@@NoFunAllowed Agreed. I think my main critiques are that I wish chapters 1 and 2 were more naturally blended because if you run it as is, chapter 2 can feel like you're just sitting around waiting for the DM to tell you you're high enough level to take on Sunblight. And the other one is that I wish the Auril and Ythryn storylines were more naturally connected.
RotF is a great story but one of the most confusing campaign layouts WotC has made. That being said with a lot of homebrewing and rewriting definitely A tier
Haven’t ran it yet but it’s among my favorite I’ve read. From reviews it seems *very* polarizing among RUclipsrs though. SlyFlurish absolutely trashes this adventure.
Breaks my heart seeing tyranny being bashed hard, I ran it online during covid with my old friends and we had such a good time... I did have to adjust lots of things heavily, to be fair. Love your channel! ❤
Tyranny of one of my favorite campaigns. Sure, it has its flaws, but it’s one of the best stories of any of them, and it’s got some really fun encounters and dungeons in there, Like Xonthal’s Tower and the Tomb of Diderius.
What do you mean with scaled it up? I am running it right now and we are at the end of the first half, planning on doing a mini adventure in the Feywild (we have an eladrin as player character and want to give her a time to shine on her backstory) and after that doing the second half. I didnt read all of the stuff thats happening in the second half but i am curious what you did, i am a little "scared" it wont be as cool as the first half.
Man, people do hate Stormwreck Isle... I personally think it's A tier, it's short enough to try and get someone to DM / play DND for the first time. The descriptions are great, there's a good nice twist, and you end up at low enough level that you can jump into pretty much any other module afterwards if the group gets going. I just wish they did it justice by giving a free DDB code alongside DLC, like they did for Icespire.
I just think the environment is boring, its just a rock haha. and WotC doesnt seem like the kind of company that willingly gives away online and physical bundles haha
@@NoFunAllowed Yeah, see, but here's the thing: they did that for Icespire, so we expected them to do the same for stormwreck. And to add salt to injury, they stopped giving the free code in newer prints of Icespire, just around the time the new set was announced. That was mean.
@@NoFunAllowed Stormwreck is a little bit easier to run than Lost Mines. It could benefited from two or three pages worth of helping the dm how to run.
I agree. Stormwreck Isle delivered actually what it set out to be which is a short intro adventure that could be run in 1 maybe 2 sessions for new players and DMs alike.
This Tier List is exactly what I would have needed when I started out a few years ago. :) I am sure this will help some upcoming DM soon. In the End I decided to start with Tomb of Annihilation because of you and I do not regret that choice at all, since it offers a fantastic playground for me to work with.
Just remember folks, You can still play all of these adventures using the new ruleset and im sure running new adventures using the 2014 set with a few tweaks.
Hey man I just finished DMing ROTFM for a group and I have to thank you for your guides on that module! They were a massive help on how to make the module more coherent especially the advice on the arcane brotherhood.
I think you treasure sandbox style more the usual reason why folks buy adventures...for a linear experience to minimize preparation. Thanks for the list!
Having fully run both Curse of Strahd and Wild Beyond the Witchlight, I can vouch for both of them being great games. I would say that WBW is the easier of the two to run, but COS is the deeper game with more interesting NPCs.
Chris Perkins is by far the best "celebrity" dm. Granted he has an unfair advantage, he's been writing d&d since before most players were born. I'd rather play at Perkins' table than Mercer's, and i know I'm not the only one. Keep up the content, i haven't seen you in my feed in a while.
I've seen some of Chris' videos, but I would love to watch him DM a campaign! Is there any in particular you would recommend for me to see him at work? Thank you!
I think there are very few of these adventures that are amazing if you run them purely as written. ToA and CoS being the exception, but even those can be elevated so much if you look up suggestions online. Personally I love Descent into Avernus the most. Running that game as a sandbox is the most fun I've had as a DM. The themes, settings, location, characters, and best of all the Infernal Vehicals is all amazing. If you check out some reddit suggestions you'll get Mad Max in hell! Now what could possibly top that?
I also ran DiA as a sandbox and it has been epic. I've loved running it and my players have loved the opportunities for character development. I've tried to offer each PC an opportunity to shine in this campaign and we've had a blast. Just receiving the sword, we aren't done but looking forward to the rest!
I take considerable offense at Tyranny of Dragons being in F tier. Sure, it requires a fair bit of extra work from the DM to put together, but it’s structured really well, and it has a fantastic storyline. It’s one of my favorite campaigns to run. Also, Out of the Abyss should absolutely be S tier. It has the best beginning of any campaign, and the questline is ridiculously fun to play out, having characters slowly go insane. Frostmaiden should be higher as well. Quests from the Infinite Staircase should be lower, because so many of the adventures contained therein are just really underwhelming. All flash and no substance.
Thank you for this! So many of my experiences echo yours-- this is a solid ranking. From my perspective, I'd raise up Call of the Netherdeep to B tier alongside Candlekeep and Abyss-- I had a LOT of fun running it for a group, and think it deserves a higher tier than the others in the "C" category. I had a blast with Storm King's, too, but did plenty of adjusting to make it work. I did not enjoy Tomb of Annihilation nearly as much as you did, so would have moved that down to C tier, and would move Icewind Dale down to D or F tier- I had a lot of issues with it.
While I have not run every adventure here and of course every group and preference is different, I do have quite some DM experience as a forever DM, and running 5e modules. I will not comment on the ones I have not ran, but I do feel the need to comment on the ones I have a lot of experience with. Especially about the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle starter set. Granted I was an experienced DM when I ran it, but for players that have barely heard of D&D before, and didn't have much games/gaming background, but have seen some iconic fantasy movies such as Lord of the Rings. I heavily disagree that the adventure deserves an F, as it does quite a good job introducing new players, and by the looks of it new DMs to the game, and is relatively easy to continue if you wish. It is a bit bland and generic, but so is Phandelver, and I would argue many other adventures. That is not necessarily bad as you can focus on other things. It is also quite short making it lower investment, which is a huge thing for when you don't know if you will vibe with a group, or if they will vibe with the game. Granted, I have made tweaks to the adventure, but everyone does that, no? While Lost Mine of Phandelver is written in a worse way, presumably because it was the first adventure for 5e, and I found it hard to motivate most groups to get through it. Also the side-quests are a bit far fetched, especially with how insignificant and inconsequential they seem. For reference, I usually run very RP heavy games with more sparse but hard and tactical combat. Other than those 2, I feel like the essentials kit should be higher as it provides the best value for money in terms of starter sets, with free continuation adventures that are decent, and while I have not run it, due to its nature, it is very easy to take locations from it and use them elsewhere. I've spent the most time running Curse of Strahd, and while it is a great adventure with themes and ideas, the book itself leaves a ton to be desired, and is not at all friendly to DMs. Don't get me wrong, I love the adventure to death, but not for many things that are actually in the book. I've also had experiences with Tales form the Yawning Portal, Candlekeep and Dragon Heist, but don't have much to add. EDIT: Great video btw! It can be overwhelming for newer players when picking up books!
@@aslaans.5654 IMO, even though it's quite a bit less content than the other sets (especially the essentials kit) it's very worth it for a first time group. I got into d&d without having played it before, so me and my friends had to learn along the way, and I had to DM. And that was back in phandelver days, I wish I started with stormwreck... It actually guides you through it way more than the other ones. If you need any tips feel free to ask.
I would love to run it using another system, because i feel it's theme goes against 5e's mechanics. But i do know people dig it for sure, I just personally dont like "Dark 5e"
Drakkenheim is not S+ tier as a campaign book. It has severe pacing issues, and lack of concrete tools for DM's to react to party's shennanigans that *won't* end up in the campaign crashing and burning. It is a great idea of the campaign, and it has a lot of S+ tier elements, and it's better than most of what WotC have released for 5e (I think Curse of Strahd is better overall), but it is not S+ tier. I'd say low S-tier. For true S+ tier experience, go to Odyssey of the Dragonlords.
While I think Drakkenheim is much better than C tier, I don't think its S+ tier just because it requires more work on the DM's part to figure out each player's personal quests along with faction dynamics to shape the path of the campaign. But I think as a sandbox campaign adventure its one of the better ones and would say its easily A tier (above the 3 listed in this video).
