Unplayable Modules?

Oh shit, I thought I was the only one. Like, that fucking ending with Sergei and whatever is completely irrelevant, because the players don't really know who the fuckers are.

The alternative that can work is that one of the male PC is actually the reincarnation of Sergei, and Strahd is trying to kill his brother, the real Lord of the land.

>the real Lord of the land.
Sergei doesn't fit as a Domain Lord, though.

He was the rightful ruler before it turned into a Domain of Darkness, though.

Right, but it's Strahd's dirt now, for all the ruling he does.

Another fun note: The canonical ending of I6 is that all the PCs die.

You want railroad? I'll give you railroad. This is part three of a module series that is 100% railroad. It ends in a final battle where the PCs kill the BBEG (who was invulnerable until then due to stupidly OP magic), followed by another battle between the actual protagonist NPC and the resurrected BBEG (because of course).
It's also unplayable because it is incredibly politically incorrect: the BBEG is leader of a country that is a fantasy-setting mix between the Arab middle east, nazi Germany and North Korea. Every single one citizen there is racially deceitful and untrustworthy. And ugly. To the point that if there is a deceitful or ugly NPC in any of the three modules, he's from that country. The country also has a gigantic underground torture laboratory, just because.

What RPG is that module for?

Drakar & demoner, a Swedish BRP-like RPG from the 80s/90s.

I now feel I have to point out that most stuff for Drakar & Demoner was well made. But those three modules were a horror show.

>It's also unplayable because it is incredibly politically incorrect: the BBEG is leader of a country that is a fantasy-setting mix between the Arab middle east, nazi Germany and North Korea. Every single one citizen there is racially deceitful and untrustworthy. And ugly. To the point that if there is a deceitful or ugly NPC in any of the three modules, he's from that country. The country also has a gigantic underground torture laboratory, just because.
I see no problem there.

> It's like the most generic Macross/Gundam pastiche ever.

I haven't even the read the thing, but I kinda already attest to that. I haven't seen any Macross stuff except for Plus and haven't seen Gundam stuff in years, but I INSTANTLY thought about the Char's Counter Attack and the finale of the original Mobile Suit Gundam when I read
>Oh, and the final battle? The villain plans to unleash a horde of evil aliens, but the PCs stop him first. The last boss fight takes place out-of-mech, inside a meteor...

>The last boss fight takes place out-of-mech, inside a meteor...
That's actually surprisingly common in mecha series, for the protagonist and his big name foe to wind up duking it out on foot after completely wrecking their mechs.

Yeah, but this usually takes place as a one-on-one fight. Here, the whole party jumps the guy.

Also, in CCA, there's a big war going on outside. Here, the lead-up fight is just the villain and his insanely dumb Mobile Armor.

There was a couple modles in the MEGA 2 core book that were truly atrocious.
One had the players (interdimentional cops, to make it simple) follow a maniac that abducted a woman and took refuge in another dimension, in a tropical region with a primitive tribe and a drug laboratory. The module is full of nonsensical stuff, assumptions that the players make choices that I've seen a party take (you have to show the locals a representation of a movie where the woman stars, and since they drink champaign in that movie, which sounds like the local sacred food, they don't get hostile), and ends with a dream sequence that will result in a TPK 99% of the time.
Another one has a young guru erasing entire dimensions from reality, and the PCs have to find that 1)he's the one behind it 2)stop him (despite the fact that he's that omnipotent fanatical avatar of a god). It's full of hippie ideology too, to the point that if you don't have the mindset of a pacifist junkie from the '70s you're likely to get mobbed and killed by everyone and everything that you encounter.

Strangely, the book also has one of my favorites modules ever, where you have to rescue a stranded scientist in the middle of a zulu-biritsh war in Scotland, with magic and light steampunk tech. The fact that it nevers feels like a wtf adventure despite such a plothook is credit to its writing.

Not gonna lie. That plotline sounds awesome. And I am picking it up to play with my SJW roommate.

Well yeah, but I get where the intention was.
But shit like that is why I like to give each PC an opposite number of sorts in a mecha game. That way when the time comes, each of them can have their one-on-one showdown, though obviously not all of them will breakdown all the way to a fist fight.

Yeah, you can find the module pretty easily. I'm amazed that they thought this was a good idea.

Like, at one point, one of the Jewish supervillains outright says "Look at the men you're defending! How can you possibly protect these motherfuckers?" (I paraphrase, but you get the idea.)

