As I near Dragon Heist's end, I want to throw random published adventures at my group to continue the campaign. I want to do some pre-planning so I can foreshadow future adventures, but there are so many anthologies and parts of adventures to use. So I decided to start building an adventure database for everything published in 5E so I can look over everything at a glance. I assume if it's useful for me, it will be useful for others. Since I have read, played, or run a significant number of the published 5E content, I can also provide some context on how I feel about each adventure.
I've created a table in Notion because it's my favorite tool for documenting D&D things. I've published it on the web here. This is a work in progress! I've only added three books worth of adventures so far, but they are big ones: Storm King's Thunder, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and Tales from the Yawning Portal. I chose the first two because I have ran significant portions of them and have some informed opinions. As for Tales, it was the anthology I have read most recently.
For each adventure, I have the straightforward book, chapter and title. But here is some background on the other fields:
- Tags: What kind of adventure is it? These aren't hard and fast, but I try to capture the way I think most groups would approach the adventure. There can be multiple types of tags for each adventure.
- Dungeon Crawl: A traditional dungeon crawl where you mostly hack and slash your way through a dungeon.
- Exploration: The adventure has a lot of exploration that isn't just crawling a dungeon. Wandering the North in "The Savage Frontier" section of Storm King's Thunder is the best example of this type of play.
- Role Playing: This means there is a significant amount of NPC interaction and role-playing in the adventure.
- Site-Based: This is different from a dungeon crawl in that it's either one set piece encounter, or using all three pillars of play in a single location like a city.
- Levels: The expected levels of the characters. Most adventures give an exact number, but some are a little less clear so I have played around with using Tier and/or specifying the levels. I might change this later, but I am leaving it inconsistent for now as I add data.
- Summary: I try to do a one-sentence summary of the adventure. They often have major spoilers. For example, from chapter 11 of Storm King's Thunder: "The characters must find the location of a ship with an imprisoned King Hekaton before the Kraken Society drags him to a watery grave."
- Primary Monsters: What kinds of foes will the characters face? I err heavily on the side of leaving out monsters rather than trying to list every monster in the adventure.
- Portability: How easy is it to incorporate this adventure into a different campaign than the one it was written for? In general, I am going to mark any adventure from an anthology like Tales from the Yawning Portal as High.
- Low: It won’t be easy to drop this adventure/chapter into your campaign, usually because it is thematically very tied to its own adventure. I wouldn’t try to reuse this adventure outside of the sourcebook it is in.
- Medium: It will take some work, but you can definitely reuse this adventure/chapter.
- High: This is really easy to fit into an existing campaign. For example, in Storm King’s Thunder, each of the giant steadings has the characters looking for a conch of teleportation from the ruling giant. You can easily replace that with any mcguffin for your campaign.
- Rating: My subjective rating of how good the adventure is based on running, playing or reading it. If I don't have a strong opinion either because its been too long since I read or played the adventure, or if I just haven't read it, I'll leave this blank. I want to have most adventures in the 2-4 star range and somewhat force a normal distribution with my ratings so there is some real discernment at the top and bottom.
- ⭐: I wouldn’t run this adventure even as part of its larger campaign.
- ⭐⭐: I don’t think it's an especially good adventure, and probably not worth shoehorning into a campaign.
- ⭐⭐⭐: If it matches the criteria you are looking for, it's worth skimming the adventure to see if you like it.
- ⭐⭐⭐⭐: This is a pretty good adventure/chapter, if it's close to what you are looking for, seriously consider it.
- ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: This is an awesome adventure/chapter, it's worth a lot of effort to shoehorn it into your campaign.
