I know this question is maybe a little sensationalist, but I think it’s fair.
Is the module dead? 
First, what do I mean by module? I see modules as cheap, short, low prep adventures that a DM can run in a few sessions and be done with it. The kind of adventures we’d get in Dungeon mag, or on the shelves of the local game store. The kind of product you would only pay a couple of bucks for.
Yeah, I think it’s dead.
A lot is said of the price of entry for D&D, and what you’re basically talking about is the “big three” books, PHB, DMG and MM, and lets not forget the starter box (and more about that in a minute…). Usually, and correct me if I’m wrong, the burden of owning most of the books falls on the DM, who is usually also the one that has to corral a gaming group together and get things grooving.
So if we look at the price of entry, (and I’ll use Amazon prices here, so we can see how cheap it ~can~ be) we are talking about an $85 investment at its lowest price.
But there’s no adventure.
We have a lot of tools to create adventures with, sure, but if you are a newbie… well…. you’re kind of out of luck, unless you go with yet another hardback. The newest one, Out of the Abyss, will run you $31 on Amazon. Now we’re talking about a $116 investment if you decide that you need a pre published adventure because you either don’t feel confident in writing your own, don’t have the time, etc etc.
What about the starter set? Yes. It’s a great product. Yes, it includes a very good adventure. Yes, it’s cheap. Yes I highly recommend it. It’s going to cost you about $13 at Amazon, and it’ll give you a REALLY nice entry ramp into D&D, for sure. But once you get past it, you still need to have something to run. So you are still looking to drop more cash on a hardback that to be honest, might not be very newbie friendly to run. Hell, I had trouble with the Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure when I started it. I actually didn’t finish it.
Let me be a realist for a second.
I know modules are probably not very economically sound for WOTC. At least not the cheap ones. I get it. And print magazines are dead. I get it. I don’t think it’s realistic to ask for a trip Back to the Future for the way things used to be.
Here’s what I’d love to see, and you tell me how realistic you think this is… How about officially sanctioned short scenarios, that can be easily dropped into existing campaigns? Maybe written by the community, with the D&D Seal of Approval ®.
How about DNDClassics? That place is FULL of modules. D&D’s past is riddled with Tombs of Lizard Kings, Frost Giant Jarls, and Tombs of Horrors. Lets take advantage of that. I’d love to see conversion guides for those old adventures.
I should point out that some of what I’m asking for is being done…. ENWorld is running a patreon that produces adventures. I’ve never read them, so I can’t tell you if they are good or not, but someone saw an opening and took it. 🙂
I think there is an untapped market for shorter modules. Not everyone has the time or patience to run a large hardback. Not everyone is going to find the storyline in the big hardback adventure interesting enough to run. So there is a place for smaller adventures.
Maybe it’s the community’s job to get this done. Maybe it’s for third parties to tackle (where’s the license?… I keep hearing Fall).
I know I’d love more shorter modules. But it seems that for now the module is dead. Long live the module.
Edit:
I was reminded by @alphastream about a few sources of third party modules… First, Merric B (a prolific and well known member of the D&D community) keeps a 5e review site with tons of third party content information and there’s also the D&D Adventurer’s League, which has modules available that require public play to get access to. Public play is something I don’t really write much about because my experience with it is nil. Perhaps somebody can comment.
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vishalicious
September 22, 2015
I haven’t run anything in 2 decades, but I still do like to check out systems when I have time. Haven’t really read DnD 5th from front-to-back yet, but if there’s a dearth of adventures, I’d expect companies to begin publishing some, assuming there’s a market.
If its a licensing issue, then its entirely possible that WotC is just keeping the initial market to themselves at the moment, until they open the gates to licensees. They’re probably analyzing past strategies and determining how to proceed so that they get maximal proceeds themselves.
Thom Harp
September 22, 2015
I used to have an account to Wizards just to go back and get the PDFs of the old Dungeon articles. Those adventures were short (unless they ran a two issue one) and had good hooks. I don’t know what’s up with those but I loved ’em.
http://www.thomharp.com Phone: (818) 661-8145 Twitter: @thomharp
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simplednd
September 22, 2015
We already have cheap alternatives on blogs like yours and mine. Enthusiast who love to make and post content for free. With wizards shutting down and not supporting the community, that help for new dms becomes harder to find.
alphastream
September 22, 2015
On the organized play side, you have several options. You can run or play the first part of each published adventure (that $30 Out of the Abyss, for example) at a game store that signs up for Encounters. You get a pdf with some are and levels 1-4 of the adventure. Sign up to run or show up and play. Very casual and easy. If you want to continue you can choose to buy the adventure and keep playing (and some store DMs do that as well).
You can sign up to run or play Expeditions, which is a living campaign. This is a shared story where a series of 2 or 4 hour adventures create a shared campaign. You might play the first adventure with one group then come back next month and play the second adventure with a different group. Despite different people at your table, you all share the same setting and experience similar events (adjusting for the choices you each made). You end up being part of a huge community. Stores can run this, but anyone can sign up to run this as a public game in a public space, including online. One of this season’s adventures is even premiering at an online convention! Through this season there will be about 45 of these adventures!
Once per season there is also a special event at certain conventions, where they run an exciting interactive event known as an Epic. Those can be a lot of fun.
I maintain a page on EN World with a lot of information about the organized play options.
alphastream
September 22, 2015
With regards to the overal topic, I think historically things were very different. Adventures were seldom big moneymakers. Many of us think of old classics, but there was a lot of nostalgia there and many of those classics are largely classic because they sat on store shelves for a decade or more. The market is really different now. Most adventures sell poorly, both for big companies and small ones. The death of the adventure was actually something said often during late 4E, because the market was so unfriendly to even amazing adventures such as Gardmore Abbey.
