Last year I delivered a paper on nostalgia and the Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics line of adventures at the Popular Culture Association conference in St. Louis. For the paper I read every adventure cover-to-cover and I (naturally) played a few using the 3.5 rule-set. I'm currently revising the paper for publication.
Since reading through these adventures, I've thought a great deal about the classic TSR adventures I played back in the day, the 3.5 retro-modules, and the modules published more recently by (or associated with) Goblinoid Games and Mythmere Games.
Adventures come in all shapes and sizes, of course, and I know what makes an adventure fun for one group might be boring for another. Having said that I really do wish that more adventures led to a climatic battle with a classic monster. I'm not talking a "boss" battle. I'm talking adventures wherein the party hunts down and defeats the deadly Chimera of Ulik! Or the Medusa that lurks in the Sunken City! Or the blood-thirsty Gorgon of Burgal-Thor! I mean, who wouldn't want to go on those adventures? You know what I mean?
I'm talking an adventure that you can bang out in a night or two with your friends that leads to a death-match between the PCs and a mighty archetypal beast. Don't give me any of the railroad/sandbox bull-shit either. It isn't about that. It's about sitting down having fun with your friends, but it's also about the
anticipation of the battle with the great beast - and if you've played D&D long enough you know that feeling - excitement mixed with trepidation.
It's for these reasons that I think
DCC#35a Halls of the Minotaur is brilliant, and provides a model for what I'd like to see/what I'm looking for. At the outset you know a minotaur is involved - but it's the anticipation of the battle to come that makes it a really cool adventure. The slow but steady build to the climatic battle with a minotaur - and it doesn't get more classic than that in terms of monsters. Further, adventures like this set the monster apart. The minotaur isn't standard-fare anymore. The adventure returns the minotaur to the exotic monster status it should have, and I really dig that.
Don't mistake the type of adventure I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about the Giant Series, or the Drow Series, where you fight so many of the same monster that you really can't distinguish one battle from the next. I'm talking a climactic battle with an archetypal monster.
