I have a group and their tired of my indie RPG/OSR antics. So, I’m going to try running 5E for them. But none of my OSR dungeons are going to work. Any suggestions on 5E adventures?
Best Module/Adventure for D&D 5E
Does anyone know why I can’t get Phandelver on D&D Beyond’s site?
Weird, I thought I looked all over but I missed it. Thanks for the legwork Darren!
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Late to the party, but I’m currently running a Tomb of Annihilation campaign and it’s going great so far. I like the way it’s designed giving a good overview but leaving a lot of blanks for the GM to fill in, at least during the first half of it.
Caveat: it doesn’t have that much social interaction since it’s mostly a hex-crawl in the jungle followed by a ruined-city–crawl and a big dungeon.
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My favourite single adventure is Wild Sheep Chase from Winghorn Press. Silly, fun, combat with the option for social/stealth if you make it and provides a great adventure for low-level parties to flex their muscles. And has a talking sheep.
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I had a lot of fun running Orcs in Tarodun’s Tomb. A bunch of Orcs with randomly generated comedic descriptors are raiding a tomb that you wanted to raid. It’s just a single session but their other adventure Shadows of Forgotten Kings is a little longer and looks like a lot of fun.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/248046/Orcs-in-Taroduns-Tomb-5e?cPath=10383
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/243857/Shadows-of-Forgotten-Kings-5e?src=newest
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Lost Mine of Phandelver is still the best module/adventure WotC has released for 5e.
However, if you give it a look and decide to pass, I think Curse of Strahd is their second best product. But make sure you chat with players about content. Strahd is all about gothic vampires, ghosts, and death. Super cool ideas and writing about it. But death.
If you and your players have played other games, I think you’re burdened with the knowledge of best practices for hexcrawls, mysteries, political intrigue, and mega dungeons. D&D products typically don’t use them, but DMs guild might have awesome gems!
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I’m a player in a D&D 5e group that’s running through Dragon Heist.
It’s a lot of fun, and isn’t one of those “all combat all the time” adventures.
One of the big sub-plots is that the PCs become owners and operators of a tavern. That’s not something I’ve seen in a published D&D adventure before!
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I’m actually interested to hear more about your Dragon Heist game. I wrote a half-lucid review for it some time ago, and I wasn’t overly positive about its usability/accessibility in information architecture and layout.
Mind you, I still had a blast playing it. Ended up running new players through it and had a very crazy finale with Mr. Infinity Gaunlet and Eyeball Basketball. But I had to do a lot of heavy lifting to get it there.
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I have deliberately not purchased or read Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, so as not to spoiler myself.
Also: Our GM is known to modify published adventures to fit the PCs and our play-style, so some of what we’ve encountered may not actually be in the book.
That said: I’ve been pretty happy with this game so far! It’s an urban adventure, with a fair amount of city politics. It uses an alliance and reputation system, where each PC can become allied with an organization and gain reputation aboung its members. As one’s reputation increases, it’s possible to lean on the organization for resources or information.
While I am truly enjoying this game, I have a few critiques…
First, we seem to bump elbows with a LOT of published high-level NPCs. This is a personal bias of mine, but are first-level schmoes really going to be recruited by NPCs for whom the publisher’s game materials have been named? (E.g., we were hired by Volo…of the D&D book Volo’s Guide to Everything fame.)
Loot levels seem very low… to the point that the PCs feel empoverished.
On a related note: The game seems to encourage the PCs to be murder-hobos by making it hard to be successful adventurers while following the law. For example, we’ve taken on a few “Patron missions” for which we didn’t get paid, but caused us to use resources. And later, when we were conducting an off-the-record investigation into criminal activity agaist our business, we found quite a bit of valuable treasure that we felt compelled to hand over to the city guards as evidence… which meat that we effectively lost it. (The GM said that this action increased our reputation with the City Watch, meaning that we can now count them as allies… but reputation doesn’t pay the rent!)
The game seems to assume that the PCs are interested in running a business. While this is kind of fun, I guess, I already work a full-time job, and don’t really want to play a game about hiring staff, HR issues, making payroll, and paying taxes. I do that in real life already! Sometimes, you just want to punch monsters in the face!
