D&D 5E Tales from the Yawning Portal as a campaign

[Mercurius]

Has anyone run all of the adventures in Tales as a single campaign? If so, how did you do it? Did you do it as completely separate adventures or did you create some kind of meta-plot?

The reason I ask is that my old 4E-era group is clamoring for me to return to the DM saddle after half a decade, and I'm looking for something I can plop into my own homebrew world. Ideally it would be pre-published adventures that I can customize to my world and weave my own sub- and meta-plot elements into the mix. Tales seems like it might do the trick, but I'm curious how others have run it.

 

[iserith]

I've not run it as a continuous campaign, but I've run a few of the adventures - Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury, Dead in Thay, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and I've played in White Plume Mountain.

Something to look out for is that the quality of these adventures vary widely in my view. You will likely need to do a lot of work hacking some of them to make them even passably good. Hidden Shrine, for example, was a mess because it was written for a version of the game from many years ago and it just don't translate to D&D 5e very well, despite it being supposedly converted. I had to make significant changes to it. Dead in Thay was a D&D 5e playtest adventure and it really shows, again, even if "converted."

So if you're looking to make them into something like an adventure path, I recommend reading them through and thinking about what you will need to do to modify them to make them more seamless and better designed for this edition of the game before committing to it.

 

[Charlaquin]

I ran it as a campaign, using the Tales from the Yawning Portal concept as the framing device. The PCs were a group of retired adventurers catching up in the Yawning Portal, reminiscing about their past adventures together. Each dungeon was a flashback. If anyone died during the flashbacks, they were out for the rest of that dungeon (though the player could take over an NPC or something if there was one available), but it was assumed they got resurrected some time between then and the next adventure, so they could play the same character for the next flashback. I had planned once we got through them all to follow it up with Tomb of Annihilation as a final hurrah, with everyone who had died during any flashback now being affected by the Death Curse, but never got around to it.

 

[jasper]

After Sunless, Meepo took over the Sunless and the nearby city as mob boss and the group patron. He assigns his family members to handle small problems.

 

[Mercurius]

I've not run it as a continuous campaign, but I've run a few of the adventures - Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury, Dead in Thay, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and I've played in White Plume Mountain.

Something to look out for is that the quality of these adventures vary widely in my view. You will likely need to do a lot of work hacking some of them to make them even passably good. Hidden Shrine, for example, was a mess because it was written for a version of the game from many years ago and it just don't translate to D&D 5e very well, despite it being supposedly converted. I had to make significant changes to it. Dead in Thay was a D&D 5e playtest adventure and it really shows, again, even if "converted."

So if you're looking to make them into something like an adventure path, I recommend reading them through and thinking about what you will need to do to modify them to make them more seamless and better designed for this edition of the game before committing to it.

Thanks. I think realistically I won't end up running every adventure - who knows where the campaign will go, and I do prefer to run a sandbox style adventure, but want to at least start us off with something fairly straightforward and that doesn't require a ton of prep (thus, Sunless Citadel). But I'll look out for Thay and Tamoachan.

I ran it as a campaign, using the Tales from the Yawning Portal concept as the framing device. The PCs were a group of retired adventurers catching up in the Yawning Portal, reminiscing about their past adventures together. Each dungeon was a flashback. If anyone died during the flashbacks, they were out for the rest of that dungeon (though the player could take over an NPC or something if there was one available), but it was assumed they got resurrected some time between then and the next adventure, so they could play the same character for the next flashback. I had planned once we got through them all to follow it up with Tomb of Annihilation as a final hurrah, with everyone who had died during any flashback now being affected by the Death Curse, but never got around to it.

Great idea!

 

[Hatmatter]

I ran it as a campaign, using the Tales from the Yawning Portal concept as the framing device. The PCs were a group of retired adventurers catching up in the Yawning Portal, reminiscing about their past adventures together. Each dungeon was a flashback. If anyone died during the flashbacks, they were out for the rest of that dungeon (though the player could take over an NPC or something if there was one available), but it was assumed they got resurrected some time between then and the next adventure, so they could play the same character for the next flashback. I had planned once we got through them all to follow it up with Tomb of Annihilation as a final hurrah, with everyone who had died during any flashback now being affected by the Death Curse, but never got around to it.

Good idea as pals swapping stories and having the adventures as back stories.