I'm only going to give my opinion on the ones I've run personally, and I like that you emphasize that it's your opinion at the end. I don't tend to read through an adventure until I'm getting ready to run it unless I'm super excited about it. Lost Mines of Phandelvar (S): This is my most run adventure and the amount of people I have taught to play with this one is insane. I've been playing 5e since the moment it came out and this adventure has been run so much over the 10 years. I know it's a shorter one, but if I was told to reconstruct one adventure from memory, it would be this one. Tyranny of Dragons (F): Completely agree with you. They were still figuring out what they were doing, there were some dregs from 4e bleeding over, and overall it wasn't a great adventure. I don't think I have a highlight of the adventure past the first 3 chapters, and I would be fine running those chapters again as their own standalone adventure with some changes because it realistically should go at least level 1-6. Curse of Strahd (S): I absolutely love this adventure! I've run it three times and each time has been so much fun. There's a ton of advice out there and fan pages that are still very active because it's such a beloved adventure. It's a self contained land, and while you can expand on it to bring even more joy to your games, playing it as is is still amazing. The progression is amazing and it's very close to a perfect adventure to me. This is the top adventure for me. Storm King's Thunder (D): I do need to run the level 1-5 adventure, but I would do that as a standalone. SKT starts at level 5 and that's where I started my players. However, it takes a LOT of work to have it flow coherently and you really need to just pick one out of the five different routes to take and lead your players along that path. Personally, even then I think there are only two real contenders for questlines. It's an interesting concept but just overstretched itself. And I HATE the direction they took with the BBEG. Tales of the Yawning Portal (B): There are some good adventures, there are some bad adventures. Out of all of the anthology books, I've run more out of this one than the others. Some of them I didn't care for, but others became staples in my DM adventure portfolio. I don't like that there's no real tie in though for an overarching story. Tomb of Annihilation (C): I completely disagree with you on your placement of this one. It is definitely not above CoS, and not at the top of the list. The amount of prep you have to do for it, the changes you have to make so that the adventure hook actually makes sense (or else your players rush and miss 70% of the adventure), and just the slog of filler you have to get through to get to the actual interesting part of the adventure makes it much lower on my list. My group actually had to take a hiatus from it because we got so bored with the adventure. Dragon of Icespire Peake (B): It's definitely not as great as LMoP, and it's the adventure that got me into crafting D&D terrain. I will say it is one of the best adventures as a West March campaign, and that's what I've run it as both times I played it. Stayed true to the story and told players what happened and what their goal was as they came in each session. They got to choose what quest they went on and that's what we did. It's almost like an anthology book of true one shots in that regard. Although I will agree that adding it to LMoP is the way to go. However, you did forget the three follow up adventures that are after this: Storm Lord's Wrath, Sleeping Dragon's Wake, and Divine Contention. Rime of the Frostmaiden (C): I'm currently running this and can't wait to be done with it honestly. The storyline does not mesh well within itself, and it kind of has the SKT effect where the book has to level them up to actually get to the campaign, but then the campaign feels rushed because most of the book is the pre-campaign. The entire first part of the book just needs a rewrite to have one continuous adventure. It barely squeaks above D tier because it's not quite as bad as SKT and isn't stretched quite as thin. Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (B): Yeah it's basic like you said "Baby's first D&D", so since I ran it for a summer camp where I was teaching kids to play, that may count towards my like of it. But it also took the place as the Starter Set adventure, and for that I think it's the better choice over LMoP. It is a starter adventure and then you can go back to the mainland and do LMoP without dying immediately to THAT encounter (you know what I'm talking about). Do I wish it had more than a barren rock of an island? Yes, but I'm not a fan of random encounters anyway. If I had to recommend any adventure for a brand new DM and group, it would be this one. Some honorable mentions because, while I haven't ran them, I was preparing to or there are other circumstances around it. Ghosts of Saltmarsh (A): I was planning on running this, I did a bunch of the prep for it, and I did run one of the adventures as a one shot. However, I did change some stuff up and added in a few things to make the overall story work better. It's still so much less work than TotYP, and I like some of the adventures here more. The Shattered Obelisk (C): This honestly gets pulled up just because it piggy backs off of LMoP and is the only way to get that great adventure anymore. The fact that half of the adventure is just reprinted and didn't get changed at all to accommodate the additional 2nd half was very disappointing. I would honestly just choose a different place to host it. Maybe take the first part of SKT since that has to do with an obelisks already and use that as the filler (1-5) adventure. If you're running LMoP, which it's unfortunate that you now have to buy this book to do, I'd run that in conjunction with DoIP and then the three follow up adventures from it to make a great adventure from levels 1-14.
I've run Icewind Dale and Witchlight, I thought both were awesome. I ran Witchlight almost entirely as-is. My players usually chose combat, but it was still pretty epic. Icewind Dale was my favorite, so far, but I can see what you mean about prep. I Homebrewed about 25% probably, and cut some of the side-stories. The three open world areas (Ten Town, Icewind Dale Wilds, and Ythrin) we're extremely fun for my group in terms of exploration. Hardly any railroading, and easy to have some relatively unconstrained sessions where people can just breath a bit. Hoping to still run some of these. May pick up TOA based on this recommendation.
Ahhh Dice Camera Action was so good. Perkins voicing the Mongrelfolk, the Dwarves at Citadel Adbar and ofc like you said Shemeshka. So good. Its the only dnd show i listen to without getting bored. Even CR can be slow and a drag but DCA kept me hooked all the time.
@@TheOffendedChickn is it still running? I thought it was cancled due to some drama with Jared or something so they just stopped. I know Anna and Holly has done alot of side things with AC INC and stuff though.
Just completed Dragonlance as a player. It is somewhat linear at the beginning, then more sandboxy on the second half. But yeah, the "final battle" is kinda epic in the scope of this adventure, but not enough in absolute term. Luckily, my DM elected to have us continue with Dragonlance Shadow of the Black Rose (from DMs Guild) which gave a more fitting and satisfactory finale to our story.
When the demands of work forced me to abandon my homebrew setting and turn to pre-published adventures, I started with Curse of Strahd. I remembered loving that adventure back when it came out for late 1st edition/early 2nd edition AD&D. After that we dove into Mines of Phandelver, specifically the first part of Shattered Obelisk, with a smattering of Dragon of Icespire Peak sprinkled in. That was my party’s “save the local area” story arc. Right now we’re in a short homebrew transition and then we’re going to tackle the mid-to-high-level dungeons of Tomb of Annihilation to finish out their “save the world” story arc. So this was a great validation to my choice of adventures and I agree with your top tier list 100%. If you only have time/money to run a handful of adventures, you can’t go wrong with those ‘S’ and ‘A’ tier choices.
I've been running a Heavily modified Tyranny of Dragons as a local game for new players. It's been fun but a lot of work. One of my fellow party members in my online group has DM 2 modules so far to middling results. We try to do a thing where we play the main game one week. Then we let him DM the next week. Descent Into Avernus The fun of that game was the characters. We had decided to take a Sucide Squad route. The middle of the game turned to one big fetch quest and got hard carried by character interactions. I think I will run this game though for my local group. Wild Beyond the Witchlight Holy shit this campaign sucks and we don't know how to tell the DM we want it to end. We're all good friends but we don't have the heart to tell him because we really don't want to hurt his feelings. This game is being carried by the comedy of the wizard and Bard being super absurd. Once we get the final stolen thing back for our last party member. We are totally going to just try end the adventure on our own terms instead of saving the lost unicorn or whatever the plot is. I don't care. I just want it over.
If you skip the level 1-5 beginning (and play LMoP instead), Storm King’s Thunder is definitely A tier! You can play all across the Sword Coast, visit every city, have epic encounters and battles, so many possibilities!
I am running OUt of the Abyss for my first long adventure (before only like 1-3 shots) and me and my group love it. we re nearly finished with the first part and it was/is amazing. I hope it doesnt fall off too hard like you said. First video of you i saw from you and i loved it have to look into some other stuff as well from you great work with that one.
I agree with the placements of the adventures I’ve played in. I love Tomb of Annihilation as well. I enjoyed curse of strahd but the constant doom and gloom made it difficult to enjoy fully (yes I know that’s the point). Our group had a great time with water deep and Rime of the Frostmaiden
Dragonlance is a great campaign. My group is nearing the end now and its been a true challenge. Thats incredibly rare in 5e. From fighting a stronghold full of draconians, escaping a crumbling city as it takes to the sky, fighting dragons both alive and reanimated with cataclysmic fire, political intrigue/subterfuge, taking the test of high sorcery and protecting a city against an oncoming horde via a floating island. Its insane and it deserves at least A tier. The epilogue where you travel to daargard keep and fight Soth could actually bump this into S tier. Its that good. I do agree that ToA is the best of 5e.
Im running Dragon of Icespire Peak rn and its honestly great! If you do your homework that is. The adventure as written is very barebones and doesnt try to connect the dots very much. It also loses a lot of cool Phandalin locations and lore from Phandelver. With a bit of effort though Ive fleshed out the half ofc cultists, the orc tribe, the Stone Cold Reavers, Cryovain himself, etc. Im basically doing the writer's jobs for them though lmao. I feel like DoIP was meant to be a larger book as a followup to the starter set but then it got put as an essentials kit so they truncated so so much of the adventure and lore.
But why, why do they ALL need to be big hardcover books? I miss the "single" adventure of old. Even when they publish these it is in those anthologies like Yawning Portal and Salt Marshes. But why do we have to buy a whole collection if all we want is one of the modules in it? I hate this. I guess we also never get around to playing these long-form campaigns so basicly every adventure book that came out for 5e is not for me 😞
My regular 5E group (technically two groups) has been playing the published adventures since 2014. Which means we haven't played all of the published adventures (lol). We have, however, played Lost Mine of Phandelver, Tyranny of Dragons, Out of the Abyss, Storm King's Thunder, Dragon Heist, Icewind Dale, and Tomb of Annihilation. I ran LMoP, ToD, SKT, and DH. I read several more books. I generally agree with this list, especially the position of ToA. One point of minor disagreement would be Tyranny of Dragons, IMO, takes elbow grease no doubt--but is very much a classic dungeons and dragons epic campaign. You do have to carve out the good bits but would rank it D+ C-. The other minor difference that I have is that SKT is a fantastic sandbox with enough of a meta-plot to move the campaign along. But it is for someone comfortable with DMing, no doubt. My players started a business in distributing "Golden Gulp" beer all over the sword coast. Which meant that the giants were messing with their production and distribution. Eventually they got involved with the ordning but for much of the campaign they were running, expanding, and maintaining a business as the story line developed in the background until the end, (SPOILER) when they started getting really involved in the missing Storm Giant King. I'd like to run the Planescape adventure/campaign if I run another 5E campaign as a longtime fan of the setting.
PotA has picked my curiosity since the beginning, and I've always wanted to play/run it. But so far no luck. But yes, the d crawl at the end seems a little too much compared to the fun beginning. My first instinct is to keep them but make them less extensive (reworking the maps maybe). What would be your recommandations to improve it?
Other than the recomandtation to not run it haha, i suppose if you dont want an extensive dungeon crawl then you would have to streamline the maps and encounters, or simply have the big bads emerge into the world and have the climactic fight outside!
@@NoFunAllowed This is not a bad suggestion. The first one or two could be a crawl, but then the baddies react to the PC actions and some fight outside, etc. Food for thought!
You do have to separate the best of books from the original anthologies. You're putting books with all-time classics just updated for the modern edition against some pretty hit or miss new adventures.
