What Adventure Should One D&D Launch With? (+)

[Reynard]

We had an absolute blast playing Dragon Heist.

Me too, after I made it playable. Again, lots of good stuff in that module that a good GM can make into a great game. But out of the box?

 

[Yaarel]

I want One D&D to have FOUR core books:
• Players Handbook: Human only, setting neutral, and ALL of the rules to play a complete D&D game.
• Forgotten Realms Guide:
− offers between 10 and 20 playable Nonhuman species according to their FR setting flavor.
− details the Neverwinter region, the main city and its hinterland, including the village of Phandelver.
− includes The Mines of Phandelver as a sample adventure, for characters of the Student tier (levels 1-4).
• Dungeon Masters Guide: cosmologies, worldbuilding, magic items, and robust playtested variant rules.
• Monster Manual: hostile statblocks, including traps.

Here, the four core are Players Handbook, Neverwinter Guide (Forgotten Realms), DMs Guide, and Monster Manual.

The reason to make the Neverwinter Guide core, is to focus on Forgotten Realms as the Setting Guide.

The Players Handbook itself is Human-only and setting neutral.

It is just as easy to use the supplemental Eberron Guide with the core Players Handbook.

Likewise, the many other regions of Forgotten Realms can have their own Setting Guides.

And the DMs Guide advises the different kinds of worlds that a DM might want to homebrew.

 

[overgeeked]

For something completely different…

A real open-world sandbox campaign book instead of yet another 1-20 railroad. Maybe something like CM01 - Test of the Warlords only updated to 5.5.

 

[Zardnaar]

A good one.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Obviously people have different experiences, but my DH game went great too, but because I broke it down into its component parts and crafted and actually playable adventure from those. There is a lot of vreat stuff on that book, but the way it is put together by default is, in my opinion, terrible.

Yeah I had a great experience running it but I also changed a LOT. Some of the things I changed or added were based on 3rd party ideas, but probably the best single change was one I came up with: putting an old-school dungeon underneath Trollskull. Discovering the secret entrance was maybe the highlight of the campaign.

 

[R_J_K75]

For something completely different…

A real open-world sandbox campaign book instead of yet another 1-20 railroad. Maybe something like CM01 - Test of the Warlords only updated to 5.5.

I never played or ran this and honestly dont even remember it. Sounds like alot was packed into 32 pages

 

[payn]

Yeah I had a great experience running it but I also changed a LOT. Some of the things I changed or added were based on 3rd party ideas, but probably the best single change was one I came up with: putting an old-school dungeon underneath Trollskull. Discovering the secret entrance was maybe the highlight of the campaign.

You really can’t underrate community input when it comes modules. Avoiding pitfalls adding great content, etc…

 

[Tonguez]

In Search of Adventure - return to Karameikos and give a smorgasbord of adventure snippets

 

[Shiroiken]

I would definitely say Keep on the Borderlands, but updated with more in-town plot hooks and a few more wilderness hooks. The Caves really aren't the entirety of the adventure, but that's what everyone remembers.

EDIT: or an updated Sentinel and Gauntlet. With the caveat that I haven’t actually looked at either since they were originally published so I may be wearing Rose-Colored Nostalgia Glasses(tm).

I ran both during the Next playtest, and Sentinel ran really well. Gauntlet... not so much. I've run Gauntlet three times (1E, 3E, 5E), and it's never quite worked the way it's intended. It makes assumptions of the players actions, which either leads to a complete railroad or a total cluster *@#^. It could work, but like Keep on the Borderlands, it could use a rewrite.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Drop an adventure and setting guide for a new setting, fully built from the ground up on the sensibilities of today’s fantasy fan.

Eberron meets reboot She-Ra meets Treasure Planet.


Or! A very small beginning, in a small island community in a very diverse archipelago, otherwise similar to the start of Neverwinter Nights 2, with an aesthetic more like Chrono Cross’s beginning.

A group of youths reaching adulthood must light a ceremonial flame at the top of the Dragon Temple, facing dangers and challenges on the way, and come face to face with an enigmatic destiny, only to find that there is a danger coming for their quiet peaceful home, and the Dragon Temples must be awakened before it’s too late!



