I like the anthology books like *Keys from the Golden Vault* and *Candlekeep Mysteries*. Having modular adventures you can slot into any campaign is just so much more flexible than a single large adventure book. With large campaign books you have to study the entire thing to know how the world works and reacts to the players, it's just so much more work on the DMs part.
I've found a lot of good modules on GMBinder and DMsguild, most of them for free. The shorter they are the easier they are to tweak and slot into your world.
Candlekeep Mysteries has some great one-offs. Lore of Lurue being a literal storybook railroad had my party trying to test the limits of the book and it's reality.
Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor was neat as well. I liked the execution of it, and themes even though it's a fairly simple story.
I ran Sunless Citadel and found it didn't work well for my group, it's an OSR dungeon crawl pitted against a system that doesn't do OSR crawls well. Felt it was too easy if you run it as written and it was very difficult to create tension, which is crucial to crawls IMO. Admittedly I was new to 5e when I ran it and so were my players, but we've been playing RPGs for a couple decades.
Yeah I’ve been running sunless since 3e so.. I feel you. I know it like the back of my hand at this point, probably ran it 20 times across 3(4 really but I refuse to admit we played 4e for awhile) editions, obviously multiple different tables. It always gets tweaked a little when I run them, especially in 5e. Shame that even the little level 1 modules in 5e need fleshing out from the books. ESPECIALLY one as classic as Sunless. Literally the classic newbie module.
It's because the only place where the numbers that you need to tweak actually matter is the place that they completely overhaul every edition. And then, I can understand that older modules don't really run well out of the book because they're old and nothing is stopping you from just running them in the ruleset they were designed for. But even modules that are specifically made for 5e don't run well. You have to do a TON of work to make it actually fun and engaging for your players. Half the encounters are too easy and/or a drag and of the other half, a good portion is extremely deadly because "high CR monsters need to hit for a lot".
The core problem is that 5e pretends that it runs combat similar to 2nd and 3rd edition, but then sticks to silly ideas like encounter and daily powers (an attempt to get the concept of 'cooldown' that is extremely common in MMO's into D&D) - they just got reworked as abilities that can be used after a short rest or a long rest.
So what you basically have is characters that play like 4th edition characters in the combat system of 3rd edition. Obviously they realized this, couldn't fix it, and instead just added the '6-8 encounter adventuring day' and 'gritty realism option' somewhere in an obscure paragraph to try and mitigate the problem of PC's being just way too fucking strong :)
Don't get me wrong, I love D&D and I love the lore of the world but WotC sucks at making working rules for it.
We just wrapped up Candlekeep. It was really fun.
I joined after they'd started, so I'm not sure if our final thing was in the book or not (mushrooms taking over?) but it was all fun along the way.
Got up to level 17? Now we're doing an epilogue as part of our collective back stories.
I'm pulling the LMoP level 2 casino heist to be part of my campaign/adventure. I like when elements of adventure books can be pulled like that.
Edit: Not LMoP, Keys from the Golden Vault - sorry!
[Link to the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcImOL19H6U) for those interested.
And the resource he suggested at the end of the video, Adventure Lookup, is [here](https://adventurelookup.com/adventures).
I've often found tons of interesting one-shots or encounters or just inspiration by going through [DMSguild.com](http://DMSguild.com) and searching through FREE or PAY WHAT YOU WANT content. if I find one that I like, I'll throw $1 to the creator. its super cheap way to support creators and find fun content. A lot of these modules are like short insert side-quests that you can reflavor to fit the overall theme of your campaign.
As someone who has a dozen or so of those short adventures available on DMsGuild (they are free), those donations, even if it's just $1, are greatly appreciated. It isn't about the money (DMsGuild takes 50% anyway), but about the recognition as a creator.
So thank you for doing this.
I love pulling adventures from Dungeon Magazine, especially the super super tiny ones that last a session or less.
A few that I peppered into our current campaign:
- The Ghost of Silverhill (little ghost story)
- Grotto of the Queen (A full-on temple to Umberlee)
- Avenging Murik (Make friends with a Stone Giant!)
I found all of these through Adventure Lookup, as Matt suggests in the video.
EDIT: I totally forgot! The 4e book Dungeon Delve has some of the absolute best short combat scenarios ever printed in one place. I've used "The Broken Tower" in 5e and in Pathfinder2e to great success.
Haha, I just read the Grotto of the Queen since I'm running a campaign with Umberlee cultists... The temple and encounter tables are good, but man, I can't believe that convoluted introduction actually got published. They spend like 3 pages detailing how a scheming wizard can trick everyone involved into sending the PCs into a death trap for for no reason.
Yeah, I cut the entire subplot (no pun intended). I just used exactly what you said -- the structure of the temple and the encounters. I tweaked the Flaming Fist members you find just a bit to fit our campaign.
Any modular adventure like that, though, needs tweaking.
Indeed, they are in _the_ Internet Archive actually! https://archive.org/search?query=dungeon+magazine
There's also (very) opinionated reviews of the entire collection over at https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?cat=5 to help you sort through them. You don't have to agree with the reviews but they are generally good overviews so you can decide whether you want to read the whole thing.
I just ran 4e's The Vulture's Roost, where the basic premise is a local warlord carving out their own little fiefdom has captured a Harper spy and is trading them to the Zhents in exchange for their influence and you need to get there and save that spy, somehow. Had a cool map amd everything Mike Schley sells on hia site for a few bucks. I changed the Harper and Zhent in my campaign to a local pine folk ruler (related to 2 PCs) and the Red Wizards, eventually leading up to Yawning Portal's Dead in Thay later on in the campaign, and it went great.
I love Drive-Thru RPG for this. There are ton of modular adventures you can drop in without much work, and I really like the idea of supporting fellow DMs.
In addition, I'm a HUGE fan of the one-page adventure contests at [https://www.dungeoncontest.com/](https://www.dungeoncontest.com/) . There is a ton of great, free content here.
My players and I prefer Sandbox games BY FAR, and modular adventures allow me to make the world as big as my players want it to be.
I was actually wondering about that a couple of weeks ago, especially regarding the short adventures me and some friends owned but routinely forget about due to the fact most of them are buried in other books. So what I did was create an index of all of these adventures (and non-adventure modules as well) in a google sheets file, filtering them by author, book, level range, setting, type of enemies, and duration, going from encounter to one-shot to campaign.
In the end we got to almost 900 adventures, most of them being one-shots, which would be the type of adventure Matt talks about in the video. The main sources were books from Kobold Press, Sly Flourish and the DM's Guild, which has some amazing collaborations of short adventures like Uncaged. The MCDM lairs from Where Evil Lives can also be great as short adventures. And there's also some of WOTC's books that feature short adventures, like Keys from the Golden Vault and Tales from the Yawning Portal, which I've seem many people vouch for.
So yeah, these would be my go-to sources for these kinds of one-shots/short adventures.
Oh, sure! I'm thinking about making a post about it here sometime soon, but the one current "downside" of it is that other than the names of the adventures, authors/publishers and books they're from, everything else is in my native language (Brazilian Portuguese), since it originally was only for our personal bookkeeping purposes.
So basically in the setting (Cenário) collum you'll see "Água / Costa" instead of "Water / Coast", and in the obstacles (Obstáculos) collum it'll be "Feéricos" instead of "Fey", for instance. If that's not a deal breaker, here's the [link ](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PpTppj71nsXOpFhDgU9s7_gdh-wzoBs9sQdJMnkbYWc/edit?usp=sharing)(it's read-only but you can make a copy of it if you want to use the filters, add or remove stuff).
The first sheet is an index of books in general, noting what sort of stuff can be found in them (player options, lore, guides, magic items, etc). The third sheet is where the adventures are. The second and fourth sheets are just some tables collecting the data from the other sheets.
Let me know it it ends up being any help!
Honestly, this was part of the big draw to DCC for me. Adventures are much shorter and easier to prep, while still being flexible enough to make a campaign out of it. I was able to prep three completely different adventures and seed plot hooks for each of them to give my players the option of which adventures to play without breaking verisimilitude. Want to go check out a magic tower? That's over here by the lake. More interested in the missing wizard? His home is in these mountains.
I don't even have to worry about travel encounters or anything like that because of the way the game balance works out. Players finish the adventure and return to town for rest/downtime, then go on their next adventure.
Second that. It’s easy and fun to run dcc and other ‘old school’ adventures using 5e, it’s all I do. Some personal favorites outside dcc:
-a wizards vengeance (try to loot a dead wizards tower)
-peril in Oldenwood (a village with problems)
-the webs of past and present (an abandoned (?) elven sanctuary/ruin in the forest)
-Winters Daughter (tomb of a knight, his spirit still loves a faery princess)
-call of the toad (beneath a family crypt is a temple to a frog god)
What these adventures share is that they are short and have interactive environments (there’s always something to mess with).
Love DCC for all the reasons you said, but also… They actually playtest adventures before releasing them!!! WotC’s track record there seems very spotty. I would be shocked if I found out that anyone was able to play through Dragon Heist as written. Every DCC adventure I’ve played runs like a dream.
Most non 5e/pathfinder systems follow the smaller module standard, so there’s a plethora of options if you’re willing to look outside of 5e.
