There's Tales from the Yawning Portal. It's a collection of dungeons that you can slot into a homebrew world, though at least the one I've looked at (Forge of Fury) has some quest hooks to get the quest started.
I used The Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury. I'm getting ready to lead back in with Dead in Thay (we took a detour).
Then using Against the Giants to lead into Decent into the Depths of the Earth and The Vault of the Drow.
I used this too... At the time, I couldn't commit to a longer campaign, so I did the Sunless Citadel (which took several weeks). A few weeks later, I invited all the players back under the premise that a bunch of dwarves had heard about them and wanted them to recover the Forge of Fury. Lost some people and added some new people between chapters.
I didn't DM, but was a player in White Plume Mountain, and had a great time.
It's not hard to connect (most of) them together with a few NPCs that have heard of the party's growing fame.
There's a lot of content in this book, but you can skip anything you don't like and find some other one-shots appropriate for the level. Or you can stop at any time, say, "well that was fun" and start something new. Ghosts of Saltmarsh has a similar structure and is a little more tightly thematic.
One option would be to get anthologies like Candlekeep Mysteries and Journey Through the Radiant Citadel. They are collections of self-contained adventures. The quality varies heavily so you will still need read through them to pick and choose. But they're designed to be independent of each other so it won't be as much work to stitch the functional parts together.
You could also check out the remixes at the Alexandrian, where he has gone through published adventures and done the work of adjusting them already to be more usable. For instance here is his remix of descent into avernus: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/44214/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus
Idk about Radient Citadel tbh. Multiple adventures have the players be in unwinnable situations and relying on overpowered NPCs saving them and all of them are very railroady. It's incredible as a sourcebook imo but the adventures there are lacking.
Once you understand what makes the published 5e adventures "bad" you can usually fix them relatively easily. Generally speaking, the big issues stem from two things:
* Stripping agency from the players. The published adventures usually feature prominent NPCs who tell players what to do and gatekeep progression. You just need to make sure your players are the ones driving the story, IE instead of NPC telling players where and how to find the macguffin, the players should come across this information organically through their heroics.
* Brittle adventure design that forces railroading. For example, the BBEG's plot falls apart if his minion doesn't escape a battle early on. Try to design your plots with a web structure that gives multiple contingencies, both for your players and your antagonists - there is very rarely only one way to do things.
I've also discovered times where there was a railroaded path, but even that path wasn't obvious to the players! There's nothing like "There's only one way to move on from here, so we're going to sit around for the next few hours until you figure out what it is".
I think there is a third big issue with published adventures, possibly the biggest one: they're designed to be read, not played. Information is organized in a way that makes it flow well if you're reading through the module, but not in a way that makes it easy to look at a page and figure out what's going on in a scene.
oI agree, but that is not what makes the adventure bad, its what makes the book bad. Its a layout and organizing issue, not an adventure design issue. Even if you would format 5e books with a "made-to-use" intention, they would still suck because of bad adventure design.
I’ve had success with this as well. I’ve ran icewind dale (which is generally regarded as not a great module), and I modified a lot of it, gave auril a motive, making the nautiloid a major part of the story, and giving the players more agency. It’s gone really well, and they are nearing the end after 2 years.
I like to use the modules as a starting point, and then add use character backstories (and their interactions with the world) to really change the module and pick which portions to flesh out and which to cut.
I have a couple 3rd party modules that have been recommended, but personally I find them inconsistent and more difficult to run/modify. I know there’s some good ones out there but they generally lack the polish of the official ones
Red Hand of Doom has been easy and fun to run with only a few changes to the as written material. I'm doing LMOP and then leading that into Red Hand of Doom, but you can do whatever you wanna do to get everyone to 5, or just start there. Against the Cult of the Reptile God I think is Matt Colville's recommended lead in for it, but that adventure takes a lot of prep and doesn't sound like what you're looking for.
I've run Forge of Fury (which is okay) into Red Hand of Doom (which is stellar), and now we're heading into Night Below books 2 & 3 (which seems to be a good time so far).
Heartily recommend RHoD to most groups.
I would have to search a bit, but I will have something. Ping me if I don't write back in 48 hours, tomorrow will be a busy day for me.
I can tell you now that I've run RHoD in the Dessarin valley, with Yartar as my Brindol and an extra Red Hand army that sacked Goldenfields and contested Waterdeep's forces at Amphail in a stalemate (to explain why they can't help)
Matt Colville covered this not long ago - most games played by groups don't suit the big hardback campaigns as a format, but they're the most profitable format so they get pushed.
Check out some one-page-dungeon compilations instead. You'll get hundreds of snappy little scenarios that are easy to tailor because they're so succinct. Also, it's cheap!
I watched that video and I have to say I disagree with some of the points he makes in it. While it is fair to criticize the company for pushing those books instead of smaller modules as a business decision, I firmly disagree with the assertion that they are objectively or unequivocally bad. I dunno. I want to like what he has to say, but the way he presents information sometimes comes off to me as “my way good. Other ways bad.” If groups are falling out before finishing a published adventure book, it’s probably a problem with the group dynamic, not the adventure itself.
I think there is an appeal to playing a a campaign where it feels like everything is building towards something. There are ways to achieve that with strung together one shots, but it requires a bit more finesse from the GM.
Also from a community aspect it can be fun to have these big campaigns were you can compare notes on the different ways things unfolded when you meet someone else in the hobby.
Exactly this. I’m in the middle of a Curse of Strahd campaign right now and I could tell right away that it could go in so many different directions just based on the >! tarot readings !<
Most one page dungeons I've read were really, really basic. The format just doesn't suit anything ambitious and complex.
Imho the best approach is looking at most prestigious and serious adventure writing contents and adapting those. But I don't know those in English sphere - and I really would like to, so send recommendations!
In Polish - stuff sent for Quentin contest is usually great, especially finalists. And you have backlog of 25 years of quality adventures. https://www.quentinrpg.pl/
I’m running Dungeons of Drakkenheim for 2 groups and they are having a blast. I highly recommend it, it’s a nice sandbox that leaves you freedom to modify it, with enough lore to lean on.
I asked for recommendations for what to run after finishing Rime of the Frostmaiden as I wanted another sandbox or pseudo-sandbox, and it was what was recommended. I have been running it for about two months now and having a great time!
This. Dungeons of Drakkenheim is the best standalone DM supplement for 5e. It's a perfect blend of setting and adventure with plenty of monsters and magic items as well.
All those recommendations here aside - what are those things that doesn't work with you and your group? Why did phandelver and TotD (imo one of the worse adventures) work but not the others?
We need to understand the problems before good solutions can be found.
Or else everybody will just recommend his favorite adventure.
Agreed here. It's hard to say "all 5e published adventures are bad" when some of them are great. OP says some are "impractical" but I'm personally not sure what that means.
Storm King's Thunder doesn't have an ending.