Think about it: If the players utterly and completely fail to stop the Holocaust, six million Jews...will live. I wonder how Captain America would have dealt with this.

The real problem with Ravenloft is that there's so much backstory the players never get to learn. I think Curse of Strahd partially solves the problem, but only partially.

How exactly is the distopian future?
I guess the PC intervention could be con,sidered a necessary evil if time paradoxes create dire stuff like a hole in reality or something.
Or it's simply satyre of heroics, just to see how far the party will go before putting themselves in question.

I can only see killing Hitler backfiring tremendously, and that's not even getting into paradox shenanigans.

Can I simply say every official adventure by the Cthulhutech team? Railroading that is meant to be dragged out for MONTHS.

Here's an honorable mention: Ends of Empire, for Wraith.

For a start, this is a great book. It actually ties up most - if not all - the plot threads from Wraith, and it does a really good job given that the series was shut down. The conclusion is actually pretty satisfactory, all things considered - Charon returns, saves the day, Transcends, and the PCs become the new Deathlords. Canonically, they're doomed. By the time of Orpheus, the sequel, the Underworld is in ruins except for malevolent Specters. This means that the PCs either helped the Wraiths flee to the Far Shores, or they all died.

The problem is that it's nearly impossible to get there. A lot of the module relies on the players basically sitting back and watching events unfold. The parts where they can actually intervene are flat-out wipe out your party, or can occasionally be impossible.

You see, the thing about Wraith is: In Wraith, ghostly powers - Arcanoi - are less 'magic' and more 'daily necessities'. The power level is a LOT lower than you'd expect, and a single Spectre can seriously fuck your day up. The Underworld is also necessarily scarce on resources, and it's important for players to carefully manage their Pathos (The game's MP) and Angst (the game's Corruption) levels.

Here's the thing. All the really useful Arcanoi - the one that allows you to fly, the one that lets you rend wraithly flesh, the one that lets you slap the Shadow out of a Wraith who's going into Carthasis - only work on the Underworld. They rarely affect the real world, if at all. The powers that *do* affect the real world are extremely hard to use, and it's thematic: You're a ghost. You're dead and gone, boy. Patrick Swayze had it easy compared to you.

There's a part where a group of gangsters attack a church, intending to torch it, and the PCs must drive them off. This is a lot harder than it looks, because the PCs might have utterly no relevant Arcanoi and no way of affecting them.

>everybody gets their own personalized rival/char clone archenemy.

I want to play mecha games with you, user.

This is my favorite un-playable. The vehicle-combat rules do not exist. The system rules are not contained within the book, which was sold as a stand-alone. The powers rules do not exist in this or any other book, and you were encouraged to make them up. The promo-adventure contained within the book? Isn't contained within the book, nor published elsewhere. It was literally unplayable. The rules it relies on were never published. Not "oh, well, you were supposed to have another supplement." Nope. The game relies on rules that it never explains and that do not exist in the system.

Even the traditional 'Poltergeist' power, Outrage, is fiddly to use. It takes an immense amount of effort to punch (Just punch) someone across the Shroud, and there's no guarantee you'll hit.

Also, good luck with fucking with someone's dreams/scaring them off with the power of song when it's a gang of skinheads with Molotov cocktails.

The final battle is another problem. At the end of the module, Specters assault Stygia, and it becomes an all-out battle. Amid the fighting (which is largely done by the extremely powerful NPCs) the PCs confront their personal nemesis, the General of Oblivion, Coldheart.

This is sort of anticlimatic, because Coldheart is ultimately just a guy with a sword, a pistol and some armor. Like most Arcanoi in Wraith, his powers are pretty unwieldy to use. What's really dangerous is that he has a squad of guys who are armed with fucking assault rifles, which will shred PCs pretty fast.

Generally, PCs in Wraith are rarely good at fighting. Again, there's relatively little Arcanoi that's useful in combat, and not as much is as destructive as Mage's Rotes, Vampire's Disciplines, or Werewolf's giant furry deathmachines. Also, it's unlikely they've actually met Coldheart before this point! He's public enemy no. 1, but they barely know the dude.

This is probably why Orpheus, the sequel, made Horrors (ghostly powers) completely kickass, with the players having a correspondingly higher powerlevel. Wraith was always a game about reflection and moving on, and this is the weirdest punch-up to end the whole metaplot on.

