D&D 5E I can’t seem to DM written adventures.

[dave2008]

There's a bunch, but check out Hot Springs Island, Neverland, or even smaller adventures like Winter's Daughter. If you watch the Questing Beast YouTube channel, he does reviews of a ton of adventures and you can see which ones you prefer.

I've put Winter's Daughter into my chart, but I couldn't find the other two. Is "Hot Springs Island" the same as "The Dark of Hot Spings Island?" I ask not just because of the name difference, but because the latter is specifically system neutral not OSR.

 

[iserith]

Neverland is actually a 5e product, written in the OSR style and there is a 5e version of Winter's Daughter, converted by Gavin himself.

I don't recommend buying D&D 5e versions of OSR products as I mention above.

 

[Arilyn]

I don't recommend buying D&D 5e versions of OSR products as I mention above.

Yes, this can be a problem but I found Winter's Daughter a good conversion. But certainly, convert yourself if there is concern. Neverland is 5e.

 

[overgeeked]

I've put Winter's Daughter into my chart, but I couldn't find the other two. Is "Hot Springs Island" the same as "The Dark of Hot Spings Island?" I ask not just because of the name difference, but because the latter is specifically system neutral not OSR.

It’s “Dark of Hot Springs Island”. It’s a system neutral adventure that’s written in the OSR style.

 

[robus]

I’m in the same boat. I’ve come to learn it’s harder to run a published adventure than run one of my own devising. Improvisation is a lot easier when you’re holding the adventure in your head rather than from a page (though notes certainly help!) The last published adventure I ran (Stormwreck) I completely redid the plot to make it my own and then had fun with it, because I no longer cared what WotC thought the NPCs were doing.

The sad part to me is how dull most of the published adventures are when you strip away the clunky plot. Rarely do we get to visit a fantastic location. The most memorable, for my group at least, was the Storm King‘s Thunder undersea lair. They loved that. But otherwise it was quite humdrum.

But anyway, that’s my advice. If you get a published adventure, try to see if it inspires a situation that you feel excited about running and then work from there, rather than bother trying to make sense of WotCs nonsensical efforts.

 

[overgeeked]

Another good system neutral OSR-style module to check out is Tomb of the Serpent Kings. It’s free as a PDF on DriveThru.

Tomb of the Serpent Kings - Deluxe Print Edition - Skerples | DriveThruRPG.com

Tomb of the Serpent Kings - Deluxe Print Edition - People keep asking for "beginner" dungeons. Everyone can name "classic" dungeons - Tomb of Horrors, Barrier Peaks, The T

www.drivethrurpg.com

The draw of the style is the succinct descriptions, use of bullet points, maps on the same page or spread as the descriptions of the rooms, and other minor quality of life improvements in layout and design. This makes them wildly easier to use than modules with walls of text for everything. Much faster to read, prep, and run.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

You're not alone. I did AL for quite a while, I've tried a couple of published adventures and it just doesn't work for me. I just want to go off script way too often for one thing. Unless you have everything memorized you don't know what you're going to screw up.

I'd rather do my own sandbox campaign. It works better and, frankly, it's a ton less work for me.

The issue with prep is real for me.

Unless you read and remember several things ahead, you will simply mess it up.

When I DM my own, I know what makes sense already and if I miss a note I know what I intended or what makes sense.

For me, running my own stuff means less memorization

 

[rgoodbb]

I will certainly check these out thanks very much!

I have very recently retired so you all may have just given me a new lease of life!

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I can’t DM written adventures.

Not sure why but when I get my hands on an adventure that someone else has written, it turns me off DM’ing. It’s not that I can’t understand the writing (although some could do with an editor’s clean-up), and it’s not that I haven’t bought a lot of material/adventures, but when it’s someone else’s words and style and creative imagination, I just can’t seem to do it. Something doesn’t work for me. So I’m just doing homebrew little one-shots or three-shots before another DM takes the next big adventure on. Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy to play and I just chip in sometimes when a DM needs a break.

Not complaining. It's not a problem. Just curious if I am alone here or does this chime with anyone else?

I kind of bounce off them a bit too, partially it's the way they're designed, and I think the amount of referencing the text I do turns off some of my personal strengths as a GM.

 

[Arilyn]

I will certainly check these out thanks very much!

I have very recently retired so you all may have just given me a new lease of life!

Enjoy your retirement. I'm semi-retired and loving it!

 

[Benjamin Olson]

While it sounds like the OP has a more generalized problem, I find that the WotC full-book release published adventures are particularly cumbersome to run. Basically I think they have more moving bits and pieces than the creative team can keep track of amongst multiple authors and though multiple revisions, and that by the end product you have lots of stuff whose purpose is obtuse, subtle, or missing, which makes trying to rework it even a little without gutting it wholesale an exercise in frustration. Of the ones I've attempted to use Out of the Abyss was the worst offender as it lacked even the introductory chapter summarizing the adventure that some of the other releases have, making for one of the most difficult to follow works of fiction I have ever encountered. But even when there is a proper introduction the adventures are still often written in a way that seems designed to not tell the DM why things are the way they are. This might be fine for a DM rigidly following the book, but most people want to make it their own at least a little.

I really just think larger scale adventures should include marginalia pointing out everything consequential that comes up whenever it comes up, and pointing to when and how it is of potential consequence.