Prince's should be at least C tier maybe higher. While I would prefer less dungeon crawl, many players prefer a game with more of a combat focus. Storm Kings should be an A. Its basically the 5e campaign setting for the Sword Coast. Also the story was epic, and it embraced the players driving the story, rather than rail roading them down one specific path. I can see people who want a linear story rating it lower, but a B should be the absolute lowest rating. Tales is basically the 5e version of Dungeon Magazine. I like that the touched upon prior all time great modules, but they don't score any points for originality. As much as I like the concept, its hard to get full use of it in actual game play. While I want to give it a B for the quality of the mini adventures, I can't go over C. Tomb is a great update to an old module. I like everything about it, but don't love it. And neither do players. I get your bias since it is so close to your heart but an A is a stretch. I'm comfortable giving it a B even though its reputation isn't as great as the quality of the story. I do admit that I want to give it an A. Mad Mage isn't my personal flavor, but it is the best dungeon crawl in 5e. it is one of very few that even attempted to provide high level content. A or B is tough for me to say. For those that prefer combat and want to go to level 20 its clearly S tier. So I will set my personal bias towards social aspects aside, and also give this an A tier rating, just like Dragon Heist. if they had done a better job of blending the two modules together so that players are exploring little sections of the dungeon in between the Dragon Heist role playing, it would be S tier, and possibly the best of all 5e modules. I'm seriously tempted to create a 5.24 version for DMs Guild that blends the two with a level 1-20 adventure based in Waterdeep. Ghosts is inspired by a great module, and does a nice job of embracing the flavor of the original. It even gives the DM some advice about story between the various adventures. My players loved the way I adjusted the module to basically give them downtime levels between the official material. After each adventure in the Anthology they got to go have fun, and eventually were dragged back into the danger of the next story Arc. If the new Citadels and Bastions rules are as good as I'm hoping, I may have to create a 5.24 version taking advantage of those rules for my players. The naval combat rules were a massive diaspointment. They were poorly designed and thought out. Basically just a blurb that left most of the work of creating actual functioning naval combat experience to the DM. Considering how many people bought the book for those rules, I have to drop the hammer. C is as high as I can go even though the module itself is excellent, the complete failure of one of the major features and selling points of the module can't be overlooked. Witchlight gets points for creativity and uniqueness. Allowing a way for players to finish the module without combat is a great add. The actual story is solid. While the Feywild isn't my cup of tea, its popular with players. I hate that WotC seems to have embraced this so much by going from PCs can only be humanoids of small or medium size to a bunch of Fey races now being part of the game. Volos at least kept such creatures as stat blocks that weren't officially playable. But I can't punish Witchlight for the stuff they did in later books, as much as I would like to. A is the rating for this module. Spelljamer has many of the same qualities as Witchlight. different, unique in style of play. The inspiration is very old Sci Fi, and provides a way to bring that to D&D. Also its not just a module but also a campaign setting. While the style isn't my ideal, it gets an A for the same reasons as Witchlight. DragonLance is proof that someone powerful at WotC hates that setting or the authors. After years of telling DL fans they aren't going back to that setting, this is the garbage that gets published. It directly spits in the face of the lore and flavor of a beloved campaign setting. The Dragon Lance Chronicles remain incredibly popular and the Authors have many best selling books. TSR published over 100 novels in this world. To intentionally sabotage such a profitable and popular piece of IP requires a level of spite which is hard to fathom. Plus the story and encounters are bland. F tier is to kind. This really deserves its own special level of bad. Obelisk is a good adventure. It should have been a sequel to the starter set, not a reprinting with some additional story added in. if I don't include the starter set as part of the rating for this module it drops dramatically. The added in parts are average at best. Creating yet another low level module while preparing to launch 5.24 drags this one down. This missed opportunity for a 5-20 module isnt a killer, but its still a net negative. That said the starter set is S tier, so that provides a boost to the overall score. Not as much as it would if this was the first appearance of that content, but its solidly a C ranking. Planescape is a great campaign setting, not unlike Guildmasters Guide to Ravnica. The adventure is solid, and deserves a good rating. However, this setting is designed for high level play. The perfect module to take players from the typical 10-12th level end of their previous adventure the rest of the way to level 20. After saving the Prime Material world, its time to go adventure in a different plane with more powerful foes. They probably should have launched this book with a new monster manual specifically dealing with outer planes and all being very high CR creatures to challenge high level parties with plenty of magic. Adding in powerful items only used by high level martial characters, and expanding upon the epic boon system to close the martial/caster divide in high level play could have catapulted this to the top even with a terrible story. C is a good rating because of the creativity and uniqueness of the setting, but its hard for me to look past the missed opportunity and not drop it to an even lower grade. Vecna Eve of Ruin shouldn't be punished for the Core Rules not being well balanced at high levels, just like Mad Mage wasn't. The linear story is a negative, but hardly unique to this specific module. The nostalgia tour is a personal preference thing, but has some value as the swan song for 5.0. The last published material for an incredibly popular edition of the most beloved RPG of all time during its 50th anniversary. I have to actually give this module points for nostalgia. There is more creativity and uniqueness to this story than most want to admit. It also creates an excuse for the changes to the rules for the next edition. A tradition which has been around since the switch from 1e to 2e. As one of two high level modules, it also scores points for attempting what others have been unwilling to even try. Creating a fun and challenging story for high level adventures, that isn't just a mini adventure within an anthology. Vecna has earned an A rating despite being a linear story that the players need to follow.
I've been running a highly modified version of Dragon Heist for high level and you're right, it's absolutely at least A tier. I also love how everyone agrees CoS is one of the best adventures ever written for 5e, literally no one hates it.
Cool tier list. one thing I will say is it would be great if you could make clear outlines for each tier. Ex. Mostly great adventure with a few pitfalls, bad adventure overall with some good moments. I felt that high C-tier adventures belonged in b-tier, and vice versa.
Great tier list! I really enjoyed hearing your explanations for why you choose certain spots for different campaigns! I just can't agree with RoTM so low though... it's at least A tier I think, but I would honestly go as far as bottom of S-tier. It's really an unforgettable campaign with a good DM and just a little rewriting. Raw, though, I totally agree that the execution is poor. But the setting, the concept... amazing.
Can you go into why you dislike Tyranny of Dragons? I've seen it rated higher on similar tier lists? Any advice on running it? I plan on following up Curse of Strahd with this module and watched all your videos on that guide series (it was wonderful, thank you!!!). Any advice or council in running Tyranny of Dragons would be appreciated!
my first piece of advice is to not run it haha! (i'm biased of course). I just think that the adventure is lukewarm at best, and instead of taking the time, effort (and maybe money) to make it an exciting experience, it would be better to simply run a better adventure. Now if you do plan on running it, I would say to expand upon its themes, make the cult a more interesting foe, allow your players to actually have options in how the story advances, and expand the endgame finale to be catastrophic!
@@NoFunAllowed Haha much appreciated! We should be wrapping up Curse of Strahd this month after a year long campaign so i'll take some time and study up on the next module. I sincerely appreciate your channel and the videos you put together, it's been especially helpful for Castle Ravenloft but all of your chapter values are gold! Anyone I know running Curse of Strahd I refer to your channel to have them watch that series in full (and just for other good D&D content too haha). Thank you again for the fast reply!
I think the praise for Lost Mine of Phandelver was a bit over the top. It is not without it's issues. The first dungeon in the module (cragmaw hideout) is too complex and difficult for new players at level 1. I ran it with 4 new players recently and they were lucky to not have a TPK in the boss fight with Klaarg, I had to make the remaining goblins run away once Klaarg was killed. Also the Black Spider is not an interesting villain as there is no backstory or motivation given for him. I've had to do a lot of work to make it interesting for the players story wise. I've bought Eve of Ruin and am a little disappointed to see it ranked so low. It seemed ok from reading but I agree it seems to be very rail roady!!
I agree on nearly everything, Drakenheim is definitely A tier though. I was really disappointed with Rime of the Frostmaiden though and would drop that down quite a few places the DM needs to do a lot of work to make it hum. Planescape I found quite hard to run i didn't feel I really got a good feel of the outlands and the gate towns were very shallow. There's some really neat ideas but bringing it to life is hard.
I have ran Out of the Abyss, Tomb of Annihilation, Princes of the Apocalypse, Curse of Strahd, and Tyranny of Dragons. I am planning on running a very very heavily modified game of Vecna: Eve of Ruin once my current group finishes up Tomb (probably late October-mid November). I have played in Tyranny of Dragons, Princes of the Apocalypse, Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, Lost Mines of Phandelver, Dragons of Icespire Peak, and Icewind Dale: Rine of the Frostmaiden. I don’t think there are any outright F-tier modules. I also don’t think Curse of Strahd is as good as ever says. It’s solid, but, from what I’ve played, Tomb is the only S tier. I loved my time with Out of the Abyss, but it is a lot of freaking work to run well.
I would describe Lost Mines as a “pick your own railroad” once you reach the town. The adventure doesn’t blow me away but I think it did a great job as a first adventure in that everything is classic, straight forward adventure with minor twists and reveals without anything “challenging” from a story standpoint.
Do you have any examples of ttrpg modules--not necessarily D&D--that would allow me to run a mindblowing sandbox? Rather than a "pick your own railroad"?