All that other shit aside, police states do tend to create untrustworthy citizens.

emersonkent.com/speeches/contaminated_moral_environment.htm

>But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.

>The thing is, Ireena Kolyana is actually a character who accompanies the party. She's a straight Fighter (unoptimized, as you'd expect) and she's prone to getting her ass kicked.
Holy shit, they actually made a vidya-style escort mission, the absolute madmen. The hell were they thinking?
Wait, so what did the publishers expect you to do with it? Is it purely a lore book you're expected to hack into the generic system of your choice, or did the company go bankrupt before they could publish the system it's meant to be used with?

> Holy shit, they actually made a vidya-style escort mission, the absolute madmen. The hell were they thinking?

Well, you know how in Dracula they couldn't leave Mina Harker alone, because that would basically give away the game? Same here. The PCs can't leave Ireena alone, because Strahd is hunting her. And nobody in the podunk little village can POSSIBLY protect her except the PCs.

>I personally blame Twilight.
Bitch please. Twilight is complete ass, but that whole "chicks wanting to hook up with a creature that is literally a rape allegory" shit goes back to AT LEAST Anne Rice.

Look man, I have to blame someone, so I'm aiming at the low-hanging fruit.

Not him, but think of the extensive cast of Gundam Zeta and how in the final battle EVERYONE gets to fight SOMEONE, even if they aren't actually dedicated rivals.

Admittedly, most die during that fight but still.

I liked Katz versus the rock best.

This thing is just terrible. Encounters are repetitive, puzzles are pointless, and it becomes borderline impossible at later levels because it refuses to give the PCs useful loot. Sure, it gives them plenty of gold and gems and cash, but there's no where to spend it. You're trapped in the dungeon, and there's no merchants anywhere. In fact, the only civilized area in the dungeon is specifically not interested in trade of any kind. Any gear you do find is either cursed to shit, useless at the level you find it (yay for +1 swords at 15th level), or outright unusable. After fighting one of the most powerful monsters in the place, your only worthwhile reward is a gem from a book you probably don't have, that you can't use anyway, and whose effects aren't even quantified.

I'm not even going to touch the infinite-unconsciousness room, the poison meant to effect undead that very specifically can't hurt undead, the really stupid angels, or the absolutely retarded house rules. The World's Largest Dungeon is an absolute mess.

Cheer up, it could be worse. It could be a LotFP module.

Like Death Frost Doom, which is basically the author giving you a giant middle finger.

>Wait, so what did the publishers expect you to do with it?
Well, the answer is that this was sold in Hot Topic during the time when VtM t-shirts were a big-ticket item, next to Pink Floyd shirts and Doc Martins. It wasn't well-planned, and no one cared.

Yeah, DFD is bad, but it's playable in the loosest sense. WLD becomes actually impossible at points. There's a DC 27 trap in the first area that will insta-kill just about any 1st level PC. The only thing that trap's guarding is barrels full of Black Mold.

Pick one of the adventure modules published in Cthulhutech supplement Damnation View. They are all terrible.

They are just entirely linear, bullet point lists of story beats that MUST happen and in most cases, the solution for what to do if your PCs try to jump the rails is "they get raped."

I'm not making that last part up.

Also, from a design perspective these "adventures" are abysmal. No maps, no handouts, no storyline branches, no stats for ANY characters encountered in the game, Allies or Enemies.

The only stat line you ARE given are for a race of Kemonimi porn stars whose only mode of attack is "save vs sex."

There's a reason why this pile of shit was featured on FATAL & Friends.

Honestly this one wouldn't be that bad if the Children of the Holocaust weren't sympathetic. Make them a over the top, psychotic version of Nakam and I'd play it

What is that bad about problematic choices?
I might just be biased because I play WoD, but the original module is something I'd gladly play, and I'm Jewish - most of us don't give a shit, and leave the whining to the Anti-Defamation League, because we don't need goyim getting their knickers in a twist about something the ADL are already mad at.
It's an interesting approach to the superhero concept, pointing out that once in a while you can't always do the right thing in the most pleasant way; it's an interesting touch on the time travel concept, deconstructing the usual "go back in history and fix everything" plot; it's nice to see the Holocaust being treated with anything else than kid gloves, because the only thing that's worse than treating the Holocaust lightly is to still be afraid of what Hitler did even nowadays, and it puts the characters in the role of doing what's right to people who're completely convinced that they're the ones who're right, just like in real life.
It gives a lot of material to work with, because it's a relatively untrodden territory to play as the villain in this setup, and I know that me and my group would enjoy this adventure a lot more in its original version.
The one you're suggesting I'd just put down and never remember again. It's toothless, it's cowardly, it's uninteresting, it's been done a billion times before - and if you really want to be respectful about the Holocaust, could you please do us all a favor and not go into hysterics? Acting like the whole thing can never be mentioned again is giving Hitler the last laugh and underestimating how much shit Jews are used to going through.