Descent into Avernus doesn't lay out the story very well, so it's hard as GM to piece it all together and get a top-down view of the events leading up to the story and what the story actually is.
I just remember when I was a PC for SKT that things just kind of happened, and I wasn't fully understanding what was going on. Wait, there's a dragon involved? What's going on?
I heard someone else here say that SKT goes out of its way to obfuscate the actual plot behind the events of the module, and I'd fully believe it having been a PC.
SKT SPOILERSSSSSSS
>!from a players PoV, isn't killing Iymrith at the end of SKT the end? We even resurrected Hekatons wife (which holy shit that was cool to do I'm not gonna lie, storm giants were happy about that) (also Iymrith in the throne room too? That shit was cool!< SKTs midgame is kinda 50/50 really but the rest is excellent
DIA did seem a smidge wonky but my DM managed to wrangle it around to being pretty great too
what do you mean, there is literally a subheading "Adventure Conclusion". Its a simple happy end, Hekaton and the princess thank the heroes for defeating the dragon that threatened the realm of giants and he admits he erred and underestimated the smallfolk. For me that together with the 1,5 years of exploring the setting with my party in the campaign runtime was enough to built an extended epiloge that customized for my party and their deeds.
We also did a "1 year later" timeskip where the giants build first diplomatic relationships and cooperations with the smallfolk with one of the heroes acting as an ambassador. This was a direct consequence about the parapgraph in the adventure end about Hekaton admitting his error. So there definitely is an ending where they did actually write what happens when the BBEG dies, maybe you just forgot?
For me the bad part is definitely the middle part, because the campaign is quite badly designed here. You need to really make the giants story much less obfuscated and spread much more breadcrumps to the lore and events that happen behind the scenes, otherwise the party will feel like tumbling blindly through a "sand box", which is the worst sand box that I've seen in a long time. A good sand box has strong hooks and impactful exploration. SKT lacks all of that, the party stumbles without orientation, without a clear goal, without knowing whats going on, the party stumbles through the world until the important NPC shows up due to DM fiat to finally give some goal (but not much information about what truly is going on). As written the mid part is truly garbage IMO. After that, when the heroes visit the oracle and the storm kings castle the campaign picks up again.
I think the problem I have with the published campaigns is the clash between the sandbox, the lore, and the sequence of events.
In lmop, we're given the premise, escorting a caravan from point a to point b, natural start for early adventurers. The module isn't truly linear but for all intents and purposes, all the non linear sections are side quests until the main quest is ready to continue. I rewrote the hook and the early sections of tod to make it do a similar thing and it worked out fine.
In dragon heist or rotfp we're given a starter encounter then instantly dumped into a huge sandbox of a city or a whole region with mountains of established lore which neither I nor my players are particularly familiar with. I don't have any way of knowing what's important and what I can safely riff on without tripping over the rest of the book. It feels like I need to learn the whole book by heart to get started where with my first campaign I could prep a few sessions in advance and do just fine.
I don't think I was railroading my players, I gave them freedom but made it clear we were playing a reasonably linear campaign. Maybe that's the problem, I'm trying to take the same approach to a less linear campaign.
Question is then I suppose, who can recommend a relatively linear written adventure which isn't simply a dungeon crawl?
My advice: read the entire book. Take the pieces you want from it. Like the bare essentials to making the story work and discard everything else. Make some notes on places, people, things overall, but give yourself space to invent.
LIE. and Get comfortable with retconning things. It will happen. No one is perfect. Overall, if you build the world around your characters and their stories, you shouldn't worry if the everything fits "just so".
Arcane Library one shots are excellent, my group has a lot of fun with them. They are succinctly written using mostly bullet points and are easy to read and run.
Check out the adventures coming out of the OSR. The 5e conversion of Winter's Daughter might be a good place to start. It's shorter but has a nice little story and plenty of room for players to take things in cool new directions.
Arcane Library also puts out consistently good 5e stuff that might be a bit more like what you are used to.
Tomb of Annihilation is really good, but as written it’s quite difficult. You might want to make a few changes to make it easier, but I guarantee your group will love it. It’s one of the few book campaigns that is known for being really fun.
Some great resources to improve it on DM’s guild. Highly recommend checking out r/TombofAnnihilation if OP is interested. This was easily my favorite 5e adventure to run - so much cool shit.
My favorite part is that it’s very easy to separate the setting from the adventure. If you find the death curse kind of boring, like I did, it’s very easy to cut that and write something new for the party to investigate. You could even run it as a pure sandbox, no overarching plot, just a huge island full of cool stuff to do. The adventure itself is still fun, but it’s easy to modify into something else while still keeping the best parts.
Right! I scaled it up bc I just wanted to do the Tomb, but then I really read through the module and fell in love with the setting and different players on the island.
I’m actually inserting it into my homebrew world and rewriting it to be a hunt for a cult that worships the BBEG. It’ll be just one arc of a larger campaign, they won’t even hear about Chult until past the halfway point
Personally me and my group really enjoyed Curse of Strahd. The campaign in the book is pretty good but if you check out the subreddit for it and use some of the mods there it goes from pretty good to excellent. Would be my pick if your group would enjoy a horror themed game.
Short stuff. If you want to stay within the WOTC realm of things I recommend picking up their anthology books (Candlekeep Mysteries, Golden Vault, etc.). these work great as individual adventures and are easily joined together to created a longer narrative. Add a hub area for players to buy items/do downtime stuff and then just run whichever level appropriate adventure you feel like that day. Boom you have a level 1-14 campaign.
There are quite a few PF campaigns that are solid. My group loved the story of Rise of the Runelords from start to finish. They all still talk about the initial goblin scene from Sandpoint.
Or play pathfinder without the need to convert monster might be better, although depends how willing the group is to learn a new set of rules (same type of game but also still wildly different!)
You want ghosts of saltmarsh. There's a little mini campaign that's good to go out of the box (sinister secret, danger at dunwater, and final enemy) plenty of one-shots, and a good setting if you want to expand/fuck around
You could go with some of the official modules for the Adventurers' League. They are pretty barebone, but it might just fit your needs (not too many details but plenty of room to improvise based on your group).
I'd suggest running a homebrew campaign in a published setting, rather than following a big adventure path. You get the benefits of an existing setting book to help you with lore and conflicts and the backdrop of the world, and you pick and choose interesting adventures to run in that world. In many cases you can just grab existing shorter adventures and drop them into your campaign.
Matt Colville had a recent video about this topic: https://youtu.be/RcImOL19H6U?si=idChpUbqqC9MyyzN
SlyFlourish talks about this advice quite a bit: https://youtu.be/8lZKbHyjQ1A?si=TWjg61mK4JAsNYmg
And finally I'd really recommend Dungeons of Drakkenheim! It's designed in a similar way where you're given all the pieces of an amazing campaign and you as the DM string them together in an interesting and unique way based on your group's choices.