@@Games-kz6ut The the official 5e adventures that are intentionally a sandbox style are Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, and Rime of the Frostmaiden. Everyone will sing CoS praises, including me. I have not ran ToA or RotFM yet, but have read through them both and really really like what I see. Reviewers like ToA, and are polarized on RotFM. I personally think RotFM is definitely worth checking out/considering. CoS is the purest sandbox- after the optional start, it truly is open for the players, only with a few planned events that happen "sometime" and ending in a large battle location for the epic final fight. Gothic castles and vampire/werewolf horror. ToA is a hexcrawl that focuses on exploration of a jungle environment with all the cool stuff that comes with it- The DM has a map, the players have an empty version of the map. The players start in point A and are sent into the jungle to wander around until they find point B. Point B is a large and challenging dungeon to finish the game. RotFM is sort of a cross between these two with environmental exploration like ToA, but the opportunity to immerse yourself in the world like CoS. It has a slight funneling shape to the story - A wonderful description of the different towns and the greater setting, with freedom for you players to go wherever, and several small quests available wherever they go. Then as the adventure goes on to the higher levels, the specific events start to be located at specific spots that your party will be tasked with finding. But it doesn't feel too forced in my opinion. This adventure polarizes people who review it and many seem to think it needs a lot of work. I see what they are talking about, but really get excited about the content and ideas it gives me to work with. I would describe this a bit like it's a sandbox, but for the DM- Your players can go/do what they want but it gives you the DM a lot of different quests that you can feed your favorites to your party based on where they go, which are your favorite, and what level they are. Then once your party has lived in the world and grown invested, the funneling starts with very interesting and impactful story elements. A theme you will notice is that sandbox style adventures feel like they focus on a setting with a story inside it, rather than focusing on a story within a setting. I like this a lot and think it helps you make the game more about the world and players, which is my preference. That said, if you like this style you might do well to check out settings books! People often look over these, but are a very good way to have an engaging world with a very open campaign. You could even go so far as building the campaign story as your players go. Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Mythic Odysseys of Theros are both highly praised, but discussed less since they are not adventures. I have not read these. Thanks for reading (:
I don't know what Turn of Fortune's Wheel is doing in A tier. I can only guess that you didn't play it (you didn't use the right image or call it by the right name either), but it's D tier at best. The characters quite literally can't die cause they just respawn, so your point about this campaign actually killing players is strange, since it does very much the opposite of letting characters die. Not to mention the massive bummer that it only explores one plane. The adventure is mostly the players just... visiting locations... It's lazy and half-baked.
Great list but I would defend the new Starter Set as to me it feels like a perfect starting adventure and a step into the game for people who haven't played AT ALL. I feel like people are too harsh on it as it's not the original that is a masterpiece too but to be honest if you have never touched the game and don't know things beforehand the new starter set does do a lot of improvements to get you into the game and make you understand what's going on and how to get more into everything
You dont get railroaded at the start of Lost Mines. Im not sure you know what being railroaded means. The adventure starts with an encounter, that isnt railroading, thats the adventure.
100% agree that ToA is better than CoS! Also, Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury in Tales from the Yawning Portal are the best beginner adventures! Having the two factions is fun, and you have a fun NPC to run. The most positive feedback I have ever received is (twice) with the massive fight that started Forge. And these adventures are linked as the players find a note about the goings-on that leads them to the second adventure.
Nice video. I wish they still made hard copies of LMOP, my magazine-style adventure book is pretty tattered, and it’s such a great adventure! Having a physical hard book copy is so nice
I think you failed to see the best thing about icepeak, it’s the easiest to run of all of these, it has some of the adventures are 2 pages long, all kinda connected to a greater and easy to understand driving force, that’s a godsend to new DMs. If you can buy, read and start playing the thing, all in a matter of a day, that’s a win for the game.
Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation being the top choices is curious to me, because they are very much designed for a certain kind of DND player. I mean, if you just don't like gothic horror, Strahd is unbearable and boring. To me, an S-Tier needs to be more universal.
@@NoFunAllowed of course! It’s more of player expectations. If I’m running strahd, I wanna make sure everyone is on board and I’ve had players pass because they aren’t interested in the genre. I acknowledge both being very well made and I personally enjoy them.
Wild Beyond the Witchlight is dependent on your party. The group I ran it with had a blast with almost no combat. But don’t know if full group would like it.
for me vecna might be C, it requires a lot of work, but still it has some really cool concepts that make for a great adventure, it really feels like the end game which is fun for a 5e module
ToA, CoS, and Phandelver I think are the standouts for me, run super well even vanilla as-written. Do you have any thoughts on the major 3rd party campaigns? Ones that come to mind are Odyssey of the Dragon Lords (or the Viking campaign they made next), Frog God’s City of Brass, XPto3’s anthology, etc.
Haven't touched any of them sadly. Between running all these official ones and running homebrew campaigns, I didn't have the time to look at the others haha
Now, to be fair to Tyranny of Dragons, the module was in the works before the official rulebook for 5e was even released. Kobold Press I believe was working on this module and they, or whoever it was that did make this module, had no idea what the CR of most or many monsters were, nor what most characters would be in terms of power at 1st level which is where the module takes off initially. Notice how for a long stretch of time, it was also the only adventure that went up to level 15 or so. Most of your other modules stop around level 10-12 or even lower sometimes with a few exceptions. They gave it their best shot to make the campaign work and were likely working under a beta and unfinished rule book guide to go off of. Now, does that excuse some of the poor choices made in terms of the story? Absolutely not. Chapter 4 is a trainwreck of a railroad that feels more like Oregon Trail than D&D, but they likely didn't have enough knowledge on what hex crawling in D&D 5e would be like vs other editions. And there are a lot of tabletop games that make hex crawling work very well, just not 5e. The closest we got was Tomb. As far as villains, Tiamat is iconic for D&D, I'd say even more than Vecna personally, at least before his name got thrown into Stranger Things or he became an antag in Critical Role. The villains made up for the campaign felt a bit one note, like Cyanwrath and some of the other cult leaders. But a good DM could make these characters work with very little tweaking. Point of a module though is to run it as is and have a good time, so that's still points off for this module. Overall, given what they had to go through with less than beta rules, and you can just omit or handwave the traveling in Chapter 4, I give Tyranny C tier, just because it is really cool fighting Tiamat, and you can make this adventure work. It just sadly takes more to make it work than most other modules.
My understanding is that there are several bangers in those type of books, they just don’t sell/get reviewed often. The handful of Theros comments I’ve seen are all high praise. My understanding is the robot world one is considered fantastic. I thought ravenloft decent and interesting, and the most slept-on book I’ve personally read for 5e is Bigby’s Glory of the Giants. Then I of course really like the one book that had a bunch of PC monster races, but haven’t read the rest of it so can’t give full thoughts.
Great job man, but i honestly disagree about RoTFM, i had a blast DMing it, altough i must admite it is a bit sandbox and i made a lot of changes, anyways, great vid
My hot take is that RotFM is intentionally the closest to CoS style-wise. I think they were shooting to make a similar sandbox that is a campaign that doubles as an isolated setting. And a critique I see for layout in RotFM is actually worse in CoS. I’m a big fan of Rime’s story and setting, I consider it fantastic. I do rate it a little lower than CoS though because the villain is amazingly present in CoS and the world is more populated. I would put it in A or low S.
While I played most of the add on modules for Adventure league. I have not ran all the books but I am working on it. Books NOT Ran. Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Princes of Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, Quests of Infinite Staircase, I am currently running Vecna Eve of Ruin. Storm King needs the map printed large. And you will need to cross reference the side quests.
due to life, i couldnt touch both the channel and the discords. The only one I can even remotely moderate is my own which i'm running my public games through!
No! Planescape sucks a lot! An adventure with nothing to say, Sigil empty like a bottle of beer drinked, planes without rules, planar door city without personality. Only good thing: the map of Sigil.
What about Chains of Asmodeus? I gotta disagree with the Tyranny of Dragons. I know Hoard of the Dragon Queen is bad, but Rise of Tiamat can be really fun with just a few tweaks. I've runned RoT twice and both times my players had a ball, so I think a C or D tier would suit it better, in my opinion.
I'm sad about Eve of Ruin being so low down - the plan was to run that after my current Curse of Strahd game. With the idea to let the players carry on with their characters, and reach level 20 one day. How's everyone else's experience with it? Any other suggestions perhaps? thanks in advance :)
My experience is that this is a rollercoaster. Your players have no agency, they just show up to "fan favorite" places, meet "fan favorite" npcs, and do what they are told. If you have players who like this structure, it works well. But if you have players who want to have more freedom, than it would require reworking some major plot points, allowing them a choice in when and where they go, and allow for a variance in the action!
@@NoFunAllowed I just started last week and No Fun is mostly correct. I am having trouble with the layout of Chapter 1 and 2. Players are already mentioning the Hand, eye and Head of Venca.
@@NoFunAllowed thanks so much! Will see what the players want after COS :) the missus is asking for Tomb of Annihilation, which we did start a while back, but due to a wonderful (NOT) thing here in South Africa called "load shedding", we had to stop it after about 10 sessions or so. But I'm pretty much prepped for it thanks to this channel! So if the players rather vote for that, I'm all for it!
Love the list, though I'm not tickled by the fact that I'm merging Princes and Eve of Ruin lol. These two are not more than the sum of their parts. It's kind of funny that they have the opposite problems; Eve of Vecna is such a linear adventure that there's nothing to consider, but Princes doesn't have enough connective tissue to make it a cohesive adventure. I like the tier list as a general assessment of "this is how much work you need to put in to make the adventure feel good/great". You need to put in a LOT of work to make Vecna great. CoS or Tomb are great from the get-go.
Storm Kings Thunder is poorly iundersted. Ive run most of these ans my players loved SKT the best because it does has epic scale. Its a DMs adventure with cool set pieces aas yousaud then tools to connect all the pieces. No hand holding. Its fir a DM that loves having scope to designand customise.
Third party content and shouldn't be rated on this list. If you are going to rate third party content it will require a review of hundreds, or at the dozen most popular 3rd party modules. A VTT publishing content doesn't make it a WotC product. Humblewood, Acquisitions, Netherdeep, Drakkenheim, and others aren't WotC IP.
Rime of the Frost Maiden is a horribly written adventure as its 3 acts are basically 3 separate adventures that are loosely threaded together that make less sense with the culmination of the adventuring taking place in middle of the campaign. Any pre-written campaign adventure should not need a "BUT" requires a lot of work on the DM's part to make it functional. That should move it down to D tier alone.
