The death curse creates urgency when the players may want to try dinosaur racing in Port Nyanzaru. I found the ingredients irresistible, but the adventure challenges DMs.
Rating Tomb of Annihilation presents more challenges. The DM needs to nudge players toward level-appropriate areas, but the Tarokka card reading hints at the means to Strahd’s defeat and provides clues that guide the adventure.
In Are the Authors of the Dungeon & Dragons Hardcover Adventures Blind to the Plight of DMs?, I described these shortcomings.Īs a recipe, Curse of Strahd doesn’t succeed completely. Based on ingredients alone, all the hardcovers rank with D&D’s greatest adventures. Curse of Strahd builds on Ravenloft, the adventure that might be D&D’s best ever. For example, Tomb of Annihilation builds on the dinosaurs and lost world of Isle of Dread, the overgrown jungle ruins of Dwellers of the Forbidden City, and the deathtrap dungeon in Tomb of Horrors. They pick the best from decades of D&D lore and then add new inspiration. The fifth-edition adventures boast consistently outstanding ingredients. To DMs accustomed to re-purposing and remixing the ingredients of adventures, recipes hardly matter, but most DMs running published adventures want help for running the scenario at the table, even if we sometimes change the recipe. The recipe includes the hooks, clues, events, goals, and obstacles that enable a DM to draw players through the adventure. The ingredients include the memorable characters and fantastic locations, the fearsome monsters and magical treasures that make the adventure. Great adventures tend to combine evocative ingredients with recipes that DMs can follow to foster fun and exciting tales. Modules serve as both the ingredients for fun adventures and recipes for dungeon masters to mix and serve at the gaming table. Ranking adventures led me to ponder what makes an adventure great. I found great adventures from D&D history, but I limited my list to 10. I decided to look past the early classics and find the best adventures published during the decades when modules fought for attention among a flood of releases. The years after 1985 produced more great adventures than those in the 2004 list, and the last 15 years yielded even more classics. See Why Did So Many Classic Adventures Come From 7 Years of D&D’s 45-Year History?. Just about everyone who played D&D played those early classics. During D&D’s early years, TSR published few adventures, and then kept those few modules on sale for a decade or more. But much of the high ratings come from the years of attention these adventures gained. Those early modules implied a setting that serves as a foundation for every D&D adventure and campaign. Why did early adventures dominate the list? Part of their stature comes from their influence. More than a third of the magazine’s picks came from 1985 and earlier-from just 7 years of the then 30-year history of D&D.Įxtraordinary adventures come from throughout the history of D&D, but overall adventure authors have learned from the past and improved the quality of published adventures. I saw few reasons to quibble with the choices, but the list favored early adventures. In 2004, Dungeon magazine published a list of the 30 greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventures.
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