I don’t tend to use modules and campaign guides to run them, but to mine them for ideas. I’ve never run one without tearing it apart and modifying it for the players/characters/campaign we’re playing. However, when we were kicking the tires on Alien a few years ago, I wound up using the Chariot of the Gods adventure to try and lure the group in and kickstart a campaign. The players wrote up their own characters instead of using provided ones. The premise was simple — a missing Weyland-Yutani ship, Cronus, is discovered by a group of salvage operators who find the science module/lifeboat is missing and most of the crew gone, save for a few in hypersleep. The ship is almost dead and they have to get it fired back up. After the crew gets wakened, the requisite horrible stuff starts happening. There’s a third act where a competitor ship shows up, but I ditched that as we got to the end and the characters did some clever things to survive aboard Cronus long enough to go into hypersleep with the ship supposedly on course for the nearest port.

It’s a good adventure and well written, as is the “sequel” a campaign instead of a one-shot “cinematic” adventure — Destroyer of Worlds. The adventure takes place on a colony world on the edge of American space. There’s the the UPP — the setting’s “commies”, if you will, invading because of a secret lab producing the bioweapons. The characters are looking for some deserters from the colonial marines and things, as one might expect, go pear-shaped. The setting of the colony is extensively presented and I wouldn’t mind running a few adventures on the world before the events of DoW. It wound up giving me ideas for creating and running the colony world that some of the players’ characters have landed on after a hit job in Tokyo went bad and they had to run for it.

So while I don’t tend to run published adventures very often, I do find them useful for inspiration or finding material to use. If you’re a new GM, however, they can be a real lifesaver — cutting the prep time down, allowing you to often hit all the rules mechanics for players to learn, and reducing the intimidation factor that running a new game for a group of people can inspire.