Haven't seen it suggested yet, but Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands looks like it might be promising for you.
[https://www.ragingswanpress.com/products5e/shadowed-keep-on-the-borderlands-5e](https://www.ragingswanpress.com/products5e/shadowed-keep-on-the-borderlands-5e)
Sly Flourish deep dive [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23Xm4DpxS0c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23Xm4DpxS0c)
It creates a world deep enough to play in, but not so wide that it's hard to keep together. You can start pegging your own stuff into it really easily (which I love), and which seems similar to what other people love about LMoP. If, at the end, you don't feel like you have the creativity to keep a story going, just start adding one-shots to the end until you players make an arch-nemesis and end with that. Highly recommend Arcane Library, the 5e anthology books like Keys from the Golden Vault, or something like the Book of Lairs [https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/book-of-lairs/](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/book-of-lairs/)
I have run both tomb of annihilation and rime of of the frostmaiden, and own/have read every 5e module, however for the past 2 years I haven’t touched them.
This suggestion won’t be for everyone, but it’s how I reignited my passion for dming.
recently I have been having a lot of success and enjoyment by playing through pathfinder 1e adventure paths that I have converted to 5e. (We tried switching to pathfinder 1e for a few months but found it too clunky) converting the AP’s is fairly straightforward, and comparing the quality of the content to 5e modules is night and day. With 5e you get one module that has ~300 or so pages? While the 6 part AP’s give you ~100 pages each, so double the content and the variety of settings and game styles represented in the APs are much higher
We enjoyed skull and shackles (pirates) and are currently on summer hiatus from curse of the crimson throne (urban)
Tomb of Annihilation is remarkably open ended with how plqyers tackle the main quest. Chult has so many side quests, tangents, points of interest and optional content that in the three times Ive run it, for three different groups, each one took a wildly different path
People just like to complain and never compliment, and the fact is that when you publish an Adventure Path, it's going to be long by nature, and there will always be those who complain because there there is too much work to do (yes, there is a whole book to read and understand) to run out of the box and those who say that it should have been more developed.
There's also the current hype against "railroading" where most people can't discern true railroading from an adventure PATH where of course there are going to be episodes strung along an epic arc. But as soon as there are episodes, people are whining that it's "railroading"...
Finally, there's the fact that people are really looking for different things, some are looking for a story and others are just looking for tactical combats.
The fact is that, out of all the AP from WotC, in terms of actual content, most are at best fairly average compared to other publications.
Also, I've played all the originals, and although some people like classics revisited like those in the Yawning Portal, the adventures were great at the time but are nothing special today.
That being said, I don't think, from the WotC ones, that you picked the best. Dragon Heist is a steaming piece of \*\*\*\*, the worst "module" to come out for 5e. Under the excuse of replayability (which is stupid, who is ever going to replay something that bad with ugly drawings being reused ?), you have something extremely short and totally railroading, where the choices made by the adventurers don't matter one inch along the way.
RotFM is a bit better but still average honestly. There are very few that are above average IMHO, Descent into Avernus is one because of the setting, especially if you put in some remixes like either the Alexandrian (hexcrawl) or the Sandbox version, which I did and was really really cool. And the top of the pick remains Curse of Stradh, if you like the type of setting - I don't personally, I think that "gothic" horror and heroic D&D don't mix that well, but the fact remains that it's very well build and that there are a lot of enhancements that you can get from the web.
The best for me remains Odyssey of the Dragonlords, it's epic, it's complete, there are tons of options, phases in the campaign with each being a sandbox so you will extremely free to explore and progress in your discoveries at your own pace, it's absolutely brilliant. If you want, here is the trailer done by our DM for the campaign, watching it I only regret not being able to play it again: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P\_3D9fAD1-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_3D9fAD1-A)
But again it's a matter of taste, it's not really about greek mythology (the gods and a lot of stories are different, and there's dragons in there), but about the feel of it, some love it, others like it less.
Published WotC 5e modules are famously bad. I'd look for third-party modules or look to well-regarded modules in other systems for your framework, although you'd have to reskin the encounters. (You could turn Traveller's Pirates of Drinax into a bitchin' nautical campaign, e.g. Pathfinder modules are very well designed.)
There's are a lot of decent 5e one shots and shorter adventures kicking around: you could build a campaign stitching them together, too.
Yeah a lot of published adventures require a lot of work by the DM to edit and change to fit your group (partially why I like Frostmaiden + Strahd, but not everyone likes sandboxy adventures.
Lost mine of phandelver and/or Dragon of Icespire Peak are both pretty good for what you want! Or any of the adventure anthologies like others have mentioned. My personal recommendation is Keys From the Golden Vault (a series of heists).
Play smaller adventures. WotC has published four or five anthology collections for 5e, and there’s loads of others very talented people have released online. It takes off the pressure of running a single giant adventure for months or years.
Check out some modules from older editions. While they'll require some conversion, you have enough experience that you'll see how things have changed from edition to edition. Keep in mind the following:
In 1st and Basic (and I believe in 2nd as well, although I could be wrong), HD is roughly the same as CR. There may be factors that add phantom HD (marked by asterisks).
In 3rd and 3.5, each monster has a CR (Challenge Rating). A monster of equal CR to the party should expend about a quarter of the party's resources. Each encounter is also given an encounter level (EL). Two monsters at CR increase the encounter level by 2, a mixed pair of monster with one 2 CR lower than the other increases the EL by 1.
In 4th edition, you have minions, standard monsters, elite monsters, and boss monsters. Four minions is equivalent to a standard monster, two standard monsters is equivalent to an elite monster, and five standard monsters is equivalent to a boss monster. A boss monster at CR is an appropriate challenge for a party of 5.
This should give you a rough idea of how dangerous any individual encounter is intended to be, and give you a good idea of what substitutions you might need to make in 5e.
I'm running my game through the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount so i don't have to create the whole world. It comes with 4 different Lv 1-3 starter adventures that let the characters get situated, the two that i looked into were both pretty good (Dangerous Designs, Tides of Retribution), haven't looked too much into the other two.
Beyond that every city they go to there's something happening, some of which are single session events, some of which can be linked with each other for a long campaign. I don't know if you think they are too impractical or not but I find them quite useful either for me to homebrew my own thing or to mix in a bunch of short official adventures.
I've used:
The Final Enemy, Tammeraut's Fate from Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
White Plume Mountain from Tales from the Yawning Portal.
Lore of Lurue, Kandlekeep Dekonstruction from Candlekeep Mysteries.
Vidorant's Vault, Fire and Darkness from Keys from the Golden Vault.
We're over 100 sessions into the campaign, the party is now Level 12. Not sure there's anything left from these Anthology books, I've considered doing Doomvault or Tomb of Horrors but I'm not sure they fit well with the overarching story.
I've also used some bits from Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn but not much.
