Dragon Mountain needs work but it is one of my favourites. As you say, any module (or nearly any) can be fixed with some work. Here are some of my recommendations (spoiler warning): 1) Remove the bait and switch with the first Book. Lothar DOES have information about the Mountain that will help the PCs find it. Instead of fleeing the assassin's guild, have him fleeing, half-mad, from Hittel, so that Lothar drops a subtle clue to that (without naming him). 2) Remove or reduce the potency of the Amulet of Dragon Warding. 3) Resolve the battle at the end of Book 1 using Battlesystem 2e (just for fun!). 4) Once inside the mountain, fill in all of those empty sections with monsters that are NOT Kobolds. Nests of pet cockatrices, angry Dwarven ghosts, enraged earth elementals and out of control Dwarven constructs. 5) Use the politics of the tribes as a centerpiece for the campaign, but don't allow for any alliance to last long. The players will obviously betray the tribes, so the tribes should do the same. Apply a cost for any alliance and makes alliances shift regularly so that cost changes and must constantly be paid. 6) You can have a few regular fights with them now and then, but the Kobolds should mostly be used as a force of nature… it should feel like the PCs are fighting against the ocean waves, not individual monsters. Throw out things like the overbearing rules… tell a PC that they are thronged with Kobolds and to make an open doors roll to avoid getting dragged down. Tell another few PCs that their area becomes saturated with all manner of missiles (darts, arrows, rocks, Kobold droppings)… 5d4 damage, save vs dragons breath for half. Introduce completely insane moves every few battles… Kobolds with hand grenades or barrel bombs, Kobold rust monster cavalry, Kobold flamethrowers, inebriated self-immolating Kobolds, Kobold war wagons or Kobolds riding in Dwarven battle mechs. If the PCs swat at the throngs, just say a couple of the little demons drop but the rest will keep swarming. If the PCs manage to do enough, the little monsters will recede into holes and dark corners for now only to return later. The Kobolds aren't 1,000 individual monsters… they are literally a force of nature.

Waaiit a minute, your Greyhawk video sent me here, but now you're sending me to a third video for your thoughts on the Return to Elemental Evil! You sneaky cross marketer you!

Conan’s actual name is Arthur Doyle. When he’s he’s doing macho things, he likes to show off with the words, “Conan is my middle name!”

I'd say I'm a collector, but in my defense I do use much of what I collect instead of sticking them in some sort archival vault. Up the Garden Path is out of my league so I won't pry whether you still have it, but I do find it pretty amazing you were actually there to buy one and read it first hand. Graeme Morris is one of my favourite module writers, so it's too bad this one wasn't very good.

Can you do a best and worst 10 source books

My three worst modules are the Pharoh, Oasis of the White Sands, and Lost Tomb of Martek. All three have goid qualities that had potential, but were early Tracy Hickman railroading modules. He got better later, but these fell flat.

Yay, you’re going to make a UK vs USA gaming video! 🤩

Dragon Mountain is a travesty of an adventure: money was lavished on the bells & whistles while the adventure is a joyless, mindless meatgrinder. Players are assumed to be fools locked into hack & slash (or bullied into it by DM fiat), when a find the path spell will allow the characters to bypass the entire dungeon and go directly to confronting the end boss dragon.

Don't know why you don't like Castle Caldwell. I've ran at is a session 1 game a couple of times. Ok yes I did basically cut down on the rooms and didn't run my party through everything. However I think the best part of the module is when the party enters a teleport room and the door they entered through vanishes right before them. Watching the numerous parties I've sent quietly utter holy sh*t to themselves was golden. And the little riddle at the end is brilliant and it really saves it from being an otherwise bland dungeon.

I actually liked Return to Temple of EE....it was huge, bloated...but also pretty creative and lots of cool encounter. I would not recommend playing thru the whole thing but just pick the good parts.

WGM1 - Border Watch is pure dreck. Absurd plot. Saying it was written for nine year-olds would be an insult to nine year-olds. However, the setting has great potential. Favorite NPC line to ridicule: "Kill all Lizardmen on sight!" The problem with having a Saturday morning cartoon aimed at 7 and 8 year olds is that they might want to play D&D before they are really old enough to play D&D. WGM1 is sort of like Bible Stories for Children meets D&D at Sunday School in 1993. Of course by 1993, Greyhawk was well established as TSR's litterbox.

I find myself in agreement with Wally Muffin. There are so many well intentioned adventurers here that I wish I could share with my son as I originally enjoyed them with my friends so long ago. However… there are adventures that I would not pay the current price to play with him. There have always been throw away quests. And these are no exception. Well done my friend!

