Best old-school dungeon crawl for 5e?

77IM said:

What? Am I remembering something wrong? I've visited the Caves of Chaos a few times, and the impression that I got was that if you simply kicked the door down, you would aggro the entire place (well, one humanoid tribe, at least) and get cut to ribbons.

Remember, "Bree-yark" is goblin for "TPK."

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No, I think the monsters by and large did not play well with one another, but one of them (won’t spoil it) was trying to get them to work together. By and large, it was pretty much a monster apartment building where you could go from door to door with impunity, as originally written.

That's pretty much why I always felt Caves of Chaos was a bad adventure, even in 1981 when I was 12. It didn't make sense that you could clear out one area without alerting the entire complex, and if you did alert the whole complex it was too difficult for the stated level range.

Elfcrusher said:

I was leaning toward Forge of Fury from Yawning Portal.

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I ran this as a one shot ( it was actually a 10 hour marathon...) for a group of 7, and it was a blast, a lot going on, a good blend of RP opportunity mixed with Hack & Slash, which went over well for the group since it was a F2F reunion of sorts and we had several different play-styles representing.


EDIT NOTE: regarding novice players: Most of the group had not played 5e at the time, I created about a dozen 3rd level characters beforehand, and threw them on the table 30 minutes before starting. The 3 PF players really got into the background and RP, where the OD&D/1E guys were all about the min-maxing and figuring out how to team up and kick doors down. It was fun to play with their expectations, knowing that it wouldn't play out the way they were used to those strategies working.