Wizards of the Coast has published 15ish ready-to-play 5e adventures at this point. Most are $50, hardback, and sell themselves as all you need to play. I have attempted to run/ran a total of 3 (Lost Mines of Phandelver, Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Curse of Strahd), only having 1 truly good experience. I have a sour taste in my mouth due to a few bad experiences and I’ve learned many lessons along the way and I’ll share them here.
Lost Mines of Phandelver - my first true adventure I ever ran. It was fun, the group was new, I was new, everything was fresh, and as an adventure it is truly easy to run. Some things are a little convoluted and a certain baddie definitely needs a little buffing up to give the adventure a solid villain, but overall it was a wonderful experience. It’s a good, standard, little bit of everything D&D experience that you can very easily remix with your own content.
Curse of Strahd (pre-Ravenloft Guide) - Oh boy. Horror is a just as poorly defined as a genre as fantasy. The group, due to wanting tons of secrets and potential for inter-party conflict and drama, ended up with a overzealous 40k Paladin, the son of Dracula, a literal werewolf (found the class on Reddit), blood ritual creepfest sorcerer, and basically Trevor Belmont. Out of the gate I had already homebrewed Byrgenwerth into Barovia, completely rewrote Vallaki, and made it an unfocused and unrecognizable adventure. Strahd became a meme by the 2nd interaction with him, all the tension was gone and we wrapped up Barovia as quickly as possible and went back to good old gonzo kitchen sink fantasy. I truly believe this devolved to insanity because of a mismatch of expectations.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh - This game probably had the strongest start to any I’ve ever run. I ran the first 3 pretty by the book and everyone was having fun I didn’t set up the council very well, they didn’t much care for the politics that much, they were in the middle of a murder mystery that took them to Seaton (homebrew adventure), then COVID hit and we stopped playing for a long time then attempted to pick it up right where we left off. Everyone had forgotten what was going on, understandably, we had a small change of characters, so we then jumped ship literally and went to exploring the a jungle with a “only-the”highlights” style speed run of Tomb of Annihilation. The game puttered out about halfway through that due to scheduling.
Current Campaign - I started this campaign with the first chapter of the notorious Tyranny of Dragons. It started with a bang, it had a cool villain, and it was high octane adventuring. I absolutely loved it! I changed motivations to fit the setting, and wrapped up the conflict without it bleeding into 15 levels of questing. It was a great use of a module
Lessons learned
- Modules are wonderful as toolkits to steal chapters, pages, NPCs, quests.
- Modules can work really well if well written and everyone is on the same page going in.
- If you are going to run a module in it’s entirety, make sure you try and keep it in the same spirit as the designers intended and make alterations as you see fit as you go. Don’t rewrite on the front side, that’s way too much work.
- Make sure everyone is on the same page with each other and the DM. The Curse of Strahd party was truly a nightmare, pun intended.
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