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Vooez

2020-04-11, 08:33 AM

scottoz

2020-04-11, 09:40 AM

Pretty sure lost mines if phandelver is free for a month or so right now on dnd beyond.

SunderedWorldDM

2020-04-11, 10:28 AM

Here's my opinions on all of the published campaigns so far. I'm going to disclude the ones that pick up after another one left off (Rise of Tiamat, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, ect.) because you won't be playing those right off the bat! Though if you don't want to invest in a full campaign, there's plenty of smaller adventures you can use.

Hoard of the Dragon Queen: I've played partially through this one. From what I've seen and read, this module is kind of tough to run well. There's some strange bits of railroading you have to do, and apparently a large travel sequence that is a slog to get through and has no bearing on the plot. I think it's pretty safe to definitively say "avoid this one".
Princes of the Apocalypse: Own it, played partially through it. This is pretty solid. You don't really have to do any work to make this adventure run like it should. It's got a bunch of really nice dungeons interspersed with some adventures, which I think would be a really nice blend for most tables (I'm on the smaller dungeon side of the continuum, so this adventure wasn't my cup of tea). The only real thing that you'd have to do beforehand is somehow tweak the Miribar Delegate (or however it's spelled), because as-is that's a lackluster sort of adventure hook that continues for well too long. Like, come on, a delegate in the Fire Node?! You have other reasons to be there by then!
Out of the Abyss: Ran it. I loved this adventure. A newer DM probably wouldn't. This adventure thrives on putting the PCs in genuinely dangerous situations, and if you're a cutthroat DM, you'll love this opportunity to push your players to their limits in every way. However, there's a lot of travel, so you're going to want to brush up on your ability do get through travel and random encounters quickly. Be sure also to give the players plenty of hints on where to go, as the sandbox feels a lot more expansive on the player's side than the DM's side. You may have to do a little hacking and extra prep for this adventure, but I definitely feel it's worth it.
Curse of Strahd: Played partially through it, want to get it. For a newer DM, you'll want to stay away from this one. It's a really phenomenal adventure, but you have to have a lot of skills to do it right. This isn't the one for you, I fear.
Storm King's Thunder: Played partially through it. If you like sandboxes, you'll love SKT. This module needs a lot of prep, but with a group of engaged players, you'll have a lot of fun exploring the Sword Coast together. In my experience, the plots are a bit slow-burn, so you might consider adjusting things so that the players have a clock over their heads or multiple threads to follow at any given time. With the right group and a little bit of prep, this adventure will be epic.
Yawning Portal: If your group likes straight up dungeon crawls, this is almost certainly the book for you. If not, well, don't pay this one any further mind.
Tomb of Annihilation: This one is a dungeon and hex crawl based adventure. As my first edition was 5e, I'm not as familiar with these sorts of play styles, but you very well might be. From what I've seen and heard, the dungeon component is well designed, if not deadly (talk to your players about InstaDeath beforehand!), but the hexcrawl is lackluster and has the potential to leave out a lot of good, flavorful places. Needs a bit of polish and the right play style, but this one is certainly one of the better ones!
Waterdeep: Dragon Heist: Own it. I love this adventure. Even in other games I've been mining the content and using this campaign to get into the "city campaign" mindset. This one, to be fair, will take a fair bit of prep, but I really do believe that's worth it. A good job DMing can bring this adventure to life! If you're up for a challenge, this campaign will entertain you for a long time, and with minimal homebrew, last you much longer than 5th level.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh: I don't really know much or have much to say on this one. I know that Sly Flourish has put out some really good guides on how to refluff and link together the adventures into a pretty cool campaign about Tharizdun, but that's all I really know about this one. Have fun with ships, I guess?
Descent into Avernus: This is one of those that needs a lot of background skill to work really well. I would say it's a better idea not to consider it.
Other things to consider: There's a bunch of free adventures on Wizard's DMsGuild page for you to check out, like Death House (intended as a Curse of Strahd prequel) and Terror in Nightstone (an SKT prequel), which would work well as standalones and also give you some insight into the tone of the adventure. Also, some of the sourcebooks have short adventures in them. For example, Explorer's Guide to Wildemount has four level 1-3 adventures and a lot of content to keep you going past that third level easily, and the Acquisitions Incorporated guide has a level 1-5 adventure, if I recall. Perhaps look into some of those? I don't know much about the shorter adventures, maybe someone else here in the Playground has some expertise...