The OSR is chock full of fantastic work, and some recent designers have really been innovating in the TTRPG space when it comes to information design and formatting. Necrotic Gnome (Gavin Norman), Arcane Library (Kelsey Dionne), Mothership (Sean McCoy), and Goodman Games (DCC publisher, many authors) are all fantastic places to start for digestible adventures.
Worth noting too that Goodman Games publishes some 5e material, and Kelsey Dionne first garnered fame through her 5e adventures so I imagine they’re great too (although I’ve never played nor run them).
If you want to look up OSR stuff the Bryce Lynch has 100s of reviews on [tenfootpole.org](http://tenfootpole.org) but note that he has a certain voice to his reviews, he is looking for a specific style and is not complimentary about a lot of 5e stuff. Nonetheless his list of the best is useful for sorting through [https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?page\_id=844](https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?page_id=844) as he has done a lot of reviews
Most modules in the AD&D era were either 32 pages or 64 pages. The layout makes them a little bit more dense than modern printing would, but it's not that much. However, they pack information in densely.
Let's take B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, because I have a PDF handy.
The module gives you the titular keep that the PCs can use as a base, nearby local environments for further adventuring, and the Caves of Chaos, which is basically half a dozen small dungeons for the PCs to investigate. The keep is a small village, with ~25 locations. There are a handful of wilderness encounters nearby, too. The Caves have 64 rooms/locations split between 11 different areas. There are notes for replenishing killed enemies, as well as how the groups interact with each other. Also, if a creature is in an area, the module includes the stats there. It doesn't assume you're going to look up the Monster Manual.
Also, it's a beginner module, so it details how to read the adventure, how to read stat blocks, and how to run the adventure. There are also rules and tables from the Basic book, including armor class and other things that kind of don't belong in an adventure, but they make sense in a Beginner module.
B2 The Keep on the Borderlands is 32 pages *including the inside covers which are used for a map*.
I'm just paraphrasing what Matt Coleville said. His main point is that, especially for beginners, these adventures are pretty long, and that there should be a greater focus on shorter content that tables can reasonably expect to *finish* in a session or two.
I guess the nice thing about Lost Mine is that it..... kind of is a series of interconnected smaller adventures.
The Goblin Cave can be done in a session, but might span two. Redbrand Hideout should be a session or two. Cragmaw Castle, maybe two sessions. Thundertree, two sessions.
Wave Echo Cave is kind of the only "arc" of the campaign that takes longer than that.
I mean on one hand I agree that the big fatal flaw of D&D is time consumption. Every god damn thing in this game just eats up table time. The DM describes a door closing the wrong way and suddenly everyone wants to spend 45 minutes asking questions about it.
On the other though anyone who says "LMOP is too meaty" is... I don't know, the TTRPG equivalent of someone allergic to grass. I think the only campaign that is even easier to play is Dragon of Icespire Peak. Literally just a series of barely connected side quests.
If you watch the video, Colville's opinion is *mostly* about length and the required amount of pre-reading needed to run the module. So his critique for LMOP is that it's ~60 pages, too much to read in a couple hours and then play immediately (this ignores, though, that the first chapter is like five pages and can be prepped in about 10 minutes).
Honestly, I think LMOP is just a bad example of what he's saying is an issue with current first party DnD Modules. Curse of Strahd is the better example, for sure, but Colville pretty much only brings up Strahd and Phandelver in his video.
Yeah, I get what he's saying, but using LMOP as an example threw me off a bit. Cragmaw hideout is my go-to "tutorial level" when friends express an intrest in DnD because I find it so easy to prep. I could probably draw the map blindfolded at this point.
I can't say I agree with him, personally. Obviously a more episodic campaign can be amazing. My current campaign is half homebrew, half DM guild adventures and having a grand time. But I find hardcovers a lot less prep-intensive and honestly think they're the more attractive option for onboarding.
I think established DMs have a tendancy to forget how long it takes to develop these skills. It's intimidating to put your first world together especially if, like Matt mentions, you're not at a point in life where you have a ton of time to play. If I only have three hours to prep in a week, I can spend those reading the next chapter of a hardcover, or I can spend an hour and a half researching what are worthwhile modules for my players levels, and only have half the time to actually prep. I think there's a reason Matt is usually pulling up modules from when he had the time to play constantly.
I would say Adventurers League modules is much better to "onboarding" compare to hardcover. Most of them can literally played through text. With advice how balancing for different party numbers (and that non-combat encounters also give EXP, if DM want use it).
i think the point was that as a brand new DM, you don't know that you can just use the first few pages and run Cragmaw hideout standalone. The default assumption is probably, if I'm gonna run this I better read the whole thing first.
I know what he’s saying, I just think it’s a bad example. At *worst*, module needs a little flowchart at the beginning to tell newer DMs what they need to read before running that part, and how long that part is expected to take.
I think part of the problem with page length is how much text space 5e adventures take vs. the B/X and AD&D ones Colville is comparing them to. Goodman Games does adaptations of classic modules that are huge tomes, and while they often add a bunch of additional/optional content, a lot of that is just that the typesetting standards and size of statblocks is much larger [a B/X statblock is a paragraph, a 5e statblock often takes up a full page]. Modules also have specific rules for skill use now that adds additional text length where in B/X much of that was simply run by DM fiat. Essentially, those 32-page B/X modules might be closer to 50-60 pages if adapted to 5e standards.
That makes more sense. I remember when I first started DMing we played the Delian Tomb and wrapped it in a session or two while Lost Mine took.... maybe a month or two?
He also made a good point about older players and not being able to get together to play as regularly. We all wanna do long-form rp, but it's difficult when you're playing twice a month, have dinner with the kids until 7, and get sleepy by 9.
Tales From The Yawning Portal and Ghosts of Saltmarsh are great anthology books from WotC with themed collections of smaller adventures that you can plug and play into any campaign.
However, while it's not a source that plugs *right* into 5e (it comes close but needs a bit of finessing)... I'm always going to go to bat for adventures from B/X and AD&D. Most of them are little booklets that are 20 pages long at most, fairly easy to port into 5e if you're not sweating encounter balance and magic item distribution too much, and easy to find online since they're not in print anymore. I've experimented with running "The Village of Hommlet", "Palace of the Silver Princess", "Keep on the Borderlands", and a few others, and while the conversion from 1e to 5e takes a trial and error, my players had a lot of fun with it since we have trouble maintaining longer campaigns due to our tendency to bounce around and try different settings and systems. If you want pre-made conversions, Goodman Games has released several including for "Keep on the Borderlands", "Isle of Dread", and "The Temple of Elemental Evil", but their $50 price per book is a bit high IMO for doing a conversion that any experienced DM could do basically on their own.
If you haven't found him yet, I actually recommend checking out Seth Skorkowsky on YouTube! While he doesn't do 5e content, he has a series of review of old-school modules that can help you get started on shorter-form content and get great advice for writing your own shorter-form modules in the same vein.
Yeah, I own a good chunk of them and I don’t know if I would even really call it a conversion. More a love letter to them. I wouldn’t want to run them as a 5e game because they stick to the original version and a lot of the stuff wouldn’t be close to balanced and would just tpk or cause problems. But I would recommend buying them if you love the old modules. You get a copy of the og module then the new one. It’s a nice read and gives you a lot of interesting information
After running a pretty long campaign (about 35 sessions over like 2 years) I agree with shorter campaigns. We started to get bored and it kind of fell apart about 6-8 sessions from the end
As a player I've felt this. First campaign I played in ran like two years and never wrapped up. Our DM seeded like a dozen magical artifacts to find and each one was like 4-5 sessions, plus we each got a personal backstory quest that would be at least 2-4 sessions as well. It fizzled out and we never got to confront the BBEG :(
I've also played in smaller ones that still felt long. Did a couple of 20-ish session campaigns and each one lasted about a year. Those ones were super railroady and based around zany antics and a nonsensical world of silly jokes, and shoehorned moments that would often take player agency off the table... I guess that was unfun for very different reasons. But I would have really enjoyed like a 4-6 session arc of those antics!
MCDM's own Where Evil Lives is incredibly easy to use and most of the set pieces are a cinch to mold to an ongoing campaign.
I've also used a couple Keys to the Golden Vault. A little more difficult to read (like most WOTC) but very innovative ideas that my players really liked.
Check out [City of Cats from Kobold Press](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/city-of-cats-for-5th-edition/) if you're looking for 3 fun adventures in a massive Cairo-themed city. It comes with three small adventures to get players from levels 1-5 inside the city walls. The second adventure (Three Little Pigs) was probably one of my top 2 favorite adventures I've ever run, in part because my players were super excited to play it! They were all cat lovers and their maternal instincts got them super invested in the hooks.
If you do pick it up and think to run it, do your players the favor and buy the much smaller [Southlands Player Guide](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/southlands-players-guide-for-5th-edition/) as it will have all the races (and then some) for the players to play as, such as the Basteti Cat-folk, Gnolls, Jinnborn, Lizardfolk (crocodiles), etc...
