In The Golden Apple by Luciella Scarlett, a party of Tier 1 characters chase a rogue eladrin into the Feywild, get caught up in the machinations of the fey courts, and have an opportunity to stop the rogue causing a war between the courts. This is a great basis for an adventure, and I’m very fond of tales of the fey. The adventure begins in … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Golden Apple
Shawn Merwin and Chris Sniezak recently touched on the phenomenon of most groups always turning left when they came to an intersection in a dungeon, as part of their Down with D&D podcast. The decision to “turn left first” is one I’ve observed at many tables over the last couple of decades. My feeling is that it comes partly from the decision to take the … Continue reading In the Dungeon: Left or Right?
Ashley Warren’s A Night of Masks and Monsters is a single-session adventure for level 3 characters. Set in the city of Ibrido, the adventurers get to experience a masquerade party where the masks have unsettling, magical properties, and the host has unsavoury plans for his guests! This is an adventure with excellent ideas, which doesn’t always execute them well. That it lacks a synopsis is … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: A Night of Masks and Monsters
Greg Marks’ Oubliette of Fort Iron is a significant milestone in the D&D Adventurers League range. It was released in 2015 as part of the second season, and it’s the first two-hour adventure for the league, a format that has come to dominate the range. The adventure is mostly a linear dungeon-crawl, with encounters split between combats and hazards. None of the three combats is … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Oubliette of Fort Iron
The Lich’s Heart is a free adventure by John Thompson for 10th-level characters. It has a very short and sweet blurb on the DMs Guild: This is the adventure I wrote to propose to my girlfriend. It reads like an old-school adventure. The adventurers explore a ruined castle, encountering various tricks, traps and monsters. Some puzzles require items from other areas of the castle to … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: The Lich’s Heart
Keep things short. Don’t overexplain. That background you wrote? It should be shorter. That NPC personality? Do you need that much detail? Try dot points. If you take over a page for an encounter, it’s too long. If it’s over a column, can you shorten it? Adventures are read twice, if you’re lucky. Once to prepare, and once during the running. When a DM runs … Continue reading On Brevity, Clarity and Adventure Writing
Sorrow’s Ruin is a Forgotten Realms adventure for first-level characters by Blaise Wrigglesworth. The adventurers must save a prophet of Ilmater from agents of Loviatar, the Goddess of Pain and Suffering. It offers a combination of wilderness and dungeon-delving, and it has some role-playing opportunities as well. The adventure begins with the kidnapping of Brother Dendar, a priest of Ilmater. The adventurers follow him to … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Sorrow’s Ruin
Rats of Waterdeep is an adventure set in Waterdeep for first-level characters. Designed as part of the Guild Adept program by Lysa Chen and Will Doyle, it presents an investigative scenario sent in the poor quarter of Waterdeep, where a strange plague is turning people into rats! I love that the adventure’s resolution is open-ended. It sets the scene very well – the adventure’s background … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Rats of Waterdeep
Red Thrall is an adventure for level 1-5 characters, designed to be used in conjunction with Storm King’s Thunder. It provides additional adventure opportunities during the opening chapter, “A Great Upheaval”, and works best when integrated with that chapter, although the material could be adapted for use elsewhere without much trouble. One of the benefits of using this material is to provide additional XP – … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Red Thrall
My World of Greyhawk campaign has been interrupted of late by other matters, but we returned to it this week with a classic dungeon crawl. After the past two sessions of a city-based adventure, which had not gone as well as I’d wished, I felt it was time to return to a dungeon. Ah, but which dungeon? There are several megadungeons in my version of … Continue reading Greyhawk – Old Tomes and Killer Plants