In order of least prep/reworking to most: TftYP, PotA, GoS (?), ToA, W:DH, SKT, HotDQ, OotA, CoS, BG:DiA
In order of least flavor to most: TftYP, HotDQ, PotA, SKT, GoS, ToA, W:DH, OotA, BG:DiA, CoS
In order of least skill needed to most: PotA, TftYP, ToA, HotDQ, GoS(?), SKT, W:DH, OotA, BG:DiA, CoS

I hope this was helpful! This is all just my opinion, so please take it with a grain of salt. If you have any questions let me know!

Vooez

2020-04-11, 11:45 AM

Grod_The_Giant

2020-04-11, 02:05 PM

I've run or tried to run three adventures:

Curse of Strahd is unreservedly great. I think it was actually the least work to run of any of the three-- I didn't have to do much in the way of rebuilding dungeons or encounters, there's a wonderful chart that tells you how dangerous the various locations are, the setting is delightfully evocative, you never have to deal with lots of NPCs at once, and Strahd is really fun to use as a villain. I highly recommend it; if you do, I also highly recommend having players take over the characters of Ismark and Ireena (keep the background, leave build and personality up to them) for added hooks and pathos.

Out of the Abyss is pretty good, but definitely more work:

As SunderedWorldDM mentioned, there's a lot of travel, which is hard to do in any sort of entertaining way. I pretty quickly gave up and just slapped one mini-adventure between each of the cities for the first half of the module, and said **** it, you're too strong for random encounters for the second half.
You wind up with absurdly bloated parties-- the opening sequence leaves you with ten extra fully-fleshed out NPCs joining the party, and at the halfway part you pick up a few dozen low-level soldiers. You'll definitely want to come up with some way to deal with them, whether it's cutting them out entirely or
It's a weird mix of linear and open-- some areas really only have one way through them, and other times you're dropped into a big fleshed-out city with no clear path or goals.
On the other hand, there are some awesome set pieces along said linear paths.
I have had to rebuild a bunch of encounters, and at least one entire dungeon. I'm not sure what the expected leveling curve is at this point; in one chapter you can very easily wind up in a fight with one or more purple worms, and in the next you're dealing with, like, a dozen CR 1/2 troglodytes as if they're supposed to be significant.

Storm King Thunder failed me. It opens with a "hurry up and get to 5th level" adventure that's mind-bendingly dumb and divorced from everything else until the end, where it goes insane (and not in a good way). After that, there's a huge open space where your party wanders around northern Faerun looking for a particular giant. Some good stuff, some stuff that looks brutally unfair at first glance, and... there are four chapters devoted to giant strongholds, and the party only needs to visit one of them. That really bugged me. The end of the module tries to include an epic foe, but forgot to make sure the players are high enough level, so it gives the party a bunch of giant allies that will be clearly stronger than their characters. The setting (the Sword Coast) is also dull. Do not recommend.

pr4wn

2020-04-11, 02:51 PM

Hi friends, long time lurker first time poster here.
So after years of begging I was finally able to convince my close friends to play D&D with me (I suspect it might have to do with them being unable to leave the house).
As you can assume my friends are completely new to D&D (except for one who played in the 7th grade).
I myself have played many times with other groups, but aside from a few one shots, I've never DMed before, especially for a group of first-timers.

I decided to go with 5th edition since I own the books, and also I think it's much easier to learn then 3.5 (which is the only other version I played).

To make things easier for me (and the players) I decided to go with an adventure published by wizards, I plan to buy it on DND beyond, I currently don't own any of them and I can't afford to buy all of them to go over nor do I have time for that, so my first question is which of the officialy published adventures would you recommend I run? (We will be running the game on VC if that affects things somehow)

Also if you have any other tips and advice for me for this situation I would really appreciate that :)

As another long time lurker, I decided to make my first post a reply to yours...

