Recently, as I am getting close to playtesting my game and writing the first oneshot scenario for it my mind wondered around the general topic of published adventures for TTRPGs.

It seems they are generally kind of bad, you know?

At least from what I've seen - for anything of a scale bigger than 1 encounter or 1 dungeon.

Even the biggest companies seem to companies seems to fail to consistently produce a viable result. D&D 5e's official modules are notorious, with Descent into Avernus being a particularly 'great' example - that adventure is so amusingly bad it might as well serve as compilation of things not to do. And that's with the WotC money!

Even people who defend various published adventures on the internet usually concede that "it's good but you have to fix it first" and when pressed on the matter say something like "well, all adventures are like this". Which always made me feel very sad, since, while it is true that all tables are unique and some tinkering is usually required, making an adventure that does not rely on a miserably brittle structure, does not feature a plethora of plot holes and features acceptable easy to swallow plot hooks definitely seems possible. Not to mention the obvious issue: if you have to fix an adventure, the main selling point that someone already made a ready-to-go adventure for you is kind of dead.

This all made me think - maybe I should try my hand at writing a document of Do's and Don'ts for general adventure design (thankfully, it should be applicable to most traditionally structured games). Even if it won't end up of use to other people, it would be an interesting rabbit hole to explore.

But this raises the question - there is no way I am the first one to have these thoughts. So perhaps there is already a good guide like this? Do note that here I don't mean "guides on how to prep" - these are obviously very bountiful, but are also a slightly different beast, as prepping a session or campaign allows the GM to include themselves in the formula explicitly, and often the players as well.

I would also like to know - what are the best playable adventures you know of? The kinds that you ran mostly straight from the box and it was pretty good, those you were excited to run again.