I totally agree with you on the whole collector mindset. Things are meant to be used. I do..."collect" things, sort of, as I do have some things sitting on display on shelves, but those are things that, given the right circumstances, will be taken down and used. My old big box PC and Amiga games? They are meant for playing, and I wouldn't buy a game that I didn't intend to play. My AD&D books are meant to be used. The fact that currently, I'm not in a position to use them doesn't mean they won't be used in the future. I never saw the appeal of owning something, JUST to own it, nor that strange desire to "complete" a collection. I keep seeing people buying things they don't actually want, simply because they feel compelled to, because they have the other parts of a set, or some such. It boggles the mind.

"If the players complain" -- wait, now I think I need to get a copy off drivethrurpg to see this!

Edit: Just to make it clear: I blame the biggest screw-up of Hoard of the Dragon Queen squarely on whoever at WotC/Hasbro was responsible for pushing out the abomination that was the first printing of this adventure without double checking if the adventure was even workable without tweaks within 5th Edition rules. If you can't put out a viable product, delay and fix the product. Period. No excuses ! One very important note about Hoard of the Dragon Queen - that makes it much worse than the other offerings on this list, imho - is that the original printing basically wasn't playable without adjusting many things on the fly (and I'm not sure how much has been adjusted for the reprint). The module was, appearently, written before the rules for 5th Edition had been set in stone and - somehow - assumed that level 1 player character would be fine with going through almost a dozen deadly encounters in a row without ever getting a long rest. Spoiler alert: That's not how 5th edition works, you only get 1 hit die to restore hitpoints at level 1 per long rest and most abilities and almost all spells only replenish after a long rest ! And even if you adjust all of that on the fly, the players are either going to be extremely frustrated by having to idly watch horrible things happen to the village/castle they are trying to protect in a cutscene-esque manner - or their characters are going to die in a pointless fashion in an encounter that is several times above the deadly threshhold. And if they somehow survive that, they get to stay on the boring, uninspiring railroad - fun !

Interesting list, and while I usually write my own material, if I need to lean on something to start a campaign, I will use Keep on the Borderlands, and then feed my own "Rumors and jobs" onto the Tavern's "Help Board."

Thank you for mentioning Ghost Tower. Every time I read that module, I just can't envision a place for it in my campaign. My least favorite modules are the collected Dragonlance modules. Lots of neat maps and settings ruined by an entire series of modules that amount to a role-playing Transcontinental Railroad.

Your collection is clearly missing the TSR adventure published: Red Sonja Unconquered by Anne Gray McCready. Ridiculously framed encounters, unbeatable monsters, and the "climax" of the adventure (spoiler alert) the players don't determine the outcome, but rather NPC does. So the players end up being just along for the ride. A little skin on the cover to sell it (in stark contrast of every other product of the time moving away from the dungeon bimbo style art) does capture the flavor of the old Robert E Howard character, but it is the only thing about the adventure that does. The extra large font, ever increasing headers, footers, and borders on the page, decreasing word count, increasing price, and absolutely no play-testing before release... this represents the lowest point of Dungeons and dragons.

I love your subjective opinions. This statement needs to be screamed from the rooftops of WOTC, and another gaming company I won't mention!! Welcome back, sir! 👊 Thnx for this 👍

Oooooh...this looks spicy. Will watch later this evening.

And 5E adventures (which I have run several a few years ago before I dropped 5E), after Lost Mines of Phandelver for a fun little intro to the system, are good reading but horribly played without big work and alterations/additions. Not to mention taking place in an exhausted and now neutered Forgotten Realms.

Love Tegel Manor. And Bone Hill don't mind Deep Dwarven Delve. But it's quite a simple dungeon. I have issues with Assassin's Knot. I'm eager to run it. We failed it a couple times as players. Love the Ghost Tower of Inverness, but we play it as a one shot. Yes the Conan adventures were terrible. I heard the Red sonja was the best of the three. But it was too late by the time it came out.

This was a fun video. I would add a 5e adventure, Descent Into Avernus. It's complete garbage writing. The concepts behind it are amazing (Mad Max in Hell, the possible redemption of an Archduke, having to save an entire city from damnation) and the execution absolute garbage (Mad Max is basically so tiny a part as to not matter, the drama of the Archduke is spoiled at the very first chance and comes down to an obnoxious step and fetch quest followed by a die roll, and the city is one neither the PCs nor anyone reading the adventure has ever given a crap about). In preparing to run it, I had to rewrite pretty much everything and cut the pointless first half in Baldur's Gate. That's when I decided to stop giving WotC my money for garbage product.

I agree I've changed some things and tweaked story lines on a few . 🤔 Feed it to a Zippo 😅

Quite enjoyable, thank you.

Ian, since you’re into using things and not collecting them, please sell your copy of Up the Garden Path and use the money gained to give to Oxfam or another charity or for presents for your loved ones or something.

