D&D 5E Thoughts on New Campaign for New Group for Returning DM

[meomwt]

The other possibility might be converting one of the "classics" - many of them use foes found in the 5th Edition Monster Manual, which can be easily dropped in.

I'm running Temple of Elemental Evil right now, re-writing it to put in new monsters, difficulty checks, revised treasure and the like. There is another document which does a lot of this already here http://newworldscoaching.ca/downloadable/toee.pdf

The pdf runs to 125 pages(!) and has converted a lot of the unique NPC's rather well. I'm using it as a help. My players had a run-in to Hommlett via the first part of Lost Mine of Phandelver and have spent a lot of post-Moathouse time persuing their own agendas. Consequently, they are at Level 6, which is a little over-powered for the fist level of the Temple itself...

 

[Kilgore Trout]

What a bunch of great responses - I really appreciate the insight, experience, and links. Lost Mines has some overwhelming support on here, so maybe that's where I'll start. I like the idea of converting old modules, too, if even only for nostaglia's sake. Alright then. Would love to hear more but if this is it, what a treasure trove!

 

[Croesus]

Another vote for using LMoP. It's not perfect, but it's a very good adventure, and it allows you to start small, in a manageable area of the world. Also there are some old threads around here with suggestions on what to improve, such as the main villain. When my group finished LMoP, I simply converted adventures from Dungeon, slowly building up the world's background and history, introducing broad story arcs (dead god, death cults, dinosaurs!) and such. Converting to 5E was a breeze.

When Princes came out, I started running that, but honestly, I should have stuck with the Dungeon adventures and my own homebrew stuff. Princes is good, but it's designed to run up to level 15, so it really drags after a while. Once the characters have trashed their second temple, getting rid of the remaining two feels a lot like "been there, done that". We had a similar issue with Monte Cook's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil - too grindy, too much fighting, too much dungeon crawling.

So my recommendation is LMoP, then take the campaign in your own direction. Just my two cents...