I would recommend "Dragon of Icespire Peak" from the Essentials Kit. It is a nice balance between a sandbox and railroad, kind of a "box of rails". The quests are small enough to prep for quickly and are fairly linear which makes it easier for a new DM. Having a small list of quests for the players to choose from, that grows as they gain experience allows them to feel as if they have control of their destiny. They don't feel as railroaded, and you don't have an unlimited sandbox you need to deal with.

I've run some first time DND players through it, and they had a blast. The short quests allow them to feel a sense of accomplishment every couple of sessions that is sorely lacking in campaign length adventures. They are also easy to add a little humor into as needed when a comedic break is in order.

I've enjoyed playing in most of the other adventures that have been listed, but as only a part time DM, I had the most fun running "Dragon of Icespire Peak".

That is just my experience and opinion, and is worth exactly what you paid for it... nothing!

I hope you all have a blast with whatever you decide to run.

-pr4wn

Sception

2020-04-11, 05:09 PM

Lost Mines of Phandelvar, from the D&D starter box, is thought very highly of as a first campaign for new players. Is a good introduction to both the rules of D&D and it's common narrative tropes, with a variety of combat & exploration scenarios, a few decent dungeons, a few tough & memorable combats (including an infamous goblin ambush right at the beginning), a sandbox section in the middle with a variety of threads for the PCs to follow, and a decent overall-goal to string it all together of rescuing a captured friend and retrieving the riches of the legendary lost mine he was searching for. If you want to add some more variety to the sandbox section, the more recent essentials box has it's own 'adventure' which mostly takes the form of a bunch of interesting but disconnected locals and scenarios in the same region as Lost Mines that you can sprinkle in.

The adventure runs from 1 to 5, so it doesn't take too long to reach a satisfying conclusion, and if you want to continue the campaign afterwards there's a variety of options. Tyranny of Dragons (Hoard of the Dragon Queen + Rise of Tiamat) and Storm Kings Thunder both have rather weak opening segments that aren't terribly essential to the overall narrative - especially in Storm King's case. But they both get much stronger after level 5. Running Lost Mines first and then jumping in to either of those adventures part way through lets you avoid the awkward parts and get to the good bits. Alternatively, if your friends enjoy the dungeon delving bits of Lost Mines but don't care much about story and character business then you could go into Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which is just one colossal dungeon crawl running characters from levels 5 to 20. Mad Mage is meant to follow on from Dragon Heist, but that's a character driven, role play heavy narrative adventure path, making the transition to straight dungeon crawl particularly jarring. In that sense Lost Mines with it's couple of decent dungeon crawls might be a better intro to Mad Mage in terms of content and tone.

Petrocorus

2020-04-11, 09:38 PM

(including an infamous goblin ambush right at the beginning)

I support LMoP. I runned it several times. It's sad that you cannot buy this adventure without buying the whole box.
I would go for it or Dragon of Icespire Peak, simply because the other campaigns can be very long, especially the sandboxy ones if the PC try to do "everything".

I do insist however that level 1 characters are fragile. So, yes, this first ambush and the first dungeon can be very dangerous if they are not careful. You need to emphasize to your players that this is not a video game and they have to think this through.

Thundertree also can be very dangerous. There is a FP 7 Dragon and the PC are level 3 to 4 at this point. So a TPK is perfectly possible.

Avoid the pre-gen PC given with this adventure, they are awfully under-optimised. And boring due to very common archetype.

And have the PC takes notes.

...and if you want to continue the campaign afterwards there's a variety of options. Tyranny of Dragons (Hoard of the Dragon Queen + Rise of Tiamat) and Storm Kings Thunder both have rather weak opening segments that aren't terribly essential to the overall narrative - especially in Storm King's case....
PotA is also situated in a very close region.

Cheesegear

2020-04-12, 02:36 AM

Hoard of the Dragon Queen: I've played partially through this one. From what I've seen and read, this module is kind of tough to run well. There's some strange bits of railroading you have to do, and apparently a large travel sequence that is a slog to get through and has no bearing on the plot. I think it's pretty safe to definitively say "avoid this one".

I've run this one twice. One thing that really stands out about Tyranny of Dragons is that it was the first published adventure, and as such contains 'a bit of everything' and the play-style of the adventure is constantly changing, which is very jarring for some players, and a lot of DMs are not able to cope with the style shifts, especially new DMs, running the very. First. Book.:

Act I: The first part of the adventure contains a lot of stealth, and avoiding fights where possible. The adventure starts you at Level 1, and the players are not supposed to walk straight into encounters. Almost every encounter has a trap, terrain difficulties, environmental issues, etc. It's a very good start to the adventure and drops the party right into the action from the word 'go', and the players are given very clear goals on what they need to do, even if they can't execute them very well - because they're Level 1, not because it's hard.

Act II: Holy ****. The adventure says 40 days, the map says 60. ****'s sake. Either way, somewhere between 40-60 days of in-game time is ****ing joke. In any case, this part plays differently in every group. The DM has to do a number of NPCs very quickly, which can be very taxing. The party isn't really given any concrete goals except for 'Get to Point B'. This part of the book will make or break the adventure for your group. It is heavily reliant on your group, it is heavily reliant on the DM... Have I mentioned that HotDQ is the first book.
Xanathar's gives a bunch of downtime activities and Tool uses your group can use to pass the time.

While I was reading reviews of this module back when I first bought it and how I should run it, one place said 'The party leaves Baldur's Gate...40-60 days later (roll 1d20+40, for increment weather), the party is in Waterdeep. Hooray you made it!'

The rest of Act II goes pretty smoothly.

Act III: Two dungeon crawls in a row - and a third that the party can skip? WTF? This is all relatively straightforward and good.

I - a reasonably experienced DM - like HotDQ.
It's got a bit of everything, and forces parties to adapt to situations and use their brains. Unfortunately, that's a big part of the reason a lot of people don't like it. It's quite hard. :smallfrown:

Safety Sword

2020-04-12, 06:17 AM

Since you don't know whether your friends are going to be into it or not I would suggest one of the starter sets. They're cheaper, easy to run and a great introduction to D&D 5E.

I am running 3 games a week on Roll20 at the moment and I can tell you that by far the one I do the least prep for is The Dragon of Icespire Peak (AKA The D&D Essentials Kit). It's a pretty simple formula with simple quests that are easy to understand the objective of. For newer players this leads them to learning how to D&D pretty effectively. There are some tricky bit of quests, but overall it's well structured and simple to run for DMs.

I am currently running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist twice and I love it! It is a bit more work to personalise it to your characters and keep them involved. One group is at the end and one just started.
The first group has 6 players, only one of whom had ever played D&D before and this group is going to be starting Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus in the coming weeks. I also anticipate BG:DiA will be time intensive for me to run because I already hate the beginning and I'm totally rewriting to start somewhere else and not suck.

I also have a Storm King's Thunder campaign that has been highly modified with my in person group... but that's on hold, clearly. As previously mentioned, SKT is very preparation intensive I find. The main part of the adventure is literally all over the map and you have to spend a fair bit of time crafting encounters, locations and NPCs to flesh it all out. It's a great book as a resource mind you.

I hope this was helpful.

HotDQ stuff
I agree with what you've said about the adventure itself. I have a common complaint about a fair few of the official adventures. The start sucks. HotDQ avoids this problem but you run into a bigger one. In D&D 5E LEVEL 1 SUCKS. It is very difficult to keep Level 1 PCs alive and do anything actually interesting. DM problems.

Petrocorus

2020-04-12, 12:40 PM

I agree with what you've said about the adventure itself. I have a common complaint about a fair few of the official adventures. The start sucks. HotDQ avoids this problem but you run into a bigger one. In D&D 5E LEVEL 1 SUCKS. It is very difficult to keep Level 1 PCs alive and do anything actually interesting. DM problems.
TBH, I'm not sure it is specific to 5E. Even in 3.5, level 1 was hard, especially for some classes, without optimization.
In AD&D, both 1 and 2, level 1 was difficult, very difficult for wizard and some others.
I don't know about 4E.

Cheesegear

2020-04-12, 09:12 PM

HotDQ avoids this problem but you run into a bigger one. In D&D 5E LEVEL 1 SUCKS. It is very difficult to keep Level 1 PCs alive and do anything actually interesting. DM problems.

The first group I ran HotDQ with, they were like "We know what we need to do, we know how to do it, too. But, dice gonna dice. If we screw up, we die. Looks like this campaign is gonna have actual stakes...From the start."

The second group I ran it with, they were like "This is too hard. Can we start at Level 2 or 3, maybe?" To which I responded, 'No. Just don't charge into every encounter. You're Level 1s, act like it.'

The difficulty - and fear (in or out of character) - that the adventure forces on the players is part of it.
To me, that's the adventure's biggest asset. To others, that's what makes it so bad - especially as ToD is the first adventure module, and a lot of people are likely to pick it up, first.

I do like the AL Season 1/ToD tie-in one-shots a lot, though.

LtPowers

2020-04-12, 09:44 PM

I don't know about 4E.

Characters in 4e start with somewhere between 20 and 30 HP at level 1. (10-15 base depending on class, plus your Constitution score (not modifier).) A wizard with 10 CON would have 20 HP, but a barbarian with 16 CON would have 31.

Plus, healing is relatively easy to come by, and every party is assumed to have a Leader (i.e., healer). So 1st level combat is quite survivable.

Powers &8^]

Safety Sword

2020-04-13, 03:24 AM

The first group I ran HotDQ with, they were like "We know what we need to do, we know how to do it, too. But, dice gonna dice. If we screw up, we die. Looks like this campaign is gonna have actual stakes...From the start."

The second group I ran it with, they were like "This is too hard. Can we start at Level 2 or 3, maybe?" To which I responded, 'No. Just don't charge into every encounter. You're Level 1s, act like it.'

The difficulty - and fear (in or out of character) - that the adventure forces on the players is part of it.
To me, that's the adventure's biggest asset. To others, that's what makes it so bad - especially as ToD is the first adventure module, and a lot of people are likely to pick it up, first.

I do like the AL Season 1/ToD tie-in one-shots a lot, though.

It probably has a bit to do with not having a finished rule set when writing the adventure. Who knows what strangeness that brings?

Again, I agree with you, it just feels bad to kill Level 1 characters.

Segev

2020-04-13, 05:43 AM

I’m running Tomb if Annihilation, and have had fun. My players seem to, as well. Maybe I’m too lenient, somehow, but for the hex crawl portion, they never felt that Chult’s jungles were dangerous. Certainly, they always had enough supplies that the rules for exhaustion practically never came up, let alone causes stress.

I altered the impetus, giving the player characters each their own reasons for being in Port Nyanzaru, and used Sunless Citadel with some replaced NPCs as the first hook and adventure. I set it further from town than the dungeon entry does, as I had a spot in the Jex crawl I wanted it to be.

The death curse got introduced to the players by trying to rez the merchant’s son, and failing.

My players also have taken their time with the hex crawl; it’s closing in on 160 days since campaign start in game-time.

If you like Storm Kong’s Thunder but are underwheoby Nightstone’s intro, you might again use Sunless Citadel as an opener. Start them in Nightstone for whatever reason. Make it take the place of Oakhurst. You can just pot the Hercule family in Nightstone.

Mention a problem with goblin bandits and put some info out that implies a tribal conflict.

You can even put the Citadel it’s canon distance from town.

After they beat the Citadel, they should be 3rd level, and doing the Nightstone plot by having them return to find it sacked, after letting them get to know some of the folks in town and possibly looking forward to some respite and reward, will up the urgency and personal nature of the Nightstone plot. And the last couple levels to 5 will likely flow a bit more naturally than SKT’s “chapter-based” leveling.

Sception

2020-04-13, 07:35 AM

Plus, healing is relatively easy to come by, and every party is assumed to have a Leader (i.e., healer). So 1st level combat is quite survivable.

This was a big thing, and is one of the bits I really miss about 4e (along with short rests short enough to be assumed and balanced for between every encounter; every character having an approximately even mix of at will, encounter, & daily resources so adventuring days that run extra short or extra long tend to affect everyone equally; the ease of combat encounter dedign; the mark & punishment design for tanks; and the warlord class in general).

Every support class got a couple bonus action heals per encounter as a class feature, on top of various optional healing spells or abilities on encounter or daily timers which were usually paired with attacks. All of these were designed to be efficient in-combat heals, so playing 'a healer' as a combat role was actually a viable thing to do. Heals also generally took the form of letting the target spend hit dice, so using a heal on the party tank actually restored more hp than healing the wizard or rogue, which rewarded the entire party with more efficient use of their overall hp reserves when the tank successfully pulled 'aggro' to themselves with their mark & punishment mechanics.

In 5e we're back to a situation where relatively few healing abilities are efficient enough to use in combat, so healer is mostly a non-combat party role like face or scout or magic item identification. This is enough outside of genre convention for fantasy games these days that you regularly get cleric, druid, and bard players frustrated when healing in combat seems to be a waste of resources, and other players annoyed when their 'healer' starts doing more efficient things in combat and only bothering to heal them when they drop or after the fight's over.

It also results in wack-a-mole situations of characters dropping and popping up repeatedly, which is obviously more efficient strategy from the players but also narratively awkward and for some even immersion breaking, where in 4e keeping your party from going down in the first place was actually a viable.

Oh well. 5e does enough things better than 4e that I still prefer it overall, but the healing mechanics are definitely one thing I miss.

KorvinStarmast

2020-04-13, 08:07 AM

Hi friends, long time lurker first time poster here.
For WoTC published adventures, Lost Mines of Phandelver is a pretty good starter.

But I'll suggest a better one if you are running the game on line on roll20.

The Masters Vault.
I think you can get it for free on roll20.

I just finished it with some old friends. It's a great starter adventure with lots of tips on DMing, how to get players to RP and do ability checks and do combat.

You can generate your own PCs or use one of the six pregen PCs.

Highly recommended. (Also, do the first quest with the larder/rats to get the party started).

The first adventure in Ghosts of Saltmarsh - The sinister Secret of Saltmarsh - is a "good but hard" adventure for starting level 1 PCs. I'd suggest having four or five PCs.

SpawnOfMorbo

2020-04-13, 09:17 AM

Hi friends, long time lurker first time poster here.
So after years of begging I was finally able to convince my close friends to play D&D with me (I suspect it might have to do with them being unable to leave the house).
As you can assume my friends are completely new to D&D (except for one who played in the 7th grade).
I myself have played many times with other groups, but aside from a few one shots, I've never DMed before, especially for a group of first-timers.

I decided to go with 5th edition since I own the books, and also I think it's much easier to learn then 3.5 (which is the only other version I played).

To make things easier for me (and the players) I decided to go with an adventure published by wizards, I plan to buy it on DND beyond, I currently don't own any of them and I can't afford to buy all of them to go over nor do I have time for that, so my first question is which of the officialy published adventures would you recommend I run? (We will be running the game on VC if that affects things somehow)

Also if you have any other tips and advice for me for this situation I would really appreciate that :)

Official?

Ehh.... I haven't seen a lot of good stuff from WotC in 5e in terms of adventures...

I would grab a free adventure from Adventure League, at least its free. Here's one from early on that I recall

https://media.wizards.com/downloads/dnd/HoardDragonQueen_Encounters.pdf

https://media.wizards.com/2014/downloads/dnd/DDEX110_TyrannyinPhlan.pdf

https://media.wizards.com/2014/downloads/dnd/DDEX13_Shadows_over_the_Moonsea.pdf

Edit

Side note, start players off at level 2 or 3... They will actually have cool things at that point and it won't be such a grind.

