[larsdangly]

Here's a high-level issue that I think reaches beyond the technical issues people are discussing on other threads:

TFT's one structural gap is an almost complete absence of commercially available 'dungeons' (or similar scale city or outdoor adventure sites) suitable for use by a group running a normal table-top gaming session (a few hours of play, with a GM). One of the things that stimulated the creation of the OSR (D+D-focused) community was the tremendous back catalogue of well liked dungeons of this sort. And, after an initial period focused (I would say pointlessly) on recreating a dozen new versions of classic D+D rules, most of the creative energy in the OSR community flowed toward making well produced, fun dungeons in that classic style. The collective weight of all this is quite large now.

TFT never really developed this kind of catalogue. All but one of its published dungeons are of the 'Solo' style; in this sense the game follows the T+T model rather than D+D. I love my solo dungeons, and they are a distinctive and fun part of the game. But they are not a good basis for forming and maintaining a regular gaming group. The one exception is Tolenkar's Lair. Which is great - I have no complaints about it and have had a blast playing it something like a dozen times. But imagine that D+D - over all its editions and decades of time - had never published a GM-suitable, largish dungeon after Caves of Chaos.

The third party community has put out quite a large number of dungeons over the last decade (I'm thinking of Dark City Games here). I haven't looked at many of them, but my understanding is they too follow the Solo dungeon style, and are thus most suitable for small scale modules and play without a GM'd group.

So: a call to arms for both SJG and the potential third party authors: we need to build up a catalogue of something like a dozen really creative, fun dungeons.

A related factor is the lack of a setting that is developed with maps and detailed descriptions, at the scale comparable to the Greyhawke boxed set or the Prax/Sartar area of Glorantha (so, a nice large scale map, a couple of regional maps, and 100 pages or so of detailed material). Cidri is a setting with great potential, but it is basically a concept presented for the GM's development. This is actually charming, as it keeps the creative energy flowing for the individual GM's and players. But it also presents a higher activation energy to participation than you encounter in OSR-style D+D.