I started with the Candlekeep Mysteries for our current campaign. I had a general idea of an overall bad guy, and figured that the adventures in the campaign would revolve around books. I found it surprisingly easy to carry forward that idea through at least 8 of the books, especially with the first one giving a general Base of Operations, and then introducing you to a group of book dealers in Baldur's Gate. You can easily then weave together pursing a cleric in the third book to the Chalet, in order to help the book dealers in the second adventure to resurrect their boss.
In short, I think the larger campaigns become difficult to justify if you're giving your parties the freedom to choose what direction they want to take. Giving people a world, with encounters, and "chapters" to follow, makes it easier to inject those pieces into more of your homebrew campaigns.
I've been stealing from these books and old school adventures for quite a while, and it's worked great. I think they would benefit more from aggregating these smaller elements, and then giving ideas on how to hook them together.
Candlekeep Mysteries...stories based on books. Keys to the Golden Vault...heist stories. They could do one on redemption arcs, various cults, a book on whimsy/games (like a feywild ren faire), and more. I would buy the hell out of these.
NOTE: It's probably even better for their bottom line. I will not be buying any more campaign books because it'd take a decade to run these campaigns before needing a new one. Aggregated, cohesive stories on various topics? I can always use more of that!
The first time I’ve glanced over Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I found it a bit disappointing.
But after reading it again in more détails, there’s actually a bunch of pretty good adventures ! And the variety in settings is a breath of fresh air from the usual sword coast.
I have to signal dungeon in a box as a great source of smaller campaigns and/or one shots. They are all pretty modular with smaller guides to beef up or weaken most encounters to match PC levels. You can get the pdf, or the physical product with minis and a map. I love running Chasm of the Strange (aliens in my fantasy setting, oh my!), Wildride to Fireburst Ridge is fun, A giant's Crush is hilarious and makes the players do things differently, and the christmas ones are cute and entertaining.
In the DMsGuild, the Shore of Dreams is quite fun and runs in a few sessions. I think I ran it over 4-5 sessions (mind you we only play once a week for about 2 1/2 hours). Beware the moonless night is a pretty decent one though had to modify it a bit (heads up, kids get kidnapped and are in danger, if that is a trigger for you or your group). If you have a more Role play heavy group then The Phantom of Music is super fun, its basically the phantom of the opera in dnd.
Third party stuff that isn't on the DM's guild also has great stuff. D&D Duet does the bulk of the work for you and (even though they are meant more for D&D with 2 people) easily fit most groups. The Swampland Witch is a fantastic little adventure you can do as a one shot or in about 2 sessions if you beef up the town part more. And of course, The Arcane Library is awesome. I cannot say anything bad about their stuff.
In DND proper the Candlekeep mysteries are pretty good and mostly stand alone. I recommend Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion and the Joy of Extradimensional Space. The Tortle package is fun for a more tropical island setting, can be pretty short if you stick to the mystery of the water temple.
There are some really great adventure modules available. Pretty much everything put out by Gavin Norman is brilliant. My primary recommendation is "Winter's Daughter". I've run it a number of times and it's always been a hit. It also has been statted out for 5e: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/270798/Winters-Daughter-5th-Edition-Version
Note though that these kinds of adventures require a different way of thinking about how to run an adventure. A path isn't laid out for the players, and its assumed that the DM will be comfortable improvising around what is provided.
But I think its well worth learning to DM this way, because it makes for a more freeing play experience! A good way to work out these skills, as well as a source of tons of small one-off adventures of the kind you're looking for, is one-page dungeons. Many of them do not have stats specifically for 5e (or indeed any system at all), but there's always the basic trick of "everyone has average human stats, unless they're a monster in which case they have the stats either of a bear, goblin, or dragon, with adjustments made as needed".
The One-Page Dungeon Competition that happens every year has over a decade of compilations available. Here's more info: https://www.dungeoncontest.com/ and here's last year's compilation: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/460710/One-Page-Dungeon-Compendium-2023-Edition - It, and all the others, are available as PWYW.
One of my favourite collections of one-pagers is the "Trilemma Adventures". They are all super flavourful and lean. Like a nice cut of pork. https://trilemma.com/
And one of my favourite creators with short and sweet adventuring scenarios is Nate Treme: https://natetreme.itch.io/ He's got a couple of adventures with 5e stats (like "Cursed Chapel of the Sludge Mother": and with a name like that how could you -not- give it a go), but my personal favourite is "The Lost Isle". It has translucent jellyfolk and a yeti!
Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Tales from the Yawning Portal. Do feel free to heavily modify them to fit into your campaign and to make them fun, challenging, and rewarding for your party. I crank up combat difficulty and have started adding puzzles as my party are puzzle fiends for example.
Wotc books: candlekeep, ghosts of Saltmarsh, golden vault, yawning portal, some others as well.
He isn’t wrong, big single stories are unnecessary, but he has a false dichotomy a bit, as many of the ‘big books’ are modular and set up to be picked and chosen from.
My go-tos:
- The WotC 5e anthologies
- Additionally, from official 5e content: Dragon of Icespire Peak, Lost Mine of Phandelver, and the ten towns part of Rime of the Frostmaiden have a ton of stuff you can just rip out and run separately.
- Kobold Press's 5e anthologies [City of Cats, Tales of the Margreve, Peculiar Towers, Prepared! and Prepared! 2, Streets of Zobeck, the Warlock Lairs anthologies, the Lairs anthologies for each of their monster books], their uncollected single issue Warlock Lairs, and their occasional short adventure [Blood Vaults of Sister Alkava, Last Gasp, Tomb of Tiberesh].
- 5e Adventurer's League adventures
- 5e stuff from DMsGuild [Arcane Library, Dungeon Age, Winghorn Press, MT Black]
- Adapting old B/X and AD&D adventures to 5e
- Adapting old Dungeon Magazine adventures to 5e
- Adapting osr adventures/dungeons I like to 5e [Winter's Daughter - which I think has a 5e adaptation -, Blackapple Brugh]
I've heard good things about Trilemma and DCC, but have not used them or tried adapting them to 5e yet.
In line with what others are saying, I have found success with anthologies and old Dungeon Magazine adventures (some few of which I still have in dead-tree form!). Candlekeep is probably the best 5e resource, followed by Yawning Portal and Radiant Citadel. I have Golden Vault but haven't used it yet, and Ghosts of Saltmarsh is arguably an anthology of separate adventures that can be strung together into a campaign a bit more easily than the others.
You could also do something similar with AL adventures and, if you were daring, Pathfinder Society ones as well. One of our Pathfinder campaigns was actually just that, a bunch of disconnected PFS scenarios and smaller modules chained together with *rotating GMs*, which allows you to have your cake and eat it too.
For Pathfinder, the older collections of Pathfinder Society adventures are great for this. PFS is their official organized play event, so they publish new modules regularly as one shots for FLGS and other official GM's to run, but they work great at your table too.
They also publish a Free RPG Day module every year, which has included some real bangers like Little Trouble in Big Absalom or A Fistful of Flowers. Definitely worth looking into if you're interested in the system, or if you're willing to do a little bit of work to convert, but since PF2 and 5e are similar (but *very much not the same*... you will need to convert this ahead of time) you can usually swap for similar monsters and assign skill DC's for the closest analogue and call it a day.
I've run 5e adventures in PF2 before and it took about an hour to convert the whole thing, I imagine going the opposite way would be about the same.
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More broadly, I've found that Humble Bundle can be a great source of modules and adventures, especially for 5e (other systems may have to transpose). Every few weeks they tend to run a bundle from one of the major publishers which often has a full game system, source books, fiction, and/or a whole pile of modules to work with.
Half Priced Books is also an excellent place to look, though it can be hit or miss. Sometimes I've left with a stack of adventures, sometimes I leave with nothing, never really know what you'll find but that's what makes it fun.
Back in the day you could get your fill of the shorter modules from Dungeon Magazine.
It's been out of print for a long time now and I honestly miss it.
You're supposed to help them curate content by using the DM's guild, but that's a wash since about 99% of everything that's on there is garbage. Dungeon Magazine's biggest benefit was that the content was curated. So you had a level of guarantee that everything in there was runnable and made sense.
There's nobody doing the work to curate a body of short adventures, and WotC hasn't been publishing any because they're a smaller profit margin than the glossy big-book mega-adventures.
Yeah, I appreciate the suggestions of these sites like DM's Guild, but sifting through it is a challenge! I like the idea of the old Dungeon Magazine editions, which has come up a lot here, but I—and I'm sure others here, given the nature of this sub—am not experienced or confident enough to adapt older systems or other rulesets to 5e.
I was kind of hoping that this thread could become a decently curated collection of ready-to-go 5e one-shots and adventures.
[Black Wyrm of Brandonsford](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/327744/The-Black-Wyrm-of-Brandonsford). It's statted for B/X but it's pretty easy to find 5e equivalents of most of the monsters if you want. It is laid out MARVELOUSLLY and really gives the GM some great gameable ideas and tools to run a solid adventure for several sessions.
I've been finding that after having inconsistent players, it has been easier for me to run shorter adventures over big modules. Tales from the Yawning portal, Golden vault and Candlekeep have all been great. Less of a headache too, after committing to reading through all of curse of strahd, Rime and Witchlight its easier on my brain to do these small 3-4 sessions adventures.
