D&D 5E D&D 5e Adventure Reviews

[delericho]

With one exception I'm not a huge fan of the 5e adventures, so much so that I stopped buying them after "Storm King's Thunder". So the following ranking only includes the titles I have actually read...

#1: "Lost Mine of Phandelver". This is quite possibly the single best adventure WotC (not TSR) have published for any edition of the game.

#2, a long way behind: "Curse of Strahd". The best of the bunch, but pales in comparison with the original. In particular, "Ravenloft" benefited immensely from its tight focus and brevity; CoS loses both of those benefits.

#3: "Out of the Abyss". The first half of this one is amazing. The second half, by contrast, is poor. And the climax is terrible - the sound and fury would make for a fine Michael Bay film, but in an RPG it's not ideal to have the PCs watching the big battle.

#4: "Storm King's Thunder". A mediocre adventure wrapped around a region guide that is rather good.

#5: "Dragon of Icespire Peak". The weak link in the otherwise outstanding "Essentials Kit", the one redeeming feature of this adventure is that it can easily be merged with "Lost Mine of Phandelver" to expand that mini-campaign.

#6: "Princes of the Apocalypse". I'm sure I had an opinion of this one once, but it's so unremarkable that I forget.

#7: "Hoard of the Dragon Queen". Better than I was led to expect by the early reviews... but that doesn't mean it's good.

#8: "Rise of Tiamat". Conversely, this one was significantly worse than I had expected.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Where did you hear that? It's a solid adventure, even if it has a few flaws. I have run it before, and had a very good experience with it.

Here? And on the 5E subreddit. Like, repeatedly. But that said, it's a squeaky wheel that gets the grease, people who were happy with the adventure would be less likely to write threads about how great it was or to ask for help/suggestions in "fixing" it (but equally I didn't see the same sort of "omg pls help fix" stuff with, say, Strahd).

I assume a sandbox module probably gives more alternatives for paths to reach key plot points. Open exploration areas can be a true sandbox, but mostly I'm looking for suggestions for what happens when players miss certain key discoveries or go off the ideal path.

Yeah, this whole trend towards increasing railroad-y-ness or linearity or whatever one wants to call it is a big part of why I stopped enjoying using modules in my campaigns, and moved to homebrew stuff. I don't really do a sandbox campaign by my own understanding of that term, but I always prefer what I used to call "scenarios" rather than "adventures". I don't think this terminology is widely use anymore (I heard it a bit in the '90s), but what I mean is, with a scenario, you set all the pieces in place, and let the PCs wander into it and interact with it, and probably they do one thing, but you set it up so a whole lot of different things could potentially happen, and few, if any, specific things have to happen (unless they happened before the PCs got there) for the scenario to tell a fun story in which the PCs are involved. Whereas an adventure, to me, tended to mean, A happens, then B needs to happen, then C, then D, and so on, and sometimes you maybe skip C or have a choice E-(i) or E-(ii) but it still fairly linear. A mid-point between the two would the "Bioware"-style of adventure design (now common in many CRPGs), where you have like a number of major, separate things (areas, planets, storylines, whatever) that need to be done before you advance to the next stage of the adventure (which is often more linear). I understand Odyssey of the Dragonlords takes this "Bioware" approach, understandably given it was literally written by three Bioware dudes (now WotC dudes! Yay!).

Anyway, point is, older design tended to go more scenario, even if it was a bit dungeon-y, and in the '90s, it was sort of often scenario-y, as it transitioned into more linear and directed adventures as a matter of being the norm (they always existed a bit, well, since the early '80s at least). And I'm just not personally keen on how linear at lot of the APs I've seen are.

 

[Enrico Poli1]

Interesting that you rank a megadungeon so high yet put the also-dungeon-crawly PotA at the bottom of your list.

By no means have I read all of these, but the reason I bought PotA is that I could use it as one great big chain of adventures (as intended) or split it out into 15 separate little adventures that didn't have to be linked at all. Thus, in a way, if nothing else I got 15 old-school-size modules for the price of maybe three; and I count that as a good deal.

