New 5e DM, which adventure book?

[Germelia]

Hi!

So I've been a DM off and on for 10+ years, but I've always homebrewed. Now I'm a busy mom with 2 kids, a husband, a household, volunteer work and a 32hr paid job, whoch means I don't have the time to set up another homebrew campaign. I decided to give the adventure books a go.
The question is, which one to go with? I am a player myself in a Princes of the Apocalyps game but have no knowledge of any other. I have 4 very experienced players who know me (and each other) well. They prefer roleplay over fights and like to have some freedom. The feel should at least be sandboxy.

DO you guys and girls have any suggestions?

[sophontteks]

Hi!

So I've been a DM off and on for 10+ years, but I've always homebrewed. Now I'm a busy mom with 2 kids, a husband, a household, volunteer work and a 32hr paid job, whoch means I don't have the time to set up another homebrew campaign. I decided to give the adventure books a go.
The question is, which one to go with? I am a player myself in a Princes of the Apocalyps game but have no knowledge of any other. I have 4 very experienced players who know me (and each other) well. They prefer roleplay over fights and like to have some freedom. The feel should at least be sandboxy.

DO you guys and girls have any suggestions?
Curse of Strahd is nice and RP friendly. Combat leans toward suicide so it encourages you roleplaying rather then hacking and slashing. Nice gothic feel to it.

[ToastyTobasco]

Hi!

So I've been a DM off and on for 10+ years, but I've always homebrewed. Now I'm a busy mom with 2 kids, a husband, a household, volunteer work and a 32hr paid job, whoch means I don't have the time to set up another homebrew campaign. I decided to give the adventure books a go.
The question is, which one to go with? I am a player myself in a Princes of the Apocalyps game but have no knowledge of any other. I have 4 very experienced players who know me (and each other) well. They prefer roleplay over fights and like to have some freedom. The feel should at least be sandboxy.

DO you guys and girls have any suggestions?

Sandboxy, experienced players and roleplay?

Curse of Strahd has lots goodies for that.

[Unoriginal]

Hi!

So I've been a DM off and on for 10+ years, but I've always homebrewed. Now I'm a busy mom with 2 kids, a husband, a household, volunteer work and a 32hr paid job, whoch means I don't have the time to set up another homebrew campaign. I decided to give the adventure books a go.
The question is, which one to go with? I am a player myself in a Princes of the Apocalyps game but have no knowledge of any other. I have 4 very experienced players who know me (and each other) well. They prefer roleplay over fights and like to have some freedom. The feel should at least be sandboxy.

DO you guys and girls have any suggestions?

Waterdeep: Dragon Heist has a lot of RP and sandbox-y freedom elements. But you might have to do a bit of work to make it fit for your ideas.

[Kadesh]

Tales drom the Yawning Portal. I'm seriousm there are some interlinked hack and slash moments with clearly defined 'attack these guys' areas in a dungeon, xbut there are plenty of opportunities to get some party interplay, and with a bit of prereading of the adventures, you can quite easily link the narratives together.

I really like Sunless Citadel to start off with, as it provides an opportunity for you to set up roots in a village, and begin to set up business in and around there. You can RP with the guys in the town, with a little foray into some lifted content from Waterdeep Dragonheist, there is plenty of content you can interweave as much as you like, while allowing for free reign and interested elsewhere (for example, Storm King's Thunder after completing Against the Orcs, even of you are slightly overlevelled, or Tyranny of Dragons pt2, or even the second part of Out of the Abyss).

I really like Tales from the Yawning Portal (alyhough try to have as little to do with the tavern itself and have the party directed away fron there ASAP).

[2D8HP]

Despite being the first, Lost Mines of Phandelver is really good.

Tyranny of Dragons is kind of weak, I'd say Tomb of Annihilation is my new favorite, but most of them are good, I think you could almost decide based on flipping through the books at the store and just go by interior art.

[Laserlight]

I'm playing in Strahd right now and enjoying it, but bear in mind that it's rather dark with horror elements. My character bought a doll, and I belatedly said "Wait...I realize this isn't a normal doll, is it." The DM said "Of course not, this is a Tim Burton doll." There have been several points where the whole table gave a collective "ewwww, yuck!"


