D&D 5E Mashup of Official WotC published adventures?

[Eyes of Nine]

Over in the Panopticon thread, Eltab posted this:

I've been wanting to do a Frozen North / Vikings campaign, featuring Arauthator's lair from Tiamat and the Frost Giants from Storm King's Thunder. This looks like another toy to fit into the plot.

Made me start thinking about if folks have created relatively coherent stories by mashing up various parts of the many WotC published adventure sets so far? (I focus on those, because those are the ones I own).

Example:
Phandelver
Triboar part of Storm King's Thunder
White Plume Mountain from Tales from the Yawning Portal
Temple of the Elder Elemental Eye from Princes of the Apocalypse
With a focus on elemental stuff.

I can see some upsides, as well as some down sides...

Upside, it would be a cool "new" adventure. And you wouldn't have to create it from whole cloth. An gives you an opportunity to use the adventure books again.
Downside, would take more work than just running someone straight through a given adventure - as you might have to change things to enable your coherent story to work.

Anyone else created custom adventure paths using bits and pieces from the existing WotC adventure paths?

 

[Sacrosanct]

Yes. I didn't like how SKT started, so after the attack on the town, the party tracked the goblins back to their lair, which was B5 Horror on the Hill.

A few years ago I started ToEE, and tied it into White Plume Mountain right after it.

 

[Viking Bastard]

That was my last campaign (and probably will be the same for my next): Started with Steading of the Hill Giant Chief before going straight into The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl. Then the PCs trekked their way through the underdark, going through two old Dungeon Magazine adventures, a One Page Dungeon and parts of the Fire Giant bits in Storm King's Thunder, before running through Hall of the Fire Giant King. Then there was the Doomvault from Dead in Thay, a Dungeon Magazine adventure in a city (that stalled hard), back to the Doomvault, back to Glacial Rift, before ending with Tomb of Horrors.

Various bits got variously remixed, cut, pasted, as plots called for. The group saved the continent but destroyed the world.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Yep, I'm doing that right now. Mashing together Lost Mine of Phandelver (they have now completed all the content there), Dragon of Icespire Peak, and Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle.

One of the players has a backstory tied to Thay and the Red Wizards, so I'm building towards implementing Dead in Thay as well (and that's why I added Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle, a prelude to that).

 

[THEMNGMNT]

I mean, that's ALL I do.

I'm currently running a campaign where the PCs just reached 16th level. It's by far the longest campaign I've ever run.

It started with Phandalin from Lost Mine of Phandelver, adjacent to Khundrukar from Forge of Fury, with a bunch of random maps from Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, and Sons of Gruumsh thrown into the mix. Then it progressed to Storm King's Thunder with Waterdeep as a major location. For Waterdeep, I pulled heavily from Dragon Heist.

And that's just scratching the surface...

 

[Eltab]

I need to find the 2e supplement on Vikings, or something else on that vein. What motivated Vikings and what did they consider heroic and worthy of emulation?
The basic plot I had in mind was removing two powers / threats that were keeping the Viking clans bottled up in the fjords and coastal waters.

Thank you for the hat tip; it is good to know I inspired somebody else to a burst of creativity.

P.S. It is also possible to combine the metaplots of Storm King's Thunder with Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat to get a sort of "World War Two" or (if things go badly) get Twilight 2000: The Sword Coast Front.

 

[Parmandur]

I mean, that's ALL I do.

I'm currently running a campaign where the PCs just reached 16th level. It's by far the longest campaign I've ever run.

It started with Phandalin from Lost Mine of Phandelver, adjacent to Khundrukar from Forge of Fury, with a bunch of random maps from Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, and Sons of Gruumsh thrown into the mix. Then it progressed to Storm King's Thunder with Waterdeep as a major location. For Waterdeep, I pulled heavily from Dragon Heist.

And that's just scratching the surface...

I can totally relate to people being tired of the Sword Coast focus...but the 5E books on my shelf now encompass one heck of a huge sandbox in potentia.

 

[MNblockhead]

I can totally relate to people being tired of the Sword Coast focus...but the 5E books on my shelf now encompass one heck of a huge sandbox in potentia.

I wonder...if for 5e WotC just created a new default setting and focusing on one small part of the world, only vaguely alluding to the larger world, would people be as upset? The problem with using Forgotten Realms as the default setting is that long-time fans want the entire corpus of Realm's gaming material updated to 5e in official WotC hard backs or boxed sets.

But rather than wishing for adventures outside of the Sword Coast or a setting hard back, if I were a FR fan, I'd be awfully jealous of what Frog God Games is giving fans of The Lost Lands settings.

The entire source book, a beautiful hard cover that details two huge continents, is available for subscription on World Anvil. In additional to the entire setting content, they also map all of their published adventures to the world map so you can go to an area on the map and find what adventures have been published for that area. Some cities and adventure areas have HUGE setting books: Bard's Gate, the Blight, The Borderland Provinces, Rappan Athuk, Northlands Saga, Razor Coast.... Decades of adventure material for 5e, Pathfinder, and Swords of Wizardry. Most of the adventure materials still needs to be purchased in print or PDF, but every month they are converting adventures to World Anvil.

I don't know why WotC won't do this? They already have all their published adventures on multiple VTT systems and in D&D Beyond. I would think that D&D Beyond could develope a Wiki system...or, heck, why not just license content to World Anvil to resell. Have someone update all of the old Realm's material and update it with 5e material and make an online setting guide.

 

[Parmandur]

I wonder...if for 5e WotC just created a new default setting and focusing on one small part of the world, only vaguely alluding to the larger world, would people be as upset? The problem with using Forgotten Realms as the default setting is that long-time fans want the entire corpus of Realm's gaming material updated to 5e in official WotC hard backs or boxed sets.

But rather than wishing for adventures outside of the Sword Coast or a setting hard back, if I were a FR fan, I'd be awfully jealous of what Frog God Games is giving fans of The Lost Lands settings.

The entire source book, a beautiful hard cover that details two huge continents, is available for subscription on World Anvil. In additional to the entire setting content, they also map all of their published adventures to the world map so you can go to an area on the map and find what adventures have been published for that area. Some cities and adventure areas have HUGE setting books: Bard's Gate, the Blight, The Borderland Provinces, Rappan Athuk, Northlands Saga, Razor Coast.... Decades of adventure material for 5e, Pathfinder, and Swords of Wizardry. Most of the adventure materials still needs to be purchased in print or PDF, but every month they are converting adventures to World Anvil.

I don't know why WotC won't do this? They already have all their published adventures on multiple VTT systems and in D&D Beyond. I would think that D&D Beyond could develope a Wiki system...or, heck, why not just license content to World Anvil to resell. Have someone update all of the old Realm's material and update it with 5e material and make an online setting guide.

They already have tons of FR material on the DMsGuild, most of it quite useable for 5E.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I wonder...if for 5e WotC just created a new default setting and focusing on one small part of the world, only vaguely alluding to the larger world, would people be as upset?

That was the 4e model with Nentir Vale.
I would say it worked out ok; but I bet almost as many people were playing in Forgotten Realms once those sourcebooks came out.