D&D 4E Best 4e Adventure to Adapt?

[Mistwell]

I am looking to adapt a 4e adventure to my 5e campaign (doesn't matter what level or setting).

I know there were some great adventures in 4e, particularly near the end of the run. I was curious to hear opinions, from both players and DMs, on which they found to be the best of these adventures.

In particular I have consistently heard four adventures named (though I am definitely open to any others, from Dungeon magazine, a third party, a fan creation, WOTC, anywhere). These four I have heard the most about are: Madness at Gardmore Abbey, Vor Rukoth, Gloomwrought, and Hammerfast.

My tastes tend to run more towards sandbox, but that's not a requirement.

So any thoughts? What were the best adventures of the 4e era, in your opinion? If you are familiar with 5e, then which adventure would both be good, and adaptable to 5e?

 

[cimbrog]

The Slaying Stone and Reavers of Harkenwold (from the Dungeon Master's box) are booth good and kinda sandboxy. The latter is the better of the two. Thunderspire Labyrinth is a good location to adventure in even if the connecting adventure is kind lame.

Finally, while the actual adventures are pretty hit or miss and tend to just be single locations, the Chaos Scar can make for a big sandbox if you run it right. I've toyed around with it myself here recently in my blog (not that Blogspot is working at the moment to show you...)

 

[D'karr]

I've gotten into the habit of doing thematic conversions of adventures rather than straight through mechanical conversions because I hardly ever use an adventure as written. With that in mind here are my recommendations.

Vor Rukoth, Gloomwrought, and Hammerfast are more adventure locations with some detailed hooks, locations/locales and NPC/monsters for the DM to run adventures. Most people would not call those adventures, in the typical sense. However, the despair deck is something really cool from Gloomwrought to emulate the environment of the Shadowfell. I would find a way to use that in almost any game.

Madness at Gardmore Abbey, and the Slaying Stone are pretty cool. The storyline behind Keep on the Shadowfell was rather good, though the execution of that adventure in 4e was horrendous. I also liked King of the Trollhaunt Warrens though I ended up reworking a lot of that adventure.

From Dungeon magazine I would recommend Last Breaths of Ashenport, and Heathen as they have rather cool premises.

For thematic conversions all adventures in 4e had rather good premises, though in many of them the execution left a lot to be desired.

For example Thunderspire Labyrinth has a great premise, but the adventure as written totally sucks, IMO.

I truly disliked the "Mario Brothers" syndrome in most of the early adventures. The princess was never in that castle, making the adventures feel forced and possibly "incomplete".

Reavers of Harkenwold is good and can serve as a great start to have adventures all along the entire Nentir Vale. I also thought that the adventure in the Red Box Starter Set was a good introduction with lots of roleplaying potential. Unfortunately I don't recall its name. Cairn of the Winter King also had lots of potential.

 

[MoutonRustique]

Reavers of Harkenwold is excellent as is - but it really shines as a starting point for a larger political/military campaign of empire building/resisting.

It combines very well with the Neverwinter book (with some massive, but very easy and quick refluff) : Neverwinter becomes "the destroyed Empire's capitol" and you can get excellent player driven options (accept and help the "invading" forces, defend the location and keep "status quo", find a worthy ruler/system of government, BECOME the "worthy" rulers, etc, etc.)

As others have said, (and it's not very helpful to you...) most 4e adventures' synopsis' were excellent and sounded really awesome and then... well... you got a list of disjointed encounters, plot information sometimes in the "main section" sometimes key points were hidden in the encounter descriptions themselves. Little help as to make it "flow".

I'll also second the idea that many of the Chaos Scar adventures were pretty fun and can fit together rather well!

I'll try and sweep through those I found more fun and chime back in latter. (Here's hoping my second-spanning attention span can strain long enough for me to remember to do this...)

 

[Wrathamon]

I think all the Essentials adventures are all really good. Reavers of Harkenwold, cairn of the winter king, etc.

The Last Breath of Ashenport , Tears of Ioun trilogy

Demon Queen's Enclave was very good imo (the ending could be modified a bit) bit of an underdark sandboxish faction city adventure, and one of the D&D Encounters adventures (cant remember name) near the end where each chapter you played a different level and months past between the periods was very different and cool.

 

[The_Gneech]

Actually, the 4E Tomb of Horrors has a lot of neat stuff in it that I'd like to rescue for a future game of my own...

-TG

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I don't have anything to add as I didn't play or run 4E. However, I find it hilarious that, without even spotting your thread, I started an identical one for good 3.XE/Pathfinder adventures to convert to 5E just 14 hours later!

Great minds think alike I guess.

 

[pemerton]

I think Heathen (which is available in one of the free Dungeon magazines from early in the 4e run - number 155) has an interesting premise and plays quite nicely if you (i) ignore some of the filler on the way from the framing to the crunch, and (ii) are liberal with players/PCs who try to redeem the main antagonist (in my game I followed the lead of Cairn of the Winter King in having successful skill checks deal psychic hit point loss as the PCs "talked him down" - and at the end allowed a use of a paladin interrupt to prevent the suicide that the NPC attempted.)

I had fun with Thunderspire Labyrinth but ignored its framing and the larger setting and just used the various dungeons as mini-settings. I also think that both the Chamber of Eyes and the Well of Demons can benefit significantly from some minor modifications.

Demon Queen's Enclave is a fun setting. Again I ignored quite a bit of filler/cruft, and just focused on the key elements - the opening spider encounter, the mindflayers and then the drow (some befriended, some fought) and the rift to the Abyss - and then skipped the other-planar stuff and had the portal go straight to the villain's lair.

 

[MoutonRustique]

I cannot believe I actually forgot this!

Zeitgeist (while incomplete) is most excellent. And WotBS is also quite good (and complete!)

 

[Wrathamon]

Demon Queen's Enclave is a fun setting. Again I ignored quite a bit of filler/cruft, and just focused on the key elements - the opening spider encounter, the mindflayers and then the drow (some befriended, some fought) and the rift to the Abyss - and then skipped the other-planar stuff and had the portal go straight to the villain's lair.

I think the shadowfell/abyss stuff is excellent, but doesnt fit the adventure. I had a lot of fun with that city and freeing of the chained guy. I think its a great setpiece for something, but it didnt feel connected with the adventure itself. But, very fun stuff and a great setting. My players pretty much roleplayed their way through most of it and it was a lot of fun. Worth looking at as a stand alone piece to something else.


I would be curious to know how 4e encounters translate to 5e. I think older edition conversions are probably much easier. 3e might have a balance issue with the higher level adventures probably needing to be toned down a lot but otherwise I think that is all. 4e I would think that the DM would need to look at the monsters being used and make sure to add in any special abilities they might have that 5e left out if those are needed to flavor the encounter. Some encounters took into account synergy with the monsters or monsters having certain abilities. Also, environment stuff should be easy to translate over.