I enjoyed Storm King's Thunder overall, but there were several points where we were casting about, wondering "What exactly do we actually do next? Is there in fact a Next Step at all? Are we just looking in the wrong place until we get bored?"

[Whit]

As I played the original keep on the borderlands I think the updated one can work for you. The main thing I like is building up your life story have a connection to a place so your down time can build your character up

[SirGraystone]

I vote for Curse of Strahd too, it's a gothic horror story which is different then most usual D&D campaign, it is great if you have a group that enjoy that kin of thing.

Storm King's Thunder is good too, a more regular kind of story, lots of wandering all over the sword coast, a few time the players may wondering where to go next since the sandbox is so large.

Tomb of Annihilation has a city start, then a large part of jungle exploration and end with a large dungeon.

[Millface]

Another vote for Curse of Strahd. I only DM half our campaigns, and I'm not DMing this one, but so far it's been a blast to play. I'm really, really enjoying it.

Having said that, I've found that the modules are often times more work than homebrewing might be, depending on how you homebrew. If you look up maps to use for your locations and play in the forgotten realms or some other established setting as opposed to making up everything from scratch, that is. So really my vote is actually to try to fit in homebrew if you can do it in the same amount of time as it takes to properly prep for a module session. It's true that you don't actually have to prep with a module, you can just read it on the fly, but the game runs super clunky that way and it's not what I would call fun on either side of the DM screen.

The thing about homebrewing is that the base work for it is stored in your head, rather than a book, and it's alot easier to keep track of and manage that way (for me, at least). With a module you have to be careful with improvisation if you don't know everything that's going to happen later in the book by heart because you might mess things up pretty soundly by doing so.

[Man_Over_Game]

I asked a similar question elsewhere and got a lot of feedback about several of the books/modules.

Curse of Strahd is one of the more open-campaign sort of modules. The entire thing is basically "here's a bunch of cool ideas and how they tie together, NOW DO WHATEVER". With lots of screaming and violence. Its open-ended-ness and its solid design makes it a good choice, but it's a bit difficult to DM and not everyone has experience with horror.

Lost Mines is incredibly user friendly, and best designed for newer players. It'll show players how they can do things like skills, combat, and RP. It has a lot of detail into the small stuff, so a newer DM can learn a lot in how to flesh out their world. It is a bit low power (level 1-5), but it's very fleshed out for that time.

Storm King's Thunder feels pretty epic. From what I understood, you run around trying to stop Giants from breaking everything. While people said they liked it a lot, the main issue is that you don't really stay anywhere in one place. You can't easily build relationships, or make a home-base. You're travelling around a lot. That being said, they really enjoyed the fact that the areas were well defined (Lightning Giant, Fire Giant, etc) so that players can adjust their playstyle to work towards the mission. A lot of the time, players can't prepare because they have no idea what's going to happen, so they just make themselves generalists so they can't possibly be useless. Since this module ends around level 6, it's a great way to get into a major mid-level campaign, as you'll be known heroes over a large section of land after travelling so much. It also takes place over a year/several months, so there's a lot of downtime that players/you can utilize.

Tales of the Yawning Portal is kinda like how I described Curse of Strahd, but where CoS is a bunch of individual locations with a single overarching plot, the Yawning Portal is more "individual" and less "plot". It works out well as specific, divided adventures that, as they're listed in the book, can happen to go in a sequential order. The first dungeon, the Sunless Citadel, could be thrown into almost any campaign to get a party to level 4 pretty easily. On the contrary, though, the local town is boring and has hardly any details fleshed into the book. Make your own world, but use Tales from the Yawning Portal for the dungeon/danger aspects of it. I don't mean to make it sound bland, though. It has a lot of great ideas, but most of them are within "danger zones", as opposed to interacting with common folk. It's effectively a series of "one-shots" (that may take a few sessions each).

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One particular thing I thought was interesting after reading through Curse of Strahd was the tarot card reading that determines where the players' help/magical items are.

The reading wasn't really optional, it was optional to show the players the results.

[Sigreid]

You'll get the most mileage and see the widest variety of setups out of Tales from the Yawning Portal.

