D&D 5E Rank the Official 5e Adventures (Updated)

Nikosandros

Golden Procrastinator
My opinion is that it’s a cool concept that fails spectacularly in execution. If you do an Alexandrian Remix level overhaul, you can get a really good campaign out of the ideas presented in it. But it fails completely as a product meant to allow you to run an adventure without having to lay that kind of groundwork.
I fully agree. Taking heavy inspiration from the Alexandrian Remix and adding plenty of my stuff, I'm enjoying it greatly (and apparently so do the players). So, as a campaign framework, I'm loving it, but I would never run it as presented in the book.
 

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TheSword

Legend
I seem to recall the books werent all that great either. Wasnt it the one with the fiend/elemental/god/whatever of mud in the Moonsheas?
Nah, the one with the blue tattoos and the bizarrely different groups. It reads and plays, like it was a badly designed party and the DM was winging it session by session depending on what was in that months dungeon magazine. 😂
 

Tales and Chronicles

Jewel of the North, formerly know as vincegetorix
Nah, the one with the blue tattoos and the bizarrely different groups. It reads and plays, like it was a badly designed party and the DM was winging it session by session depending on what was in that months dungeon magazine. 😂
Oh god, I just reread the synopsis, what a hot mess!

Honestly I think there's something that could be done with the whole ''cursed tattoos brainwashing heroes to kill good NPCs'' as a scenario, in a little sandbox maybe?
 


Ancalagon

Dusty Dragon
The hook suffers from serious one-point failure. The PCs have absolutely no reason to trust this cloud giant who just showed up to a town that was recently ransacked by cloud giants, but if they don’t, the adventure just doesn’t happen. Also, there’s a huge chunk of the adventure that’s literally just “run some other adventures until the PCs are high enough level for the next part” with no other guidance. I’d be willing to bet the parts that seem “a bit lumpy” are the parts that are actually written in the adventure, and the good parts are entirely of your DM’s creation. Not because they’re going off-script but because there isn’t even a script to be on.
I've read that it takes a good GM to run it. I'm currently in it as a player (psi warrior, an old scholar who knows his way with a sword) and I have to agree on the weakness of the hook. The thing that made us accept is that we had all been reunited from all over northern faerun - we had ties to a village destroyed by giants a while back - so we decided that it seemed to be Fate.

Our GM has a bit of a wild style so it makes up for the plot holes :) In fact last session was stellar.
 



Burnside

Space Jam Confirmed
Supporter
My personal experience with running Hoard of the Dragon Queen suggests that no 5E adventure book is irredeemable or unplayable.

Agreed that you can make them all work and have a good time, but I don't think they're all playable as written. I think even the weakest ones have good content. But they require a lot of work from the DM.
 
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