Hello everyone!
In this post, wanted to mention about campaign books of Dungeons & Dragons.
Do you like to use or follow ready-made scenarios? I never had to check ready-made scenarios except Call of Cthulhu one-shots, before late 2016. After some private issues, I had to hang around at home, and a friend gifted me Fantasy Grounds Classic licenses and told me that I'm "THE" Dungeon Master from now on. And I accepted it.
Long story short, in the following years, I had some chances to run and play most of the official D&D scenarios, and by using D&D, I mean 5th edition. (They call all previous editions as "D&D Classic")
So, people were asking me about campaign books, like "have you ever run this?", "which one do you suggest?" etc. And some days ago, I made a YouTube video about it. It's (obviously) in my native language (here's the link for native friends) and I thought that could be an interesting topic to bring on the Hive. So I will share my top 3 (instead of 5, as in the video) best D&D campaign books so far, with some reasons.
WARNING: This may -and probably will- have SPOILERS; so I suggest you to check titles before read the rest.
Rules
Before starting, I have to explain my consideration steps:
- I specifically picked Forgotten Realms based books.
- I didn't consider Magic: the Gathering books, and Critical Role content.
- I didn't consider anthologies, because regardless of how old editions had magnificent lore and content, their game scenarios were crappy and old-minded. They were only beautiful in their own times. When they convert old adventures to current edition, it bothered me that how cheap they look. Sorry if I write it harsh, but ideologically innovation is a need for dungeoncrawl.
3. Curse of Strahd
When I talked about innovation, I actually meant this scenario. Curse of Strahd is a scenario based on an Advanced D&D Scenario called I6 - Ravenloft. They turned 40-pages of oldschool adventure module with a detailed and nicely designed 250-ish page campaign book. That's quite impressive.
The sad thing is, if you ever read the Ravenloft novels, you already know what will you play. If you read them as a Dungeon Master, you may add some nice details on your game, to make your players more excited and happy. But that happiness will be gone after having some sessions in Ravenloft, and instead, there will be unnerving cruelty, chaos and death.
What I liked about it is that it gives players a nice sandbox-like sense of gameplay. You don't have to follow a certain road, and maybe, with some differences, it could be replayable. Most of other D&D campaigns are not replayable.
What I didn't like about it is that if the players want to explore everywhere before going to the final place, they will find everything in the game, and that will kill the replay possibility. That means, it's not really replayable. Another thing is, there is a specific fortune-telling deck called Tarokka, but the game only uses it in the beginning. After that, it's just a decor. They could add some interesting Tarokka readings during the game, but they didn't. It's a huge MEH.
2. Rime of the Frostmaiden
I guess I mentioned somewhere that I was running this Frostmaiden scenario. This took the 2nd place because of a nonsense reason:
When in late 2020, D&D was hugely advertising Frostmaiden, and they also added some specific designed character sheets for it, mixing it with their Celebration 2020 event. They gave interview about how the game bears such horror of a cold Northern area, and it could give players psychological stress etc. IT'S A LIE!
Intro gives characters some "dark secrets" which are not even close to dark, also not worthy of keeping it as a secret, at all. Some of them are usable but not useful little perks, and most of them... Who cares about them to hold as a secret LOL
First chapter assumes that characters are random adventurers, running here and there and completing random quests.
Second chapter is kinda same with the first chapter, but now characters should travel across Ten Towns of Icewind Dale for completing their random quests.
In the third chapter, still there's no any horror elements.
Hellooo?! They advertised it as a horror campaign!
So, I just said "F the book, I will do it with my way" and I started add all the horror by myself. And with the base storyline of the game itself, my horror elements worked perfectly and made this game playable. And it gained my 2nd place on this list. Not a recommendation to new DMs.
1. Dragon Heist
This adventure has my sword, bow and axe!
For those who never heard about it before, Dragon Heist is a city investigation adventure takes place in Waterdeep, the biggest city in Sword Coast. It has really good details, and you could play or run this scenario at least 4 times. Let me tell you why it's really good:
- A city adventure is the best way to introduce a city to your players, and Waterdeep is the most important city on Sword Coast adventures.
- When you reach chapter 2, you have a place you can run as a bar or an inn. Some people like to play as artisan or business person, and while you're going after a Sherlocking storyline, you could also run your business, get reputation and earn some extra money.
- There are lots of interesting NPCs, like a gay couple in the blacksmith, a non-binary wood-elf druid, and a mysterious private investigator.
- You can raise a challenging tension with using business rivalry during the investigation.
- You can play the adventure in 4 different seasons, and every season has its different events unfolding.
- There are four big bosses in the adventure, which are related with the season you picked. You can change between the bosses as the events unfold.
- There's no any big and boring combat, which makes the story flow goes faster.
- I can count some more, but do you really need it? :)
Conclusion
I guess I never played or run Elemental Evil's "Princes of the Apocalypse" campaign, but I -at least- tried others somehow.
What do you think about this topic? Do you read, follow, run or play any campaign books of D&D? What do you think about adventure books of other game systems?
Tell me about your experiences.
And see you in another post!