I’ve heard by many people that it is a great module.
Do you mind elaborate a bit?
I haven’t played it yet.
What makes it special for you?
Trad/mainstream rpgs
I can’t speak for the Temple of Elemental Evil - I’d come out of the other side of AD&D by the time it came out in the 80’s, but the precursor ‘Village of Hommlet’ (1979-ish?) was ‘peak-AD&D’ for me and my Univ group. It blew my mind because it was … a village …! not just a dungeon … but a village.
It opened up new vistas for our play and got me to buy the City State of the Invincible Overlord (which had been around for a while I think but I’d always though ‘City? What could I do with a City … I have dungeons!’) and start using the AD&D DM Guides random tables to populate hex map after hex map of LG kingdom after LE theocracy after CE failed state.
So my feelings for Hommlet’ are entirely nostalgic - the details have been long sent into the recesses of memory whence little emerges apart from a warm glow. It’s probably still in the basement, though - so I might refresh my memory. Happy, and simpler, days. Thanks for prompting me to think about them.
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Thanks a lot.
I was a bit late to the party. In the late 80ies, early 90ies there were dungeons the thing you started with and learned walking so to say, but the real adventure was in complete continents with encyclopedias of stuff to learn. So I could only imagine how this “wow” moment was 
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I admit I fairly naively went from trad RPGs to indies and the G+ communities for games like Fiasco, Dungeon World and of course Dungeon World, assuming that everyone outside of D&D and Pathfinder was doing the same. When I got round to revisiting RPG.net when I remembered it existed, I realised that all of the old stuff was still going on and I’d let a lot of it pass me by.
D&D is of course still a thing, and hosting one-shot nights at my FLGS I always need at least one table as the thirst for D&D doesn’t stop. Luckily I’ve had at least one indie table as well to sate my needs for running different games.
The evolution from the trad spheres, with games like Dungeon World (from D&D), Lovecraftesque & Cthulhu Dark (From CoC) are great and for me have replaced the originals. I’ve hit the point with WoD where if I wanted to run a story I’d used nWoD for, I’d probably use MotW, Urban Shadows or something along those lines.
I’ve only dabbled in the modern trad games, specifically in this year’s UK Games Expo and Free RPG Day.
I played Era: Survival, Coriolis and 13th Age at Expo. 13th Age was crunchier than I thought it would be given people’s descriptions of it, but I liked the mutations to the old d20 style. Coriolis and Era: Survival reminded me that you’ve got one ‘game’ and then when combat starts, it’s kind of a whole different ‘game’. I’d been enjoying Coriolis and thought I’d figured out the system when it broke into combat and everything just became another combat system.
There was a similar incident with revisiting oWoD for the first time since 2004, by playing Changeling: The Dreaming. The GM was one of the indie GMs from my fortnightly one-shots and we kind of discussed and agreed not to bother with combat. When there were fights they were short and didn’t really need initiative or a sub-system compared to continuing with the core game system. It sped up the game and let us focus on the social drama.
I’d be interested in seeing which trad games ignore the difference between combat/non-combat systems.
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For D&D, my go-to is Ravenloft.
For the uninitiated, this is a Gothic horror setting that revolves around the centuries-old vampire Count Strahd von Zarovich, who rules the cursed land of Barovia from his haunted Castle Ravenloft.
In my opinion, the original is still the one to beat: The 1983 AD&D module I6: Ravenloft by Tracy & Laura Hickman. This was the first published D&D module that gave character class levels to a monster: In addition to being a vampire, Strahd is also a 9th-level magic-user. The module was also a highly-detailed castle with six floors and two basement levels, and it just dripped the mood and atmosphere of Gothic horror.
[Note: Being a product of its time, the module does have some problematic content, particularly a racist stereotype presentation of a Roma-inspired people, which were called by their most-common racial slur. In later editions, these people were renamed “Vistani,” but the stereotype presentation remains to this day.]