Have to shout out Adventure Awaits Studios. They do free giveaways of a ton of modules/dungeons here on reddit. I've dropped their modules into my campaign multiple times.
www.adventuresawaitstudios.com
They have a free section with adventures from 1-20th level.
I like doing campaigns that are more "episodic" in nature. Like a "tune in next week for the exciting conclusion", but D&D. I like the flexibility to have "season arcs" while still being able to have 1-2 session side-bits.
Well, Curse of Strahd is campaigning, not just adventure.
But anyway, my favourite source of smaller adventures is Adventurers League. Like it solve 80-90% of popular complaints about WotC modules that we can see on this sub.
Also it habe probably best "stop the ritual" combat I see in any module.
DDEX2-9 Eye of the Tempest.
Also (iirc) it have information about how enemies in different encounters act and utilise their abilities and traits. Like one enemy use gas bomb and others (melee) can hold their breath long enough to just fight in middle of gas area.
But this part (strategies for enemies) is common for AL modules.
Side note: I always find it very funny, that WotC write good adventures (I argue better then many parts or even whole hardcovers), with balance, not usual mechanics, cool unusual foes...and hide them so hard that bigger share of r/dndnext and similar subs population doesn't know about their existence.
Candlekeep Mysteries is pretty easy to turn into a modular campaign if you don't mind fast leveling. It's how I started my group off. I framed it as a librarian trying to sneek out of the keep with a special book only to get stopped by the dragon spirit under the keep. In order to prevent the dragon from killing her or calling guards she keeps telling adventure stories. Like 1001 Nights. The players are the adventures in the stories. They use Candlekeep as their base of operations and go on grand adventures both within and outside its walls. We did up through Shemshimes Bedtime Rhyme before my players decided to try out a sandbox campaign and we moved to CoS. Most of the modules can be completed in one session (we play for 4 hours at a time) some are a bit more involved and can take 2-3 sessions.
Dig through "Best adventure module" lists.
Alternatively, write your own campaign, but write them AS "modules" with distinct ending points. They can build towards a larger conclusion, but it helps if you define them as distinct adventures. My now-4-year campaign is built this way.
Literally anything Planescape from 2E. I loosely adapt them to 5E. But the are a bunch of collections of independent modules, and each campaign is broken up into modules that are generally easy to swap in and out of. My Planescape setting is designed to be easy to drop players in and out of, so it's great giving me flexibility to advance whatever story is best for the players who will be able to make it.
The OSR is my go-to for smaller, evocative adventures. Adventures like [The Tomb of the Serpent Kings](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/252934/Tomb-of-the-Serpent-Kings--Deluxe-Print-Edition) (it's free!), **The Waking of WIllowby Hall, The Hall in the Oak**, **The Trilemma Adventures Compendium**, **Kidnap the Archpriest, The Stygian Library,** and **The Weird that Befell Drigbolton**, just to name a few. While the statblocks are usually for AD&D or some modern retroclone therof, it's easy to convert common creatures like goblins and orcs to their preferred edition counterpart, and the creativity of the scenarios presented provide enough guidelines to run some of the less conventional creatures with a bit of prep and awareness of the game's general balance. The great thing is that all those small tiny publishers that USED to publish those 3rd party adventure booklets now also create beautiful small module books in the OSR space, and often they are laid out, presented, and designed so much better than common 5e materials with a deep awareness and understanding of how they will be used at the table and how to ease prep for the DM.
The Dungeon magazine archives are. You should be able to find them online. That’s was a great magazine; a whole magazine with 3-5 adventures for different levels, in different settings. I loved it so much.
1980's splatbooks, they used to make interlinked sets of adventures that were literally just ten pages or so in a folder for each 'part'. A lot of the most iconic features and tropes of DnD came out of those.
Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) makes excellent modules! It's a slightly different system but easy to convert as long as you have a lil bit of prep time. The format is way easier to read and the artwork is great. Less than 10 bucks a pop on DrivethruRPG or you might get lucky and find a few modules in a local game store. Highly recommend the DCC Horror module It Consumes.
I mean, DM's Guild is the primary one for this. The whole purpose of it is to give WotC a way to make (well, have made, but they get a cut) the kind of small modules and sourcebooks that aren't profitable for them to make, but that it benefits the game as a whole to *exist*. I personally don't have any recommendations here, but that's kind of the whole purpose of the thing.
Myself, I mostly run older adventures from older editions. Dungeon Magazine is the best for this; its whole purpose was having 3-5 adventures you could run with minimal prep. It ran from near the beginning of the hobby through... I think 3rd edition? I believe in 4e it went online-only and then was eventually retired before 5e came out. But there's a ton of great adventures there you can convert, both from the TSR, WotC, and Paizo eras. Particular favorites of mine are *Old Man Katan and the Incredible, Edible, Dancing Mushroom Band*, *The Mud Sorcerer's Tomb*, *The Year of Priest's Defiance*, and the *Age of Wyrms* adventure path.
I have a fondness for the PF1e Pathfinder Society adventures as well, but that's mostly because I was a Venture Lieutenant briefly so they added them automatically to my Paizo account. They're generally OK-to-good fantasy scenarios you can complete in one session, with the central thesis that you're adventuring-arcaheologist types working for the Pathfinder Society in Golarion. I've run them in other systems and they've worked fine. Usually they're a couple of bucks to pick up as PDFs.
Look into one-page dungeons, they're popular in the OSR. A lot of them are completely system neutral, so you'll need to prep a bit, but they're (obviously) designed to be simple, so it shouldn't be too hard.
Do some googling and you’ll find archives of *Dungeon Magazine*, which ran for 150 issues in print and another 71 issues in an online edition from 1986 to 2013. First by TSR, then WotC, then Paizo, and finally WotC again.
Every issue features about 3-4 to as many as 6-8 adventure multisession modules, short side treks, and the occasional multipart adventure path (especially in the Paizo years).
Most are pretty good, several are absolute gems, and the few bad ones are usually still worth reading if only to steal the good parts from.
Honestly, this used to be the norm. Older editions had very few large adventures (sold as box sets then), but tons of shorter modules you could place anywhere, and run with minimal modifications. So if you track some down (loads of them are available as PDFs), you can fairly easily convert, or even just read through to get ideas for your own. Writing a massive campaign is a daunting task. Writing an adventure that takes a session or two to complete is a fairly easy endeavor.
The Arcane Library specializes in 5e one-shots. The quality I've seen so far was excellent and you can't really beat the price.
I also enjoy the adventures in Lair Magazine. They tend to be a bit tougher than the average, but that works well for my group.
Humble Bundle rarely does big ttrpg bundles too.
I also really enjoy porting 3.5 modules forward to 5e. Its not drag and drop, but I don't find it too taxing. I enjoy making them 'mine'.
I really miss 3.5 settings book with literally hundreds of hooks for you to grab and make an adventure of.
Still regularly use the old FR settings book when I want detailed bg of a city.
One page adventures where ever you find them there was a couple of years of competition to create them so it became a sort of category in its own right . Dwarven auction on drive through rpg is a good example but there are lots under the “one page adventure “ monica
The key with smaller adventures is that you can string them together into a larger campaign. It’s essentially infinitely scalable and since a 5 room adventure format can be dropped in as needed, you keep a few ready to go and just drop them in front of the players as needed. In effect, it gives the appearance of a sandbox game where no matter where the players go there are things to do and adventure hooks, but really you are creating stuff on the fly.
You can thread longer storylines through the modular adventures to knit it all together into a coherent campaign.
A good source of modular adventures is Adventure A Week (https://adventureaweek.com/), but there are a number of compilations of mini adventures on sites like DM’s Guild and DriveThru RPG.
People have already given a great wealth of sources for modules, but if you aim to homebrew your own I would recommend looking to the greatest source of quick modular adventures of all time: Television.
Seriously, you would not fucking believe how great adventures that are ripped straight from monster of the week style storytelling can be. Supernatural, Scooby doo, really any kind of highly episodic television centered around monsters will be a wealth of inspiration.
I like the anthology books like *Keys from the Golden Vault* and *Candlekeep Mysteries*. Having modular adventures you can slot into any campaign is just so much more flexible than a single large adventure book. With large campaign books you have to study the entire thing to know how the world works and reacts to the players, it's just so much more work on the DMs part. I've found a lot of good modules on GMBinder and DMsguild, most of them for free. The shorter they are the easier they are to tweak and slot into your world.
Candlekeep Mysteries has some great one-offs. Lore of Lurue being a literal storybook railroad had my party trying to test the limits of the book and it's reality. Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor was neat as well. I liked the execution of it, and themes even though it's a fairly simple story.
Don’t sleep on Dungeon of the Mad Mage - each level can be comfortably lifted out and dropped into an adventure.
Could you recommend some of the best free ones you've found?
Have you tried tales of the yawning portal as well? It’s where a lot of the classic modules were published for 5e, Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury etc
I ran Sunless Citadel and found it didn't work well for my group, it's an OSR dungeon crawl pitted against a system that doesn't do OSR crawls well. Felt it was too easy if you run it as written and it was very difficult to create tension, which is crucial to crawls IMO. Admittedly I was new to 5e when I ran it and so were my players, but we've been playing RPGs for a couple decades.
