Tales from the Yawning Portal as a single campaign

[Ashuan21]

Ssssssso, has anybody found out how one could join all of those dungeons in a sufficiently realistic campaign?

The suggestions present in the book don't convince me... Go to the dungeon -- go back to the inn -- hear of the next dungeon -- go to the next dungeon... I don't like this solution mostly because of the evident geographical distance of these places, I know they give suggestions on how to move the dungeons to your world, but the dungeons themselves clearly speak "different languages", so different that I find it repulsing to even try modifying the adventures into a more coherent group.

The only thing I could think of is how wasted was the wonderful story of the Yawning Portal (I am quite new to DnD so this was my first approach to all these traditional elements) inside the inn, and of the barkeeper as well.

Do you think is an option to change the Yawning Portal into a portal leading directly into the dungeons?

The characters would find themselves with a little knowledge about the place, they would storm the dungeon and find the way back to the portal, coming back full of treasure and glory, as Durnan the barkeeper did twice.
The inn would become the final destination of hundreds of adventurers form many planes, exploiting the portal to get to the richest and most challenging dungeons of the multiverse in order to become the greatest adventurers of all times.
Such a plot would give me a way to use the Inn in a fun way... Durnan would initially ignore the party, it is just a group of dead men walking... Then he would grow curious of the PCs as they start coming back from the Portal once, twice!! Eventually he would become envious of the glory of the PCs, and he could even try to harm them somehow during their dimensional trips! Furthermore the inn would now be full of true NPCs, people coming here to follow the PCs in their deeds, or even trying to challenge or rob them!

What do you think of this idea? I know it may sound as a blasphemy to some experienced players... but the Yawning Portal was there with all of its hooks and not a single one (maybe White Plume) was tied to the dungeons!

[Vogonjeltz]

Ssssssso, has anybody found out how one could join all of those dungeons in a sufficiently realistic campaign?

The suggestions present in the book don't convince me... Go to the dungeon -- go back to the inn -- hear of the next dungeon -- go to the next dungeon... I don't like this solution mostly because of the evident geographical distance of these places, I know they give suggestions on how to move the dungeons to your world, but the dungeons themselves clearly speak "different languages", so different that I find it repulsing to even try modifying the adventures into a more coherent group.

The only thing I could think of is how wasted was the wonderful story of the Yawning Portal (I am quite new to DnD so this was my first approach to all these traditional elements) inside the inn, and of the barkeeper as well.

Do you think is an option to change the Yawning Portal into a portal leading directly into the dungeons?

The characters would find themselves with a little knowledge about the place, they would storm the dungeon and find the way back to the portal, coming back full of treasure and glory, as Durnan the barkeeper did twice.
The inn would become the final destination of hundreds of adventurers form many planes, exploiting the portal to get to the richest and most challenging dungeons of the multiverse in order to become the greatest adventurers of all times.
Such a plot would give me a way to use the Inn in a fun way... Durnan would initially ignore the party, it is just a group of dead men walking... Then he would grow curious of the PCs as they start coming back from the Portal once, twice!! Eventually he would become envious of the glory of the PCs, and he could even try to harm them somehow during their dimensional trips! Furthermore the inn would now be full of true NPCs, people coming here to follow the PCs in their deeds, or even trying to challenge or rob them!

What do you think of this idea? I know it may sound as a blasphemy to some experienced players... but the Yawning Portal was there with all of its hooks and not a single one (maybe White Plume) was tied to the dungeons!

Two ways you could get around it is that each adventure is a different creature narrating the tale of a famous adventuring company. They don't need to be linked in any form then, because it would always be, hey tell the one about the Sunless Citadel! Or what about that time they went to find the Tomb of Horrors?

[Pratfall_Junior]

It's your campaign brah.

You can do whatever the frack you want to the Yawning Portal, Durnan, and the adventure sites in the book. Don't worry about people's (probably dated) opinions about the "proper" way to run these classic modules. Just take whatever idea your brain chocks up and roll with it (no pun intended).

I, for one, think your linking device is pretty rad and that you should keep pressing ahead with it. Your universe would make for a much more exotic Yawning Portal than the one that exists already. With some Planescapey adventurer NPCS--some githyanki pirates, a fallen angel trying to redeem herself, a gang of demons on the run after stealing Orcus's toilet plunger of disembowelment, etc--you've got yourself a quirky, intriguing and memorable world.

[Naanomi]

It could easily be in an interplanar hub as well... make it a tavern in Sigil, or built into the Infinite Staircase, or make it the World Serpant Inn. Then the dungeons can easily be on the 'right' worlds while still having access to them

[Unoriginal]

You could make it so that each adventure is a literal tale being told in the Yawning Portal.

As in, something like the Canterburry's Tales.