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We played that at Dice Saloon recently. It was good fun and a definite recommend for a one-shot.
Personally I still want to run a Bioware as heck Dragon Heist, possibly using that Witch+Craft sourcebook currently on KS to make it more pastoral (or I guess the city-based version of ‘pastoral’).
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I’ve personally never read nor played this one, but Storm Kings Thunder is often touted in my circles as the best D&D 5e product. In the sense that it’s a series of sandboxes connected by a metaplot. These folks are all pretty experienced dungeon masters so I certainly trust their opinions, but I’m not sure it’d be the best product for a newer dungeon master.
For that person, Lost Mines is still the best. Period.
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The first D&D adventure I ever tried to run was Storm King’s Thunder explicitly because it was a sandbox connected by a metaplot and I was hoping the group would go for a sort of Dracula Dossier play experience, it’s definitely a fun adventure! I’m currently playing Curse of Strahd which from my limited POV has a ton of fun stuff in it, despite my character being more (entirely) suited to social combat than combat-combat.
I’ve run a group part of the way through SKT (before the group fell apart due to scheduling) and we had a blast. It’s a well-written adventure and I like it a lot. I enjoyed the more sandbox-esque feel.
For one-shots or dipping your toes in, I really enjoy the work of M.T. Black. I think he’s one of the best 3rd party D&D adventure writers working right now. I actually strung together a series of his adventures (the “Triboar trilogy”) as a start to SKT, and it worked really well.
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Great call @jexjthomas. I didn’t know that’s the author behind the city encounters in waterdeep but i adore that little supplement too.
For others wondering, SKT isn’t perfect. It’s far from it. I’ve heard some of the issues with certain parts of the game’s story as written. But as far as a product goes, it’s extremely mineable for other games as well. With so many locations and NPCs you cold easily deconstruct this adventure and turn it into a west marches sandbox. That’s a very useful product!
What’s really interesting here is that so little of WotC product design has changed since the 90s or even earlier. If you’re willing to deep dive, there’s great lists of adventures in Dungeon magazine and stuff. Now with Ghosts of Saltmarsh coming out to pair with Tales from the Yawning Portal, great 3e modules are seeing life again-- stuff like The Styes.
@EricVulgaris what are the problems with the story you’ve heard of? (Do we have spoiler tags here? Doesn’t seem like it …)
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I heard complaints and friction around Zephyros and the sky castle/info dump portions.
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He does a bunch of other fun adventures, but Wild Sheep Chase is my favourite. I ran a mini-campaign stringing together his adventures which capped off with the lvl20 adventure set at the end of time itself, using the party all plucked from moments before their deaths. That was a lot of fun too!
I’m currently starting a campaign of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, and I recommend that if you’re looking for a city-crawl campaign with plenty of downtime. Second to that I’d recommend Curse of Strahd or Lost Mines of Phandelver since those are solid adventures with clear goals and motivations for your players.
Princes of the Apocalypse is a nice hexcrawl, but can suffer from a lack of focus at the start.
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I wrote…
I have deliberately not purchased or read Waterdeep: Dragon Heist , so as not to spoiler myself.
That said: I’ve been pretty happy with this game so far! It’s an urban adventure, with a fair amount of city politics. It uses an alliance and reputation system, where each PC can become allied with an organization and gain reputation aboung its members. As one’s reputation increases, it’s possible to lean on the organization for resources or information.
Our last session didn’t go so well, and it showed the limitations of running investigation-style play in D&D. There were a couple of clues we missed because everyone rolled low on their “Perception” checks, and nobody had proficiency in the “Investigate” skill. We ended up flailing around going down blind alleys… I was getting bored, and our GM was getting a bit frustrated with us. Eventually, an NPC came along and pointed us in the right direction… which made me feel like our PCs were idiots.
Since my other group is playing a GUMSHOE game, I kept wanting to use an Investigative skill to automatically find clues, or to spend a point to just have the GM tell us what the clue means and where to go next!
In both situations, the GM is just telling us what’s next, but… in in GUNSHOE, the PCs figure it out, while in D&D, the GM had to send in an NPC to bail out the party. VERY differnt feel!
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