I can almost hear the people asking Goodman Games this, "I love your adventures, but our group plays 5E. I wish you made old-school-style adventures for 5E!"
So, they did.
These are actually kind of cool. If I am considering playing Level Up: Advanced 5E again, I don't want the Wizards' adventures and worlds. I am looking to get away from them and do new stuff, rather than retreading Ravenloft for the third time in 5E. Nostalgia only goes so far before I get sick of it all.
And while I love the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, they feel so overused to me, known, cosmopolitan, and done with after playing in them since 1980. The Realms especially feels so overdone and overblown; every time I look at it, it feels like walking around Manhattan, and it's too much to grasp and comprehend.
I play in the Realms, and it is "what about the Harpers, this group, that group, or the video game characters?" I don't want a world like that; it is too busy, too pop, too hard to grasp the lore, and I would rather make my own world than be forced to deal with a stream of canon and adventures 40+ years in.
Even Greyhawk feels too much like nostalgia bait to me. If I accept Greyhawk, that gives Wizards the license to re-release every AD&D module in that world, and I am doomed to never see anything new. I played all those adventures when they came out. I still have them. I am not interested in them.
I want Wizards to prove that they can write an all-new, all-time classic like The Tomb of Horrors. They have a few out, but they come from the early days of 5E. I have not seen too many absolute bangers from Wizards lately, and it all feels like nostalgia.
These are very creative and inventive adventures, written a lot like the all-time classics of the Original Adventures Reincarnated series, which I am blessed to have a complete collection of on my shelf. If you loved those and want adventures in the old-school style written just like these, then the 5E Goodman Games releases are a perfect continuation of that theme and series.
If you loved those, you will love this.
Oh, and these get a pass on nostalgia from me since these are amazing, faithful, and incredible recreations. I have these. I would love to see Goodman do more of these, but they will likely never revisit this line, and the reprint licenses have expired. This is the best nostalgia, since it includes history, interviews, the original adventures and maps, and is a complete history of the moment.
Nostalgia, the original adventure, plus history and interviews? Yes, please. This is preservation of the hobby and creating a historical document. This is not a remaster or rewrite.
Would I play them? Maybe, maybe not. I appreciate that they are not CR-balanced and they "are what they are." Playing without balancing and letting the players balance things without the referee needing to worry about it is how I play 5E. You set up a dungeon, stock it, let the players roam around it, and the players will figure out when they need to stop or if they can take a fight. This is the OSR way.
The adventures in the Compendium of Dungeon Crawls feel like they were balanced with the CR tools. I can live with that, since I am free to expand these as I wish. Having them balanced is good for groups who play that way, but I can always create my own themed dungeons as add-on areas to these. Plus, if I want adventures not CR-balanced and "as it is," I always have my 5E megadungeon adventures.
And really, they are a perfect fit for a more old-school themed version of 5E, such as Level Up A5E. This version of 5E supports the exploration pillar of play, which makes it unique and matches the old-school feeling of these adventures. This is a peanut-butter and chocolate combination; having exploration play supported and written into the rules makes A5E play like an old-school game, but with 5E rules and builds. The social pillar, fully supported by the rules, helps, too, and it makes my social characters shine more than they do in either D&D or ToV.
A5E is a unique mix of 5E, 4E, and old-school gaming. The danger is here. Pop-up healing and other exploits are fixed. The martial classes rock. There are rare spells to collect. The three pillars of play are supported in the rules. The exploration game is real and supported by class features. Multiclassing is expanded upon and fully supported. The characters are more complicated than straight 5E or ToV characters, but the details are appreciated and needed for the new rules systems.
Yes, you are doing extra work on the characters to support the new subsystems, but that extra work matters. Paired with adventures written in the old-school way and keeping the library pared down, perhaps this fixes everything.
A generally innocent and fun series from Goodman for 5E, and it shows the system can take on a different complexion and feeling with the right adventures, and a system written in that style.
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