The players incarnates tavern-goers who are telling stories about the same group of heroes, and then play the heroes within those stories to see how the narrative goes.

[Millstone85]

The players incarnates tavern-goers who are telling stories about the same group of heroes, and then play the heroes within those stories to see how the narrative goes.https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tabletop_roleplaying.png

[Unoriginal]

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tabletop_roleplaying.png

I meant it as "the players play both the storytellers and the heroes", but my syntaxe was ambiguous. Fun and appropriate use of the pic, though.

[Millstone85]

I meant it as "the players play both the storytellers and the heroes", but my syntaxe was ambiguous. Fun and appropriate use of the pic, though.The truth is, I deliberately used the ambiguity of your sentence. Still, even if the characters at the tavern aren't playing the characters of the tales, it is going to feel like that picture.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

But I would give the tavern-goers an adventure of their own, in the present. Perhaps one that is mostly intrigue with little combat. Or maybe one that is also from the book but adapted to Waterdeep, the Yawning Portal and Undermountain. I think White Plume Mountain would be the easiest to adapt, though the Yawning Portal could also become the Gatehouse of Dead in Thay. And then elements from the tales, like items, could show up in the present.

[Ashuan21]

Wow thank you for the feedback!!!!
Great thought about Sigil! Why Waterdeep after all.... Sigil is much better! And would explain better the high number of cool adventurers around.

A nice thing I have thought of is that the Portal itself may have sentience :3, and may lead the adventurers to those places in order to get what it wants (no idea about it).
Durnan may have a role in this... either supporting or antagonizing the Portal, having built the inn to keep it under control (woah).

Such a plot would surely allows interplanar pirates and chases... and everybody loves interplanar pirates and chases!!

The Portal may want... I don't know! It may be a Celestial (or a Fiend) and want the retrieval of an artifact scattered in the seven dungeons or something similar (as the defeat of Acererak)...

[Armored Walrus]

Sounds like you already have lots of ideas, but I'll throw this in there, too.

One nice thing about taking the "This is a series of stories being told in the Inn about these dungeons" is that you could actually have the players roll up a new character for each dungeon. So it's not someone telling a story about this one group that did all the dungeons, but a collection of stories about the folks who ultimately 'beat' each one. Many of the groups may have retired wealthy after completing just one of the dungeons.

For the denouement of the campaign, Durnan brings them into the back room and shows them trophies from each of the adventures.

Or, once all the dungeons are cleared, they take the group that cleared the final one and that launches your high-level campaign, telling the story of what this group did once they collected all their fortune and fame.

Edit: Oh, there are seven dungeons? Maybe each one has one of the Rod of Seven Parts in it...

[Orion3T]

You could make it so that each adventure is a literal tale being told in the Yawning Portal.

As in, something like the Canterburry's Tales.

The players incarnates tavern-goers who are telling stories about the same group of heroes, and then play the heroes within those stories to see how the narrative goes.

This is how I was planning to do it, if I end up running them.

The 'campaign' would start with an NPC going into the Yawning Portal. They go to the bar and get chatting to Durnan, who then begins to recount the tale of a group of adventurers who went on an adventure to e.g. Sunless Citadel. He can explain how they heard tale of the dungeon in question and start the tale with them literally at the entrance.

This also avoids having to worry about 'plot hooks'. The hook is that yu start the players at the entrance so they are already invested. Obviously it needs a group who are up for an advenure of that type, rather than a RP-heavy open word type of game where they get to do whatever they like. But that tends to apply to most pre-written campaigns unless you fit them into a larger campaign.

To be honest I think this was the approach they were going for when they chose the name. It's not that the Yawning Portal is directly related to the stories, it's that what happened to the adventurers has become a tale told in the Yawning Portal. Of course, if th group dies then that begs the question of how Durnan came to know what happened to them. Which leaves it open for another group to go in for another try. :)

Seems like a good premise for a quick 1-shot action adventure dungeon crawl.

[Douche]

Two ways you could get around it is that each adventure is a different creature narrating the tale of a famous adventuring company. They don't need to be linked in any form then, because it would always be, hey tell the one about the Sunless Citadel! Or what about that time they went to find the Tomb of Horrors?

Ah man, that'd be cool. Like a sort of "How We Got Here" trope.

You could also have the adventurers find an ancient library or something, and all the adventures are books or chapters within a tome of epics. When you read the chapter, it'd be like the Neverending Story & pull you into the world of the book. Then, when they finish the chapter, that'd allow them to take their loot with them from adventure to adventure.

[Vogonjeltz]

Two ways you could get around it is that each adventure is a different creature narrating the tale of a famous adventuring company. They don't need to be linked in any form then, because it would always be, hey tell the one about the Sunless Citadel! Or what about that time they went to find the Tomb of Horrors?

You could make it so that each adventure is a literal tale being told in the Yawning Portal.