I actually ran it over the summer and thought it was fine. The biggest issue I had is that the pcs would move about during the day so some encounters made no sense.

The way I ran Strahd was make him not care about the pcs at all. So he would make it obvious that he wasn't gonna attack Ireena and spent most of the time trolling the party until he enacted his master plan to make the pcs his unwitting wingmen.

My god you're a sanctimonious prick. I'm Jewish too, and this has nothing to do with the Holocaust. I'd feel the same way if it were the Yugoslav civil war or Rwanda or any other genocide. The problem isn't the subject matter, it's that it's the same "you were the bad guys all along" shit people here hate. There's no interesting questions being raised here and little moral complexity- you're just contriving a situation where the PCs are forced to do bad shit to watch them squirm. I'm not surprised you like WoD, since it's the exact kind of shit that made so much 80's and 90's media age horribly and even now gives people a visceral hatred of the word "edgy."

And I wouldn't be complaining about "hysterics" in the middle of a hamfisted sermon that's literally 10x longer than the post it's responding to.

OT: Orpheus is one of my all-time favorite RPGs. Spooky and mysterious af, X-files mixed with Sixth Element and Necronomicon, and has ordinary normie PCs (to start with, at least).

And yet these posts is like the only mention of Orpheus I've seen on Veeky Forums. :(

I don't know, it seems like a nice dilemma for your players. On one hand, you have to save the future; on the other, that means sparing Hitler and defeating these good people.

I don't get why so many people seem to hate DFD. Sure, I can see that it could cause some trouble when dropped in the middle of a campaign, but it makes for a great one-shot.

Aw fuck, I lost my entire post.

Okay, the gist of what I was saying is that DFD is from a very different aesthetic than other modules. In D&D, there's usually the implicit agreement that dungeons are level-appropriate. If the players follow up on rumors of the Tomb of the Wind Duke, they can take it for granted that they're not going to inadvertently end the world by going there. It's just a dungeon crawl.

DFD, however, is a module which is counterintuitive. It's a 'If we weren't meant to go there, why the fuck is there a puzzle?' thing. Half of the dungeon is closed off unless the players fight a plant-monster, and if they fight and kill the plant-monster, they unleash a zombie apocalypse when all the dead bodies (thousands of them) animate at once.

It's implicitly not playing by the rules. It violates the DM-PC contract. It's sort of like if you had an action movie with Jason Statham, then Jason was shot dead in the first scene and the whole show was about his grieving wife. No martial arts at all, just the breakdown of a family.

DFD is a big 'fuck you' if you drop it into your usual campaign. In most, say, D&D games, if the PCs hear about a mission, they go for it. Hearing that a buddy in hell is an invitation to storm Hell, not go "Well, he had a good run. Let's get drunk."

Also, DFD is quite likely to kill all your PCs. There's also basically no treasure worth collecting anyway. So the entire endeavor is pointless and actually self-destructive. However, if you're playing a game where the PCs are encouraged to think with the right mindset, they'd simply NOT go to where DFD takes place which is the best option for all involved.

I'll add that there are games which have done this with a lot more grace, and without fucking the players over.

For instance, Pendragon has a lot of adventures which are basically "Players show up and see a cool thing happening" or adventures which the PC knights cannot solve. The old staple is 'the Adventurous Shield', where the PCs can take a magic shield from a church.

Three days later, an angelic knight comes down and beats the living fuck out of the PC, then takes the shield and returns it to the church. Why? Because it's Sir Galahad's shield. It's not meant for them.

The thing is, this doesn't feel mean-spirited or unfair. The monks warn the PC what's going to happen. When the angel himself shows up, he asks the PC to return the shield. If he doesn't, he honorably fights the PC and explicitly doesn't aim to maim or kill. Also, if the PC fights heroically, he gets the Glory bonus anyway. If the PC really impresses the angel, the angel actually says "Good job. But this shield is meant for the Best Knight in the World. However, that was a good try - Let's get you some medical aid."