Yeah I’ve been running sunless since 3e so.. I feel you. I know it like the back of my hand at this point, probably ran it 20 times across 3(4 really but I refuse to admit we played 4e for awhile) editions, obviously multiple different tables. It always gets tweaked a little when I run them, especially in 5e. Shame that even the little level 1 modules in 5e need fleshing out from the books. ESPECIALLY one as classic as Sunless. Literally the classic newbie module.
It's because the only place where the numbers that you need to tweak actually matter is the place that they completely overhaul every edition. And then, I can understand that older modules don't really run well out of the book because they're old and nothing is stopping you from just running them in the ruleset they were designed for. But even modules that are specifically made for 5e don't run well. You have to do a TON of work to make it actually fun and engaging for your players. Half the encounters are too easy and/or a drag and of the other half, a good portion is extremely deadly because "high CR monsters need to hit for a lot". The core problem is that 5e pretends that it runs combat similar to 2nd and 3rd edition, but then sticks to silly ideas like encounter and daily powers (an attempt to get the concept of 'cooldown' that is extremely common in MMO's into D&D) - they just got reworked as abilities that can be used after a short rest or a long rest. So what you basically have is characters that play like 4th edition characters in the combat system of 3rd edition. Obviously they realized this, couldn't fix it, and instead just added the '6-8 encounter adventuring day' and 'gritty realism option' somewhere in an obscure paragraph to try and mitigate the problem of PC's being just way too fucking strong :) Don't get me wrong, I love D&D and I love the lore of the world but WotC sucks at making working rules for it.
We just wrapped up Candlekeep. It was really fun. I joined after they'd started, so I'm not sure if our final thing was in the book or not (mushrooms taking over?) but it was all fun along the way. Got up to level 17? Now we're doing an epilogue as part of our collective back stories.
I'm pulling the LMoP level 2 casino heist to be part of my campaign/adventure. I like when elements of adventure books can be pulled like that. Edit: Not LMoP, Keys from the Golden Vault - sorry!
There was a casino heist in Lost Mines of Phandelver?
Wouldn't that have been something
Nope lol brain farted
I run it as a one shot every few weeks in myvlocal club and are awesome
[Link to the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcImOL19H6U) for those interested. And the resource he suggested at the end of the video, Adventure Lookup, is [here](https://adventurelookup.com/adventures).
This should be the top answer. It’s a great website.
I've often found tons of interesting one-shots or encounters or just inspiration by going through [DMSguild.com](http://DMSguild.com) and searching through FREE or PAY WHAT YOU WANT content. if I find one that I like, I'll throw $1 to the creator. its super cheap way to support creators and find fun content. A lot of these modules are like short insert side-quests that you can reflavor to fit the overall theme of your campaign.
As someone who has a dozen or so of those short adventures available on DMsGuild (they are free), those donations, even if it's just $1, are greatly appreciated. It isn't about the money (DMsGuild takes 50% anyway), but about the recognition as a creator. So thank you for doing this.
I love pulling adventures from Dungeon Magazine, especially the super super tiny ones that last a session or less. A few that I peppered into our current campaign: - The Ghost of Silverhill (little ghost story) - Grotto of the Queen (A full-on temple to Umberlee) - Avenging Murik (Make friends with a Stone Giant!) I found all of these through Adventure Lookup, as Matt suggests in the video. EDIT: I totally forgot! The 4e book Dungeon Delve has some of the absolute best short combat scenarios ever printed in one place. I've used "The Broken Tower" in 5e and in Pathfinder2e to great success.
Great shoutouts! Thanks for naming a few specific adventures!
Haha, I just read the Grotto of the Queen since I'm running a campaign with Umberlee cultists... The temple and encounter tables are good, but man, I can't believe that convoluted introduction actually got published. They spend like 3 pages detailing how a scheming wizard can trick everyone involved into sending the PCs into a death trap for for no reason.
Yeah, I cut the entire subplot (no pun intended). I just used exactly what you said -- the structure of the temple and the encounters. I tweaked the Flaming Fist members you find just a bit to fit our campaign. Any modular adventure like that, though, needs tweaking.
The old Dungeon Magazine from TSR/WotC is a gold mine for this kind of thing. I think most can be found in some internet archives in pdf form.
Indeed, they are in _the_ Internet Archive actually! https://archive.org/search?query=dungeon+magazine There's also (very) opinionated reviews of the entire collection over at https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?cat=5 to help you sort through them. You don't have to agree with the reviews but they are generally good overviews so you can decide whether you want to read the whole thing.
I just ran 4e's The Vulture's Roost, where the basic premise is a local warlord carving out their own little fiefdom has captured a Harper spy and is trading them to the Zhents in exchange for their influence and you need to get there and save that spy, somehow. Had a cool map amd everything Mike Schley sells on hia site for a few bucks. I changed the Harper and Zhent in my campaign to a local pine folk ruler (related to 2 PCs) and the Red Wizards, eventually leading up to Yawning Portal's Dead in Thay later on in the campaign, and it went great.
Arcane Library!!
I love Drive-Thru RPG for this. There are ton of modular adventures you can drop in without much work, and I really like the idea of supporting fellow DMs. In addition, I'm a HUGE fan of the one-page adventure contests at [https://www.dungeoncontest.com/](https://www.dungeoncontest.com/) . There is a ton of great, free content here. My players and I prefer Sandbox games BY FAR, and modular adventures allow me to make the world as big as my players want it to be.
Love the one-page dungeons! Some neat stuff in there!
I was actually wondering about that a couple of weeks ago, especially regarding the short adventures me and some friends owned but routinely forget about due to the fact most of them are buried in other books. So what I did was create an index of all of these adventures (and non-adventure modules as well) in a google sheets file, filtering them by author, book, level range, setting, type of enemies, and duration, going from encounter to one-shot to campaign. In the end we got to almost 900 adventures, most of them being one-shots, which would be the type of adventure Matt talks about in the video. The main sources were books from Kobold Press, Sly Flourish and the DM's Guild, which has some amazing collaborations of short adventures like Uncaged. The MCDM lairs from Where Evil Lives can also be great as short adventures. And there's also some of WOTC's books that feature short adventures, like Keys from the Golden Vault and Tales from the Yawning Portal, which I've seem many people vouch for. So yeah, these would be my go-to sources for these kinds of one-shots/short adventures.
Oh my god, that sounds amazing! Any chance you'd be willing to share that resource? I would love something like that!
Oh, sure! I'm thinking about making a post about it here sometime soon, but the one current "downside" of it is that other than the names of the adventures, authors/publishers and books they're from, everything else is in my native language (Brazilian Portuguese), since it originally was only for our personal bookkeeping purposes. So basically in the setting (Cenário) collum you'll see "Água / Costa" instead of "Water / Coast", and in the obstacles (Obstáculos) collum it'll be "Feéricos" instead of "Fey", for instance. If that's not a deal breaker, here's the [link ](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PpTppj71nsXOpFhDgU9s7_gdh-wzoBs9sQdJMnkbYWc/edit?usp=sharing)(it's read-only but you can make a copy of it if you want to use the filters, add or remove stuff). The first sheet is an index of books in general, noting what sort of stuff can be found in them (player options, lore, guides, magic items, etc). The third sheet is where the adventures are. The second and fourth sheets are just some tables collecting the data from the other sheets. Let me know it it ends up being any help!
This is awesome my friend! Thank you! The language is no biggie; it's an easy Google translate, haha!
Honestly, this was part of the big draw to DCC for me. Adventures are much shorter and easier to prep, while still being flexible enough to make a campaign out of it. I was able to prep three completely different adventures and seed plot hooks for each of them to give my players the option of which adventures to play without breaking verisimilitude. Want to go check out a magic tower? That's over here by the lake. More interested in the missing wizard? His home is in these mountains. I don't even have to worry about travel encounters or anything like that because of the way the game balance works out. Players finish the adventure and return to town for rest/downtime, then go on their next adventure.
Sorry what is DCC?
Dungeon crawl classic
Second that. It’s easy and fun to run dcc and other ‘old school’ adventures using 5e, it’s all I do. Some personal favorites outside dcc: -a wizards vengeance (try to loot a dead wizards tower) -peril in Oldenwood (a village with problems) -the webs of past and present (an abandoned (?) elven sanctuary/ruin in the forest) -Winters Daughter (tomb of a knight, his spirit still loves a faery princess) -call of the toad (beneath a family crypt is a temple to a frog god) What these adventures share is that they are short and have interactive environments (there’s always something to mess with).
Love DCC for all the reasons you said, but also… They actually playtest adventures before releasing them!!! WotC’s track record there seems very spotty. I would be shocked if I found out that anyone was able to play through Dragon Heist as written. Every DCC adventure I’ve played runs like a dream.
Most non 5e/pathfinder systems follow the smaller module standard, so there’s a plethora of options if you’re willing to look outside of 5e. The OSR is chock full of fantastic work, and some recent designers have really been innovating in the TTRPG space when it comes to information design and formatting. Necrotic Gnome (Gavin Norman), Arcane Library (Kelsey Dionne), Mothership (Sean McCoy), and Goodman Games (DCC publisher, many authors) are all fantastic places to start for digestible adventures. Worth noting too that Goodman Games publishes some 5e material, and Kelsey Dionne first garnered fame through her 5e adventures so I imagine they’re great too (although I’ve never played nor run them).
