Dragonbane by Free League

Maggan said:

If you're looking for an adventure in the boxed set which is less of a dungeon bash and more centered around building a relationship with a frenemy, I suggest looking at Trollspire (which I wrote).

It has turned out to be frequently used when introducing new players to the game, and tries to be something different from the standard dungeon delve while still being exciting.

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Awesome! Sounds perfect for introducing my wife and kids to it!

I've been running Dragonbane with the Foundry Module for a weeks now (its excellent btw.)

I really like it. It perfectly scratched the itch of a "Classic" or "OSR-like" fantasy system for me, while avoiding some of the most common pitfalls I have with those games, such as high lethality. Its still pretty dangerous, but a fair shake more forgiving than like.. B/X. Really fun mash-up of BRP and D&D (with some YZE to boot.) My only complaint is I want more of it. The tagline "Mirth & Mayhem" I find exceptionally accurate.

I think the adventures are great. A delightful sandbox in a box. They're all short and scattered around a classic feeling mini-setting and I think there's plenty of rules for negotiation.

Reef said:

I had the same reaction as you, and then was flummoxed by the inherently combat intensive dungeons. It feels like it should be a system that rewards finding ways around combat, through negotiation or cleverness, with combat being a brutal but exciting final option. But the adventures don’t necessarily seem to be set up that way on a quick read-through.

It got me thinking that maybe I need to find some old school adventures, where people at least claim that providing ways of bypassing combat was standard (I was too young back in the day…we’d just try to kill everything, and die…heh).

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Most of the pre-90's fantasy adventure modules I've skimmed were pretty much a stack of fights with ways to get from one to another; if one didn't have a GM using that special sauce GM-mode, they may as well have been minis wargames. And most of those are from the 80's. Only a few from the 70's, and those had lots of save or die traps.

A few were hex-crawlers. A handful were actually minicampaigns.
Sneaky parties could do modules g1-3 as level 1-3... but they're combat heavy appropriate for the listed...