Ravenloft is such a long-standing and popular classic that TSR released a sequel, Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill in 1986. TSR later published a box set campaign setting for AD&D 2e in 1990 called Ravenloft: Demiplane of Dread, and followed that with a bunch of adventures and setting material for AD&D 2e.
After WotC acquired TSR in 1997, they licensed the Ravenloft IP to White Wolf. In 2000, WW produced a series of Ravenloft material for D&D 3.0 through their “Sword & Sorcery Studios” line. WotC later took back the license, and put out a D&D 3.5 hardback called Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in 2006. And let’s not forget the latest release: the excellent official 5e adventure hardcover Curse of Strahd (2016).
Both Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and Curse of Strahd include updated versions of the original Castle Ravenloft from the 1983 original. Of the two, CoS hewed much closer to the original vision.
About four years ago, I ran an on-the-fly conversion of the original 1983 TSR module I6: Ravenloft in Pathfinder. I just used the module straight, substituting Pathfinder monsters, traps, and other statistics for the AD&D 1e stats, and moving the setting to Paizo’s “Inner Sea” campaign world, and modifying as little else as I could. My players and I all had a blast with it!
I have been strongly considering running this again with my new F2F gaming group, using World of Dungeons as the system…
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I played 13th Age for the first time at UKGE … Perhaps we were at the same table (graveyard after graveyard full of increasingly dangerous undead? Didn’t really finish by 11.30pm?).
It felt too much like a.n.other d20 to me … though the fairly random activation of a stunt during combat spiced it up a bit. Still felt like roll-playing, though.
I6 Ravenloft and the sequel I10 Ravenloft II blew my mind away at the time. Suddenly, AD&D had come out of the dungeon and a world of new possibilities opened up.
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Ha, no. I had a living dungeon of stained glass monsters. It was a fun setting with some great ideas, but the system was far less narrative than I thought, especially with a nervous and increasingly drunk GM telling me where he felt the narrative parts were. He was nice, he just didn’t need to draw back the curtain so much. It probably didn’t help that an experienced 13th Age GM was a player making repeated (often wrong) rules challenges throughout the evening.
Personally my whole Expo experience just made me feel like I need to GM a few games next year.
I went for the first time last year and came to the same conclusion so offered 3 x PbtA sessions this year. I’ll probably do the same next year.
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I found it, with authentic 1979 coffe stain! Hommlet in all its glory …
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I know! I’m doing what I can to make that happen
New to this forum and wanted to add my answer to the original question.
First, I agree with folks that have said it’s often harder to find players for these RPGs rather than being easier (with D&D 5e being one of the few exceptions). To me the distinction isn’t traditional versus indie, but instead big versus small systems/rules. This is probably a function of the fact that we’re all getting older and in general it’s harder to get people to commit to trying (and learning) big new systems. It’s also true that most new games (especially PbtA) make it really easy to get started (playbooks, random character creation, single page rules summaries, etc.); games that don’t have these are a harder sell.
As far as playing modern versions of traditional games: I’ve wanted to try the newest incarnation of Traveller but haven’t found folks interested in it (and don’t really expect to). I can play (or run) D&D 5e when asked but I mostly learned it to be able to game with old friends. I haven’t been able to get excited about any of the others you listed (or other big modern games like Mutant: Year Zero, Numenara, Eclipse Phase, etc.).
As far as modern big games which might not be “traditional” (e.g. Burning Wheel, Ryuutama) or slightly older big games (e.g. Ars Magica 5e), I also struggle to find folks interested enough to learn the rules and commit to playing a story arc. In some of the groups I game with this is because we just enjoy smaller games with shared authorship more. In other groups, I think folks would enjoy a bigger game with more up-front planning and a slower burn on the story/system, but are hesitant to commit to a new system.
However, it’s hard for me to be sure that my interest in some of these big systems doesn’t come from a (perverse) interest in byzantine rules or from nostalgia. I have a belief that there are stories that would benefit from some of these systems (and players who might enjoy them more than the alternatives) but currently I don’t have a lot of evidence.
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