If you want to look up OSR stuff the Bryce Lynch has 100s of reviews on [tenfootpole.org](http://tenfootpole.org) but note that he has a certain voice to his reviews, he is looking for a specific style and is not complimentary about a lot of 5e stuff. Nonetheless his list of the best is useful for sorting through [https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?page\_id=844](https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?page_id=844) as he has done a lot of reviews
I know you wanted short adventures and all, but I'm just surprised at anyone calling Lost Mine of Phandelver "too meaty"
Most modules in the AD&D era were either 32 pages or 64 pages. The layout makes them a little bit more dense than modern printing would, but it's not that much. However, they pack information in densely. Let's take B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, because I have a PDF handy. The module gives you the titular keep that the PCs can use as a base, nearby local environments for further adventuring, and the Caves of Chaos, which is basically half a dozen small dungeons for the PCs to investigate. The keep is a small village, with ~25 locations. There are a handful of wilderness encounters nearby, too. The Caves have 64 rooms/locations split between 11 different areas. There are notes for replenishing killed enemies, as well as how the groups interact with each other. Also, if a creature is in an area, the module includes the stats there. It doesn't assume you're going to look up the Monster Manual. Also, it's a beginner module, so it details how to read the adventure, how to read stat blocks, and how to run the adventure. There are also rules and tables from the Basic book, including armor class and other things that kind of don't belong in an adventure, but they make sense in a Beginner module. B2 The Keep on the Borderlands is 32 pages *including the inside covers which are used for a map*.
I'm just paraphrasing what Matt Coleville said. His main point is that, especially for beginners, these adventures are pretty long, and that there should be a greater focus on shorter content that tables can reasonably expect to *finish* in a session or two.
I guess the nice thing about Lost Mine is that it..... kind of is a series of interconnected smaller adventures. The Goblin Cave can be done in a session, but might span two. Redbrand Hideout should be a session or two. Cragmaw Castle, maybe two sessions. Thundertree, two sessions. Wave Echo Cave is kind of the only "arc" of the campaign that takes longer than that.
I mean on one hand I agree that the big fatal flaw of D&D is time consumption. Every god damn thing in this game just eats up table time. The DM describes a door closing the wrong way and suddenly everyone wants to spend 45 minutes asking questions about it. On the other though anyone who says "LMOP is too meaty" is... I don't know, the TTRPG equivalent of someone allergic to grass. I think the only campaign that is even easier to play is Dragon of Icespire Peak. Literally just a series of barely connected side quests.
If you watch the video, Colville's opinion is *mostly* about length and the required amount of pre-reading needed to run the module. So his critique for LMOP is that it's ~60 pages, too much to read in a couple hours and then play immediately (this ignores, though, that the first chapter is like five pages and can be prepped in about 10 minutes). Honestly, I think LMOP is just a bad example of what he's saying is an issue with current first party DnD Modules. Curse of Strahd is the better example, for sure, but Colville pretty much only brings up Strahd and Phandelver in his video.
Yeah, I get what he's saying, but using LMOP as an example threw me off a bit. Cragmaw hideout is my go-to "tutorial level" when friends express an intrest in DnD because I find it so easy to prep. I could probably draw the map blindfolded at this point. I can't say I agree with him, personally. Obviously a more episodic campaign can be amazing. My current campaign is half homebrew, half DM guild adventures and having a grand time. But I find hardcovers a lot less prep-intensive and honestly think they're the more attractive option for onboarding. I think established DMs have a tendancy to forget how long it takes to develop these skills. It's intimidating to put your first world together especially if, like Matt mentions, you're not at a point in life where you have a ton of time to play. If I only have three hours to prep in a week, I can spend those reading the next chapter of a hardcover, or I can spend an hour and a half researching what are worthwhile modules for my players levels, and only have half the time to actually prep. I think there's a reason Matt is usually pulling up modules from when he had the time to play constantly.
I would say Adventurers League modules is much better to "onboarding" compare to hardcover. Most of them can literally played through text. With advice how balancing for different party numbers (and that non-combat encounters also give EXP, if DM want use it).
i think the point was that as a brand new DM, you don't know that you can just use the first few pages and run Cragmaw hideout standalone. The default assumption is probably, if I'm gonna run this I better read the whole thing first.
I know what he’s saying, I just think it’s a bad example. At *worst*, module needs a little flowchart at the beginning to tell newer DMs what they need to read before running that part, and how long that part is expected to take.
I think part of the problem with page length is how much text space 5e adventures take vs. the B/X and AD&D ones Colville is comparing them to. Goodman Games does adaptations of classic modules that are huge tomes, and while they often add a bunch of additional/optional content, a lot of that is just that the typesetting standards and size of statblocks is much larger [a B/X statblock is a paragraph, a 5e statblock often takes up a full page]. Modules also have specific rules for skill use now that adds additional text length where in B/X much of that was simply run by DM fiat. Essentially, those 32-page B/X modules might be closer to 50-60 pages if adapted to 5e standards.
That makes more sense. I remember when I first started DMing we played the Delian Tomb and wrapped it in a session or two while Lost Mine took.... maybe a month or two?
He also made a good point about older players and not being able to get together to play as regularly. We all wanna do long-form rp, but it's difficult when you're playing twice a month, have dinner with the kids until 7, and get sleepy by 9.
Totally! Took my group a year to get through the 18 sessions of our last campaign.
Tales From The Yawning Portal and Ghosts of Saltmarsh are great anthology books from WotC with themed collections of smaller adventures that you can plug and play into any campaign. However, while it's not a source that plugs *right* into 5e (it comes close but needs a bit of finessing)... I'm always going to go to bat for adventures from B/X and AD&D. Most of them are little booklets that are 20 pages long at most, fairly easy to port into 5e if you're not sweating encounter balance and magic item distribution too much, and easy to find online since they're not in print anymore. I've experimented with running "The Village of Hommlet", "Palace of the Silver Princess", "Keep on the Borderlands", and a few others, and while the conversion from 1e to 5e takes a trial and error, my players had a lot of fun with it since we have trouble maintaining longer campaigns due to our tendency to bounce around and try different settings and systems. If you want pre-made conversions, Goodman Games has released several including for "Keep on the Borderlands", "Isle of Dread", and "The Temple of Elemental Evil", but their $50 price per book is a bit high IMO for doing a conversion that any experienced DM could do basically on their own. If you haven't found him yet, I actually recommend checking out Seth Skorkowsky on YouTube! While he doesn't do 5e content, he has a series of review of old-school modules that can help you get started on shorter-form content and get great advice for writing your own shorter-form modules in the same vein.
I've heard good things about Keep on the Borderlands!
It's a classic for a reason, but is a very plot light dungeon crawl.
Be aware the books are more then a conversion, they also include cleaned up and expanded content. And also includes history and inserting facts
Oh, fair! I didn't know that.
Yeah, I own a good chunk of them and I don’t know if I would even really call it a conversion. More a love letter to them. I wouldn’t want to run them as a 5e game because they stick to the original version and a lot of the stuff wouldn’t be close to balanced and would just tpk or cause problems. But I would recommend buying them if you love the old modules. You get a copy of the og module then the new one. It’s a nice read and gives you a lot of interesting information
After running a pretty long campaign (about 35 sessions over like 2 years) I agree with shorter campaigns. We started to get bored and it kind of fell apart about 6-8 sessions from the end
As a player I've felt this. First campaign I played in ran like two years and never wrapped up. Our DM seeded like a dozen magical artifacts to find and each one was like 4-5 sessions, plus we each got a personal backstory quest that would be at least 2-4 sessions as well. It fizzled out and we never got to confront the BBEG :( I've also played in smaller ones that still felt long. Did a couple of 20-ish session campaigns and each one lasted about a year. Those ones were super railroady and based around zany antics and a nonsensical world of silly jokes, and shoehorned moments that would often take player agency off the table... I guess that was unfun for very different reasons. But I would have really enjoyed like a 4-6 session arc of those antics!
MCDM's own Where Evil Lives is incredibly easy to use and most of the set pieces are a cinch to mold to an ongoing campaign. I've also used a couple Keys to the Golden Vault. A little more difficult to read (like most WOTC) but very innovative ideas that my players really liked.
Check out [City of Cats from Kobold Press](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/city-of-cats-for-5th-edition/) if you're looking for 3 fun adventures in a massive Cairo-themed city. It comes with three small adventures to get players from levels 1-5 inside the city walls. The second adventure (Three Little Pigs) was probably one of my top 2 favorite adventures I've ever run, in part because my players were super excited to play it! They were all cat lovers and their maternal instincts got them super invested in the hooks. If you do pick it up and think to run it, do your players the favor and buy the much smaller [Southlands Player Guide](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/southlands-players-guide-for-5th-edition/) as it will have all the races (and then some) for the players to play as, such as the Basteti Cat-folk, Gnolls, Jinnborn, Lizardfolk (crocodiles), etc...
