D&D 5E Where to next? (post LMOP)

[MerricB]

Here's my slightly older article about it:

What to play after finishing the D&D Starter Set - Merric's Musings

It is fair to say that the D&D Starter Set adventure, “The Lost Mine of Phandelver”, is a good adventure. I’ve run it at least four times, and each time the players are do things the other groups haven’t done. It’s a really good introduction to the game, and it manages this by just being a...

merricb.com

Honestly, it depends what sort of experience you want. I think Storm King's Thunder is great afterwards, or Curse of Strahd, or Tomb of Annihilation...

Most of the adventures work well afterwards - starting them a little into their run to get past the low levels often improves them.

Cheers!

 

[Benjamin Olson]

We should note, in terms of what published adventures are on the right level with minimal adjustments that several, including Storm King's Thunder and Curse of Strahd, have "starter area" beginning sections that are intentionally disconnected from the rest of the adventure so that they can be skipped if you are coming in from an existing campaign. Both of those are really campaigns for level 3 and up with an extra mini-adventure at the beginning for levels 1 and 2.

We're considering Dungeon of the Mad Mage, but wondered what other options experienced players recommend (it's the 1st campaign for most of us)

If you want an official 5e megadungeon, Mad Mage is the official 5e megadungeon. It is a particular type of gameplay not to everyone's tastes, and even for people whose tastes it is to it might not want a whole book worth of it, and this particular megadungeon has gotten mixed reviews. I'm not trying to discourage you, just know what you're getting into. Don't just pick it because it is one of the only 5e official campaign books that starts at level 5, pick it because you like the idea of a whole campaign delving the same ludicrous dungeon. It is definitely a change of pace from the "regional sandbox with light dungeoneering" feel of Lost Mines of Phandelver.

 

[Lyxen]

Dragon Heist is great fun. Just bump up the difficulty of the monsters to account for the higher starting level. It's a lot of roleplaying and dealing with factions and a bit of mystery.

Dragon Heist is the worst 5e production ever, it's a railroad fest where whatever you do in one vignette has absolutely no impact on the next vignette that is forced down your throat, and where you get outrageously manipulated by extremely high level NPCs without being able to do anything about it whatever you try. Moreover, you end up using 25% of what you pay for as there are four plots using exactly the same locations in another order, as if anyone would like to replay this again...

After that, depending on your group's preferences, you might end up somewhere in the middle between these two advices, but honestly, out of all 5e campaigns, official and homebrew, that we have played since 5e came out it was by far the very worst.

Apart from this, as mentioned, a lot of published adventures can be started at level 5, in particular STK, but it's certainly doable with BGDiA and ToA, and these will provide much, much better play value than WDH. Just be careful that these are way more sandboxy style, in particular a specific section of STK, and this might need to be managed with your groups.

 

[Burnside]

My recommendations would depend on what your players enjoy.

Regarding some of the adventures others have suggested.

WHAT YOU SHOULDN'T RUN

Waterdeep: Dragon Heist - I am running this now and can't wait for it to end. In my opinion this is among the worst - possibly the worst - official 5E adventure. It's an unfinished product. Chapter 2 in particular is a nightmare for new DMs. For an encore, it covers exactly the same levels (1-5) as Lost Mine of Phandelver, so if you plan to continue with your 5th level characters you'd need to re-work everything. Honestly, you'd have to re-work everything anyway because it's really bad.

Storm King's Thunder - I know this looks good on paper. There is an obvious on-ramp at level 5. It's in the same general region as Lost Mine. But that's where the virtues end. You're already level 5 so you'll mercifully skip the irrelevant levels 1-5 prologue part. Your adventure will begin in a city on the Sword Coast. As a pointless gimmick, in the first session your players will play NPCs assigned to them instead of their own characters as they defend a city from giants. You might think this is smart because then your players will develop an attachment to either these NPCs or the city they are defending. Nope! Your players talk to the NPCs once and then leave the city forever. Then for the next two levels of play you are given 50 pages of thumbnail descriptions of the Sword Coast and told to make up your own adventures (this is not the sort of thing I buy a $50 hardcover for). Finally, around level 7, the adventure (billed as covering levels 1-10) starts. From that point forward it's...okay. Except that the adventure does everything possible to conceal its pointlessly complicated plot from the players - in fact, they may finish it without really understanding what happened.

