One of the more unusual products to cross my radar was The Ultimate Fantasy Collection. Curated by Glen Cooper, this product gathers together nine adventures from the early days of the DMs Guild, adds in three supplements, and provides the lot at a discount.

However, Glen decided to do something interesting. Instead of just offering the adventures in a bundle, he decided to write notes for each adventure and to provide a campaign framework that would allow a group to play each of the adventures in turn.

I had an extremely small role in this process: Glen asked me to provide an introduction, and to write notes about his adventure. This I did, and the product went on sale last month. (I did this gratis; I like to help innovative work when I can).

With the weaving of these adventures together into a campaign framework, Glen did something that D&D players have been doing since the first D&D adventure was published: incorporating adventures by different authors into an ongoing campaign. What’s unusual is that he’s then shared the result with you. It’s probably worth picking up just to see how he did it. We DMs tend to not talk about this process a lot, mainly because we’re busy doing it instead of writing about it! (You can see classic examples of this process in the mid-80s superadventures of T1-4, A1-4 and GDQ1-7).

I run one homebrew campaign at present, which I supplement greatly with published adventures. There are two primary ways I use published adventures.

The first way is using it as a major adventure for the players. I have used both Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and Gary Gygax’s Necropolis in this manner in previous campaigns. These adventures made up significant portions of the campaign, but they didn’t represent the entire campaign; this is as opposed to how I ran Princes of the Apocalypse, where that adventure was the entire campaign, and I didn’t use anything else.

Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil was used as the capstone for a campaign that lasted six years and took up only the final year. I adapted the adventure to run for the highest levels in the game, rather than its original mid-level presentation. The adventure features a confrontation with major cultists of Tharizdun, whom I’d used as recurring antagonists throughout the campaign, so the adventure made sense to use in this context.

During the campaign in which I used Necropolis, I’d introduced the idea of the “Rainbow Portal,” a device that could send characters to other worlds. The group thus found a world based on Egypt and there explored the final resting place of the Set Rahotep – something that took them several months. It was another exciting adventure opportunity, rather than being something I’d built the campaign around.

The second way is using an adventure as a side-quest. A short diversion or supplement to the main campaign path. A lot of the adventures on the DMs Guild are of this sort, adventures that take no more than a session or two to play.

It’s useful to build up a stable of good, short adventures for this purpose. You might not use them immediately, but, when the opportunity arises, they’re there to drop in at a moment’s notice.

The oddest adventure I ever used as a side-quest was Queen of the Demonweb Pits. This is not an adventure you’d likely ever associate as a side-quest, but during the play of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, one of the characters drew the “Void” tile from a deck of many things, and it imprisoned his soul on another plane. Which plane? As I’d read Queen of the Demonweb Pits many times, it immediately occurred to me to place it there, in the Demonweb, in the care of Lolth. Thus, the characters descended into the Vault of the Drow, and from there entered the Abyss. After fighting their way through to Lolth’s throne, they discovered that Lolth was quite amenable to their overall quest of stopping Tharizdun, and so returned the character’s soul. After that, we returned to the Temple and completed the campaign.

One of the chief reasons for using published adventures in a homebrew campaign is that it allows you to explore different design styles. When I write adventures, there are a few tropes I tend to use over and over again. If I use the work of other authors, they have different design quirks, and so the players have the ability to experience an adventure written from a different point of view.

The other reason I use them is simply a matter of time. With a full-time job and two nights a week given over to running D&D Adventurers League games, the amount of time I have left to design is less than I like. Even less once I start writing blog articles and reviews!

Once you’ve decided to adapt a published adventure, you can change anything you don’t like: setting, monsters, characters, tone. Exactly how much depends on how much work you wish to do. I was aided in the conversion of the Temple by having a computerized tool to reset the level of the monsters, with all numbers scaling to meet the new level. (Alas, the tool was for 4^th edition; I don’t know a 5^th edition equivalent).

It’s important to keep track of your players’ wishes in this process. If they’re reacting well to one element of an adventure, see if you can develop it further. Just because the adventure’s author wrote something down on the page doesn’t mean you’re forced to abide by it. Change things to make the adventure better for your group. The glory of Dungeons & Dragons is that you can do this; you’re not playing a computer game and limited by the imagination of the game’s designer. Go forth and create!