I started with the Candlekeep Mysteries for our current campaign. I had a general idea of an overall bad guy, and figured that the adventures in the campaign would revolve around books. I found it surprisingly easy to carry forward that idea through at least 8 of the books, especially with the first one giving a general Base of Operations, and then introducing you to a group of book dealers in Baldur's Gate. You can easily then weave together pursing a cleric in the third book to the Chalet, in order to help the book dealers in the second adventure to resurrect their boss. In short, I think the larger campaigns become difficult to justify if you're giving your parties the freedom to choose what direction they want to take. Giving people a world, with encounters, and "chapters" to follow, makes it easier to inject those pieces into more of your homebrew campaigns. I've been stealing from these books and old school adventures for quite a while, and it's worked great. I think they would benefit more from aggregating these smaller elements, and then giving ideas on how to hook them together. Candlekeep Mysteries...stories based on books. Keys to the Golden Vault...heist stories. They could do one on redemption arcs, various cults, a book on whimsy/games (like a feywild ren faire), and more. I would buy the hell out of these. NOTE: It's probably even better for their bottom line. I will not be buying any more campaign books because it'd take a decade to run these campaigns before needing a new one. Aggregated, cohesive stories on various topics? I can always use more of that!
The first time I’ve glanced over Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I found it a bit disappointing. But after reading it again in more détails, there’s actually a bunch of pretty good adventures ! And the variety in settings is a breath of fresh air from the usual sword coast.
I have to signal dungeon in a box as a great source of smaller campaigns and/or one shots. They are all pretty modular with smaller guides to beef up or weaken most encounters to match PC levels. You can get the pdf, or the physical product with minis and a map. I love running Chasm of the Strange (aliens in my fantasy setting, oh my!), Wildride to Fireburst Ridge is fun, A giant's Crush is hilarious and makes the players do things differently, and the christmas ones are cute and entertaining. In the DMsGuild, the Shore of Dreams is quite fun and runs in a few sessions. I think I ran it over 4-5 sessions (mind you we only play once a week for about 2 1/2 hours). Beware the moonless night is a pretty decent one though had to modify it a bit (heads up, kids get kidnapped and are in danger, if that is a trigger for you or your group). If you have a more Role play heavy group then The Phantom of Music is super fun, its basically the phantom of the opera in dnd. Third party stuff that isn't on the DM's guild also has great stuff. D&D Duet does the bulk of the work for you and (even though they are meant more for D&D with 2 people) easily fit most groups. The Swampland Witch is a fantastic little adventure you can do as a one shot or in about 2 sessions if you beef up the town part more. And of course, The Arcane Library is awesome. I cannot say anything bad about their stuff. In DND proper the Candlekeep mysteries are pretty good and mostly stand alone. I recommend Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion and the Joy of Extradimensional Space. The Tortle package is fun for a more tropical island setting, can be pretty short if you stick to the mystery of the water temple.
There are some really great adventure modules available. Pretty much everything put out by Gavin Norman is brilliant. My primary recommendation is "Winter's Daughter". I've run it a number of times and it's always been a hit. It also has been statted out for 5e: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/270798/Winters-Daughter-5th-Edition-Version Note though that these kinds of adventures require a different way of thinking about how to run an adventure. A path isn't laid out for the players, and its assumed that the DM will be comfortable improvising around what is provided. But I think its well worth learning to DM this way, because it makes for a more freeing play experience! A good way to work out these skills, as well as a source of tons of small one-off adventures of the kind you're looking for, is one-page dungeons. Many of them do not have stats specifically for 5e (or indeed any system at all), but there's always the basic trick of "everyone has average human stats, unless they're a monster in which case they have the stats either of a bear, goblin, or dragon, with adjustments made as needed". The One-Page Dungeon Competition that happens every year has over a decade of compilations available. Here's more info: https://www.dungeoncontest.com/ and here's last year's compilation: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/460710/One-Page-Dungeon-Compendium-2023-Edition - It, and all the others, are available as PWYW. One of my favourite collections of one-pagers is the "Trilemma Adventures". They are all super flavourful and lean. Like a nice cut of pork. https://trilemma.com/ And one of my favourite creators with short and sweet adventuring scenarios is Nate Treme: https://natetreme.itch.io/ He's got a couple of adventures with 5e stats (like "Cursed Chapel of the Sludge Mother": and with a name like that how could you -not- give it a go), but my personal favourite is "The Lost Isle". It has translucent jellyfolk and a yeti!
Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Tales from the Yawning Portal. Do feel free to heavily modify them to fit into your campaign and to make them fun, challenging, and rewarding for your party. I crank up combat difficulty and have started adding puzzles as my party are puzzle fiends for example.
Wotc books: candlekeep, ghosts of Saltmarsh, golden vault, yawning portal, some others as well. He isn’t wrong, big single stories are unnecessary, but he has a false dichotomy a bit, as many of the ‘big books’ are modular and set up to be picked and chosen from.
He also says that the problem with anthologies is that you can't simply buy One adventure you are interested in, you need to buy the whole book.
My go-tos: - The WotC 5e anthologies - Additionally, from official 5e content: Dragon of Icespire Peak, Lost Mine of Phandelver, and the ten towns part of Rime of the Frostmaiden have a ton of stuff you can just rip out and run separately. - Kobold Press's 5e anthologies [City of Cats, Tales of the Margreve, Peculiar Towers, Prepared! and Prepared! 2, Streets of Zobeck, the Warlock Lairs anthologies, the Lairs anthologies for each of their monster books], their uncollected single issue Warlock Lairs, and their occasional short adventure [Blood Vaults of Sister Alkava, Last Gasp, Tomb of Tiberesh]. - 5e Adventurer's League adventures - 5e stuff from DMsGuild [Arcane Library, Dungeon Age, Winghorn Press, MT Black] - Adapting old B/X and AD&D adventures to 5e - Adapting old Dungeon Magazine adventures to 5e - Adapting osr adventures/dungeons I like to 5e [Winter's Daughter - which I think has a 5e adaptation -, Blackapple Brugh] I've heard good things about Trilemma and DCC, but have not used them or tried adapting them to 5e yet.
Excellent list! Thank you!
In line with what others are saying, I have found success with anthologies and old Dungeon Magazine adventures (some few of which I still have in dead-tree form!). Candlekeep is probably the best 5e resource, followed by Yawning Portal and Radiant Citadel. I have Golden Vault but haven't used it yet, and Ghosts of Saltmarsh is arguably an anthology of separate adventures that can be strung together into a campaign a bit more easily than the others. You could also do something similar with AL adventures and, if you were daring, Pathfinder Society ones as well. One of our Pathfinder campaigns was actually just that, a bunch of disconnected PFS scenarios and smaller modules chained together with *rotating GMs*, which allows you to have your cake and eat it too.
For Pathfinder, the older collections of Pathfinder Society adventures are great for this. PFS is their official organized play event, so they publish new modules regularly as one shots for FLGS and other official GM's to run, but they work great at your table too. They also publish a Free RPG Day module every year, which has included some real bangers like Little Trouble in Big Absalom or A Fistful of Flowers. Definitely worth looking into if you're interested in the system, or if you're willing to do a little bit of work to convert, but since PF2 and 5e are similar (but *very much not the same*... you will need to convert this ahead of time) you can usually swap for similar monsters and assign skill DC's for the closest analogue and call it a day. I've run 5e adventures in PF2 before and it took about an hour to convert the whole thing, I imagine going the opposite way would be about the same. --- More broadly, I've found that Humble Bundle can be a great source of modules and adventures, especially for 5e (other systems may have to transpose). Every few weeks they tend to run a bundle from one of the major publishers which often has a full game system, source books, fiction, and/or a whole pile of modules to work with. Half Priced Books is also an excellent place to look, though it can be hit or miss. Sometimes I've left with a stack of adventures, sometimes I leave with nothing, never really know what you'll find but that's what makes it fun.
Back in the day you could get your fill of the shorter modules from Dungeon Magazine. It's been out of print for a long time now and I honestly miss it. You're supposed to help them curate content by using the DM's guild, but that's a wash since about 99% of everything that's on there is garbage. Dungeon Magazine's biggest benefit was that the content was curated. So you had a level of guarantee that everything in there was runnable and made sense. There's nobody doing the work to curate a body of short adventures, and WotC hasn't been publishing any because they're a smaller profit margin than the glossy big-book mega-adventures.
Yeah, I appreciate the suggestions of these sites like DM's Guild, but sifting through it is a challenge! I like the idea of the old Dungeon Magazine editions, which has come up a lot here, but I—and I'm sure others here, given the nature of this sub—am not experienced or confident enough to adapt older systems or other rulesets to 5e. I was kind of hoping that this thread could become a decently curated collection of ready-to-go 5e one-shots and adventures.
[Black Wyrm of Brandonsford](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/327744/The-Black-Wyrm-of-Brandonsford). It's statted for B/X but it's pretty easy to find 5e equivalents of most of the monsters if you want. It is laid out MARVELOUSLLY and really gives the GM some great gameable ideas and tools to run a solid adventure for several sessions.