WHAT YOU MIGHT WANT TO RUN

Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage - If your group really likes dungeons and combat, look no further. It even starts at level 5. To flesh it out and add some much-needed depth and connectivity, grab Wyatt Trull's Dungeon of the Mad Mage Companion from DMsGuild: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/311108/DotMM-Companion-Complete-Edition

Dragon of Icespire Peak - But only if you really want more of the same. It's more Phandalin, more quests (even simpler than Lost Mine). Covers levels 1-6 so again you'd have to re-work a lot of encounters for higher levels, or just skip to the level 5&6 stuff. The free follow-up adventures on DNDBeyond are a mixed bag. Storm Lord's Wrath is pretty great - in some ways better than Dragon of Icespire Peak - but the following two are quite bad.

Curse of Strahd - Still the strongest 5E adventure and actually a great second adventure to run. It's considerably more complicated than Lost Mine but still WAY simpler and limited in scope than most of the other 5E hardcovers. But not the right choice if your group isn't story-focused. Starting this at level 5 is fine, just don't use Death House.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Hiya!

Maybe write your own "inspiration tables" or go pick up one of the numerous books/pdfs that others have done (the 3e/d20 "Toolbox" books are good, or the "D30 DM Companion" and "D30 Sandbox Companion" I find really fun).

Wouldn’t even need to go that far. The 5e DMG has tables for generating random adventure ideas, and an appendix for generating entire random dungeons. I used the appendix to create the starting adventure for my campaign and it worked out really well. After determining the original layout, purpose of the structure and the rooms in it, you dungeon-fy it and figure out what has happened since. It took care of a massive amount of the work in a satisfying manner, and I still got something that felt like I had created it after I interpreted everything and added the specific elements I wanted to.

The 5e DMG doesn‘t have as large of a word count as most previous editions, but it is concise and very useful with those words.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I tend to end LMoP with a quest hook for Princes of the Apocalypse. In PotA, 4 elemental prophetes are contacted by a mad drow wizard who forged 4 elemental weapons/key before the game starts. So I made the drow end boss of LMoP the student of said mad drow, and the magic item forge found in the mine being the one used to craft the elemental weapons.

 

[overgeeked]

Dragon Heist is the worst 5e production ever, it's a railroad fest where whatever you do in one vignette has absolutely no impact on the next vignette that is forced down your throat, and where you get outrageously manipulated by extremely high level NPCs without being able to do anything about it whatever you try. Moreover, you end up using 25% of what you pay for as there are four plots using exactly the same locations in another order, as if anyone would like to replay this again...

Sounds like you had a terrible DM run it.

 

[delericho]

Storm King's Thunder - I know this looks good on paper. There is an obvious on-ramp at level 5. It's in the same general region as Lost Mine. But that's where the virtues end. You're already level 5 so you'll mercifully skip the irrelevant levels 1-5 prologue part. Your adventure will begin in a city on the Sword Coast. As a pointless gimmick, in the first session your players will play NPCs assigned to them instead of their own characters as they defend a city from giants. You might think this is smart because then your players will develop an attachment to either these NPCs or the city they are defending. Nope! Your players talk to the NPCs once and then leave the city forever. Then for the next two levels of play you are given 50 pages of thumbnail descriptions of the Sword Coast and told to make up your own adventures (this is not the sort of thing I buy a $50 hardcover for). Finally, around level 7, the adventure (billed as covering levels 1-10) starts. From that point forward it's...okay. Except that the adventure does everything possible to conceal its pointlessly complicated plot from the players - in fact, they may finish it without really understanding what happened.

Ouch. That's a fairly brutal assessment. And I can't fault it.

 

[Lyxen]

Sounds like you had a terrible DM run it.

No, not really, he's an old friend of mine who has run games for us for 30+ years. Admittedly, he did not spend a lot of time buffing the adventure, he ran it straight out of the book. But I read it afterwards, and I confirm it. It is a total railroad fest where you are led from vignette to vignette by powerful NPCs and events and where what you are doing has zero consequence on the next vignette. Encounters are from 1 to 10, and at the end of each you have a paragraph called "next encounter", with a trigger condition which reveals the location of the next encounter. It's not even a "choose your own path", there is only ONE path.

And I confirm that there are 4 paths, and that when you run the adventure, you only use one of them. Total waste.

 

[LordEntrails]

Dragon Heist, as written, is a very poor adventure. But, as a resource for creating adventures its actually really good. I will say again, using the Alexandrian Remix, or doing your own remix, can turn DH into an excellent adventure.

Those of you who played it and enjoyed it, imo, enjoyed it because of the skills of your DM, not because of the quality of the adventure.