Yeah, but why would you not kill Hitler?

or they beat him up and escape the demiplane of dread, Strahd heals up and carries on being evil vampiric Johnny Bravo, and that why nobody ever saw them again.

>Add to it that Hitler will shout things like "See! See the Champions of the Volk! They have come to protect the Aryan race!" and shit like that.

That sounds great. Not enough modules give the PCs the recognition they deserve and let them fight the real evil of International Judaism.

I swear, I was thinking of giving there the party an actual reason to go. A sort of white whale to drive them forward.

A shot at raising the dead. A philosopher's stone, a magic elixir, the holy grail, something. It's supposed to be there. The party either all has a person they want back, or they each have a different one, and if push comes to shove would betray each other to be sure they are the one to get bring back their person.

Naturally, there is no fucking magic item. The information they have is a corruption of the truth. The dead WILL rise if they do the thing, as per the module proper... but the party didn't realize it meant zombies.

To finish up my musing,I might do it as a Halloween game.

Technically, the PCs need to kill up to 40 more people to stop the Holocaust.

Also, here's the module. Enjoy.

Because god knows how history might turn. It's not like anti-semitic tendencies in thirties' Germany would go anywhere.
Also, it depends on timeframe. If Hitler already has power, as description in seems to indicate, then his death will only lead to his replacement with someone who'll likely be less charsmatic but more competent.

>you're just contriving a situation where the PCs are forced to do bad shit to watch them squirm.

this is incorrect, the pcs are doing the right thing.

The Tower of the Stargazer is a much better Raggi module. It still has fuck-you traps but there's a reason for them and the PCs do stand to gain something from negotiating the tower. DFD's reputation in OSR circles is completely overblown and I can't begin to understand why. Same with Carcosa, which is "here are some RAPE RITUALS that are completely pointless to perform, also roll random dice to see what random dice you will roll for every single thing forever"

No, it's the right bad thing but it's still bad. That's the point of the module and everything beyond the basic choice of "save Hitler and allow WWII or something even worse happens" is totally unnecessary. Again, you're just screwing with the players to watch them squirm.

Have you read Planetary? This kind of shit is EXACTLY what that one bit about 80's superheros was complaining about. It adds nothing of value; it's just being edgy to show off how edgy it can be.

It's easy to choose between Good and Evil; the hard thing is to choose between two Goods. I do believe there is a lesson to be learned by the players here, even if it makes them squirm in the process (and no, this lesson is not a litteral "preventing the holocaust is bad, m'kay", because I've rarely played with superpowered beings with access to time machines, and because most players are able to understand abstraction and diffeenciate between themselves and their character).

And I don't think that refusing to use the Shoah in fiction is a good thing, either.

There was a GURPS setting about time traveling Arabs protecting Hitler from time travelling assassins, so that the Holocaust can happen and Israel can still be formed, just to fuck with Iran. It was so much better than this Champions bullshit.

Or Emma and her own inability to realise that getting out of your 80 tonne battle robot to get a better look at the nuclear explosion is a bad idea.

Because no man did as much to make Germany lose the war as he did. Kill him early and you risk replacing him with someone more competent, who wont micromanage his own armies, wont invade Russia before finishing western europe, or without cold weather gear, doesn't pre-emptively declare war on the US after Pearl Harbour and doesn't have all his best generals killed.

The Axis will still lose Africa because Italy is a joke, but they might just be able to take the caucuses this time which makes up for it.

Boy do I have the module for you.

That's all just subjective opinion though. That should be clear from how you've had to use a ton of loaded terms to use it as an argument at all.

Not really on unplayable level, but the AD&D Avatar Trilogy adventures had some heavy-duty railroading going on. Not that railroad was the only problem in those adventures.

Never played the trilogy sadly, cause I always wanted to. Can you share some experiences as to why it's supposed to be bad in particular? Railroading hasn't have to be the worst thing in my opinion if it is done well...

Holy shit, is this a thing?

Is this like World of Darkness: Gypsies?

nice, thanks user.

Yes.

No.

As you might be able to see, it was published under WW's Black Dog label. Which it uses for mature subjects. Often this is just sex, gore, and shit.

Here it's because Charnel Houses of Europe covers something truly horrific, so much so that anything fictional is handled in sidebars.