Second part of Ghost Marsh is just filler. Some of the most uninspired adventures and worst railroads are in the second half of that book. Icewind Dale is just two seperate adventures smashed together, with no regards to story progression-which could have been fine if kept seperately but both parts detract from each other when run in successive order. The same goes with Out of the Abyss as well, it should be run as 2 seperate mini campaigns with different characters for each part-and not as a single continuous campaign. The same with Avernus as well, but it is probably THE worst piece of crap ever relased for not only 5e but for the entire D&D history. Both parts of that adventure suck so bad in a myriad of ways that it should be considered a crime against RPGs in general. Elemental Evil was just too long, like 5x times longer than its worth. The same with Storm King's Thunder; as it could have been a great short module for 3rd tier gameplay but was instead released as if it had an idea worth stretching over 11 levels. Tyranny of Dragons is actually a great adventure if you'd start it at chapter 5 as a follow up to Phandelver. Dragon Heist is just a sorry excuse of a railroad but could turn out excellent if run skilfully. Undermountain, the ginormous mega-dungeon it is, has no place in the 5e playstyle-they just released it so people would shut up about high level adventures. Otherwise agreed with all your assessments, especially the S-Tier ones.
S-Tier - Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Tales from the Yawning Portal. B-Tier - Curse of Strahd, Quests from the Infinite Staircase, Lost Mines of Phandelver D-Tier - Everything else
@@AlexS-xh6ud CoS starts and ends well. The middle drags - we have the Sunblade but now need to do a bunch of quests just to be the right level to face Strahd! It's also too easy to wander into an area too high or low level for the party. A bit directionless. GoS however was a fun series of classic adventures with a nautical theme. Set in Greyhawk it's easy to tie the adventures together for a fun campaign.
I realize this video was made just for engagement, so I guess it worked, but if I'm going to be bothered by this and not respond, I will feel robbed. This is an awful video and you clearly haven't run most of these. You could be a good DM, but you made a bad video that helps nobody. Your take on half these modules are first chapter at best.
"5E's cycle of content is ending" it's objectively not though. No new edition has been announced, the 2024 update isn't a new, separate thing. Everything released going forward until a new edition is announced and drops is still 5e content.
I love how cos is D tier in the thumbnail hahaha. You trixie guy you.
Haha I just threw some random adventures in random spots
@@NoFunAllowed keep that trick in your back pocket. It worked!
This is such an underrated channel even though you were wrong about Rime of the Frostmaiden cuz it's at least A tier
haha i love frostmaiden, but i think RAW it is lacking in many places haha
@@NoFunAllowed Agreed. I think my main critiques are that I wish chapters 1 and 2 were more naturally blended because if you run it as is, chapter 2 can feel like you're just sitting around waiting for the DM to tell you you're high enough level to take on Sunblight. And the other one is that I wish the Auril and Ythryn storylines were more naturally connected.
RotF is a great story but one of the most confusing campaign layouts WotC has made. That being said with a lot of homebrewing and rewriting definitely A tier
Haven’t ran it yet but it’s among my favorite I’ve read. From reviews it seems *very* polarizing among RUclipsrs though. SlyFlurish absolutely trashes this adventure.
RotFM was a hot mess. No way that was A tier.
Breaks my heart seeing tyranny being bashed hard, I ran it online during covid with my old friends and we had such a good time... I did have to adjust lots of things heavily, to be fair. Love your channel! ❤
thank you thank you!
Tyranny of one of my favorite campaigns. Sure, it has its flaws, but it’s one of the best stories of any of them, and it’s got some really fun encounters and dungeons in there, Like Xonthal’s Tower and the Tomb of Diderius.
totally agree on Out of the Abyss being two seperate adventures. I actually just ran the *second* half and scaled it up which was a lot of fun!
heck yeah!
What do you mean with scaled it up? I am running it right now and we are at the end of the first half, planning on doing a mini adventure in the Feywild (we have an eladrin as player character and want to give her a time to shine on her backstory) and after that doing the second half. I didnt read all of the stuff thats happening in the second half but i am curious what you did, i am a little "scared" it wont be as cool as the first half.
Man, people do hate Stormwreck Isle... I personally think it's A tier, it's short enough to try and get someone to DM / play DND for the first time. The descriptions are great, there's a good nice twist, and you end up at low enough level that you can jump into pretty much any other module afterwards if the group gets going.
I just wish they did it justice by giving a free DDB code alongside DLC, like they did for Icespire.
I just think the environment is boring, its just a rock haha. and WotC doesnt seem like the kind of company that willingly gives away online and physical bundles haha
@@NoFunAllowed Yeah, see, but here's the thing: they did that for Icespire, so we expected them to do the same for stormwreck. And to add salt to injury, they stopped giving the free code in newer prints of Icespire, just around the time the new set was announced.
That was mean.
@@NoFunAllowed Stormwreck is a little bit easier to run than Lost Mines. It could benefited from two or three pages worth of helping the dm how to run.
I agree. Stormwreck Isle delivered actually what it set out to be which is a short intro adventure that could be run in 1 maybe 2 sessions for new players and DMs alike.
@@imakuniaw I think it gets hated on because the original starter set was substantially better.
This Tier List is exactly what I would have needed when I started out a few years ago. :) I am sure this will help some upcoming DM soon.
In the End I decided to start with Tomb of Annihilation because of you and I do not regret that choice at all, since it offers a fantastic playground for me to work with.
heck yeah thank you!
Just remember folks, You can still play all of these adventures using the new ruleset and im sure running new adventures using the 2014 set with a few tweaks.
Hey man I just finished DMing ROTFM for a group and I have to thank you for your guides on that module! They were a massive help on how to make the module more coherent especially the advice on the arcane brotherhood.
haha thank you thank you!
I think you treasure sandbox style more the usual reason why folks buy adventures...for a linear experience to minimize preparation. Thanks for the list!
haha sometimes linear is too linear for me!
Having fully run both Curse of Strahd and Wild Beyond the Witchlight, I can vouch for both of them being great games. I would say that WBW is the easier of the two to run, but COS is the deeper game with more interesting NPCs.
Fair fair!
Chris Perkins is by far the best "celebrity" dm. Granted he has an unfair advantage, he's been writing d&d since before most players were born. I'd rather play at Perkins' table than Mercer's, and i know I'm not the only one.
Keep up the content, i haven't seen you in my feed in a while.
Haha thank you! If I ever wanted to play, I'd want it to bring at Perkins table as well!
I've seen some of Chris' videos, but I would love to watch him DM a campaign! Is there any in particular you would recommend for me to see him at work? Thank you!
@@LeeCsM "Dice Camera Action" It was a fantastic team of players who evolved and grew over the runtime!
ruclips.net/video/a1ZbgywIF6Y/видео.html
@@NoFunAllowed Awesome! Thank you for the reply!
I think there are very few of these adventures that are amazing if you run them purely as written. ToA and CoS being the exception, but even those can be elevated so much if you look up suggestions online. Personally I love Descent into Avernus the most. Running that game as a sandbox is the most fun I've had as a DM. The themes, settings, location, characters, and best of all the Infernal Vehicals is all amazing. If you check out some reddit suggestions you'll get Mad Max in hell! Now what could possibly top that?
I also ran DiA as a sandbox and it has been epic. I've loved running it and my players have loved the opportunities for character development. I've tried to offer each PC an opportunity to shine in this campaign and we've had a blast. Just receiving the sword, we aren't done but looking forward to the rest!
I take considerable offense at Tyranny of Dragons being in F tier. Sure, it requires a fair bit of extra work from the DM to put together, but it’s structured really well, and it has a fantastic storyline. It’s one of my favorite campaigns to run.
Also, Out of the Abyss should absolutely be S tier. It has the best beginning of any campaign, and the questline is ridiculously fun to play out, having characters slowly go insane.
Frostmaiden should be higher as well.
Quests from the Infinite Staircase should be lower, because so many of the adventures contained therein are just really underwhelming. All flash and no substance.
Thank you for this! So many of my experiences echo yours-- this is a solid ranking. From my perspective, I'd raise up Call of the Netherdeep to B tier alongside Candlekeep and Abyss-- I had a LOT of fun running it for a group, and think it deserves a higher tier than the others in the "C" category. I had a blast with Storm King's, too, but did plenty of adjusting to make it work. I did not enjoy Tomb of Annihilation nearly as much as you did, so would have moved that down to C tier, and would move Icewind Dale down to D or F tier- I had a lot of issues with it.
While I have not run every adventure here and of course every group and preference is different, I do have quite some DM experience as a forever DM, and running 5e modules. I will not comment on the ones I have not ran, but I do feel the need to comment on the ones I have a lot of experience with.
Especially about the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle starter set. Granted I was an experienced DM when I ran it, but for players that have barely heard of D&D before, and didn't have much games/gaming background, but have seen some iconic fantasy movies such as Lord of the Rings.
I heavily disagree that the adventure deserves an F, as it does quite a good job introducing new players, and by the looks of it new DMs to the game, and is relatively easy to continue if you wish. It is a bit bland and generic, but so is Phandelver, and I would argue many other adventures. That is not necessarily bad as you can focus on other things. It is also quite short making it lower investment, which is a huge thing for when you don't know if you will vibe with a group, or if they will vibe with the game.
Granted, I have made tweaks to the adventure, but everyone does that, no?
While Lost Mine of Phandelver is written in a worse way, presumably because it was the first adventure for 5e, and I found it hard to motivate most groups to get through it. Also the side-quests are a bit far fetched, especially with how insignificant and inconsequential they seem.
For reference, I usually run very RP heavy games with more sparse but hard and tactical combat.
Other than those 2, I feel like the essentials kit should be higher as it provides the best value for money in terms of starter sets, with free continuation adventures that are decent, and while I have not run it, due to its nature, it is very easy to take locations from it and use them elsewhere.
