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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9051003" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Basically WotC's full book campaigns are bloated messes with too many moving pieces (and little cross-referencing) that make them way more trouble to run as is than they're really worth, and by time you adapt them to work for you, you've written half a campaign yourself. The one you all already started and lost the inertia with, Lost Mines of Phandelver is probably the strongest 5e campaign they've put out in terms of being a manageable scale, written loosely enough that a DM can easily insert their own material or adapt to whatever the group wants to do (not including all the entires in the multi-adventure compendium books). One official adventure that might be worth considering at some point if your family enjoyed their time looking for Phandelver is the Dragon of Icespire Peak from the Essentials Kit, which is a comparable scale, similarly written with less experienced DMs in mind, and takes place in the exact same region (so you can easily plop in content you never got to when you did Phandelver). Not that I want to sell you another thing... just suggesting a possible way to handle unfinished business at some point.Which leads me to my other point about the campaigns, just because you don't run them, doesn't mean you can't get lots of use out of them. Read over them, find things that appeal to you, and pull locations, encouters, NPCs and other ideas out of them liberally and wholesale. WotC campaigns are messes, but I've yet to encounter one that wasn't full of great ideas for a D&D campaign, it's just that by time the reach a final form they are a random mess assembled by committee and not presented for easy consumption by a DM.I don't know the Dragonlance book personally, but if that one really appeals to you that is something worth keeping in mind, and every complaint I've just made about official campaigns notwithstanding, you can probably also just play that one, liberally adapting the opening couple chapters to accommodate 4th level characters. It really doesn't matter if some encounters are trivial, as long as you pick some key ones to beef up into actual challenges. Several of the WotC books are actually written with the idea that you might skip the beginning to start at third level or so in mind, so it may be you can just start at the second chapter or something.Personally I find "just spitballing encounters" is great for a session or two, but tends to overemphasize the monster killing part of the came over the roleplaying, the storytelling, the creative problem solving, the etc. However playing with no actual plot for a few sessions and not telling the players can be a great opportunity to listen to the metagame discussion, get a sense for what the players think or want the plot to be, and build a plot catered to what actually interests them as gamers. The stories that grow organically out of play are usually the most memorable ones in my experience.</blockquote>

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