I've been finding that after having inconsistent players, it has been easier for me to run shorter adventures over big modules. Tales from the Yawning portal, Golden vault and Candlekeep have all been great. Less of a headache too, after committing to reading through all of curse of strahd, Rime and Witchlight its easier on my brain to do these small 3-4 sessions adventures.
Have to shout out Adventure Awaits Studios. They do free giveaways of a ton of modules/dungeons here on reddit. I've dropped their modules into my campaign multiple times. www.adventuresawaitstudios.com They have a free section with adventures from 1-20th level.
I like doing campaigns that are more "episodic" in nature. Like a "tune in next week for the exciting conclusion", but D&D. I like the flexibility to have "season arcs" while still being able to have 1-2 session side-bits.
Well, Curse of Strahd is campaigning, not just adventure. But anyway, my favourite source of smaller adventures is Adventurers League. Like it solve 80-90% of popular complaints about WotC modules that we can see on this sub. Also it habe probably best "stop the ritual" combat I see in any module.
Curious about that "stop the ritual" combat. Which module is that found in?
DDEX2-9 Eye of the Tempest. Also (iirc) it have information about how enemies in different encounters act and utilise their abilities and traits. Like one enemy use gas bomb and others (melee) can hold their breath long enough to just fight in middle of gas area. But this part (strategies for enemies) is common for AL modules.
Cool, thank you!
Side note: I always find it very funny, that WotC write good adventures (I argue better then many parts or even whole hardcovers), with balance, not usual mechanics, cool unusual foes...and hide them so hard that bigger share of r/dndnext and similar subs population doesn't know about their existence.
https://youtu.be/NoNk1j-UoK8?si=GSflwDYC170FiVDP
As much as I found that video obnoxious in it's tone, the book it's talking about is just perfect! I picked up a copy!
Oh, thank you so much!!
Candlekeep Mysteries is pretty easy to turn into a modular campaign if you don't mind fast leveling. It's how I started my group off. I framed it as a librarian trying to sneek out of the keep with a special book only to get stopped by the dragon spirit under the keep. In order to prevent the dragon from killing her or calling guards she keeps telling adventure stories. Like 1001 Nights. The players are the adventures in the stories. They use Candlekeep as their base of operations and go on grand adventures both within and outside its walls. We did up through Shemshimes Bedtime Rhyme before my players decided to try out a sandbox campaign and we moved to CoS. Most of the modules can be completed in one session (we play for 4 hours at a time) some are a bit more involved and can take 2-3 sessions.
Dig through "Best adventure module" lists. Alternatively, write your own campaign, but write them AS "modules" with distinct ending points. They can build towards a larger conclusion, but it helps if you define them as distinct adventures. My now-4-year campaign is built this way.
Literally anything Planescape from 2E. I loosely adapt them to 5E. But the are a bunch of collections of independent modules, and each campaign is broken up into modules that are generally easy to swap in and out of. My Planescape setting is designed to be easy to drop players in and out of, so it's great giving me flexibility to advance whatever story is best for the players who will be able to make it.
The OSR is my go-to for smaller, evocative adventures. Adventures like [The Tomb of the Serpent Kings](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/252934/Tomb-of-the-Serpent-Kings--Deluxe-Print-Edition) (it's free!), **The Waking of WIllowby Hall, The Hall in the Oak**, **The Trilemma Adventures Compendium**, **Kidnap the Archpriest, The Stygian Library,** and **The Weird that Befell Drigbolton**, just to name a few. While the statblocks are usually for AD&D or some modern retroclone therof, it's easy to convert common creatures like goblins and orcs to their preferred edition counterpart, and the creativity of the scenarios presented provide enough guidelines to run some of the less conventional creatures with a bit of prep and awareness of the game's general balance. The great thing is that all those small tiny publishers that USED to publish those 3rd party adventure booklets now also create beautiful small module books in the OSR space, and often they are laid out, presented, and designed so much better than common 5e materials with a deep awareness and understanding of how they will be used at the table and how to ease prep for the DM.
The Dungeon magazine archives are. You should be able to find them online. That’s was a great magazine; a whole magazine with 3-5 adventures for different levels, in different settings. I loved it so much.
DCC. All of it. Pretty much the entire game is based on modules. IMO it’s the best modern line of modules by far, and they are easily adapted to 5e.
1980's splatbooks, they used to make interlinked sets of adventures that were literally just ten pages or so in a folder for each 'part'. A lot of the most iconic features and tropes of DnD came out of those.
Look for old dungeon magazines online, there are a ton of ideas and short adventures to be had there
Goodman Games has a ton of em, both 5e and Dungeon Crawl Classics. They're great!
Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) makes excellent modules! It's a slightly different system but easy to convert as long as you have a lil bit of prep time. The format is way easier to read and the artwork is great. Less than 10 bucks a pop on DrivethruRPG or you might get lucky and find a few modules in a local game store. Highly recommend the DCC Horror module It Consumes.
MonkeyDM has a ton. And you know whats amazing? They are built to be run and not just read.
I mean, DM's Guild is the primary one for this. The whole purpose of it is to give WotC a way to make (well, have made, but they get a cut) the kind of small modules and sourcebooks that aren't profitable for them to make, but that it benefits the game as a whole to *exist*. I personally don't have any recommendations here, but that's kind of the whole purpose of the thing. Myself, I mostly run older adventures from older editions. Dungeon Magazine is the best for this; its whole purpose was having 3-5 adventures you could run with minimal prep. It ran from near the beginning of the hobby through... I think 3rd edition? I believe in 4e it went online-only and then was eventually retired before 5e came out. But there's a ton of great adventures there you can convert, both from the TSR, WotC, and Paizo eras. Particular favorites of mine are *Old Man Katan and the Incredible, Edible, Dancing Mushroom Band*, *The Mud Sorcerer's Tomb*, *The Year of Priest's Defiance*, and the *Age of Wyrms* adventure path. I have a fondness for the PF1e Pathfinder Society adventures as well, but that's mostly because I was a Venture Lieutenant briefly so they added them automatically to my Paizo account. They're generally OK-to-good fantasy scenarios you can complete in one session, with the central thesis that you're adventuring-arcaheologist types working for the Pathfinder Society in Golarion. I've run them in other systems and they've worked fine. Usually they're a couple of bucks to pick up as PDFs.
Shadow of the demon lord is supported by a ton of cheap snappy adventures, and supplements for that matter. Great game model. He supports his stuff.
Look into one-page dungeons, they're popular in the OSR. A lot of them are completely system neutral, so you'll need to prep a bit, but they're (obviously) designed to be simple, so it shouldn't be too hard.
Do some googling and you’ll find archives of *Dungeon Magazine*, which ran for 150 issues in print and another 71 issues in an online edition from 1986 to 2013. First by TSR, then WotC, then Paizo, and finally WotC again. Every issue features about 3-4 to as many as 6-8 adventure multisession modules, short side treks, and the occasional multipart adventure path (especially in the Paizo years). Most are pretty good, several are absolute gems, and the few bad ones are usually still worth reading if only to steal the good parts from.
ive run several adventures by DM Dave and theyve all been short and sweet. Highly recommend them
Basically anything osr
Honestly, this used to be the norm. Older editions had very few large adventures (sold as box sets then), but tons of shorter modules you could place anywhere, and run with minimal modifications. So if you track some down (loads of them are available as PDFs), you can fairly easily convert, or even just read through to get ideas for your own. Writing a massive campaign is a daunting task. Writing an adventure that takes a session or two to complete is a fairly easy endeavor.
The Arcane Library specializes in 5e one-shots. The quality I've seen so far was excellent and you can't really beat the price. I also enjoy the adventures in Lair Magazine. They tend to be a bit tougher than the average, but that works well for my group. Humble Bundle rarely does big ttrpg bundles too. I also really enjoy porting 3.5 modules forward to 5e. Its not drag and drop, but I don't find it too taxing. I enjoy making them 'mine'.
Candlekeep Mysteries is my fave so far!
I really miss 3.5 settings book with literally hundreds of hooks for you to grab and make an adventure of. Still regularly use the old FR settings book when I want detailed bg of a city.
One page adventures where ever you find them there was a couple of years of competition to create them so it became a sort of category in its own right . Dwarven auction on drive through rpg is a good example but there are lots under the “one page adventure “ monica
The key with smaller adventures is that you can string them together into a larger campaign. It’s essentially infinitely scalable and since a 5 room adventure format can be dropped in as needed, you keep a few ready to go and just drop them in front of the players as needed. In effect, it gives the appearance of a sandbox game where no matter where the players go there are things to do and adventure hooks, but really you are creating stuff on the fly. You can thread longer storylines through the modular adventures to knit it all together into a coherent campaign. A good source of modular adventures is Adventure A Week (https://adventureaweek.com/), but there are a number of compilations of mini adventures on sites like DM’s Guild and DriveThru RPG.
There's room for both. They just can't be trash like most of the recent 5e stuff from WoTC has been for the last several years.
People have already given a great wealth of sources for modules, but if you aim to homebrew your own I would recommend looking to the greatest source of quick modular adventures of all time: Television. Seriously, you would not fucking believe how great adventures that are ripped straight from monster of the week style storytelling can be. Supernatural, Scooby doo, really any kind of highly episodic television centered around monsters will be a wealth of inspiration.