I watched your videos for hours today. :)

No N2 The Forest Oracle? It is bad on so many metrics - from grammar to plot, spelling to editing, from inconsistent NPCs to missing text; The Forest Oracle fails miserably.

Do you know the best thing you can do to make the collector gods angry is undercut and sell your coffee for $30 so that sells instead of the ridiculously priced one

The traps in Grimtooths books are awesome to work with, especially those traps that can take out entire parties if the Rogue is not paying attention......

Fun video! I appreciate what you thought worked and didn't work about each. For 5th ed, while HotDQ is bad, you haven't seen excrement until you've read Descent Into Avernus. It was marketed as Mad Max in Hell, which would have been awesome. It was mostly a Baldur's Gate sourcebook with an adventure set there and a tedious and frustrating series of fetch quests in Avernus. It is the worst adventure I have ever read. It was then I decided to stop giving WotC money, because they are selling me materials I have to fix to make decent. I would also put any adventure written by Ed Greenwood on the bad pile. He is a talented world builder, but his adventures usually are railroads (with detailed instructions on how to force players into doing what he wants) that lead from one scene of NPC showboating to the next. The Avatar trilogy adventures are particularly bad about this, because most scenes leave nothing interesting for the players to do.

Nicely done

No mention of 'Terrible Trouble at Tragidore'???

What program are you using to draw this map? :)

I saw someone recommend B9 Castle Caldwel on youtube and got it last week. And I 100% agree it's the worse adventure module ever.

I’d say most of these bad modules you could find a simple root cause for. Prior to 1987, I’d say the writers were either phoning it in to make a deadline, were toying around with ideas that didn’t flesh out, or in the case of Castle Caldwell - a group project where you always have that one procrastinator that crams it in overnight. Only the walls know how many may have been screwing around or, on bad drug trips, or stoned out until the deadline. Post 1987 I’d say there was too much corporatization. More shiny products, Dragon Mountain, that spent more time on marketing than writing and testing. Finally I think without Gary’s Greyhawk expertise or review, the product went downhill. TSR also probably wanted to distance themselves from his campaign.

Fun take, cheers.

I’ve run Castle Caldwell and Hoard of the Dragon Queen….both were terrible modules. Good list, thanks.

Even when I was really into 5e I couldn't stand 5e adventure books. They're more like interactive novels than anything else before them. Multiplayer Lone Wolf with extra work is what they are in my opinion.

The only one I didn't know on the list was "Up the Garden Path". But since I'm not British (my late grandmother would argue otherwise), it's hardly surprising. I started with 1st-edition AD&D around 1984 when I was in my twenties and if I didn't see the modules on the shelves, then I saw advertisements in Dragon magazine. The Tyranny of Dragons series had to be adapted to my homebrew world to start with. At least two chapters were excised and replaced with adventures which tied in more with what the PCs were doing. I certainly didn't run "Hoard" as is. First, the beginning seemed more work than it needed to be. Second, it was also unfair with the endless attacks. A friend of mine made the mistake of running it as is and it was very bad. He kept popping in new NPCs with yet more potions of healing. I tried to explain the problems out of the session and he stopped the campaign entirely. I'm not sure if that's because he was upset with me or simply decided it wasn't worth it. As for my "Tyranny" campaign, everything worked out well enough. I was amused but not startled to see "Ghost Tower of Inverness" on your list. I never thought I'd run it but after a couple of characters suffered mishaps thanks to the Deck of Many Things, it provided a nice rescue mission to retrieve the characters' souls. True, I had to change some things, but it wasn't too far from the original. The group spent about four sessions to get through it all. We would have come last in a tournament! Possibly the Con would be over too.

I like return tomb of horrors but everyone says return to temple of elemental evil is junk. Avoiding that one.

This is going to be good.

Good bad list. I completely agree regarding Dragon Mountain. A friend purchased it and then asked me to run it. Absolutely uninspired railroading. We made it about 1/2 through before I gave up.

I thought C2 Ghost Tower was interesting concept, though I never played that one.

Ah yes, the obligatory Chessboard dungeon room. We all had them back in the 80s and early 90s.

It says DELUXE on the box. Case closed, it's awesome.

None of these hold a candle to the shit heap that is the Radiant Citadel.

I actually enjoyed the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I think it could benefit from some expansion of the regions around the dungeons. (Much like Curse of Strahd did.) But I had fun running it. I am a bit surprised that there wasn't more recent adventures on this list, but i am well aware that TSR had some stinkers. Especially when they were still trying to figure out what makes a good adventure product. I'm also surprised that there wasn't at least a token adventure from Dungeon Magazine on this list. I suppose, however that there is only so much you can fit on a list like this.