D&D 5E (2014) Best 5E Adventure?

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Mephista]

I vote for the political intrigue D&D adventure they released back in Summer of 2017. Man, that one was a blast! Loved the evil half-elf queen. Who would have thought a Lore Bard could be so vicious? ​Oh, wait, its right there in the cantrip, nevermind.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I own all of the official adventures, and some unofficial, but I've only run Lost Mine. It was great though.



I like to run a variety of RPGs, and have only a few hours a week to play, so the storyline adventures are a daunting time investment for me.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Agreed. I will say that Out of the Abyss is the first of the big adventure books that I’ve said “I have to run this!” And now I am doing so.

That being said, I totally dig Lost Mines of Phandelver as a great introductory module. I didn’t get to use it, but the way it integrates learning the new rules with the module is quite well done. The adventure also has plenty of hooks to entice new DMs to start creating their own adventures.

I wouldn't like to rate OoTA or the Tiamat adventures without running them. I long ago learned the lesson that adventures often play completely differently than they read. Having said that, I just joined a HotDQ campaign, and will soon be launching an OoTA campaign, so should have a better idea soon.

 

[Louis Brenton]

I have run Lost Mine. I've also run HotDQ & I'm in the midst of running RoT. I'm part way through reading PotA to prep for my next campaign now, but I like it a lot & I'm confident that I'll enjoy running it. I own Out of the Abyss, but I've barely read it, so I'm not going to offer any comment on it.

My current rankings would be:

Lost Mine of Phandelver
Princes of the Apocalypse
Hoard of the Dragon Queen
Rise of Tiamat

No vote on OotA until I've at least read it.

Like others on this post, I think Phandelver is special, & arguably the best introductory adventure that's been done.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I don't really think that ranking the 5th edition adventures against each other is productive.

Rating them entirely independently of each other (i.e. asking if Lost Mine of Phandelver is awful, excellent, or somewhere between, rather than if Lost Mine of Phandelver is better or worse than Hoard of the Dragon Queen or any of the others), or providing each a rating compared against other adventures with similar themes and styles, if not also level ranges, would be more productive... though still not largely productive.

That said, I have little bit of "rating" to share: For being written before final word could possibly be delivered on important details like what is or is not an appropriate random encounter, or exactly how to properly set up milestones for gaining levels, Hoard of the Dragon Queen is actually a mighty fine adventure.

It certainly takes less effort to make play well than the modules I've run that are often claimed as among the "best", certain disorderly caverns and color-coded cult hideout for example.

 

[Wrathamon]

Shouldn't it be QoD instead of Quests of Doom?

couldnt resist

 

[Grakarg]

I'd like to know what other 'non-official' adventures there are out there that are actually worth getting.
It sounds like QoD might be worth picking up, what else is worth it?

 

[Jester David]

Only run part of LMoP and read the rest.

I love OotA. I like the sandbox nature and stronger story, the change in tone from fleeing survivors to conquering heroes returning. And just the fun of the myriad little characters and scenes.
After that things get screwy.

HotDQ and RoT are a hot mess, but mostly from a rules perspective. They could easily be fixed and made awesome. And the adventure is more varied instead of endless dungeons, but it requires a lot more work to flesh out into a functional adventure. It's a good framework.

PotA is next, but not by much. There's just no story. It's endless dungeons. There's the player's story, and they have a tale, but there's nothing else going on. And the dungeons themselves are just room after room filled with monsters. There's just an illusion of a story crafted by planned reactions. There's literally no reason the Elemental Evil cultists don't stop attracting attention and hunker down in their caves and summon the elemental princes right away. Not even the pretense of a justification for why they're waving a big red flag while shouting "over here adventurers! We're up to eeeeevil!"

Then there's LMoP, which is also just a series of interconnected dungeons lacking any interesting terrain or features. And despite having a lot of overland potential, there's no travel or natural hazards. The NPCs are flat and exist only for the adventure. There are lost of gaps, such as missing location maps and NPCs. LMoP just feels uninspired and generic. At least PotA has the Temple of Elemental Evil homage and sandbox game justifications for being more than a series of dungeon chambers.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

The most important thing for me is that you can play an adventure without any DM preparation. Like, the players just say where they want to go and then I can just read the section for that exact area and know what to do. I want to explore the dungeons as the players go too, because I love exploration, if I read ahead it's only exciting for the players and not for me.

Only LMoP could really offer this for me.

Certainly the other campaigns might have more interesting locations, but they are all a mess to play spontaneously. I don't even know on which page to start / what to read first!