Wizards of the Coast has actually done something pretty incredible in resurrecting the adventure! They have found a way to focus on a story season, with all of that creativity centered on a fairly epic adventure. The adventures are big and long and expensive, but they provide a very good (not perfect, but really very good) experience for a campaign. The same effort feeds into the organized play program, as I mentioned above, which provides lots of free DMing and play opportunities. On top of the 45+ organized play adventures you have all of the existing 5E content on DnD Classics, such as Vault of the Dracolich and previous Encounters seasons. Many of those were during the playtest for 5E, but a quick sub from the free rules or Monster Manual and you are good to go. Very few gamers could play through all of this free content in two years!
There is no official license, but that hasn’t stopped a number of companies from creating tons of adventures. It actually frightens me, because the OGL glut in early-to-mid 3E was really bad, filled with tons of those short adventures you are asking for… the quality was usually sub-par and mucked up the industry, further hurting the market for good official adventures.
I do agree that it would be great to see conversions for DnD Classics adventures. However, it gets a bit dicey here too. Some of those classics really are boosted in our brains by nostalgia. I’ve run several since 5E came out and only a small subset are truly good enough that I would recommend them to a new group. Adventure design really has come a long way since that time. If I had it my way I would be really picky about which I converted.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a few short adventures, but I think most DMs own either the Starter Set (tons of parts of it can be used as short self-contained adventures) or one of the recent 3 big adventures (also have tons of great parts you can separate out). I suspect the market could support a well-designed adventure with a series of short experiences, but they did just release Harried In Hillsfar on Dragon+. That adventure is the first organized play Expeditions scenario for the Out of the Abyss season and provides five 45-min to 1-hr missions all around a cool central premise. Completely free, on Dragon + for any mobile device!
The adventure seems alive and well and really well supported by Wizards of the Coast!
andrewkropff
September 23, 2015
I think WotC should go the route that LEGO did. LEGO Ideas is a community-driven website fully backed by LEGO, and allows users to submit their LEGO designs for fan support, and if a project has enough backers, it goes to LEGO for review. If approved, it becomes an official LEGO set.
Why not do the same for D&D? Let users submit adventures, have them vetted by the community, and then give them the official D&D seal of approval.
newbiedm
September 23, 2015
I like this. but it seems that “community” short of Facebook or Twitter isn’t top of mind right now. Freelancing for wotc seems to be a thing of the past, except in Org Play circles, and unless ylu work for one of the design studios they partner with for adventures, food luck writing official content.
It seems that 3rd party (licensed or not) is the way to go. I expect a 5e glut of unlicensed stuff soon.
On Wednesday, September 23, 2015, www. Newbie DM .com wrote:
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Marty
September 23, 2015
It’s dead if you mean as a lost-cost official product from Wizards of the Coast. There is no margin in small adventures for a company like Hasbro/Wizards, so the “adventure path” hard cover is the product that will be the type we will see going forward.
But that won’t stop smaller press companies like Goodman Games from printing 5e compatible adventures. More small press publishers are getting on this bandwagon, which is a good thing.
So, no we are not likely to see a B21 – Search for the Lost McGuffin from WotC anymore… but there are lots of alternative sprouting up all over.
Mark K.
September 24, 2015
You might also mention that there are the Free PDFs available for the core rules. You don’t have to buy the big 3 books.
Mondbuchstaben
October 6, 2015
@Andrewkropff: I think WotC should go the route that LEGO did. (…) Let users submit adventures, have them vetted by the community, and then give them the official D&D seal of approval.
Good idea in theory, but once you put your module in the open it can be used by the community. The popular ones will be used, so the ones that receive the most backing are very likely the ones that are also “most dead” for publication.
With LEGO it’s different – seeing a design and owning exactly the blocks needed for it are different things.
Johnny F. Normal
October 11, 2015
Sure, who cares.
WotC is not, nor are they displaying any interest in keeping the RPG industry alive and vibrant.
This is unfortunate because 5th is a decent game.
There are a good many other BETTER companies interested in providing us with interesting modules for whatever our game system: FGG, LotFP, Goodman, ACKs, Labyrinth Lord, etc…
Marty
October 14, 2015
WotC actually did several conversions during the 4e era for the Dungeon Magazine PDFs (and D&D Encounters). They weren’t exact conversions, but re-imaginings of popular dungeons of the past. The Village of Hommlet conversion for 4e was especially excellent (the monsters were less random, and were actually different factions working together – sort of).
They also did Hidden Shrine, Against the Giants and a few others.
The 5e playtest convesions for B2 and X1 were also decent — they were straight up stat block conversions with little changes to the root text.
I’d read that they had planned to do more of the straight stat block conversions for the other “Best of AD&D” modules, but resourcing got in the way (and one of the editors got put on an extended jury duty).
I would love to see some more of these conversions for the modules that were truly top-notch. I don’t think we need White Plume Mountain or Barrier Peaks or the like. They may be well loved, but in all honesty, they’re not that great as adventures.
nerdarchy101
October 27, 2015
As Marty and so many others commenters have mentioned, this is going to be a space that third party publishers will be filling. PDF downloadable modules from 3rd party publishers is the new floppy, low cost module and having this content will still leave a space for WOTC to publish the “big” books, setting and monster books and the like. -Nerdarchist Ryan