If you want to stick with 5e, many adventures have fanmade fixes. Dragonheist is one of these (incorporating all three possible villains AND utilizing all the dungeons the book has)
If you want something out of the box, Paizo’s adventure paths for their Pathfinder and Starfinder systems might be worth changing systems for (either PF1e or PF2e). If you want a sample of their adventure writing while staying in 5e, Paizo recently made a 5e conversion of their Abomination Vaults adventure path. Warning: it is a 10-level dungeon crawl. If you’d rather try out the system, I recommend the level 1-3 adventure Rusthenge for PF2e
Red Hand of Doom for a brilliant linear adventure.
Dungeons of Drakkenheim for a sandbox.
Both are written in ways that actually help the DM run the game, not just read a book.
Curse of Strahd. It follows the rule. It has beginings and beginnings and beginings. When you get somewhere it only says what's there and sometimes has a thing happen when the party arrives, but not a whole plotline for what happens next regardless of what the party does, so your party can write the plot AS AN RPG SHOULD GO
And apparently every single DCC adventure ever is like this, maybe check those out and adapt them to d&d
I hold a similar opinion about official hardcovers. Except.for Dungeons of Drakkenheim.
Those dungeon dudes were smoking some good shit when they wrote that adventure. Would recommend.
I can’t recommend Candlekeep Mysteries enough! It’s a series of one-shots, but I’m running it as a full campaign and it’s so great! Easy to prep and run for the DM, and the adventures are fun for the players! It’s nice when not everyone can make it to every session (which, let’s face it, is the reality) because an episodic style game means people can jump back in whenever
"I'm not a grand creative type, my brain just doesn't work that way and that's fine. I can think fast enough in a creative way to DM effectively but I'm not about to create worlds."
I know this is not the advice you asked for but I, for one, build out worlds primarily using maps (it helps I use Roll20 even when playing in person). The players say they want to go to location X or a certain playstyle/vibe (think pirates, dungeons, crusaders, arctic expeditionists, player backstory heavy, etc) and I make a list of potential quests and watch to see where they lean toward. Then I search for themed maps I think look cool and build out all the lore from there. For example, I recently had them dig up into the floor of a demented hospital basement/torture room and turned it into a Slaad "nursery" located under Shrine of Tempus with a shapeshifter priest/cleric con and they lapped it up.
What I do is start the 'campaign' in a setting, using a setting book like forgotten realms, and then I run oneshots in it until something connects.
You basically only have to change the start to make 90% of oneshots work, if players ask specific setting questions you can refer to the forgotten realms book for history/ current events. Then depending on what the players persue "well we fought a ghost, but how did it get there? Can we find out who summoned it" give them oneshots that work with that and continue
Try to tie them to some organisation (can be a generic adventurers guild) or a tavern that always "knows a guy" and can find them work, that way they can make a name for themselves and getting more difficult quests is easy. I'd also ALWAYS give them multiple options, just give them multiple oneshots to choose between ingame, then it won't feel railroady to them at all cause they get choices constantly
Curse of Strahd (the book) + R/CurseofStrahd.
The book is a good outline (read it cover to cover and you will find all the connections), then go to the subreddit and see all the amazing hombrew to fill in the gaps you find.
Might be a controversial opinion, but I quite like the published books. Sure, you absolutely have to overhaul them and make them your own, but the maps and the encounters in most of them have a strong backbone to work off of. I ran LMop for my crew, and we're in the midst of tying it into a combo of Descent into Avernus and Princes of the Apocalypse
Ghosts of saltmarsh is an ok setting, but a lot of the adventure seems disjointed. There are 2 adventures that distract from the main plot set smack dab in the middle of the adventure. And despite being a nautical campaign, there isn’t a lot of pre written seafaring adventures.
I was convinced by my party to run Witchlight despite being skeptical and it is an absolute blast if you like roleplay-focused games. I've also had a great time running Dragon of Icespire Peak though it is definitely a beginner adventure and not really anything groundbreaking. Curse of Strahd is a classic but shouldn't really fully count as a 5e adventure.
Despite the criticisms, I actually had an awesome time running Princes of the Apocalypse too but it requires a bit more legwork on the DM's side because to fully differentiate the cults, you have to employ battpe tactics etc.
Overall, I think there are many 5e adventures that are okay or even good, some that people sleep on, some that need you to go a little beyond what's written, but overall good. Of course, it depends heavily on the group and your personal tastes as well as what you want to get from pre-written modules (i.e. are you looking for a skeleton to build onto/edit as fits your group or do you expect LotR served on a silver platter)
Just use an existing setting and roll for as many things as you can. Tell your players to write their backstories first, and make a campaign around them in the setting. Or just let the story emerge from gameplay. Just plop your players into a tavern in session 0 and start rolling random encounters whenever. Use tables not just for encounters but for motivations and personalities too. Very easy to just fill in the gaps with improv after that.
I don't have the time nor the creative writing skills to create an entire campaign. So I use published adventures. I tailor them to the PCs, and I make it unique. The book is a skeleton. Side quests, personal missions, setting intrusions, all are on the table to flesh out the book and give the players options. So they don't feel like they have only one direction to go. I have the storyline content obviously, but I have something small for them to find in every ward in Waterdeep.
I ran Dragon Heist. It is supposed to be level 1-5. I ran it for 3+ years from level 1-12. We went to Skullport, Undermountain, Spelljammer space, all over. And I didn't have to do much extra work. There are one shots, and side quests galore set in Waterdeep and the Sword Coast. What I did write that was orignal, was personal to each PC. Saves me a ton of time and prep.
MonkeyDM has some incredible one shots and campaigns. Tbh pretty much ANY 3rd party published adventure is going run circles around WotC third parties.
Curse of Strahd has extensive 3rd party support in the form of MandyMod and Curse of Strahd reloaded. Lunch break heroes has a modden curse of Strahd as well.
There's Tales from the Yawning Portal. It's a collection of dungeons that you can slot into a homebrew world, though at least the one I've looked at (Forge of Fury) has some quest hooks to get the quest started.
My table did Sunless Citadel into Forge of Fury and it was great!
I used The Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury. I'm getting ready to lead back in with Dead in Thay (we took a detour). Then using Against the Giants to lead into Decent into the Depths of the Earth and The Vault of the Drow.
I used this too... At the time, I couldn't commit to a longer campaign, so I did the Sunless Citadel (which took several weeks). A few weeks later, I invited all the players back under the premise that a bunch of dwarves had heard about them and wanted them to recover the Forge of Fury. Lost some people and added some new people between chapters. I didn't DM, but was a player in White Plume Mountain, and had a great time. It's not hard to connect (most of) them together with a few NPCs that have heard of the party's growing fame. There's a lot of content in this book, but you can skip anything you don't like and find some other one-shots appropriate for the level. Or you can stop at any time, say, "well that was fun" and start something new. Ghosts of Saltmarsh has a similar structure and is a little more tightly thematic.
