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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9854835" data-attributes="member: 6779196">This article is very interesting. I had always suspected that 5e’s big-honking-adventure books were backdoor setting guides. Tyranny of Dragons and Princes of the Apocalypse don’t really fit the pattern, but they were the first two such adventure books for 5e. Starting with Out of the Abyss, which was pretty transparently built like “everything you need to know to run adventures in the Underdark” with the plot mostly being an excuse to tour the PCs around the major Underdark cities. Curse of Strahd was the Ravenloft (though limited to Barovia) source book; Tomb of Annihilation was the Chult sourcebook; Dragon Heist and Mad Mage were Waterdeep sourcebooks; Descent into Avernus was both a Baldur’s Gate and Nine Hells sourcebook… Storm King’s Thunder and Witchlight don’t fit the mold quite as cleanly, but the intent is clearly there with a lot of them.This also explains why those campaign books all feel like they have paper thin plots to me. As Chris says here, they focused on the locations first and then came up with reasons for the players to need to go there after. That results in them all being “and then” stories, instead of “but/therefore” stories. The motivations feel weak because they’re just excuses to get the party to the next location the designers had already decided they were going to go. Needless to say, I do not share Polygon’s apparent adoration for this approach to adventure design. Seeing that they have taken a different approach with Adventures in the Forgotten Realms gives me hope that maybe they’ve moved on from this experiment and will try writing future adventures with the primary goal of being good adventures instead of that being secondary to the goal of being secret setting guides.</blockquote>

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