As in, something like the Canterburry's Tales.

The players incarnates tavern-goers who are telling stories about the same group of heroes, and then play the heroes within those stories to see how the narrative goes.

What a great idea! I of course fully endorse it.


Ah man, that'd be cool. Like a sort of "How We Got Here" trope.

You could also have the adventurers find an ancient library or something, and all the adventures are books or chapters within a tome of epics. When you read the chapter, it'd be like the Neverending Story & pull you into the world of the book. Then, when they finish the chapter, that'd allow them to take their loot with them from adventure to adventure.

Thank you, I like the book idea. It would certainly be striking when someone accidentally kicks open a book, and, just before being sucked inside they notice the title...Ye Olde Tomb of Horrors....

[Asha Leu]

Turning Tales from the Yawning Portal into a continuous adventure isn't that difficult. There are plenty of excellent framing devices you can use, many of which have already been suggested in this thread (another great one mentioned in another thread was turning the Yawning Portal tavern into an extra-planar hub filled with literal portals to the various dungeons).

However, I do wonder if running the adventures continuously is actually a good idea. The issue is that pretty much all the adventures in TFtYP are old-school dungeon crawls (even the newer ones). If you think your players would enjoy a succession of dungeon crawls with little breaking them up, then great, I'm sure they will really dig the campaign. But you should bear in mind that most of the adventures in Yawning Portal don't actually have a great deal of content besides the dungeons themselves.

Personally, I reckon that TFtYP is much better used as intended - as separate adventures that can be slotted into different ongoing campaigns as needed. If you want a continuous adventure path to take your players from level 1-15 or whatever, pretty much every other 5E adventure would suit your purposes better, IMO.

[Crusher]

When the current campaign I'm DMing ends, I've got two campaigns planned which I'll decide between based on what the players find more interesting. The first is Frog God's upcoming Blight campaign (which will be dark, urban semi-steam punk-y horror-ish) and the other is based largely upon Yawning Portal.

If they go with Yawning Portal, the narrative plan is that the characters find themselves in a clearing in the middle of a small village, with weird gaps in their memory. They remember the details about the specific events in their backstory (like, the formative moment when the strange elf first taught them to conjure forth the wild magic inside them or whatever), but no other details at all like their childhood, or how they got to the town. Standing in front of them is an old woman who thanks them for agreeing to help her sort some things out.

The party can wander the small village, buying whatever supplies they need, and when they're ready to go, they suddenly find themselves in front of the dungeon, with no memory of how they go there. If anyone dies (and some of those dungeons are pretty lethal), they get odd mental messages saying things like "This isn't easy, you know! Be careful!" and find themselves reincarnated shortly afterwards. Players can change characters, but I'll strongly encourage them to pick a theme, like elves, or martial characters or whatever.

When they're done, they suddenly find themselves back in the town which gradually gets bigger as the characters level up, with more interesting NPCs and better shop selections, etc. And the old woman slowly becomes more majestic and angelic as the campaign progresses. The entire campaign will just be a succession of these "jobs" the mysterious woman sends them to fix, which are the dungeons of Yawning Portal, plus a couple others to span level gaps (mostly sort of fun-house style dungeons).

Finally, when the characters defeat Acerarak, it will be revealed that the characters are all newly born demi-gods of whatever their chosen "themes" were and the mysterious woman was a Planetar charged with helping them grow their powers and evolve into their true deific selves.

[Unoriginal]

Honestly the only way I can see this going is the players getting upset at this woman who is clearly f***ing with them and will probably consider she's the BBEG, and try to get out of all of those jobs by any way possible.

[Waterdeep Merch]

I'm running a campaign colloquially called 'the Metagame' where I'm including the entirety of the TotYP. The understanding is that every dungeon from it exists in the game world. They can be avoided, but that would mean falling behind in levels and treasure compared to their rivals, as I'm only doing a few completely original dungeons in between managing the dense sociopolitical and military situation in the campaign. I'm real grateful the book hit right as I started all this, it freed up a ton of time designing dungeons on my end.

The original conceit behind a lot of old school dungeons is that you are there precisely because you've heard legends of their valuable treasures and riches. Playing a game as a bunch of pulp action tomb raiders or thrill seekers suits something like TotYP best.

[Jacquerel]

Everyone's talking about how you could but I'm not 100% certain that you should.
They might be published in one book, but not all of the dungeons in Tales from the Yawning Portal were created for the same purpose.

