D&D 5E (2024) The Dalelands & Myth Drannor : Are they inseparable ?

[Zardnaar]

Indeed, to me it feels too well trod, and almost like sacrilege to not use Ed's own stuff. I haven't read FR: AiF yet, but I would be more inclined to lift the elements I liked from the Dalelands chapter and relocate them into one of the less well trod areas of the FR (it's huge, there are lots of vaguely defined areas).

Or make a fantasy Yorkshire Dales as a homebrew setting.

In hindsight I should have done dalelands next.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If I do ever get round to using AiF it's the Calimshan stuff I would use. I've already done Moonshaes and Icewind Dale anyway.

 

[Tonguez]

I recently got my hands on Adventures in Faerûn, and it got me SUPER inspired for my next big campaign in the Forgotten Realms. After going through some of the content, I focused my attention on the section about the Dalelands. It quickly became my favorite setting. Sadly, one little aspect of my playgroup make me hesitate about taking the Dalelands over another region : Myth Drannor. As I understand, Myth Drannor is supposed to be (the book says it) a megadungeon meant for the players to be explored gradually through a campaign, when resources fall flat, or when the monsters' levels are too high .

The thing is, my playgroup does not really find dungeons particularly interesting, and I really want to include at some point Myth Drannor. I genuinely find Myth Drannor's story interesting, and it seems that the players can't not know of Cormanthor's biggest secret if they begin a campaign in a setting almost entirely based around it.
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My questions are : Does Myth Drannor can really be skipped in a Dalelands campaign? If so, what could I do without it ? And if not, in what way can Myth Drannor (full of monsters and ruins) be interesting to my players who don't like the concept of dungeons* ?

*It could certainly be a way for me to show them how cool dungeons can be in D&D, but I don't know how to tackle the matter yet... I've always found the dungeons as something important in the overall game of D&D, and yet so tricky to insert in a game.

At the end of the day Myth Dranor is a region in the Elven Forest subject to wild magic and planar portals - so if you want to remove the 'dungeon' ruins, you could just treat it as a cursed part of the deep forest, over run with corrupted monsters, dark fey, wild magic and demons. I'd leave the mythal in place and as an adventure hook have various factions - elf, human and otherwise - seeking to claim it or at least recover artifacts and keys that might give them control of the corrupted mythal