red_bus wrote:As to Beyond The Mountains Of Madness; well it is MASSIVE, and totally impressive in detail.  However I am not sure if it is 100% impressive as a playing experience. I am actually in a group playing it at the moment - and it is quite linear in operation - more so than would be necessary even though you do have to go on an expedition.    Still well worth playing though.

It's on my wish list.
Although I presume it's not easily adaptable to 1e or to Pathfinder.

JasonZavoda wrote:
Outside of the Cthulhu I have most of these but what is the difference between Griffin Mountain and Griffin Island.

I don't think these Runequest boxed sets are impressive physically but their qualty must make up for that.

I can think of several boxed sets that I had a great desire for before I actually read them such as the Mayfair CSIO, Dragon Mountain and Menzoberranzan, but all left me feeling greatly disappointed and I look at them now as commonplace rather than impressive.

I've heard of Big Rubble but have never owned it. Is it a slim boxed set like Griffin Island?

For my list, I took items that if you handed them to someone with a set of the rulebooks for, say, AD&D, 2E, OSRIC, Basic D&D, Labyrinth Lord (for Fantasy) or Call of Cthulhu, or Runequest; you could say "Go get 'em" and they guy could run a complete campaign with just those materials and a few extra items.  For most of the items on this list, I have done just that, so I know they will work; for the others, I suspect I could do so.

While boxed sets Dragon Mountain and Menzoberranzan are very massive, with lots of goodies, I've never had a "spark" or connection to the material, at least not enough to ever want to run them.

Ruins of Undermountain: More bang for the buck than almost any RPG set ever published. Once ran a campaign lasting three years with this and very little else.

Night Below: Same thing as above, except the campaign only lasted almost two years before breaking up due to player conflicts.

Griffin Mountain/Griffin Island: A truly massive setting. Unlike a lot of RQ purists (which I'm not, i've never played the game), I enjoy Griffin Island quite a bit precisely because it "de-Gloranthas" the setting and makes it easier to run using regular D&D rules and settings.

Big Rubble, Pavis:  Massive RQ boxed sets (massive with great ideas and adventures), truly epic in scope, either/both would make great settings. The ideas within are truly impressive, as is the setting (which can be switched to any fantasy setting if you wish). One of the adventures in the Big Rubble set, which involves a baby giant sailed down the River of Cradles, is IMO one of the most epic in scope in RPG history...players truly have a chance to effect the history of Glorantha (or whatever fantasy world the DM has created) by their choices of whether they decided to protect the baby from the hordes of creatures/characters wanting to kill/enslave/steal it, or themselves join the groups wanting to put an end to it's life.  Sadly the difficulty of scoring either boxed set for cheap has led to both these sets being somewhat obscure.

RAR:  Easily converted to any edition of D&D, could be adventured in a long, long time.  Put Ptolus down the road a bit, and you have an instant campaign setting for any edition.

Ptolus: The first impressive city product in quite a few years. You can flip to any page and get some good ideas for your own city setting or adventures.

Castle Whiterock:  You can easily score this boxed set for far, far less than the cover price ($100); I got mine for $25 and I suspect you can get it that cheap or less to this day.  For $25, you have basically 10 modules worth of material, either usable as a campaign setting or as a set of totally separate adventures.  I agree it's a little too "constructed" to be truly great, but you still get a giant doorstop ofa boxed set for a cheap price.

Castle Zagyg: What is there is pretty damn cool.  The beginnings of a great campaign setting, any DM worth his salt can build the lower levels himself or use something like "Castle of the Mad Archmage" to finish it out.

BMOM, MON, HOE:  All are seminal Call of Cthulhu Campaigns that could last for a year or more, although looking back at it, I might not include Orient Express on the list since it's more fragmented than the first two, which are classic in scope.

Shackled City:  The collected book is massive, if you wanted to run the campaign inside that would be great, but basically I include this for the setting more than anything else. The maps of the city inside the volcano, along with the description of the city itself, makes it almost a "must do" at some point, I'd love to shoehorn this city into one of my games.

RTTOH:  I would love to run this someday. What can you say with an adventure that STARTS you out going through S1, then only gets DEADLIER and MORE EVIL from there.  Very tough for high level opponents without being completely ridiculous.

GDQ1-7:  The classic D&D campaign in one book. Ignore the linking sections and just revel in the fact you have seven classic adventures under one roof.

CSIO: The classic D&D city setting....place this near any D&D fantasy setting and your players will never get bored exploring this when they aren't exploring dungeons.

Mike B.

Clearly, CSIO stands up and above all, as it still stands the test of time 30+ years later.

We're using the content for our 3.5 home game (as my 3.5 friends begin to appreciate old school material...).  

A post above mentioned Warhammer.

Warhammer is an older game system, right?
Does it pre-date the 3E/OGL era?

Thanks!

One could argue that the Warhammer White Box is a RPG... I mean, it certainly feels like it could be.

Another one worth mentioning as massive:

The World of Synnibar.

benjoshua wrote:At first I thought it was just funny, but then I wondered if Carl Sargent, or somebody else on the editorial board, had some bad history with Erol Otus.  Anybody else know something or had that thought?  

Possibly, but I would wager that it's just a nod to Otus' illustrations of the myconids for their debut appearance in A4.

MetamorphosisSigma wrote:
Possibly, but I would wager that it's just a nod to Otus' illustrations of the myconids for their debut appearance in A4.

Quite likely.  There's the drow artist Ool Eurts or somesuch mentioned in passing in A4 as well, which is another nod to Erol.

serleran wrote:One could argue that the Warhammer White Box is a RPG... I mean, it certainly feels like it could be.

[OT] Don't really need to argue that since it clearly is a RPG rather than just stating that on the covers as a sales pitch.

Anyhow, I gotta get a post in on a thread with both The World of Synnibar and WLD (which would've been as logical a setting/scenario IMO if they'd just photocopied all the MM entries, randomly multiplied their numbers, arranged those in ascending EL and presented that to the would-be adventurers to roll dice against without further explanation).