[MilkmanDanimal]

Lost Mine of Phandelver feels like an incredibly well-designed tutorial level for 5e. It does a great job of introducing all kinds of mechanics. It's great. I've been going through Waterdeep Dragon Heist, and, so far, I'm really impressed, and it looks like a fun adventure. I ended a campaign that wasn't going well just so I could use it, as I was kind of burned out.

I really dig the first two adventures in Tales from the Yawning Portal (The Sunless Citadel and the Forge of Fury), but not really a fan of most of the other adventures. The Lost Shrine of Tamoachan is an annoying, meandering, trap-filled adventure I hated back in AD&D, and Dead in Thay is huge and full of teleporting portals and other confusing things. I kind of want to get back to White Plume Mountain for nostalgia's sake, but revising TftYP has made me remember that a lot of those old AD&D modules were actually pretty incoherent and just felt like random rooms full of monsters interspersed with annoying traps.

[Germelia]

Wow guys thanks for all the suggestions! I took this discussion to the players and they like to do Curse of Strahd. It is a bit different from 'normal' but these guys are hardcore, so I think they'll love it. I do realise I will need to do a lot of reading work ;)

[Sigreid]

Wow guys thanks for all the suggestions! I took this discussion to the players and they like to do Curse of Strahd. It is a bit different from 'normal' but these guys are hardcore, so I think they'll love it. I do realise I will need to do a lot of reading work ;)

Curse is a good module. I would warn them up front that it can be very brutal. Not to discourage them but to encourage them to use all due caution and then some. Especially with newer players.

[NRSASD]

Another vote for Curse of Strahd. We're about to start it since our homebrewed campaign just wrapped up, but it looks really cool and awesome. Bear in mind it is a horror game, so playing it straight may not be for you.

Besides that, Tomb of Annihilation is a really good one to get too. While the last dungeon is a doozy, everything up to it is a pretty spectacular high stakes wilderness exploration game. Wandering the Jungles of Chult infected with mad monkey fever while being pursued by zombie T-Rexes has never been more entertaining!

P.S. Since I'm lucky enough to have access to a high quality printer I managed to manufacture a lovely set of Strahd Tarroka cards. First session is going to involve a live fate reading session that'll determine the destiny of the entire adventure :).

[guachi]

There are a large number of good 3rd party or AL adventures that are a good introduction.

However, I think Lost Mines of Phandelver will go down as a true classic. I loved it the instant I read it.

1st edition and Basic have a number of outstanding, classic adventures. But if you want something built for 5e (though converting old stuff is easy and you can get the adventures cheap on DMs Guild) and you want something that's good for levels 1-5 then Lost Mines is your adventure.

The only early adventure that compares - multi-level, a variety of small side encounters, wilderness travel - is B10 Night's Dark Terror, which has my vote for best D&D adventure of all time.

[R.Shackleford]

Despite being the first, Lost Mines of Phandelver is really good.

Tyranny of Dragons is kind of weak, I'd say Tomb of Annihilation is my new favorite, but most of them are good, I think you could almost decide based on flipping through the books at the store and just go by interior art.

As much as I don't like parts of LMoP, it's a great first adventure.

[kivzirrum]

I really dig the first two adventures in Tales from the Yawning Portal (The Sunless Citadel and the Forge of Fury), but not really a fan of most of the other adventures. The Lost Shrine of Tamoachan is an annoying, meandering, trap-filled adventure I hated back in AD&D, and Dead in Thay is huge and full of teleporting portals and other confusing things. I kind of want to get back to White Plume Mountain for nostalgia's sake, but revising TftYP has made me remember that a lot of those old AD&D modules were actually pretty incoherent and just felt like random rooms full of monsters interspersed with annoying traps.

Lost Shrine of Tamoachan totally lost me. I think a lot of the old modules have their charms and are classics for a reason, but Lost Shrine is not one of them. That's the one module from TftYP I really have no desire to run.

Anyway, to the OP, it seems you've already made up your mind, but for what it's worth I think you made the right decision. I just got into running Curse of Strahd myself and if nothing else it's perfect for the gothic horror fans that comprise my group (myself included). I've never run a module before, I almost always do homebrew, so the other good thing about Strahd is that it still leaves so much work to the DM that it wasn't too much culture shock for me! :smallbiggrin: