Need help picking an adventure, newish group with hard requirements

[Delta_tea]

Hi. I'm trying to DM for an interesting group of players. Initially, I was going to just run Mines of Phandelver with milestones and call it a day. But they have a lot of requests that made it a lot harder to pick something. Since this group could be large depending on the day, I'd like something easy to run and flushed out; doesn't need much from me. Training is hard enough without having to fight a module's poor documentation.

Group's Requests:

3-7 people
mostly new (2 one-shot sessions under them)
prefer one-shots due to people may miss
start at level 3
want the characters to grow with sessions
don't want to figure out Adventure League rules
some will min-max from multiple books while others will use a premade template character


I'm honestly scratching my head. This is an odd place for most one-shots I've seen because they are typically level 1-4 in this range. But again, they want them to be distinct one-shots and not story arcs. Anyone have ideas on good one-shots that would work for this group without over-loading their poor DM (me)? And any ideas on how to address all of these other requirements? For example, I'm almost forced to do Experience since I don't have set points in a story line for milestones (boss fights). But now we'll have characters scattered in levels depending on who plays which nights which makes balancing harder. Sigh... Yes, I need ideas and help. Please and thank you.

[Zhorn]

Storm King's Thunder run as a Westmarch-esque style using the Savage Frontier chapter to set your locations.

If the party will be 3-7 people rotating in and out, the narrative is simply the group as a whole is stretched between two locations;
Those who are not attending the night session are off-screen in the previous town
Those who are in attendance are traveling ahead to the next location
The conclusion of each session is wrapped up in the town one stop over from the last, with the narrative that they will be waiting there for the absent characters to catch up before they press on.
Locations that are not towns on the map still have a town within striking distance, so those can still be used for the narrative of where absent players are.

later in the module the campaign offers
an air ship and a network of teleportation circles
So they can be used to establish a base of operation for the offscreen characters to idle at when the location ranging jumps significantly between sessions.

Many locations in the Savage Frontiers section have suggested encounters, and those which don't you can weave in story points using the provided Random Wilderness Encounters.

[J-H]

There are a lot of one-shot modules on the DM's Guild. I've reviewed a few here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?635482-Westvault-Explorations-A-5e-episodic-dungeon-crawl-campaign-log). Most are pretty cheap.
Explicitly ignoring setting and story connection will help, as that limited me somewhat in what I could pick.

It's OK to have characters at different levels, I think, especially once everyone is over 5th level. The difference between level X and X+1 is most often a couple of spell slots or +1 to hit/save/DCs/etc. Roll with it, awarding XP per session (level up every 2 sessions?) and rebalance later if you need to. You can just tell your players "we'll try this, and if it doesn't work, we'll change it."

[5eNeedsDarksun]

Not quite one shots, but Ghosts of Saltmarsh has a series of loosely connected mods as well as some other encounters (like scavenging the treasure from various wrecks) that could be expanded into one shots, particularly if they ended up with the ship from one of the early mods. It might work for what you're looking for; my group liked the nautical theme.

[Molchmeister]

Keep on the borderlands, you can treat each cave complex as a separate one-shot. The town gives you Npc's you can flesh out for some continuity.

[nickl_2000]

How about Candlekeep Mysteries. That is a collection of one shots that you can tie together in an overall plot and it's all levels.

[Emongnome777]

You can use Adventure League adventures without using the restrictions built into AL gaming without a problem (I think so, never did it, though). May have to rebalance encounters, but I think those adventures have some suggestions on rebalancing based on the party level anyway. A bunch were given out for free (Season 1?) back in 2020 by WotC. They are also on dmsguild.com to buy.