D&D 5E Which was the most recent Wizards adventure you consider a classic?

[Olaf the Stout]

We just beat Acererak (we think - he was nearly down and teleported away). It was an incredibly epic! Almost every one of our resources were exhausted (all spellcasters had almost no spell slots left, which has never happened before). We had to first fight the Hags, who were incredibly tough with their ability to disappear to another plane when they wanted to. [edit- forgot we fought the soul monger and it's deadly tentacles too]. Then we fought the Atropal, who hit us with multiple levels of exhaustion. Then we fought Acererak. All three battles in a row with zero rest. That was not the plan, we had planned to rest, but it didn't work out that way.

Our DM swapped out all of Acererak's spells and some abilities, and played him like a very high intelligence caster (as he is). He nearly destroyed us all, even with 50 temporary hit points renewing every round. He cast fireball as a legendary action after PC turns (up to three a round, not including his own turn), and dispel magic, and counterspell as a reaction. He moved around to make sure he'd be out of line of sight of casters, or forced them to come right to the edge of the lava pit and risk being pulled or pushed in by a spell. He teleported, managing to split our party for a round (He stepped through the transport curtain in the lava room, then teleported back to the hag room and hit us from behind as half our team charged through the curtain after him).

Really epic battle. I think we had been in initiative for 14 or 15 rounds by the end.

Nice work. Our party defeated Acererak, but we found the final battle a bit underwhelming. The 50hp regen and the powers you got from your chosen god made it feel a bit too video-gamey to me.

It was like the designers wanted the final battle to be more epic than could be achieved with characters of that level, so they added these power ups in to try and even the field. But I just felt like our PCs were just playthings in a proxy battle.

Plus you don’t truly defeat Acererak in the end anyway, so even the victory feels a bit hollow.

 

[jdrakeh]

The one I had the most fun with was Storm King's Thunder. There's a lot to do with it and I like the open, hexcrawl, nature of the thing.

 

[Nightfly]

I thought the hexcrawl part of Tomb of Annihilation was hit-or-miss. Some really fun encounters, some pretty blah ones. But the dungeon at the end was absolutely exquisite. It brought back vivid memories of going through Tomb of Horrors as a kid, but also had some clever modern touches. Fusing Acererak's lore with the pseudo-African trickster gods seems like it shouldn't work, but it's brilliant.

So I'll call that a classic even if the first part is uneven.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I thought the hexcrawl part of Tomb of Annihilation was hit-or-miss. Some really fun encounters, some pretty blah ones. But the dungeon at the end was absolutely exquisite. It brought back vivid memories of going through Tomb of Horrors as a kid, but also had some clever modern touches. Fusing Acererak's lore with the pseudo-African trickster gods seems like it shouldn't work, but it's brilliant.

So I'll call that a classic even if the first part is uneven.

Interestingly, I think our group loved the hex crawl, but I know our DM put a lot of work adding extra stuff to it (both with additional DM’s Guild material and his own), so I’m not sure if we loved it because of all the extra stuff added into it.

The final dungeon was fun too (although I found the level where the beholder could shoot from his eye stalks that were all over the level a bit unbalanced). It was just the final battle with Acererak that I didn’t enjoy as much.

 

[Zardnaar]

Idk if ToA is a classic as such but it's the second best larger hardcover adventure.

 

[Burnside]

An official 5E adventure I've yet to see mentioned (possibly because it was digital only) is the Lost Laboratory of Kwalish. It was the Extra Life adventure Wizards released in 2018. I used it in the middle of a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign when the party headed inland for reasons, and it was one of the best 'chapters' of that entire campaign.

LLoK had two really evocative locations with strange and deadly NPC's to interact with and fight. The Grand Master and the clockwork kraken are still talked about with a significant amount of fear/frustration/respect by my players. The entire adventure was pretty free form and contained TONS of advice on different ways encounters could shake out.

It also contained one of my favorite magic items of all times: The Deck of Several Things.

I agree this is very good - Infernal Machine Rebuild is a kind of prequel to it, and is also quite good.

 

[jgsugden]

I think the best way to figure this out is a survey - List the 5E adventure paths and then ask two questions: Did you play it, and if so what score between 1 and 10 would you give it with a 5 being ok and a 10 being the single one and only best adventure path you know.

 

[Retros_x]

Tomb of Annihilation is an adventure I've played for the past four years, and we're at the climax just now. I would say it's 100% a classic. Wonderful adventure all the way through.

Funny, I am in a similar situation - currently in the last level of the final dungeon after 3 years of playing - but I am way less fond of the campaign. The hexcrawl was fun in the beginning but we basically stumpled upon the right track to Omu and in general there was not a lot to discover. Omu was my personal highlight, exploring the town was real fun. The dungeon is a great funhouse dungeon but it drags and I just realized that a funhouse dungeon is not a good fit as a finale for a long campaign. For years we built our characters and backstories only for them do die like flies due to deadly traps that are often not telegraphed really well. Only two out of six are the OG crew that arrived at the dungeon and we basically just want be done with it.

Might also be a DM problem, I don't think he changed a lot of stuff, maybe he should've individualized it a bit more, I don't know. I like the "zoom in" structure of the campaign, but I think the execution is weak.

My personal classic is Storm Kings Thunder. I was not a player here, but a DM. Had to adjust a lot in chapter 3, but honestly I think it was worth the effort. My players still talk about this campaign years later, felt epic and mystic and exciting.

 

[Mistwell]

Completed Tomb of Annihilation last night. January 14th, 2021 to April 16th, 2025. Epic!

 

[evilbob]

I am particularly fond of Curse of Strahd, and have commented on this a lot over the years. It's still probably my favorite adventure, and I've run it 3 times: once as a 3.5 game, once as a reskinned Vampire the Masquerade game, and once as a 5.0 game. I think it got better each time. Eventually as I got older, the thinly-veiled domestic abuse allegory of a controlling, arrogant tyrant subjugating a woman to eternal torment based on his own envy wore a little thin, what with real life and all.

Witchlight was also a delight. It's also more of a mindset than a campaign.

To be fair: I have consistently modded games - sometimes a little, sometimes a lot - so YMMV on everything. But these two probably had the least amount of heavy lifting that was required, even if I did some anyway.