D&D General Adventurers in Faerun-The Book of Low and Mid Level Adventures?

[Paul Farquhar]

Does anyone have info on the Golden Vault anthology off hand? Where does that stop? And am I missing an Anthology (besides Yawning Portal)?

11: Fire and Darkness.

Missing: Infinite Staircase, which goes up to 11 (Barrier Peaks).

 

[Parmandur]

The only truly high level books have been Dungeon of the Mad Mage (which is workable as a catalog of a bunch of high level dungeons, just cut out each Level and run it as an independent dungeon), and Vecna.

 

[BenjaminPey]

Turn of Fortune's Wheel goes up to 17th (with a twist).

 

[DragonLancer]

Just had a look and Dragon Delves caps at 12th.

 

[Zardnaar]

Ok, but when you reach back 3 editions and a company ago, it undermines the argument that this thing is still true.

And if it is, I think they should just excise that material from the core books. Compress 1-12ish down to 1-10 (because everyone likes round numbers) and let the community and 3PP support the high end. or plan to do it as a cool supplement. But if you honestly don't expect players to ever get there, that is a huge amount of wasted material and space that could either reduce costs or make room for more useful information for things like the social and exploration pillars.

I think its inter edition though.

Like how ever edition rewards death as best debuff and focus fire.
. WotC doesn't make that material generally. Paizos stopped doing it.

Must be a reason right? What do you think is the obvious answer?

 

[Zardnaar]

Candlekeep mysteries has "Xanthoria" and adventure for 16th level characters.

The adventures might say that but theyre also really easy.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Also, put me down as another who starts planning the end of their campaign when the characters hit 9th, usually petering out by 12th max.

The only time I've ever played 5e above Level 11 was here on ENWorld, when we ran a Level 20 playtest to see if we could beat the Vecna statblock as-written. (IIRC, we lost, tried again, and stomped on him, having figured out what we did wrong). I was surprised that I didn't hate it, but it wasn't enough to make me want to play higher IRL.

 

[Mort]

The adventures might say that but theyre also really easy.

Depends on the group.

I haven't run the Candlekeep one.

But I did run Turn of the Fortune's Wheel (through 17th, but, yes, not exactly) and found the encounters way to easy so I had to beef them up quite a bit. That said the adventure was decent and increasing the difficulty while keeping the spirit if the adventure, worked out well.

 

[Zardnaar]

Depends on the group.

I haven't run the Candlekeep one.

But I did run Turn of the Fortune's Wheel (through 17th, but, yes, not exactly) and found the encounters way to easy so I had to beef them up quite a bit. That said the adventure was decent and increasing the difficulty while keeping the spirit if the adventure, worked out well.

The adventures are often run yeah. I just tend to delete a level or 3 off the suggested range.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

What we kind of need are instructions for how to run high level adventures. It's the kind of thing that would be great right in a DMG. Rather than a paragraph, hav 5-8 pages explaining how all the variables need to be changed.

You don't just suddenly run into tougher and tougher monsters on the road between towns, or inexplicably have the levels of the same sorts of villains scale with the PCs. No, you think in terms of where these high level challenges make sense. That's typically out on the Planes. I mean, there are some real high level challenges out there that make perfect sense. There are entire hierarchies and military setups of fiends. A random patrol of Baatezu may not be a climatic battle for 18th level characters, but it can definitely be a close equivalent of low level bandit encounters designed to whittle away some HP.

One of the absolute best, lore appropriate challenges that very believably scales up with virtually no cap is to launch some sort of mission against a fiendish army. Stealth infiltration for an easy one, right up to, "See that meeting of balors way over there? Yeah the one watched over by the molydeus and surrounded by a bunch of marilith and goristro attendants and such. No, your not looking for enough; look way over there past the thousands of demons of various ranks they command. Yeah, we're pretty sure their mages have set up a bunch of protections and surveillance, and our intel says the Demon Prince they are meeting with might already be in the tent. We figure stealth is probably the going to be right out given all that. You may want to open with a meteor swarm to clear out some of the rabble in carefully selected areas, because there's no way you'll be able to get all the ones you need to get past in the spell areas, and some of them won't go down to it anyway. But nevermind me, you guys know what you're doing, that's why we hired you! Just remember that after you eliminate everything in and around that tent, you're going to half to get quick, because the remaining 20,000 or so fiends on that field will be after you, and a good number of them will be able to divine where you went and teleport after you. But we really need to completely eliminate that gathering. That's why you get paid the big bucks!"

And while that encounter might be a high level campaign climax, it's just one battlefield in the Blood War! The planes are infinite, so the DM can reasonably have infinite dragons and stuff that stretches credulity in a regular setting.

And that's just for combat encounters--you can do really fun non-combat stuff out there also. And this goes way back to 1e. If you don't retire or shift to realm rulership, you start adventuring mostly on the Planes where everything is already scaled up for you.

But it would be great to have a lot of explicit how-to info, probably including guiding DMs through setting up some high-level one shots to get a taste for it rather than expecting you can't do it until you've played with a group from level 1.