Other adventures do this, like the Forge of Fury, but most are “here’s a map you’ll have to keep flipping back to” like the sprawling fortress level of The Sunless Citadel.Īnd while we’re at The Sunless Citadel, we’re going to loop back to 5e adventure design. It’s a good way to keep access to the map near the important information. (This map must have been printed as a poster-sized thing as we’re looking at a grid with about 25 divisions per inch.) However, I do like how they solve the solution for that adventure: closeups of the map appear in the adventure near relevant area descriptions. As a hardcover book, the maps are printed in the pages of the book, leaving us with Dead in Thay’s massive Doomvault taking up all of page 111 with crazy tiny type and grid. The paper booklet would have the printed adventure, the cover (which could be used as a DM screen) had the maps for the adventure easy to access. These adventures (the older ones) also were originally published with a detached cover. Back when AD&D was around, there weren’t any skill checks - almost all of the solutions had to come from the players, not the characters. When looking at a portal, for example, players could describe exactly what element they’re manipulating, or perhaps the illustration of an intricately detailed lock will give players a clue to solve the puzzle. The original version of Tomb of Horrors came with a twenty-page booklet of images for players to reference. I feel that the form factor of the book hampers the re-envisioning of these classic adventures. It’s part of D&D history, like Eric and the Gazebo or The Head of Vecna. Perhaps we all just make three or four level 18 heroes and see if we can get to the end. On initiative count 10, anyone still in is crushed against the roof and slain.”īut people love Tomb of Horrors.
Fifth Edition really goes out of its way to keep player characters from dying from a bad die roll or two, but in this update there are still plenty of insta-death: “…which is fatal, and all the characters in the … area are dead, with no saving throw, while any in the are slain unless they succeed on a DC 17 Constitution saving throw.” “Roll initiative. The version I played, back when D&D was Advanced, involved several instances where you had to make saving throws or your character would die.
Despite this edition’s claim that Tomb of Horrors was supposed to be a “thinking person’s adventure”, TSR’s Lawrence Shick said the traps in the adventure were intended “not to challenge the intruders but to kill them dead.” ( Wizards of the Coast from a few years back even wrote, “Gygax’s main purpose in creating Tomb of Horrors was to take his players down a peg.”) The design for this 1970s module doesn’t look like what design in the 2010s should be: the adventure is mainly linear and has a more adversarial DM versus player mindset than games in the past few decades have been. Take Tomb of Horrors, a classic adventure module.
To me, it makes more sense to use a collection of those adventures to show 5e Dungeon Masters how to structure a 5e adventure. One-off adventures have been limited to the organized play program run at game stores. Fifth Edition’s adventure offerings sold in stores have mainly been campaign-driven, from Tyranny of Dragons through Storm King’s Thunder. This is a book of nostalgia, bringing adventure modules from the early days of Dungeons & Dragons to “D&D Next” up to speed with current rules.Īside from the nostalgia factor, I’m not certain why this book exists the way it does. None of the adventures link to any other.
The book is a collection of classic Dungeons & Dragons adventures updated for Fifth Edition, arranged so one could just go through each in order with a group of characters, campaign-like.
I’m not sure what to make of this product, but let’s start.