Sunless Citadel was designed as a starter adventure and works quite well as one, you could start any campaign there and add hooks to a bigger plotline, but when you get further on into the book...
The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan was designed as a competitive module that players would race other teams of players to complete, with points to score based on finding treasure and avoiding damage. This adventure in many ways challenges players more than it does characters, and people who are trying to play characters will have a bad time in there. Some level of metagaming is almost expected in this module, because the idea is not to have a character-building adventure together, it is to win and to do it better than someone else.
White Plume Mountain is again another different kind of beast, as it was essentially someone's portfolio of fun puzzle ideas all crammed together into one location. It features a lot of puzzles that, again, challenge players themselves to puzzle out solutions rather than calling for skill checks, disorienting after Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury which are character driven.
Following that is Dead in Thay, which is a megadungeon deserving of the name because it was originally designed for multiple groups of players to tackle at the same time! Not only would it be strange tonally following the previous two adventures (this is a character adventure rather than a player one again), it is also difficult to understate how large this environment is.

And I shouldn't even mention how bad of an idea it is to include Tomb of Horrors in any kind of actual campaign :P

Playing Tales from the Yawning Portal as a single campaign would I think would be a confusing, tonally inconsistent experience, where players are asked to re-evaluate how they play and approach the game in each chapter, where expectations for how you can use character skills vs player lateral thinking vs metagaming are not consistent, and where even the amount of combat and social encounters you can expect varies very wildly between adventures.
It is not something I could particularly recommend doing.

[Millstone85]

*snip*You make such a compelling argument that I am now very surprised TftYP dedicated three small paragraphs to the possibility.
Creating a Campaign
While these adventures were never meant to be combined into a full campaign--over 30 years separates the newest from the oldest--they have been selected to provide play across a broad range of levels. With a little work, you can run a complete campaign using only this book.
Starting with The Sunless Citadel, guide your players through the adventures in the order that they are presented in this book. Each one provides enough XP that, upon completing the adventure, the characters should be high enough level to advance to the next one.
The Yawning Portal, or some other tavern of your own invention or drawn from another D&D setting, provides the perfect framing device for the campaign. The characters hear rumors of each dungeon, with just enough information available to lead them to the next adventure. Perhaps a friendly NPC drawn from the upcoming adventure visits the tavern in search of help, or some element of a character's background pushes the group down the proper road. In any case, these dungeons are designed to be easily portable to any campaign setting.

[Temperjoke]

Another thought, what if the party is retracing the steps of a past group of adventurers, maybe searching for them or something they had? This would explain why the group travels to such wildly different areas. Then the book turns into the middle part of the campaign, the beginning sets up why they have to follow these other adventurers, the end ties it all together with the result of their journey being used somehow. Maybe it turns out that the various places ended up twisting the old adventurers and turned them into the BBEGs of the group's story?

[Jacquerel]

You make such a compelling argument that I am now very surprised TftYP dedicated three small paragraphs to the possibility.

I would like to believe that they wrote those paragraphs purely because they knew some people would want to do it anyway, and others would be upset by the idea of a book of setpieces that are not actually linked to each other. You could even go further and say this is why there are no particularly good ties from one dungeon to the next included in the book...
...but that's just speculation. Maybe they really did think such a campaign would be a good idea!

I very much don't.

[Orion3T]

I don't know about the rest of them, but the Sunless Citadel has a plot hook for the next adventure, Forge of Fury. It's fairly subtle, but it's there.

[BillyBobShorton]

There are lots of great ideas already posted in here as to going about the whole "inn fables" that I won't bother adding more conceptual bar-storyline ideas. Kudos to all who have such brilliant ideas.

However, if I were going that route, only thing I might add is that the "story" never makes it to the last 3 or four dungeons. As each party in previous tales may have never been seen or heard from again after entering something like Dead in Thay or TOH(who is? Lol)... but then the party that is hearing these tales may venture into said unfinished dungeons on a conquest of their own. They may even meet or have to confront adventurers from other stories. This ties things together nicely while giving the cool "there was a time" concept more meaning and continuity while also making sense for a set group to venture into several dungeons concecutively for more reason than just "following the module".

The way I am running it is tied into some side-story 1-shots from TOD in AL, based mostly in Phlan. Tales from tbe Laughing Goblin. Basically the Cult of the Dragon is kind of 1-step ahead of the party, and entering each dungeon to do their dastardly dragon worship deeds, like harvesting the Gulthais Tree or bringing something powerful to thr Black Dragon in the forge. This gives the party a solid storyline and reason to chase, rather than Diablo looting one crawl after another with no investment in anything other than being stronger so they can rinse and repeat the crawls.

[Gryndle]

I am currently running Tales as a mini-campaign (an aside to our normal game when all players cant be present).

I have pretty much completely thrown out the Yawning Portal tavern & redefined the areas the assorted dungeons are in. Its kinda simplistic, but the basis is simply that the PCs are looking for a set of McGuffins to save their homes. Legends tale of these artifacts being lost in the ruins of an ancient civilization that is buried in a nearby wild region. The wild areas are shrouded in myth and tales of curses and such, so everyone has avoided it until now when times have gotten desperate.