 

[zedturtle]

I always wonder how adventures written by people who don't like pre written adventures would look like...

Probably like Elfshot, or The Three Ogre Brothers, or The Serpent of Glenreddïn (that last is least likely, since it's my most trad adventure for Beowulf: Age of Heroes). I used to hate prewritten adventures and refused to run them the first two decades of gaming after a few bad experiences. What really turned me around was the adventures for The One Ring, especially Darkening of Mirkwood, which is really just a big sandbox (detailed in the companion volume Heart of the Wild) and a year-by-year list of what the NPCs will do (if certain things happen, with notes on other possibilities).

Both Elfshot and 3OB are that way, with smaller sandboxes and an inciting incident that the player(s) walk into and then lets them loose. Serpent is more trad, with a visit to the king to receive the mission, a choice between two NPCs to guide you to the adventure location and then a couple more fairly binary choices in how to proceed from there.

 

[TwoSix]

I can’t DM written adventures.

Not sure why but when I get my hands on an adventure that someone else has written, it turns me off DM’ing. It’s not that I can’t understand the writing (although some could do with an editor’s clean-up), and it’s not that I haven’t bought a lot of material/adventures, but when it’s someone else’s words and style and creative imagination, I just can’t seem to do it. Something doesn’t work for me. So I’m just doing homebrew little one-shots or three-shots before another DM takes the next big adventure on. Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy to play and I just chip in sometimes when a DM needs a break.

Not complaining. It's not a problem. Just curious if I am alone here or does this chime with anyone else?

I'm right there with you. They just don't mesh with my playstyle.

 

[robus]

I will certainly check these out thanks very much!

I have very recently retired so you all may have just given me a new lease of life!

Congrats and happy gaming!

 

[robus]

Of the ones I've attempted to use Out of the Abyss was the worst offender as it lacked even the introductory chapter summarizing the adventure that some of the other releases have, making for one of the most difficult to follow works of fiction I have ever encountered.

My players quickly identified that it’s basically the same story over and over again as they visit a location and, oh dear, once again the leadership has gone crazy and the PCs have to try and sort it out. Add that to the monotony of the environment and, needless to say, we ended up nuking the story line from orbit!

 

[Azzy]

I, too, have difficulty with pre-written adventures, too. I can muddle through (like I did with Lost Mines of Phandelver/Dragon of Icespire Peak), but it's still not my favored flavor of Fanta. Mostly I feel a bit too constrained by them, but on the upside, it usually requires a bit less prep work (and that's a plus these days).

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I, too, have difficulty with pre-written adventures, too. I can muddle through (like I did with Lost Mines of Phandelver/Dragon of Icespire Peak), but it's still not my favored flavor of Fanta. Mostly I feel a bit too constrained by them, but on the upside, it usually requires a bit less prep work (and that's a plus these days).

I think the main thing that keeps me coming back to those adventures at this point is that, when DMing through a virtual tabletop, I can google any location in the module and get a detailed battlemap that someone has made for it. Our heroes want to get in a fight at any random building in Phandalin... someone has made a map for it.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

While it sounds like the OP has a more generalized problem, I find that the WotC full-book release published adventures are particularly cumbersome to run. Basically I think they have more moving bits and pieces than the creative team can keep track of amongst multiple authors and though multiple revisions, and that by the end product you have lots of stuff whose purpose is obtuse, subtle, or missing, which makes trying to rework it even a little without gutting it wholesale an exercise in frustration. Of the ones I've attempted to use Out of the Abyss was the worst offender as it lacked even the introductory chapter summarizing the adventure that some of the other releases have, making for one of the most difficult to follow works of fiction I have ever encountered. But even when there is a proper introduction the adventures are still often written in a way that seems designed to not tell the DM why things are the way they are. This might be fine for a DM rigidly following the book, but most people want to make it their own at least a little.

I really just think larger scale adventures should include marginalia pointing out everything consequential that comes up whenever it comes up, and pointing to when and how it is of potential consequence.

This.

They are too much for me to prep. Modules? Ok. Modules dropped into setting. Multiple interacting modules plopped into a setting?

Too much for me to remember

 

[Azzy]

I think the main thing that keeps me coming back to those adventures at this point is that, when DMing through a virtual tabletop, I can google any location in the module and get a detailed battlemap that someone has made for it. Our heroes want to get in a fight at any random building in Phandalin... someone has made a map for it.

Too true. I have Foundry VTT and one of the modules you can install allows you to import adventures (amongst other things) that you've bought on D&D Beyond. It imports the maps with walls, doors, lighting, and populated encounters all done for you. It's a time-saver and a half.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I can't run them without significant hacking because of the way they structure things. This is partciularly true of plot-based adventures which I find very weird to DM since you have to hide the plot then hope you can still somehow funnel the PCs down it. It's really not for me. I've found that OSR adventures are actually way better than WotC adventures, both in structure and presentation. So I'm more inclined to get those and convert them to D&D 5e than try to hack apart a WotC adventure built for the system. Sometimes OSR adventures have a D&D 5e version, but I find those authors don't really seem to understand the system as well, so it's clunky. I'd rather do it myself.

Otherwise, they sometimes have the odd gem of an idea, which I'm happy to steal and claim as my own.

This is what I do. Steal stuff from adventures for my own homebrew campaigns. I'm not sure I've ever run a complete published adventure for D&D, but I've used pieces of dozens of them for my own games.