DotMM's dungeons are better-then-average, but for now they are the only ones produced for high level, so I use them a lot.

On the contrary, if I need a low- or mid- level dungeon, I have plenty of choice and the PotA ones are left unused.

 

[Parmandur]

Here? And on the 5E subreddit. Like, repeatedly. But that said, it's a squeaky wheel that gets the grease, people who were happy with the adventure would be less likely to write threads about how great it was or to ask for help/suggestions in "fixing" it (but equally I didn't see the same sort of "omg pls help fix" stuff with, say, Strahd).

I like the Adventure, but most of the criticisms from people who don't that I've seen are valid. People going in expecting to get a piece of furniture get frustrated when they get a Baroque IKEA set with a million parts. But, with some work, it comes together nicely. It's basically ~23 low level modules (some with multiple keys!), with a super loosey-goosey outline to suggest four broad ways they could be connected, but probably won't given player agency. But the modules are legit.

Yeah, this whole trend towards increasing railroad-y-ness or linearity or whatever one wants to call it is a big part of why I stopped enjoying using modules in my campaigns, and moved to homebrew stuff. I don't really do a sandbox campaign by my own understanding of that term, but I always prefer what I used to call "scenarios" rather than "adventures". I don't think this terminology is widely use anymore (I heard it a bit in the '90s), but what I mean is, with a scenario, you set all the pieces in place, and let the PCs wander into it and interact with it, and probably they do one thing, but you set it up so a whole lot of different things could potentially happen, and few, if any, specific things have to happen (unless they happened before the PCs got there) for the scenario to tell a fun story in which the PCs are involved. Whereas an adventure, to me, tended to mean, A happens, then B needs to happen, then C, then D, and so on, and sometimes you maybe skip C or have a choice E-(i) or E-(ii) but it still fairly linear. A mid-point between the two would the "Bioware"-style of adventure design (now common in many CRPGs), where you have like a number of major, separate things (areas, planets, storylines, whatever) that need to be done before you advance to the next stage of the adventure (which is often more linear). I understand Odyssey of the Dragonlords takes this "Bioware" approach, understandably given it was literally written by three Bioware dudes (now WotC dudes! Yay!).

Anyway, point is, older design tended to go more scenario, even if it was a bit dungeon-y, and in the '90s, it was sort of often scenario-y, as it transitioned into more linear and directed adventures as a matter of being the norm (they always existed a bit, well, since the early '80s at least). And I'm just not personally keen on how linear at lot of the APs I've seen are.

Curious to know how you understand "sandbox," since your "scenario" definition is how I would understand sandbox. Dragon Heist is very strongly that style of story...a series of scenarios that set a scene for players to interact with...

 

[Burnside]

In case it's of interest, we last had this thread in December, so more opinions/reviews available here: 5E - Rank the Official 5e Adventures

 

[Retreater]

In case it's of interest, we last had this thread in December, so more opinions/reviews available here: 5E - Rank the Official 5e Adventures

I was just going to link this thread.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

In case it's of interest, we last had this thread in December, so more opinions/reviews available here: 5E - Rank the Official 5e Adventures

Thanks for the link. I'd been searching for a thread like that, and couldn't find it.

 

[Guest 6801328]

1. Out of the Abyss: Demon Lords.

The fact that all the Demon Lords are severely gimped so that you can defeat them at low (relatively speaking) levels vastly diminished that aspect, imo.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

The fact that all the Demon Lords are severely gimped so that you can defeat them at low (relatively speaking) levels vastly diminished that aspect, imo.

They're also contained in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, and 2 of them in Descent into Avernus.

 

[Mistwell]

Tales from the Yawning Portal has been the most enjoyable of all of them, with Curse of Strahd just behind it.

Yes, it's dungeon adventures. The BEST dungeon adventures ever published. If you don't like dungeons that's fine. But dinging them for "not having enough story" when the point is to be the dungeons and dragons part of Dungeons and Dragons seems odd to me. That's like dinging Baseball for not being Basketball.