves. You pay the designer for ideas you couldn't think by yourself and guidelines to make it fun. I can fill blank spaces in a map, and run generic monsters that fight until kill by myself. Most BECMI adventures understood this and went hard on page optimization, factions, new monsters, and maps. So, no "Any good DM can make it work" doesn't work here.

Quagmire is the worst module lol, for years my friends would say Quest for the Heartstone was the worst, but that's only cause of it's very railroady nature, I actually love that adventure.... but yeah Quagmire is the worst i think.

"My name is Richard - and I'm the Dungeon Crawler" - or "I'm Richard, the Dungeon Crawler."