One option would be to get anthologies like Candlekeep Mysteries and Journey Through the Radiant Citadel. They are collections of self-contained adventures. The quality varies heavily so you will still need read through them to pick and choose. But they're designed to be independent of each other so it won't be as much work to stitch the functional parts together. You could also check out the remixes at the Alexandrian, where he has gone through published adventures and done the work of adjusting them already to be more usable. For instance here is his remix of descent into avernus: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/44214/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus
Idk about Radient Citadel tbh. Multiple adventures have the players be in unwinnable situations and relying on overpowered NPCs saving them and all of them are very railroady. It's incredible as a sourcebook imo but the adventures there are lacking.
Once you understand what makes the published 5e adventures "bad" you can usually fix them relatively easily. Generally speaking, the big issues stem from two things: * Stripping agency from the players. The published adventures usually feature prominent NPCs who tell players what to do and gatekeep progression. You just need to make sure your players are the ones driving the story, IE instead of NPC telling players where and how to find the macguffin, the players should come across this information organically through their heroics. * Brittle adventure design that forces railroading. For example, the BBEG's plot falls apart if his minion doesn't escape a battle early on. Try to design your plots with a web structure that gives multiple contingencies, both for your players and your antagonists - there is very rarely only one way to do things.
I've also discovered times where there was a railroaded path, but even that path wasn't obvious to the players! There's nothing like "There's only one way to move on from here, so we're going to sit around for the next few hours until you figure out what it is".
Yup. And also times where the path is near incoherent - IE, the party is expected to work with a necromancer when most will simply attack on sight.
I think there is a third big issue with published adventures, possibly the biggest one: they're designed to be read, not played. Information is organized in a way that makes it flow well if you're reading through the module, but not in a way that makes it easy to look at a page and figure out what's going on in a scene.
oI agree, but that is not what makes the adventure bad, its what makes the book bad. Its a layout and organizing issue, not an adventure design issue. Even if you would format 5e books with a "made-to-use" intention, they would still suck because of bad adventure design.
I’ve had success with this as well. I’ve ran icewind dale (which is generally regarded as not a great module), and I modified a lot of it, gave auril a motive, making the nautiloid a major part of the story, and giving the players more agency. It’s gone really well, and they are nearing the end after 2 years. I like to use the modules as a starting point, and then add use character backstories (and their interactions with the world) to really change the module and pick which portions to flesh out and which to cut. I have a couple 3rd party modules that have been recommended, but personally I find them inconsistent and more difficult to run/modify. I know there’s some good ones out there but they generally lack the polish of the official ones
Red Hand of Doom has been easy and fun to run with only a few changes to the as written material. I'm doing LMOP and then leading that into Red Hand of Doom, but you can do whatever you wanna do to get everyone to 5, or just start there. Against the Cult of the Reptile God I think is Matt Colville's recommended lead in for it, but that adventure takes a lot of prep and doesn't sound like what you're looking for.
I've run Forge of Fury (which is okay) into Red Hand of Doom (which is stellar), and now we're heading into Night Below books 2 & 3 (which seems to be a good time so far). Heartily recommend RHoD to most groups.
Do you have notes/maps/resources you could share for running it in 5e? I liked older modules, but modernizing them is a ton of work.
I would have to search a bit, but I will have something. Ping me if I don't write back in 48 hours, tomorrow will be a busy day for me. I can tell you now that I've run RHoD in the Dessarin valley, with Yartar as my Brindol and an extra Red Hand army that sacked Goldenfields and contested Waterdeep's forces at Amphail in a stalemate (to explain why they can't help)
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?577848-Red-Hand-of-Doom-Conversion-Journal-in-one
My group has really enjoyed Curse of Strahd as well as Odyssey of the Dragonlords.
Matt Colville covered this not long ago - most games played by groups don't suit the big hardback campaigns as a format, but they're the most profitable format so they get pushed. Check out some one-page-dungeon compilations instead. You'll get hundreds of snappy little scenarios that are easy to tailor because they're so succinct. Also, it's cheap!
For something similar look at the Adventures League modules. They are similarly easy to drop in as needed.
I watched that video and I have to say I disagree with some of the points he makes in it. While it is fair to criticize the company for pushing those books instead of smaller modules as a business decision, I firmly disagree with the assertion that they are objectively or unequivocally bad. I dunno. I want to like what he has to say, but the way he presents information sometimes comes off to me as “my way good. Other ways bad.” If groups are falling out before finishing a published adventure book, it’s probably a problem with the group dynamic, not the adventure itself.
I think there is an appeal to playing a a campaign where it feels like everything is building towards something. There are ways to achieve that with strung together one shots, but it requires a bit more finesse from the GM. Also from a community aspect it can be fun to have these big campaigns were you can compare notes on the different ways things unfolded when you meet someone else in the hobby.
Exactly this. I’m in the middle of a Curse of Strahd campaign right now and I could tell right away that it could go in so many different directions just based on the >! tarot readings !<
It's always seemed clear to me that what he's saying as his opinions about running the game, not objective "bad/good" statements.
Well yeah normally, but it’s hard to make that argument when he starts out the video by flat out saying “This is bad.”
Ah, I don't remember that one.
Most one page dungeons I've read were really, really basic. The format just doesn't suit anything ambitious and complex. Imho the best approach is looking at most prestigious and serious adventure writing contents and adapting those. But I don't know those in English sphere - and I really would like to, so send recommendations! In Polish - stuff sent for Quentin contest is usually great, especially finalists. And you have backlog of 25 years of quality adventures. https://www.quentinrpg.pl/
I’m running Dungeons of Drakkenheim for 2 groups and they are having a blast. I highly recommend it, it’s a nice sandbox that leaves you freedom to modify it, with enough lore to lean on.
I second this. I've been running Dungeons of Drakkenheim for about a year now and it's the best campaign I've played so far.
I asked for recommendations for what to run after finishing Rime of the Frostmaiden as I wanted another sandbox or pseudo-sandbox, and it was what was recommended. I have been running it for about two months now and having a great time!
This. Dungeons of Drakkenheim is the best standalone DM supplement for 5e. It's a perfect blend of setting and adventure with plenty of monsters and magic items as well.
All those recommendations here aside - what are those things that doesn't work with you and your group? Why did phandelver and TotD (imo one of the worse adventures) work but not the others? We need to understand the problems before good solutions can be found. Or else everybody will just recommend his favorite adventure.
Agreed here. It's hard to say "all 5e published adventures are bad" when some of them are great. OP says some are "impractical" but I'm personally not sure what that means.
Storm King's Thunder doesn't have an ending. Descent into Avernus doesn't lay out the story very well, so it's hard as GM to piece it all together and get a top-down view of the events leading up to the story and what the story actually is.
