Living Forgotten Realms Adventures

There've been various threads here over the years where I've explained the hoops which you used to have to jump through to get involved with various WotC organised play programmes. Fortunately, it's now become a great deal easier to access Living Forgotten Realms adventures.

With some very minor exceptions, all LFR adventures which have been released to date are now openly available in one of two places - a .zip archive of about 60 adventures, and individual files for another 75.

Links to the archive and the website hosting the individual files are on this page on the LFR wiki: http://community.wizards.com/lfr/wiki/adventures (which also contains 'blurb' details for most of the available adventures).

So if you're looking for more adventures, or for more FR content, do check these out. They vary in the amount of 'Realmslore' they contain, but I imagine many will be of interest to fans of the Realms.

If you are interested in using them as part of the organised Living Forgotten Realms campaign, all the details and discussion are on the LFR community group here: http://community.wizards.com/lfr and there are now no tests to take or emails to send to get started - just gather some players, choose an adventure and start playing!

I saw this stuff Friday, and although it is a little hard to navigate, there are 'gaps', and the format is not fantastic, there is no doubt a lot of content there to be used.

If you are going to get involved with LFR get ready for some disappointment because the vast majority of LFR adventures are terrible. They are so bad, I pretty much got fed up with 4E after playing them for a while.

For their limited scope (essentially delves) they're not bad. I personally wouldn't recommend them as a full campaign (well, except the campaign ones , the Mini-x are pretty good) as written, but with a bit of polish my home group had a blast with them.

Formulaic

Like most organized play adventures need to be for convention format, the adventures are a bit formulaic. With some DM polish and use of MyRealm adventures, which are open adventure formats that DM's can use; you can do quite a bit. I have no idea what they are doing now that LFR is being spun off from WotC though.

However there are some jewels hidden among the mediocre and bad adventures

One of the main things about LFR that quickly kills enthusism for the game is the horrible encounter design. There are way too many mods that use soldiers and brutes much higher level than the party with lots of difficult terrain as well. Many LFR mods are recipies for grindfests.

I've run a bunch of LFR games, and I agree that they're not all fantastic. That said, they're mostly fine frameworks for one-shot delve adventures, even if the DM does need to modify encounters as they see fit to make them more fun.

Keep in mind that we've just been given a whole load of free, published adventures complete with maps, stat blocks, etc. This is a GOOD THING for DMs who occasionally find themselves in a pinch for a quick adventure or even an idea for a new ongoing adventure. There's nothing wrong with starting with an LFR adventure and then expanding from there using the DM's imagination.

I'm really glad that I have a bunch of LFR adventures loaded and ready to go in MapTool for use with my projector setup. When some family visited over the holidays and went nuts for D&D, I was able to run games all week long without having to come up with brand-new content. LFR adventures are convenient to have in a pinch.

It's true that Sturgeon's Law applies to LFR adventures, just like it does to everything else. But there are some good ones, which I'll list here. Obviously, my opinion.

Note: I'm not sure how many of these are readily available any more, because not all of the regions got their adventures into the new mega-.zip file.

Minor spoilers, so I'll put the whole thing in an s-block.

[sblock]Standard Adventures

AGLA 1-2 At the Foot of the Lighthouse features both shipboard combat and a potentially very fun final combat in the titual location. The final combat will be much better if you make the larger (wider), and you really need some PCs with forced movement effects for maximum chaos.

Core 1-13 The Fate of Camp 15 is a surprisingly open-ended LFR adventure. The PCs have a particular mission, but if they dig beneath the surface they'll realize all is not as it seems. And then, they can decide whether to help one faction or another, or perhaps neither!

Core 1-2 The Radiant Vessel of Thesk
Core 1-6 Incident at the Gorge of Gauros
Core 1-14 What Storms May Come

These three adventures make up the Radiance Against Thay quest, which is one of the most entertaining and small-e epic feeling quests. The PCs start out by delivering a baby during combat, and by the end of the quest they're fighting a lich.

Core 1-3 Sense of Wonder features a potentially annoying gnome priest of Gond as an NPC -- he summons the PCs by mistake, which is how the adventure starts -- but it's also got a highly entertaining combat on a huge map against numerous "robotic" enemies. And, this adventure features a great logic puzzle, if you like those.

CORM 1-1 The Black Knight of Arabel is widely derided for being too easy, but it's also extremely entertaining. Sets a strong mood of "something isn't quite right" and introduces the PCs to the best LFR region (Cormyr).

CORM 1-2 Gangs of Wheloon -- have you seen the movie Escape from New York? Ever wished you could play it as a D&D adventure? Oh yeah. You can.

CORM 1-6 Curse of the Queen of Thorns is a race that pits the PCs against various harbingers of a terrible curse, with an integrated skill challenge / matrix-logic puzzle. It's easily possible for the PCs to botch part of this adventure if they don't do a thorough job of gathering information and planning, which is far too rare in LFR. Also has several satisfying fights against iconic monsters.

CORM 1-7 Patronage and Pestilence tasks you with saving the city from a plague... which I've failed to do several times, yet still had fun. Some of the combats are a bit brutal, and the key twist is kind of ridiculous, but I still enjoy this whenever I play it.

CORM 2-1 For Crown and Kingdom has the PCs helping out one of two rival Cormyrian knights in capturing a wayward War Wizard who's apparently gone bad. It would be really cool to run two tables of this which each table helping one of the two knights, to play up the rivalry, and turn it into a friendly (?) contest.

DRAG 1-4 Falling Snow, White Petal
DRAG 1-5 White Flower Falling
DRAG 1-6 Night of Fallen Petals

Hey, you got your wuxia game in my D&D! Just from the titles you can tell these have a strong "Eastern" vibe. Fun if you don't mind some genre crossover.

TYMA X-X

All of the Tymanther adventures feature the PCs working for Lord Tuanek of Ruinspoke, head of House Jalt. And your PC will accumulate tons of bling with the Jalt logo on it. It's satisfyin to see your reputation develop, as long the DM rolls with it.

TYMA 1-4 Death Before Dishonor is a particularly fun one as you get to delve into an Egyptian style tomb, and race a rival party of NPCs to the prize.

TYMA 2-1 Old Enemies Arise and TYMA 2-2 The Hand of Darkness kind of re-set the story, but also up the ante, with Lord Tuanek himself coming in for negative attention.

Nonstandard Adventures

ADCP 2-1 The Paladin's Plague, a/k/a "the battle interactive", is one of the finest LFR adventures of them all, featuring a desperate fight to save Elturgard from the Plaguelands. Optimally you'll want to play this in an convention environment with multiple tables. It could work (maybe) with just one table, though you'd lose the sense of scale and small-e epic-ness.

SPEC 1-1 Shades of the Zhentarim -- do you like kiling Zhents? Over and over? Then you'll like this. For when you're in the mood just to kick butt without worrying about anything silly like plot or story.[/sblock]

I agree there are some dogs in LFR, but there are also some very good adventures.

I am prepping to run IMPI 2-4 "Goblins Strike Back", which feeds upon actions taken in several prior adventures (IMPI 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 1-6, 2-2 and 2-3 to be exact). All of the players actions in those prior adventures has bearing on this adventure.

This is the sort of thing I had been wanting from LFR all along, meaningful story awards that have real impact on the following adventures. Seems they are finally coming around to that.

In addition, the story looks very exciting... I cannot wait to see how things unfold.

I am also running Waterdeep 1-7, "The Missing and the Missed", which has challenging tactical encounters as well as a good plot with interesting NPCs to interact with.

There is a good web site that rates the various LFR adventures, you can get to it here:

LFR Compendium >> Modules Page