The Dungeons & The Dragons!

Someone posted a fake old-school D&D adventure..

https://imgur.com/gallery/ykdVXaf/comment/2408376549

And, it reminded me of being a kid, where the adventure modules were a crap-shoot. Either you got a really good fully-fleshed-out adventure... or you got something that felt like the publishing dept dug through a writers waste bin, and threw together a bunch of crumpled-up adventure notes into a hastily released hot mess that left the DM trying to figure out how to piece and adventure from it all.

Earthshaker! was what immediately popped into my head.

Earthshaker is a giant steam-powered mechanoid. There's a Gnome tribe operate the thing, and they literally live inside it, with a make-shift village built out and such.

The adventure was basically a heist film. A traveling circus / wonderous oddities troupe has this massive mechanoid thing in tow. A group of baddies have decided to hijack Earthshaker, so they can go on a terror spree or something.

This was one of the first modules I remember artifacts being introduced in, as the gnomes have a special artifact that can act as a simple brain for Earthshaker if it's placed inside the head. Earthshaker could then operate a lot of functions on its own without needing the Gnomes, and it could respond to simple voice commands. Hence, the baddies really wanted to get their hands on that.

Your team of deviants is supposed to chase them inside and stop them.

The adventure, however, felt like a hodge-podge of jumbled notes and maps. Earthshaker itself was a massive dungeon. It had wonderful sections like "if a character falls down into the darkness of the arm/leg, consider them dead." Or, "if a character gets stuck in the section of shockabsorbers on the bottom of the foot while Earthshaker is walking, basically roll for an absolute shit-ton of damage to let the player know they better dust off a new character sheet. And no cleric can bring them back, b/c they are a red paste. Nothing less than a wish could bring them back."

The module, being a "jumble of notes" variety, also went into great detail on what to do with Earthshaker at the end. This is when players start to realize they're no longer clearing out local dungeons or creating a castle/tower/guild at a local town. Nope, their actions can have LARGE-SCALE impact on the game world. They defeat a giant mech, and .. what now?

The best part was the module authors anticipated some band of deviants blowing Earthshaker up. B/c obviously "the bad guys have control of Earthshaker, so.. let's just blow it up!" would be an option. It went into detail on how pieces of it would devastate the kingdom for miles around, and how in the years to come folks would tear it apart, sell it, etc.

Even if you didn't play the module, it was a fantastic read b/c of all the outlandish stuff it posed.

But, I stumbled across reddit post talking about it, and they were fixated on one thing...

https://www.reddit.com/r/DungeonsAndDragons/comments/1d7uj50/earthshaker/

If anyone ever asks you what "playing D&D" is like?

This.

This is what playing D&D is like.

A monstrous creation is ruining a castle... and the "players" are fixated on the lack of pants. And hilarity ensues.