Quo Vadis, Dungeons & Dragons?

I realize that a lot of you might find this an odd Editorial this week; but bear with me. I found out, recently, as many of you have that Wizards of the Coast no longer produces "modules" or "adventures" for it's Dungeons and Dragons game. While this is certainly their option*, I kind of have to scratch my head at it and wonder a bit - thinking about modules puts me in a nostalgic mode, so bear with me.

One can fault the various ownerships of TSR, Inc. for all of their amazingly bad business decisions, from the Blumes putting dozens of cars and high end office furniture before paying bills, to Lorraine Williams' contempt for gamers and constant "dumping" of low grade product into a bloated and sagging industry, but the one thing that was constant and by and large good for the company was the adventure module, alternately called "adventure" or "module".

I've got a stack of 'em sitting on my bookshelf in various states of repair, some of them legendary, some of them infamous. Who can forget their first tentative steps into the Caves of Chaos? Or the maddening puzzles of Acecerak's Tomb of Horrors? How many people went mano-a-mano against Lolth at the end of the G-D-Q series that spanned two years publishing time and probably took characters from first level to almost godlike status?

One of the last products released by TSR, Inc., was the Silver Anniversary Boxed Set which contained the G and D modules, as well as a few one-offs such as C2:White Plume Mountain. Additionally it contained the "last" officially published 1st Edition AD&D module, L3: Deep Dwarven Delve.

You see, this collection of greatness wasn't about a set of rulebooks or various Dragon Magazine articles - it was modules. Stuff we all remember and remember well. Many of my modules are used, and I love them all the more for it (I'm not a collector - I'm a player). For example, the hastily scribbled notes in my very worn out copy of C1: Hidden Shrine of Tomachan shows that someone had a heck of a good time running that one...

But now, from the offices of Hasbro - the company that effectively destroyed MicroProse - an edict has come down that the adventure module is nicht gehwer. 

They've decided, one can presume, that the flock of companies desperately clinging to d20 will pick up this end of the load and carry it for them. 

I'm sure the few d20 D&D fans who read my web-page may well go rabid at my casting of aspersions onto Wizards of the Coast, but so be it. From step one, they've failed to perform the mission Ryan Dancey claims he was given; namely, to "save Dungeons and Dragons".

Oh, they created a new rule-set that had almost zero reverse compatibility with the older rules, but beyond that there's been little from the folks in Seattle to crow about. Chainmail? An abject failure. Greyhawk support? Don't make me laugh. That was a sick joke from the get-go. Apparently in the lexicon of Corporate America grafted on to the RPG hobby, "support" means "leave it up to the fans" - as if the fans hadn't been carrying Greyhawk for almost a decade!
Even Dragon magazine and it's sister, Dungeon, have gone the way of the dodo. Oh, sure, a third party company publishes them now - much like Greyhawk has support from WotC.

If Wizards of the Coast feels compelled to do little more than write ever-so-useful tomes like The Book of Vile Darkness (a title apt in more than one way, fellow grognards, I assure you) and issue major rule revisions that smack of the very video-gameness I rant about ("3.5E"?!), then you can rest assured that they most certainly did fail to save Dungeons & Dragons. Whether or not the younger crowd knows, or even cares, Dungeons & Dragons used to be about modules. Some of them were good, some were great, and some were awful. But at the end of the day the hallmark of a good campaign often was how well you were able to build it around a module. Because that's what modules were. People who rant about the illogic of various encounters and events in modules are the same who crow about the "greatness" of 3rd Edition. Third Edition - d20 - Dungeons & Dragons has a rule for virtually everything. Very little if anything requires fleshing out at all. 1st and even 2nd edition modules required more than opening the shrinkwrap - it took some work, even a little bit, on the part of the Dungeon Master to make the modules fit into a campaign.

But neither Wizards of the Coast (nee Hasbro) nor the inexperienced/insensate need worry about being sullied with inconsequential modules any more.

They ain't there.

I wonder what else Wizards of the Coast has in store for the d20 D&D crowd? Just selling CDs with text files and images for users perhaps? You know - print them out and bind them yourselves. 

If this is the saving of Dungeons & Dragons, I for one am quite happy to have missed the lifeboat.