D&D (2024) 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.