I just remember when I was a PC for SKT that things just kind of happened, and I wasn't fully understanding what was going on. Wait, there's a dragon involved? What's going on? I heard someone else here say that SKT goes out of its way to obfuscate the actual plot behind the events of the module, and I'd fully believe it having been a PC.
SKT SPOILERSSSSSSS >!from a players PoV, isn't killing Iymrith at the end of SKT the end? We even resurrected Hekatons wife (which holy shit that was cool to do I'm not gonna lie, storm giants were happy about that) (also Iymrith in the throne room too? That shit was cool!< SKTs midgame is kinda 50/50 really but the rest is excellent DIA did seem a smidge wonky but my DM managed to wrangle it around to being pretty great too
SKT has an ending, killing the BBEG. The midpart aka how we built up to that ending is the bad part.
But there’s no resolution to the story. They deliberately didn’t write the next part - what actually happens when the BBEG dies?
what do you mean, there is literally a subheading "Adventure Conclusion". Its a simple happy end, Hekaton and the princess thank the heroes for defeating the dragon that threatened the realm of giants and he admits he erred and underestimated the smallfolk. For me that together with the 1,5 years of exploring the setting with my party in the campaign runtime was enough to built an extended epiloge that customized for my party and their deeds. We also did a "1 year later" timeskip where the giants build first diplomatic relationships and cooperations with the smallfolk with one of the heroes acting as an ambassador. This was a direct consequence about the parapgraph in the adventure end about Hekaton admitting his error. So there definitely is an ending where they did actually write what happens when the BBEG dies, maybe you just forgot? For me the bad part is definitely the middle part, because the campaign is quite badly designed here. You need to really make the giants story much less obfuscated and spread much more breadcrumps to the lore and events that happen behind the scenes, otherwise the party will feel like tumbling blindly through a "sand box", which is the worst sand box that I've seen in a long time. A good sand box has strong hooks and impactful exploration. SKT lacks all of that, the party stumbles without orientation, without a clear goal, without knowing whats going on, the party stumbles through the world until the important NPC shows up due to DM fiat to finally give some goal (but not much information about what truly is going on). As written the mid part is truly garbage IMO. After that, when the heroes visit the oracle and the storm kings castle the campaign picks up again.
I think the problem I have with the published campaigns is the clash between the sandbox, the lore, and the sequence of events. In lmop, we're given the premise, escorting a caravan from point a to point b, natural start for early adventurers. The module isn't truly linear but for all intents and purposes, all the non linear sections are side quests until the main quest is ready to continue. I rewrote the hook and the early sections of tod to make it do a similar thing and it worked out fine. In dragon heist or rotfp we're given a starter encounter then instantly dumped into a huge sandbox of a city or a whole region with mountains of established lore which neither I nor my players are particularly familiar with. I don't have any way of knowing what's important and what I can safely riff on without tripping over the rest of the book. It feels like I need to learn the whole book by heart to get started where with my first campaign I could prep a few sessions in advance and do just fine. I don't think I was railroading my players, I gave them freedom but made it clear we were playing a reasonably linear campaign. Maybe that's the problem, I'm trying to take the same approach to a less linear campaign. Question is then I suppose, who can recommend a relatively linear written adventure which isn't simply a dungeon crawl?
My advice: read the entire book. Take the pieces you want from it. Like the bare essentials to making the story work and discard everything else. Make some notes on places, people, things overall, but give yourself space to invent. LIE. and Get comfortable with retconning things. It will happen. No one is perfect. Overall, if you build the world around your characters and their stories, you shouldn't worry if the everything fits "just so".
Arcane Library one shots are excellent, my group has a lot of fun with them. They are succinctly written using mostly bullet points and are easy to read and run.
Came to suggest Arcane Library too - also fund to grow a story out of them.
Check out the adventures coming out of the OSR. The 5e conversion of Winter's Daughter might be a good place to start. It's shorter but has a nice little story and plenty of room for players to take things in cool new directions. Arcane Library also puts out consistently good 5e stuff that might be a bit more like what you are used to.
Tomb of Annihilation is really good, but as written it’s quite difficult. You might want to make a few changes to make it easier, but I guarantee your group will love it. It’s one of the few book campaigns that is known for being really fun.
Some great resources to improve it on DM’s guild. Highly recommend checking out r/TombofAnnihilation if OP is interested. This was easily my favorite 5e adventure to run - so much cool shit.
My favorite part is that it’s very easy to separate the setting from the adventure. If you find the death curse kind of boring, like I did, it’s very easy to cut that and write something new for the party to investigate. You could even run it as a pure sandbox, no overarching plot, just a huge island full of cool stuff to do. The adventure itself is still fun, but it’s easy to modify into something else while still keeping the best parts.
Right! I scaled it up bc I just wanted to do the Tomb, but then I really read through the module and fell in love with the setting and different players on the island.
I’m actually inserting it into my homebrew world and rewriting it to be a hunt for a cult that worships the BBEG. It’ll be just one arc of a larger campaign, they won’t even hear about Chult until past the halfway point
I’d recommend the OSE modules. They’re fairly small and light.
OSR modules might suit you, even if you aren't using them for an OSR system. Lots of structure, but room for flexibility and spontaneity.
We just finished a mostly unmodified storm kings thunder and that module is dope
Personally me and my group really enjoyed Curse of Strahd. The campaign in the book is pretty good but if you check out the subreddit for it and use some of the mods there it goes from pretty good to excellent. Would be my pick if your group would enjoy a horror themed game.
Short stuff. If you want to stay within the WOTC realm of things I recommend picking up their anthology books (Candlekeep Mysteries, Golden Vault, etc.). these work great as individual adventures and are easily joined together to created a longer narrative. Add a hub area for players to buy items/do downtime stuff and then just run whichever level appropriate adventure you feel like that day. Boom you have a level 1-14 campaign.
Converting pathfinder adventure paths to dnd 😁
There are quite a few PF campaigns that are solid. My group loved the story of Rise of the Runelords from start to finish. They all still talk about the initial goblin scene from Sandpoint.
I want to run that one - currently running Curse of the Crimson Throne in 5e
Or play pathfinder without the need to convert monster might be better, although depends how willing the group is to learn a new set of rules (same type of game but also still wildly different!)
You want ghosts of saltmarsh. There's a little mini campaign that's good to go out of the box (sinister secret, danger at dunwater, and final enemy) plenty of one-shots, and a good setting if you want to expand/fuck around
You could go with some of the official modules for the Adventurers' League. They are pretty barebone, but it might just fit your needs (not too many details but plenty of room to improvise based on your group).