I've spent the most time running Curse of Strahd, and while it is a great adventure with themes and ideas, the book itself leaves a ton to be desired, and is not at all friendly to DMs. Don't get me wrong, I love the adventure to death, but not for many things that are actually in the book.
I've also had experiences with Tales form the Yawning Portal, Candlekeep and Dragon Heist, but don't have much to add.
EDIT: Great video btw! It can be overwhelming for newer players when picking up books!
Thank you thank you!
tysm for this input. learning to dm and was planning on picking up stormwreck isle so I can try my hand at a first try without getting overwhelmed
@@aslaans.5654 IMO, even though it's quite a bit less content than the other sets (especially the essentials kit) it's very worth it for a first time group.
I got into d&d without having played it before, so me and my friends had to learn along the way, and I had to DM. And that was back in phandelver days, I wish I started with stormwreck...
It actually guides you through it way more than the other ones.
If you need any tips feel free to ask.
Hard to rank all the adventures considering that nobody has run them all.
Drakkenheim is S+ and it’s not even close!
I would love to run it using another system, because i feel it's theme goes against 5e's mechanics. But i do know people dig it for sure, I just personally dont like "Dark 5e"
Drakkenheim is not S+ tier as a campaign book. It has severe pacing issues, and lack of concrete tools for DM's to react to party's shennanigans that *won't* end up in the campaign crashing and burning. It is a great idea of the campaign, and it has a lot of S+ tier elements, and it's better than most of what WotC have released for 5e (I think Curse of Strahd is better overall), but it is not S+ tier. I'd say low S-tier.
For true S+ tier experience, go to Odyssey of the Dragonlords.
While I think Drakkenheim is much better than C tier, I don't think its S+ tier just because it requires more work on the DM's part to figure out each player's personal quests along with faction dynamics to shape the path of the campaign. But I think as a sandbox campaign adventure its one of the better ones and would say its easily A tier (above the 3 listed in this video).
I'm only going to give my opinion on the ones I've run personally, and I like that you emphasize that it's your opinion at the end. I don't tend to read through an adventure until I'm getting ready to run it unless I'm super excited about it.
Lost Mines of Phandelvar (S): This is my most run adventure and the amount of people I have taught to play with this one is insane. I've been playing 5e since the moment it came out and this adventure has been run so much over the 10 years. I know it's a shorter one, but if I was told to reconstruct one adventure from memory, it would be this one.
Tyranny of Dragons (F): Completely agree with you. They were still figuring out what they were doing, there were some dregs from 4e bleeding over, and overall it wasn't a great adventure. I don't think I have a highlight of the adventure past the first 3 chapters, and I would be fine running those chapters again as their own standalone adventure with some changes because it realistically should go at least level 1-6.
Curse of Strahd (S): I absolutely love this adventure! I've run it three times and each time has been so much fun. There's a ton of advice out there and fan pages that are still very active because it's such a beloved adventure. It's a self contained land, and while you can expand on it to bring even more joy to your games, playing it as is is still amazing. The progression is amazing and it's very close to a perfect adventure to me. This is the top adventure for me.
Storm King's Thunder (D): I do need to run the level 1-5 adventure, but I would do that as a standalone. SKT starts at level 5 and that's where I started my players. However, it takes a LOT of work to have it flow coherently and you really need to just pick one out of the five different routes to take and lead your players along that path. Personally, even then I think there are only two real contenders for questlines. It's an interesting concept but just overstretched itself. And I HATE the direction they took with the BBEG.
Tales of the Yawning Portal (B): There are some good adventures, there are some bad adventures. Out of all of the anthology books, I've run more out of this one than the others. Some of them I didn't care for, but others became staples in my DM adventure portfolio. I don't like that there's no real tie in though for an overarching story.
Tomb of Annihilation (C): I completely disagree with you on your placement of this one. It is definitely not above CoS, and not at the top of the list. The amount of prep you have to do for it, the changes you have to make so that the adventure hook actually makes sense (or else your players rush and miss 70% of the adventure), and just the slog of filler you have to get through to get to the actual interesting part of the adventure makes it much lower on my list. My group actually had to take a hiatus from it because we got so bored with the adventure.
Dragon of Icespire Peake (B): It's definitely not as great as LMoP, and it's the adventure that got me into crafting D&D terrain. I will say it is one of the best adventures as a West March campaign, and that's what I've run it as both times I played it. Stayed true to the story and told players what happened and what their goal was as they came in each session. They got to choose what quest they went on and that's what we did. It's almost like an anthology book of true one shots in that regard. Although I will agree that adding it to LMoP is the way to go. However, you did forget the three follow up adventures that are after this: Storm Lord's Wrath, Sleeping Dragon's Wake, and Divine Contention.
Rime of the Frostmaiden (C): I'm currently running this and can't wait to be done with it honestly. The storyline does not mesh well within itself, and it kind of has the SKT effect where the book has to level them up to actually get to the campaign, but then the campaign feels rushed because most of the book is the pre-campaign. The entire first part of the book just needs a rewrite to have one continuous adventure. It barely squeaks above D tier because it's not quite as bad as SKT and isn't stretched quite as thin.
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (B): Yeah it's basic like you said "Baby's first D&D", so since I ran it for a summer camp where I was teaching kids to play, that may count towards my like of it. But it also took the place as the Starter Set adventure, and for that I think it's the better choice over LMoP. It is a starter adventure and then you can go back to the mainland and do LMoP without dying immediately to THAT encounter (you know what I'm talking about). Do I wish it had more than a barren rock of an island? Yes, but I'm not a fan of random encounters anyway. If I had to recommend any adventure for a brand new DM and group, it would be this one.
Some honorable mentions because, while I haven't ran them, I was preparing to or there are other circumstances around it.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh (A): I was planning on running this, I did a bunch of the prep for it, and I did run one of the adventures as a one shot. However, I did change some stuff up and added in a few things to make the overall story work better. It's still so much less work than TotYP, and I like some of the adventures here more.
The Shattered Obelisk (C): This honestly gets pulled up just because it piggy backs off of LMoP and is the only way to get that great adventure anymore. The fact that half of the adventure is just reprinted and didn't get changed at all to accommodate the additional 2nd half was very disappointing. I would honestly just choose a different place to host it. Maybe take the first part of SKT since that has to do with an obelisks already and use that as the filler (1-5) adventure. If you're running LMoP, which it's unfortunate that you now have to buy this book to do, I'd run that in conjunction with DoIP and then the three follow up adventures from it to make a great adventure from levels 1-14.
I've run Icewind Dale and Witchlight, I thought both were awesome. I ran Witchlight almost entirely as-is. My players usually chose combat, but it was still pretty epic. Icewind Dale was my favorite, so far, but I can see what you mean about prep. I Homebrewed about 25% probably, and cut some of the side-stories. The three open world areas (Ten Town, Icewind Dale Wilds, and Ythrin) we're extremely fun for my group in terms of exploration. Hardly any railroading, and easy to have some relatively unconstrained sessions where people can just breath a bit. Hoping to still run some of these. May pick up TOA based on this recommendation.
Ahhh Dice Camera Action was so good. Perkins voicing the Mongrelfolk, the Dwarves at Citadel Adbar and ofc like you said Shemeshka. So good. Its the only dnd show i listen to without getting bored. Even CR can be slow and a drag but DCA kept me hooked all the time.
I need to watch all through it again haha
I agree! There’s never been another dnd show that’s really clicked for me. Totally miss it and having fomo thats it’s still running but not recorded
@@TheOffendedChickn apparently it is recorded, but it's more than likely that it will never be released
@@NoFunAllowed that’s brutal. I feel like watching Perkins DM really improved my skill set. That’s a lot of lost footage that could have been mined 😂
@@TheOffendedChickn is it still running? I thought it was cancled due to some drama with Jared or something so they just stopped. I know Anna and Holly has done alot of side things with AC INC and stuff though.
Just completed Dragonlance as a player. It is somewhat linear at the beginning, then more sandboxy on the second half. But yeah, the "final battle" is kinda epic in the scope of this adventure, but not enough in absolute term. Luckily, my DM elected to have us continue with Dragonlance Shadow of the Black Rose (from DMs Guild) which gave a more fitting and satisfactory finale to our story.
Starting Witchlight next week. I'm relieved to see you rate it an S-Tier. :)
It's one of my favorites of the 5e lineup for sure!
Loved and subbed! I hope you jump into the 2024 content coming up! I’m excited to hear your ideas! ♥️
Thank you!
When the demands of work forced me to abandon my homebrew setting and turn to pre-published adventures, I started with Curse of Strahd. I remembered loving that adventure back when it came out for late 1st edition/early 2nd edition AD&D. After that we dove into Mines of Phandelver, specifically the first part of Shattered Obelisk, with a smattering of Dragon of Icespire Peak sprinkled in. That was my party’s “save the local area” story arc. Right now we’re in a short homebrew transition and then we’re going to tackle the mid-to-high-level dungeons of Tomb of Annihilation to finish out their “save the world” story arc. So this was a great validation to my choice of adventures and I agree with your top tier list 100%. If you only have time/money to run a handful of adventures, you can’t go wrong with those ‘S’ and ‘A’ tier choices.
I've been running a Heavily modified Tyranny of Dragons as a local game for new players. It's been fun but a lot of work.
One of my fellow party members in my online group has DM 2 modules so far to middling results. We try to do a thing where we play the main game one week. Then we let him DM the next week.
Descent Into Avernus
The fun of that game was the characters. We had decided to take a Sucide Squad route. The middle of the game turned to one big fetch quest and got hard carried by character interactions. I think I will run this game though for my local group.
Wild Beyond the Witchlight
Holy shit this campaign sucks and we don't know how to tell the DM we want it to end. We're all good friends but we don't have the heart to tell him because we really don't want to hurt his feelings. This game is being carried by the comedy of the wizard and Bard being super absurd. Once we get the final stolen thing back for our last party member. We are totally going to just try end the adventure on our own terms instead of saving the lost unicorn or whatever the plot is. I don't care. I just want it over.