Stepping outside my own strange predilections, something with a high adventure vibe set in Cormyr or Sembia, involving the ruins and persistent population of Myth Drannor as an adventure site, and moving elsewhere via airship for the third act, possibly ending up in somewhere rad like Lantan, seems both plausible and cool.

Barring something new…probably STK or Princes of The Apocalypse.

 

[pemerton]

5e is predominantly a game about intricate PC combat builds, and GM-driven adjudication of non-combat action. So the 1st adventure for One D&D should showcase this. Something similar to Dragonlance would therefore be a good fit: a quest which requires a group of unlikely comrades to join together to travel to strange places, where they have to fight to get the thing they're there to get. There should be some NPCs that allow players with social-oriented PCs to do their thing - but the progression of the adventure should be largely independent of how those NPCs end up responding to the PCs.

 

[AnotherGuy]

An adventure on the lines of Murder in Baldurs Gate which has a fair bit of play on all the pillars.
They just require stronger hooks for the PCs to be initially involved.
Otherwise it's a great city adventure with chaos and disorder looming around the next corner as things become progressively worse. Very under appreciated adventure I think.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

An adventure on the lines of Murder in Baldurs Gate which has a fair bit of play on all the pillars.

If they'd just go back to that damn format they used in the first playtest.

Those small adventures in 2 booklets with a soft DM screen doubling as a folder was magnificent.

I still consider Murder in BG and Legacy of the Crystal Shard to be the most usable products WotC published in the last 10 years when it comes to organization and table use.

 

[MockingBird]

Loved that format for Murder in Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale. I was really hoping that would continue. Hate they didn't print the next two in the Sundering arch.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

5e is predominantly a game about intricate PC combat builds, and GM-driven adjudication of non-combat action.

Insofar as this is true, and it’s a + thread so I won’t start an argument on the point, the playtest thus far indicates that it will be less true in 2024.

So the 1st adventure for One D&D should showcase this. Something similar to Dragonlance would therefore be a good fit: a quest which requires a group of unlikely comrades to join together to travel to strange places, where they have to fight to get the thing they're there to get. There should be some NPCs that allow players with social-oriented PCs to do their thing - but the progression of the adventure should be largely independent of how those NPCs end up responding to the PCs.

I don’t think this quite matches how most people play the game, but I do agree that something like Dragonlance would be a good introduction to D&D and especially to a D&D which is primarily about making and telling stories about your heroic OC in a dangerous fantasy world.

 

[Shiroiken]

If they'd just go back to that damn format they used in the first playtest.

Those small adventures in 2 booklets with a soft DM screen doubling as a folder was magnificent.

I still consider Murder in BG and Legacy of the Crystal Shard to be the most usable products WotC published in the last 10 years when it comes to organization and table use.

I didn't see Legacy of the Crystal Shard, but MiBG was amazing. It was a solid adventure, but the city setting information made it usable long after finishing the adventure. The only thing I've seen that worked almost as well was Ghosts of Saltmarsh, but the size and information of Saltmarsh isn't really enough to keep going for very long afterwards.

 

[Minigiant]

Here's the thing...

None of the old adventures have tieflings, dragonborns, ardlings, good orcs, and goliaths in it.

The Launch Adventure should have all the PHB races species in it as NPCs. Period Full Stop.

At some point D&D has to stop leaning on 20 year or more old content for sales.

 

[pemerton]

None of the old adventures have tieflings, dragonborns, ardlings, good orcs, and goliaths in it.

That's why I said something like DL!

 

[Minigiant]

That's why I said something like DL!

But DL doesn't have orcs.
But I agree. To me the biggest trends in the last 20 years in fantasy are:

• 
  
• Story Arcs
• Crossovers (people from different worlds or cultures coming together)
• Dramatic Relationships
• Big Battles

Dragonlance + MCU + GOT should be the face of One D&D out the gate.

 

[Clint_L]

Here's the thing...

None of the old adventures have tieflings, dragonborns, ardlings, good orcs, and goliaths in it.

Not yet. Easy enough to add them to an updated version. I'm assuming that they will all be part of an updated Greyhawk, for example.