SunderedWorldDM

2020-04-14, 10:12 AM

First of all thanks a lot, this is very helpful! Especially I wasn't aware of the mini adventures you've mentioned, I think I will look into them.

I forgot to mention this in the OP but as a player I played through STK and OoTA (and Im scheduled to play dragon's heist with my usual group).
I already knew there was no way I would run Out of the Abyss for a group of first timers, it's too hard (imo).
Personally, as a player, I absolutely loved STK, I was very much leaning towards that one, so it's good to know that there's a prequel adventure for it.

All in all, from your comment it seems like the best option for me is prince of the apocalypse, the thing is, I have an ulterior motive here and it is to get my friends to want to play more in the future, I wanted to go with an adventure that's simple to run so I dont ruin their experience with my newbie DM skills, but, I haven't play through PoTA myself, would you say it's a good enough adventure to get new players hooked?

Also on an unrelated note, do you recommend any other sources (preferably free ones) that I can read before running a game? (Other then the DM book and the adventure book that is).

Thanks again :)

*Deleted most of the quotes so the comment is not too long.
I think the only real pitfalls with PotA is a) you'll have to think about how to make it not be too 'same-y' for long stretches of time (I would recommend going through the larger elemental dungeons, picking your absolute favorite rooms, and then plopping them onto a smaller map), and b) it's layout is a bit funky, so you'll have to spend enough time reading through beforehand so that you can get a feel for the order in which story beats happen and when to place adventures- the whole thing is unfortunately written in a nonlinear style. But past those two things, it's really classic DnD: lots of dungeons with cool, unique elemental enemies and a dragon or two!

As far as DM resources go, I have a lot of favorites. In no particular order:
-Matt Colville, always a great source to go to
-Matt Mercer, particularly his series he did with Geek and Sundry on how to GM better
-GM Tips with Satine Phoenix, she gets a bunch of wonderful guests on to talk about GMing good
-Runehammer/Drunkards and Dragons, I love his DMing style and the way he thinks about encounter design! He's one of my favorites, and you should check him out. I recommend starting from his earlier videos and watching in a more or less linear style.
-Anything by Ivan van Norman ever, he's a killer GM and you can learn a lot from him no matter what game he's running/talking about!
-DM Round Table by Geek and SUndry, working my way through these but they have a lot of neat food for thought
-Office Hours/DM Chat(?) by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Dimension20, these videos are really great, kind of hidden gems of DM tips. HIGHLY recommend, especially since, like GM Tips, they feature a lot of guests from other places on this list.
-Good blogs: Power Score (who makes great guides to help you run adventures, if you are ever stuck in prep check his guide out), Sly Flourish (kinda sparse on the GM tips side but very good ideas for making published adventures cooler), the Angry GM (close this tab and read his article for brand new GMs, then leave that blog alone until you've leveled up your DM skill).
-Take some time and watch an hour or two of a couple real play games. Not all of them will hook you, and that's no biggie, but watch long enough so that you can pick out one or two discrete things that GMs do that you can use. For example, when I was watching the Unsleeping City from Dimension 20, I noticed how Brennan was using camera angle terminology in his descriptions ("we pan down to see this beast, we zoom in on this person, we cut to this area"), and I thought that was a stroke of genius. Some of my favorite real play- serieses? Seri? Series? are: Critical Role, Dimension 20 (any of theirs are great), DnD Live Events (The Descent, Stream of Many Eyes, ect.), Titansgrave, anything from Geek and Sundry, Maze Arcana, Sirens of the Realms, High Rollers, Bylaw and Order, UnDeadwood, and anything else you can get your hands on!

Honestly, GM tips are quantity over quality! There is no better crucible to becoming a better GM than the table, and you will suck the first time guaranteed, but the more DnD media you consume and the more inspired you are to run an awesome game, the more fun you and your players will have, and the more quickly you'll be able to increase your skill level! I have faith in you, you got this!

Sorry to be long-winded again. Hope this helps!