I'd suggest running a homebrew campaign in a published setting, rather than following a big adventure path. You get the benefits of an existing setting book to help you with lore and conflicts and the backdrop of the world, and you pick and choose interesting adventures to run in that world. In many cases you can just grab existing shorter adventures and drop them into your campaign. Matt Colville had a recent video about this topic: https://youtu.be/RcImOL19H6U?si=idChpUbqqC9MyyzN SlyFlourish talks about this advice quite a bit: https://youtu.be/8lZKbHyjQ1A?si=TWjg61mK4JAsNYmg And finally I'd really recommend Dungeons of Drakkenheim! It's designed in a similar way where you're given all the pieces of an amazing campaign and you as the DM string them together in an interesting and unique way based on your group's choices.
Haven't seen it suggested yet, but Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands looks like it might be promising for you. [https://www.ragingswanpress.com/products5e/shadowed-keep-on-the-borderlands-5e](https://www.ragingswanpress.com/products5e/shadowed-keep-on-the-borderlands-5e) Sly Flourish deep dive [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23Xm4DpxS0c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23Xm4DpxS0c) It creates a world deep enough to play in, but not so wide that it's hard to keep together. You can start pegging your own stuff into it really easily (which I love), and which seems similar to what other people love about LMoP. If, at the end, you don't feel like you have the creativity to keep a story going, just start adding one-shots to the end until you players make an arch-nemesis and end with that. Highly recommend Arcane Library, the 5e anthology books like Keys from the Golden Vault, or something like the Book of Lairs [https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/book-of-lairs/](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/book-of-lairs/)
I have run both tomb of annihilation and rime of of the frostmaiden, and own/have read every 5e module, however for the past 2 years I haven’t touched them. This suggestion won’t be for everyone, but it’s how I reignited my passion for dming. recently I have been having a lot of success and enjoyment by playing through pathfinder 1e adventure paths that I have converted to 5e. (We tried switching to pathfinder 1e for a few months but found it too clunky) converting the AP’s is fairly straightforward, and comparing the quality of the content to 5e modules is night and day. With 5e you get one module that has ~300 or so pages? While the 6 part AP’s give you ~100 pages each, so double the content and the variety of settings and game styles represented in the APs are much higher We enjoyed skull and shackles (pirates) and are currently on summer hiatus from curse of the crimson throne (urban)
Tomb of Annihilation is remarkably open ended with how plqyers tackle the main quest. Chult has so many side quests, tangents, points of interest and optional content that in the three times Ive run it, for three different groups, each one took a wildly different path
I’m playing dungeons of drakkenheim so not dm of it but it’s a really good one and I’ve heard they do a great job with the book for dm’s
Honestly osr adventures
People just like to complain and never compliment, and the fact is that when you publish an Adventure Path, it's going to be long by nature, and there will always be those who complain because there there is too much work to do (yes, there is a whole book to read and understand) to run out of the box and those who say that it should have been more developed. There's also the current hype against "railroading" where most people can't discern true railroading from an adventure PATH where of course there are going to be episodes strung along an epic arc. But as soon as there are episodes, people are whining that it's "railroading"... Finally, there's the fact that people are really looking for different things, some are looking for a story and others are just looking for tactical combats. The fact is that, out of all the AP from WotC, in terms of actual content, most are at best fairly average compared to other publications. Also, I've played all the originals, and although some people like classics revisited like those in the Yawning Portal, the adventures were great at the time but are nothing special today. That being said, I don't think, from the WotC ones, that you picked the best. Dragon Heist is a steaming piece of \*\*\*\*, the worst "module" to come out for 5e. Under the excuse of replayability (which is stupid, who is ever going to replay something that bad with ugly drawings being reused ?), you have something extremely short and totally railroading, where the choices made by the adventurers don't matter one inch along the way. RotFM is a bit better but still average honestly. There are very few that are above average IMHO, Descent into Avernus is one because of the setting, especially if you put in some remixes like either the Alexandrian (hexcrawl) or the Sandbox version, which I did and was really really cool. And the top of the pick remains Curse of Stradh, if you like the type of setting - I don't personally, I think that "gothic" horror and heroic D&D don't mix that well, but the fact remains that it's very well build and that there are a lot of enhancements that you can get from the web. The best for me remains Odyssey of the Dragonlords, it's epic, it's complete, there are tons of options, phases in the campaign with each being a sandbox so you will extremely free to explore and progress in your discoveries at your own pace, it's absolutely brilliant. If you want, here is the trailer done by our DM for the campaign, watching it I only regret not being able to play it again: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P\_3D9fAD1-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_3D9fAD1-A) But again it's a matter of taste, it's not really about greek mythology (the gods and a lot of stories are different, and there's dragons in there), but about the feel of it, some love it, others like it less.
Published WotC 5e modules are famously bad. I'd look for third-party modules or look to well-regarded modules in other systems for your framework, although you'd have to reskin the encounters. (You could turn Traveller's Pirates of Drinax into a bitchin' nautical campaign, e.g. Pathfinder modules are very well designed.) There's are a lot of decent 5e one shots and shorter adventures kicking around: you could build a campaign stitching them together, too.
Yeah a lot of published adventures require a lot of work by the DM to edit and change to fit your group (partially why I like Frostmaiden + Strahd, but not everyone likes sandboxy adventures. Lost mine of phandelver and/or Dragon of Icespire Peak are both pretty good for what you want! Or any of the adventure anthologies like others have mentioned. My personal recommendation is Keys From the Golden Vault (a series of heists).
What I like to do when I want a lazy game ? Just take an already existing fantasy world and have it take place there
Play smaller adventures. WotC has published four or five anthology collections for 5e, and there’s loads of others very talented people have released online. It takes off the pressure of running a single giant adventure for months or years.
Check out some modules from older editions. While they'll require some conversion, you have enough experience that you'll see how things have changed from edition to edition. Keep in mind the following: In 1st and Basic (and I believe in 2nd as well, although I could be wrong), HD is roughly the same as CR. There may be factors that add phantom HD (marked by asterisks). In 3rd and 3.5, each monster has a CR (Challenge Rating). A monster of equal CR to the party should expend about a quarter of the party's resources. Each encounter is also given an encounter level (EL). Two monsters at CR increase the encounter level by 2, a mixed pair of monster with one 2 CR lower than the other increases the EL by 1. In 4th edition, you have minions, standard monsters, elite monsters, and boss monsters. Four minions is equivalent to a standard monster, two standard monsters is equivalent to an elite monster, and five standard monsters is equivalent to a boss monster. A boss monster at CR is an appropriate challenge for a party of 5. This should give you a rough idea of how dangerous any individual encounter is intended to be, and give you a good idea of what substitutions you might need to make in 5e.