If you skip the level 1-5 beginning (and play LMoP instead), Storm King’s Thunder is definitely A tier! You can play all across the Sword Coast, visit every city, have epic encounters and battles, so many possibilities!
I am running OUt of the Abyss for my first long adventure (before only like 1-3 shots) and me and my group love it. we re nearly finished with the first part and it was/is amazing. I hope it doesnt fall off too hard like you said.
First video of you i saw from you and i loved it have to look into some other stuff as well from you great work with that one.
thank you thank you!
Love these rankings. I’ve run Dragon Heist and Curse of Strahd, and I’m really looking forward running a few others here
I agree with the placements of the adventures I’ve played in. I love Tomb of Annihilation as well. I enjoyed curse of strahd but the constant doom and gloom made it difficult to enjoy fully (yes I know that’s the point). Our group had a great time with water deep and Rime of the Frostmaiden
you need to play in more adventures to rank more of them haha!
Dragonlance is a great campaign. My group is nearing the end now and its been a true challenge. Thats incredibly rare in 5e.
From fighting a stronghold full of draconians, escaping a crumbling city as it takes to the sky, fighting dragons both alive and reanimated with cataclysmic fire, political intrigue/subterfuge, taking the test of high sorcery and protecting a city against an oncoming horde via a floating island. Its insane and it deserves at least A tier.
The epilogue where you travel to daargard keep and fight Soth could actually bump this into S tier. Its that good.
I do agree that ToA is the best of 5e.
Im running Dragon of Icespire Peak rn and its honestly great! If you do your homework that is. The adventure as written is very barebones and doesnt try to connect the dots very much. It also loses a lot of cool Phandalin locations and lore from Phandelver. With a bit of effort though Ive fleshed out the half ofc cultists, the orc tribe, the Stone Cold Reavers, Cryovain himself, etc. Im basically doing the writer's jobs for them though lmao. I feel like DoIP was meant to be a larger book as a followup to the starter set but then it got put as an essentials kit so they truncated so so much of the adventure and lore.
But why, why do they ALL need to be big hardcover books?
I miss the "single" adventure of old. Even when they publish these it is in those anthologies like Yawning Portal and Salt Marshes.
But why do we have to buy a whole collection if all we want is one of the modules in it? I hate this.
I guess we also never get around to playing these long-form campaigns so basicly every adventure book that came out for 5e is not for me 😞
I do love 10-40 page adventures for sure!
I have loved Tyrany of Dragons every time of have played it (4) times. Yes it has its flaws but I still loved the overall story and adventure.
My regular 5E group (technically two groups) has been playing the published adventures since 2014. Which means we haven't played all of the published adventures (lol). We have, however, played Lost Mine of Phandelver, Tyranny of Dragons, Out of the Abyss, Storm King's Thunder, Dragon Heist, Icewind Dale, and Tomb of Annihilation. I ran LMoP, ToD, SKT, and DH. I read several more books. I generally agree with this list, especially the position of ToA. One point of minor disagreement would be Tyranny of Dragons, IMO, takes elbow grease no doubt--but is very much a classic dungeons and dragons epic campaign. You do have to carve out the good bits but would rank it D+ C-. The other minor difference that I have is that SKT is a fantastic sandbox with enough of a meta-plot to move the campaign along. But it is for someone comfortable with DMing, no doubt. My players started a business in distributing "Golden Gulp" beer all over the sword coast. Which meant that the giants were messing with their production and distribution. Eventually they got involved with the ordning but for much of the campaign they were running, expanding, and maintaining a business as the story line developed in the background until the end, (SPOILER) when they started getting really involved in the missing Storm Giant King. I'd like to run the Planescape adventure/campaign if I run another 5E campaign as a longtime fan of the setting.
Tyranny of Dragons at least C tier. I loved to be DM of that.
PotA has picked my curiosity since the beginning, and I've always wanted to play/run it. But so far no luck. But yes, the d crawl at the end seems a little too much compared to the fun beginning.
My first instinct is to keep them but make them less extensive (reworking the maps maybe). What would be your recommandations to improve it?
Other than the recomandtation to not run it haha, i suppose if you dont want an extensive dungeon crawl then you would have to streamline the maps and encounters, or simply have the big bads emerge into the world and have the climactic fight outside!
@@NoFunAllowed This is not a bad suggestion. The first one or two could be a crawl, but then the baddies react to the PC actions and some fight outside, etc. Food for thought!
You do have to separate the best of books from the original anthologies. You're putting books with all-time classics just updated for the modern edition against some pretty hit or miss new adventures.
Haha that's what ranking them is for
This is a good list, BUT Drakkenheim deserves higher! S tier for me. After running it, it's the most fun I've had since running tomb of annihilation.
fair fair!
I also think this list shows your bias vs the high fantasy
the more expected you are to win, the less engaging it feels to win in my opinion haha
Prince's should be at least C tier maybe higher. While I would prefer less dungeon crawl, many players prefer a game with more of a combat focus.
Storm Kings should be an A. Its basically the 5e campaign setting for the Sword Coast. Also the story was epic, and it embraced the players driving the story, rather than rail roading them down one specific path. I can see people who want a linear story rating it lower, but a B should be the absolute lowest rating.
Tales is basically the 5e version of Dungeon Magazine. I like that the touched upon prior all time great modules, but they don't score any points for originality. As much as I like the concept, its hard to get full use of it in actual game play. While I want to give it a B for the quality of the mini adventures, I can't go over C.
Tomb is a great update to an old module. I like everything about it, but don't love it. And neither do players. I get your bias since it is so close to your heart but an A is a stretch. I'm comfortable giving it a B even though its reputation isn't as great as the quality of the story. I do admit that I want to give it an A.
Mad Mage isn't my personal flavor, but it is the best dungeon crawl in 5e. it is one of very few that even attempted to provide high level content. A or B is tough for me to say. For those that prefer combat and want to go to level 20 its clearly S tier. So I will set my personal bias towards social aspects aside, and also give this an A tier rating, just like Dragon Heist. if they had done a better job of blending the two modules together so that players are exploring little sections of the dungeon in between the Dragon Heist role playing, it would be S tier, and possibly the best of all 5e modules. I'm seriously tempted to create a 5.24 version for DMs Guild that blends the two with a level 1-20 adventure based in Waterdeep.
Ghosts is inspired by a great module, and does a nice job of embracing the flavor of the original. It even gives the DM some advice about story between the various adventures. My players loved the way I adjusted the module to basically give them downtime levels between the official material. After each adventure in the Anthology they got to go have fun, and eventually were dragged back into the danger of the next story Arc. If the new Citadels and Bastions rules are as good as I'm hoping, I may have to create a 5.24 version taking advantage of those rules for my players. The naval combat rules were a massive diaspointment. They were poorly designed and thought out. Basically just a blurb that left most of the work of creating actual functioning naval combat experience to the DM. Considering how many people bought the book for those rules, I have to drop the hammer. C is as high as I can go even though the module itself is excellent, the complete failure of one of the major features and selling points of the module can't be overlooked.
Witchlight gets points for creativity and uniqueness. Allowing a way for players to finish the module without combat is a great add. The actual story is solid. While the Feywild isn't my cup of tea, its popular with players. I hate that WotC seems to have embraced this so much by going from PCs can only be humanoids of small or medium size to a bunch of Fey races now being part of the game. Volos at least kept such creatures as stat blocks that weren't officially playable. But I can't punish Witchlight for the stuff they did in later books, as much as I would like to. A is the rating for this module.
Spelljamer has many of the same qualities as Witchlight. different, unique in style of play. The inspiration is very old Sci Fi, and provides a way to bring that to D&D. Also its not just a module but also a campaign setting. While the style isn't my ideal, it gets an A for the same reasons as Witchlight.
DragonLance is proof that someone powerful at WotC hates that setting or the authors. After years of telling DL fans they aren't going back to that setting, this is the garbage that gets published. It directly spits in the face of the lore and flavor of a beloved campaign setting. The Dragon Lance Chronicles remain incredibly popular and the Authors have many best selling books. TSR published over 100 novels in this world. To intentionally sabotage such a profitable and popular piece of IP requires a level of spite which is hard to fathom. Plus the story and encounters are bland. F tier is to kind. This really deserves its own special level of bad.
Obelisk is a good adventure. It should have been a sequel to the starter set, not a reprinting with some additional story added in. if I don't include the starter set as part of the rating for this module it drops dramatically. The added in parts are average at best. Creating yet another low level module while preparing to launch 5.24 drags this one down. This missed opportunity for a 5-20 module isnt a killer, but its still a net negative. That said the starter set is S tier, so that provides a boost to the overall score. Not as much as it would if this was the first appearance of that content, but its solidly a C ranking.
Planescape is a great campaign setting, not unlike Guildmasters Guide to Ravnica. The adventure is solid, and deserves a good rating. However, this setting is designed for high level play. The perfect module to take players from the typical 10-12th level end of their previous adventure the rest of the way to level 20. After saving the Prime Material world, its time to go adventure in a different plane with more powerful foes. They probably should have launched this book with a new monster manual specifically dealing with outer planes and all being very high CR creatures to challenge high level parties with plenty of magic. Adding in powerful items only used by high level martial characters, and expanding upon the epic boon system to close the martial/caster divide in high level play could have catapulted this to the top even with a terrible story. C is a good rating because of the creativity and uniqueness of the setting, but its hard for me to look past the missed opportunity and not drop it to an even lower grade.
Vecna Eve of Ruin shouldn't be punished for the Core Rules not being well balanced at high levels, just like Mad Mage wasn't. The linear story is a negative, but hardly unique to this specific module. The nostalgia tour is a personal preference thing, but has some value as the swan song for 5.0. The last published material for an incredibly popular edition of the most beloved RPG of all time during its 50th anniversary. I have to actually give this module points for nostalgia. There is more creativity and uniqueness to this story than most want to admit. It also creates an excuse for the changes to the rules for the next edition. A tradition which has been around since the switch from 1e to 2e. As one of two high level modules, it also scores points for attempting what others have been unwilling to even try. Creating a fun and challenging story for high level adventures, that isn't just a mini adventure within an anthology. Vecna has earned an A rating despite being a linear story that the players need to follow.
