When in December 2023 Scroll for Initiative polled game designers for the "the greatest RPG adventure of all time", Robin Laws named a module few people had heard of. I certainly hadn't.

The hardboiled detective adventure The Case of the Editor's Envelope appeared in Dragon 47 (1981). It was written by David "Zeb" Cook, along with a complete Pulp RPG system called Crimefighters, published in the same magazine issue. Cook went on to write D&D adventures for TSR, The Veiled Society among them – a hardboiled detective story in fantasy disguise, as the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast pointed out in a review.

I can of course only speculate about Laws' reasons, but part of it is certainly a rejection of the premise, as his reasoning shows: "I just remember it being super fun in play."

That resonates with me. I don't think there can be one greatest adventure. I could name a different "greatest" adventure every week. The best module for each of us is what works at our table, for our group, even if it has not been influential or sold well.

Giving it a go

Though suspicious of superlatives, I admit I'm still susceptible to their magic. As soon as I saw Laws' statement, I wanted to run The Case of the Editor's Envelope.

Instead of the original Crimefighters rules, we used a lightweight system only available in German, alea atra. This had the advantage that we could create characters in minutes. From character creation to epilogues, we took 2,5 hours to finish.

(As an aside, I also have an English set of tables for pulp and hardboiled hero creation available on itch.io, for use with Journeyman by Zac Bir, another excellent minimalist system.)

Turns out the adventure played really smoothly. It is nothing more than five or six scenes, which are likely to be encountered in a certain order, though shortcuts are possible, and a car chase can triggered at least at two points.

We found the actual investigation and clue hunting to be really easy. No bottlenecks occurred. The story is simple, as it should be.

We certainly would have appreciated some diversity. True to the pulps, all of the five NPCs are male, and all the bad guys (including goons) are Chinese. Sadly, as the cast is very small, this cannot be easily remedied.

Need more pulp

The Case of the Editor's Envelope is not my favourite adventure of all time. I never expected it would be. Me and my players did enjoy it, though. The adventure as well as the genre. We're now hoping to get a few more pulp and hardboiled modules on the table.

Maybe that was another reason for Robin Laws' odd choice: to hint at what might have been. What if TSR, back in 1981, had not recruited Cook to write fantasy adventures, but had instead published a Crimefighters box – and a series of pulp investigations?