D&D 5E How are you using Tales from the Yawning Portal?

[Prakriti]

Just curious -- what use have people gotten out of Tales so far? Personally, I DMed Sunless Citadel and really enjoyed it. My group has now moved on to Forge of Fury. I'm less enthused about the later adventures, so I don't know if I'll end up running them, but I might cannibalize them for a homebrew campaign later. I'd rather drop one giant stronghold into a campaign than run all of Against the Giants back-to-back. And the Doomvault just begs to be split up into smaller dungeons.

Overall, I'm still undecided on Tales. It's a very difficult product to judge compared to the adventure paths (at least for me). As far as I can tell, the small maps are the biggest complaint so far, which I can understand. Luckily, I play online, so it's not a concern for me or my group. So far, I've enjoyed every bit of it.

 

[discosoc]

In my experience, 5e adventures don't really run well out of the box, instead requiring quite a bit of adjustments for encounters and stuff. Since TftYP are all reprints of older stuff, I may as well just run the older stuff that I either have or can get much cheaper elsewhere. I know my opinion on this isn't probably a common one, though.

 

[ccs]

ATM the books sitting on my shelf.....

But eventually I'll need to plug a hole in one of the campaigns & then I'll run something out of it.
Slowly wash-rinse-repeat. It'll take me a few years to use the whole book.

 

[akr71]

I bought it, but haven't read it yet. Glanced at some maps and stat blocks, but that's it. I'm hoping my wife might try running one of them for us & give me a chance to play.

 

[Waterbizkit]

I quite like it. Not because it's "classic" adventures I've never had the chance to run before, though that's nice as well, but because it's smaller adventures rather than a full campaign. See, my group meets a bit too infrequently to make playing a campaign viable. I tried my hardest to make CoS work, but after a run of sessions it all broke down and at this point the breaks have become too great and frequent to maintain a proper flow to the story.

So Tales is perfect for us. I can have my players roll up some characters, we can run an adventure and call it a day. If we don't meet again for two months it doesn't matter because each piece is self-contained. And honestly for all the homebrew campaigns I've run in the past my own personal forte has always been my own one-offs, so I'm quite content with a collection of disjointed adventures.

Anyway, I like it and I'll eventually use all of it.

 

[plisnithus8]

[spoilers for ToH]

I have been running an Asian homebrew campaign for about a year and a half. I told my players that there was s chance of the campaign ending or changing drastically depending on thrir choices soon so I asked them what they might want to do next (or while I write up an altered world). They wanted to try Tomb of Horrors. I warned thrm how particular and tedious some of could be and hiw deadly. They didn't care.

So the party decided to split up on 2 simultaneous missions to collect resources to save the world. I hate splitting the party because half the players have nothing to do do I asked them to create new players for the mission their regular players weren't going on. One of the missions was going to be going in a Raiders of the Lost Ark temple eith boulder, darts, sand bags, etc.

BUT I decided to slip the Tomb of Horrors in its place, knowing half the characters were expendable. After about 20 minutes in (having fallen into several traps). Turns out one player had a little knowledge of the place, but I just said what he knew was a legend his character had heard. Several characters were teleported to a cell. They got stuck in the repetative DC 20 secret chambers (I nerfed these). We got only about 1/4 of the way through in last night's 4-hours.

 

[alienux]

I haven't started yet as we're going to finish up another story line first, but as much as I'd love to say that I'm going to run every adventure in TftYP, I'm sure that due to time I won't be able to for awhile.

 

[MiraMels]

I'm planning to weave Against the Giants into my current game of Storm King's Thunder. Currently though, my copy is on lend to one of my players because she wants to try her hand at running a more traditional dungeon, probably Forge of Fury. My partner wants to run Tomb of Horrors as a stand alone Halloween special in October.

So, my group is both running the dungeons as standalone adventures, and weaving them into longer campaigns. Pretty standard stuff.

There is one odd thing that i am trying to do though. I'm far more comfortable running games theatre of the mind than on a grid map, so I'm trying to see if I can adapt one of these traditional dungeons in such a way that I could run it without a map or minis, and have it still be fun and compelling, and not totally obnoxious. I'm starting with Sunless Citadel.


Sent from my iPhone using EN World

 

[plisnithus8]

I hardly ever use a grid when I DM but felt the need for ToH.

 

[Ath-kethin]

I marked "not at all," but that's not 100% true. Currently, I'm using it as a paperweight.