D&D Beyond Releases Free Forgotten Realms Adventure

D&D Beyond has a new Forgotten Realms-focused adventure that focuses on battling the forces of Orcus. Today, D&D Beyond released The Tenebrous Stone, a new adventure that will appear in the upcoming Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun book. The adventure is a Level 3 "Deity Adventure" set in Helmsdale and sends players into a basalt quarry to track down an evil artifact. Players will battle several undead creatures before a final encounter at the hidden location of the artifact.

The adventure is one of many in the book and is similarly structured as the quick adventures found in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. There's a map, three encounters, and a brief overview of the adventure, but otherwise The Tenebrous Stone is relatively light. D&D Beyond has also loaded up the adventure on its Maps VTT, complete with both maps and monsters pre-loaded for the DM.

Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun will be released on November 11th.

 

[Parmandur]

This is a slightly upgraded Orc and Pie. "Adventure" implies a lot of content that isn't there.

For what it is, it's fine. Pretty cool map, and a unique little vision encounter. There isn't a lot of room for thematic resonance or compelling character moments or whatever, but it's not aiming for that. It's a building block. It's a perfectly cromulent building block.

If the adventure book has a bunch of these, that's an interesting choice. Maybe not a super great one -- it's a little monolithic. But I can see where they're going and I don't hate it.

Overall, I like the format, and I'm MUCH more likely to run this than to run a 100-page hardcover adventure, that's for sure.

There are 50 of these, 10 each for each of the 5 Gazateers to bring characters from Level 3 to Level 13...PLUS one more detailed traditional Level 1-3 Adventure that can work for all 5 starting areas. Based on the pages we have seen, they get at least a little more complex for the higher Level modules.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It could be, like I suppose that it once was, short for "Modular Adventure".

I believe the idea was a "module" could be dropped into an ongoing campaign, which was at least how I was playing in the 80s.

 

[Reef]

As much as I love fully fleshed out adventures, with motivated NPCs, stories, etc, a whole lot of interesting single-session encounters like this would be very useful. Like, when I’m trying to think of something to space out important plot points. Or, if I have a quest idea, but need an actual location to host the story mcguffin.