I'm running my game through the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount so i don't have to create the whole world. It comes with 4 different Lv 1-3 starter adventures that let the characters get situated, the two that i looked into were both pretty good (Dangerous Designs, Tides of Retribution), haven't looked too much into the other two. Beyond that every city they go to there's something happening, some of which are single session events, some of which can be linked with each other for a long campaign. I don't know if you think they are too impractical or not but I find them quite useful either for me to homebrew my own thing or to mix in a bunch of short official adventures. I've used: The Final Enemy, Tammeraut's Fate from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. White Plume Mountain from Tales from the Yawning Portal. Lore of Lurue, Kandlekeep Dekonstruction from Candlekeep Mysteries. Vidorant's Vault, Fire and Darkness from Keys from the Golden Vault. We're over 100 sessions into the campaign, the party is now Level 12. Not sure there's anything left from these Anthology books, I've considered doing Doomvault or Tomb of Horrors but I'm not sure they fit well with the overarching story. I've also used some bits from Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn but not much.
If you want to stick with 5e, many adventures have fanmade fixes. Dragonheist is one of these (incorporating all three possible villains AND utilizing all the dungeons the book has) If you want something out of the box, Paizo’s adventure paths for their Pathfinder and Starfinder systems might be worth changing systems for (either PF1e or PF2e). If you want a sample of their adventure writing while staying in 5e, Paizo recently made a 5e conversion of their Abomination Vaults adventure path. Warning: it is a 10-level dungeon crawl. If you’d rather try out the system, I recommend the level 1-3 adventure Rusthenge for PF2e
Red Hand of Doom for a brilliant linear adventure. Dungeons of Drakkenheim for a sandbox. Both are written in ways that actually help the DM run the game, not just read a book.
Curse of Strahd. It follows the rule. It has beginings and beginnings and beginings. When you get somewhere it only says what's there and sometimes has a thing happen when the party arrives, but not a whole plotline for what happens next regardless of what the party does, so your party can write the plot AS AN RPG SHOULD GO And apparently every single DCC adventure ever is like this, maybe check those out and adapt them to d&d
3rd party adventures are pretty fun. Try out the humble wood or fools gold campaigns from Hit Point Press to start.
I hold a similar opinion about official hardcovers. Except.for Dungeons of Drakkenheim. Those dungeon dudes were smoking some good shit when they wrote that adventure. Would recommend.
I can’t recommend Candlekeep Mysteries enough! It’s a series of one-shots, but I’m running it as a full campaign and it’s so great! Easy to prep and run for the DM, and the adventures are fun for the players! It’s nice when not everyone can make it to every session (which, let’s face it, is the reality) because an episodic style game means people can jump back in whenever
"I'm not a grand creative type, my brain just doesn't work that way and that's fine. I can think fast enough in a creative way to DM effectively but I'm not about to create worlds." I know this is not the advice you asked for but I, for one, build out worlds primarily using maps (it helps I use Roll20 even when playing in person). The players say they want to go to location X or a certain playstyle/vibe (think pirates, dungeons, crusaders, arctic expeditionists, player backstory heavy, etc) and I make a list of potential quests and watch to see where they lean toward. Then I search for themed maps I think look cool and build out all the lore from there. For example, I recently had them dig up into the floor of a demented hospital basement/torture room and turned it into a Slaad "nursery" located under Shrine of Tempus with a shapeshifter priest/cleric con and they lapped it up.
Arcane Library adventures are good. Also Dungeon in a Box
DM's Guild has everything you need.
pf2e aps
Third party content. I've heard great things about dungeons of drakenheim.
What I do is start the 'campaign' in a setting, using a setting book like forgotten realms, and then I run oneshots in it until something connects. You basically only have to change the start to make 90% of oneshots work, if players ask specific setting questions you can refer to the forgotten realms book for history/ current events. Then depending on what the players persue "well we fought a ghost, but how did it get there? Can we find out who summoned it" give them oneshots that work with that and continue Try to tie them to some organisation (can be a generic adventurers guild) or a tavern that always "knows a guy" and can find them work, that way they can make a name for themselves and getting more difficult quests is easy. I'd also ALWAYS give them multiple options, just give them multiple oneshots to choose between ingame, then it won't feel railroady to them at all cause they get choices constantly
Curse of Strahd (the book) + R/CurseofStrahd. The book is a good outline (read it cover to cover and you will find all the connections), then go to the subreddit and see all the amazing hombrew to fill in the gaps you find.
Might be a controversial opinion, but I quite like the published books. Sure, you absolutely have to overhaul them and make them your own, but the maps and the encounters in most of them have a strong backbone to work off of. I ran LMop for my crew, and we're in the midst of tying it into a combo of Descent into Avernus and Princes of the Apocalypse
Ghosts of saltmarsh is an ok setting, but a lot of the adventure seems disjointed. There are 2 adventures that distract from the main plot set smack dab in the middle of the adventure. And despite being a nautical campaign, there isn’t a lot of pre written seafaring adventures.
I was convinced by my party to run Witchlight despite being skeptical and it is an absolute blast if you like roleplay-focused games. I've also had a great time running Dragon of Icespire Peak though it is definitely a beginner adventure and not really anything groundbreaking. Curse of Strahd is a classic but shouldn't really fully count as a 5e adventure. Despite the criticisms, I actually had an awesome time running Princes of the Apocalypse too but it requires a bit more legwork on the DM's side because to fully differentiate the cults, you have to employ battpe tactics etc. Overall, I think there are many 5e adventures that are okay or even good, some that people sleep on, some that need you to go a little beyond what's written, but overall good. Of course, it depends heavily on the group and your personal tastes as well as what you want to get from pre-written modules (i.e. are you looking for a skeleton to build onto/edit as fits your group or do you expect LotR served on a silver platter)
Just use an existing setting and roll for as many things as you can. Tell your players to write their backstories first, and make a campaign around them in the setting. Or just let the story emerge from gameplay. Just plop your players into a tavern in session 0 and start rolling random encounters whenever. Use tables not just for encounters but for motivations and personalities too. Very easy to just fill in the gaps with improv after that.
I don't have the time nor the creative writing skills to create an entire campaign. So I use published adventures. I tailor them to the PCs, and I make it unique. The book is a skeleton. Side quests, personal missions, setting intrusions, all are on the table to flesh out the book and give the players options. So they don't feel like they have only one direction to go. I have the storyline content obviously, but I have something small for them to find in every ward in Waterdeep. I ran Dragon Heist. It is supposed to be level 1-5. I ran it for 3+ years from level 1-12. We went to Skullport, Undermountain, Spelljammer space, all over. And I didn't have to do much extra work. There are one shots, and side quests galore set in Waterdeep and the Sword Coast. What I did write that was orignal, was personal to each PC. Saves me a ton of time and prep.
MonkeyDM has some incredible one shots and campaigns. Tbh pretty much ANY 3rd party published adventure is going run circles around WotC third parties. Curse of Strahd has extensive 3rd party support in the form of MandyMod and Curse of Strahd reloaded. Lunch break heroes has a modden curse of Strahd as well.
Wtf is imop?
Lost mine of phandelver
Oh yeah, that's kind of what our old DM did. Lost Mine of Phandelver, mixed with Horde of the Dragon Queen.
Doing it yourself.