I've been running a highly modified version of Dragon Heist for high level and you're right, it's absolutely at least A tier. I also love how everyone agrees CoS is one of the best adventures ever written for 5e, literally no one hates it.
Haha it's old but gold!
Cool tier list. one thing I will say is it would be great if you could make clear outlines for each tier. Ex. Mostly great adventure with a few pitfalls, bad adventure overall with some good moments. I felt that high C-tier adventures belonged in b-tier, and vice versa.
Great tier list! I really enjoyed hearing your explanations for why you choose certain spots for different campaigns! I just can't agree with RoTM so low though... it's at least A tier I think, but I would honestly go as far as bottom of S-tier. It's really an unforgettable campaign with a good DM and just a little rewriting. Raw, though, I totally agree that the execution is poor. But the setting, the concept... amazing.
haha i give it A for effort for sure!
Can you go into why you dislike Tyranny of Dragons? I've seen it rated higher on similar tier lists? Any advice on running it? I plan on following up Curse of Strahd with this module and watched all your videos on that guide series (it was wonderful, thank you!!!). Any advice or council in running Tyranny of Dragons would be appreciated!
my first piece of advice is to not run it haha! (i'm biased of course). I just think that the adventure is lukewarm at best, and instead of taking the time, effort (and maybe money) to make it an exciting experience, it would be better to simply run a better adventure.
Now if you do plan on running it, I would say to expand upon its themes, make the cult a more interesting foe, allow your players to actually have options in how the story advances, and expand the endgame finale to be catastrophic!
@@NoFunAllowed Haha much appreciated! We should be wrapping up Curse of Strahd this month after a year long campaign so i'll take some time and study up on the next module. I sincerely appreciate your channel and the videos you put together, it's been especially helpful for Castle Ravenloft but all of your chapter values are gold! Anyone I know running Curse of Strahd I refer to your channel to have them watch that series in full (and just for other good D&D content too haha). Thank you again for the fast reply!
I think the praise for Lost Mine of Phandelver was a bit over the top. It is not without it's issues. The first dungeon in the module (cragmaw hideout) is too complex and difficult for new players at level 1. I ran it with 4 new players recently and they were lucky to not have a TPK in the boss fight with Klaarg, I had to make the remaining goblins run away once Klaarg was killed. Also the Black Spider is not an interesting villain as there is no backstory or motivation given for him. I've had to do a lot of work to make it interesting for the players story wise. I've bought Eve of Ruin and am a little disappointed to see it ranked so low. It seemed ok from reading but I agree it seems to be very rail roady!!
I agree on nearly everything, Drakenheim is definitely A tier though. I was really disappointed with Rime of the Frostmaiden though and would drop that down quite a few places the DM needs to do a lot of work to make it hum. Planescape I found quite hard to run i didn't feel I really got a good feel of the outlands and the gate towns were very shallow. There's some really neat ideas but bringing it to life is hard.
I have ran Out of the Abyss, Tomb of Annihilation, Princes of the Apocalypse, Curse of Strahd, and Tyranny of Dragons. I am planning on running a very very heavily modified game of Vecna: Eve of Ruin once my current group finishes up Tomb (probably late October-mid November).
I have played in Tyranny of Dragons, Princes of the Apocalypse, Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, Lost Mines of Phandelver, Dragons of Icespire Peak, and Icewind Dale: Rine of the Frostmaiden.
I don’t think there are any outright F-tier modules. I also don’t think Curse of Strahd is as good as ever says. It’s solid, but, from what I’ve played, Tomb is the only S tier. I loved my time with Out of the Abyss, but it is a lot of freaking work to run well.
I would describe Lost Mines as a “pick your own railroad” once you reach the town. The adventure doesn’t blow me away but I think it did a great job as a first adventure in that everything is classic, straight forward adventure with minor twists and reveals without anything “challenging” from a story standpoint.
Do you have any examples of ttrpg modules--not necessarily D&D--that would allow me to run a mindblowing sandbox? Rather than a "pick your own railroad"?
@@Games-kz6ut The the official 5e adventures that are intentionally a sandbox style are Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, and Rime of the Frostmaiden. Everyone will sing CoS praises, including me. I have not ran ToA or RotFM yet, but have read through them both and really really like what I see. Reviewers like ToA, and are polarized on RotFM. I personally think RotFM is definitely worth checking out/considering.
CoS is the purest sandbox- after the optional start, it truly is open for the players, only with a few planned events that happen "sometime" and ending in a large battle location for the epic final fight. Gothic castles and vampire/werewolf horror.
ToA is a hexcrawl that focuses on exploration of a jungle environment with all the cool stuff that comes with it- The DM has a map, the players have an empty version of the map. The players start in point A and are sent into the jungle to wander around until they find point B. Point B is a large and challenging dungeon to finish the game.
RotFM is sort of a cross between these two with environmental exploration like ToA, but the opportunity to immerse yourself in the world like CoS. It has a slight funneling shape to the story - A wonderful description of the different towns and the greater setting, with freedom for you players to go wherever, and several small quests available wherever they go. Then as the adventure goes on to the higher levels, the specific events start to be located at specific spots that your party will be tasked with finding. But it doesn't feel too forced in my opinion. This adventure polarizes people who review it and many seem to think it needs a lot of work. I see what they are talking about, but really get excited about the content and ideas it gives me to work with. I would describe this a bit like it's a sandbox, but for the DM- Your players can go/do what they want but it gives you the DM a lot of different quests that you can feed your favorites to your party based on where they go, which are your favorite, and what level they are. Then once your party has lived in the world and grown invested, the funneling starts with very interesting and impactful story elements.
A theme you will notice is that sandbox style adventures feel like they focus on a setting with a story inside it, rather than focusing on a story within a setting. I like this a lot and think it helps you make the game more about the world and players, which is my preference. That said, if you like this style you might do well to check out settings books! People often look over these, but are a very good way to have an engaging world with a very open campaign. You could even go so far as building the campaign story as your players go. Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Mythic Odysseys of Theros are both highly praised, but discussed less since they are not adventures. I have not read these.
Thanks for reading (:
I don't know what Turn of Fortune's Wheel is doing in A tier. I can only guess that you didn't play it (you didn't use the right image or call it by the right name either), but it's D tier at best. The characters quite literally can't die cause they just respawn, so your point about this campaign actually killing players is strange, since it does very much the opposite of letting characters die. Not to mention the massive bummer that it only explores one plane. The adventure is mostly the players just... visiting locations... It's lazy and half-baked.
Great list but I would defend the new Starter Set as to me it feels like a perfect starting adventure and a step into the game for people who haven't played AT ALL. I feel like people are too harsh on it as it's not the original that is a masterpiece too but to be honest if you have never touched the game and don't know things beforehand the new starter set does do a lot of improvements to get you into the game and make you understand what's going on and how to get more into everything
You dont get railroaded at the start of Lost Mines. Im not sure you know what being railroaded means. The adventure starts with an encounter, that isnt railroading, thats the adventure.
I agree for the most part but my players (who also played cos and toa) said that dungeons of drakkenheim is a solid third place
heck yeah!
100% agree that ToA is better than CoS! Also, Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury in Tales from the Yawning Portal are the best beginner adventures! Having the two factions is fun, and you have a fun NPC to run. The most positive feedback I have ever received is (twice) with the massive fight that started Forge. And these adventures are linked as the players find a note about the goings-on that leads them to the second adventure.
They picked some greats to recreate for sure!
Nice video. I wish they still made hard copies of LMOP, my magazine-style adventure book is pretty tattered, and it’s such a great adventure! Having a physical hard book copy is so nice
Hopefully they'll do so for the next edition!
They did. It was reprinted in Phandelver and Below or something like that. It made it a longer adventure
Have you tried Empire of the ghouls or some other kobold press stuff?
have not sadly, heard it was good though!
S tier for the TRUE Prince!
all hail agdon longscarf haha
I think you failed to see the best thing about icepeak, it’s the easiest to run of all of these, it has some of the adventures are 2 pages long, all kinda connected to a greater and easy to understand driving force, that’s a godsend to new DMs. If you can buy, read and start playing the thing, all in a matter of a day, that’s a win for the game.
Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation being the top choices is curious to me, because they are very much designed for a certain kind of DND player. I mean, if you just don't like gothic horror, Strahd is unbearable and boring. To me, an S-Tier needs to be more universal.
I'd say the more you try to appeal to everyone, the more you appeal to no one haha!
@@NoFunAllowed of course! It’s more of player expectations. If I’m running strahd, I wanna make sure everyone is on board and I’ve had players pass because they aren’t interested in the genre. I acknowledge both being very well made and I personally enjoy them.
Wild Beyond the Witchlight is dependent on your party. The group I ran it with had a blast with almost no combat. But don’t know if full group would like it.
for me vecna might be C, it requires a lot of work, but still it has some really cool concepts that make for a great adventure, it really feels like the end game which is fun for a 5e module
I got burnt out on End Games with marvels End Game haha
What ratings would you give Mythic to Odysseys of Theros and Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica?
i'll be posting that up next!
ToA, CoS, and Phandelver I think are the standouts for me, run super well even vanilla as-written.
Do you have any thoughts on the major 3rd party campaigns? Ones that come to mind are Odyssey of the Dragon Lords (or the Viking campaign they made next), Frog God’s City of Brass, XPto3’s anthology, etc.
Haven't touched any of them sadly. Between running all these official ones and running homebrew campaigns, I didn't have the time to look at the others haha
Now, to be fair to Tyranny of Dragons, the module was in the works before the official rulebook for 5e was even released. Kobold Press I believe was working on this module and they, or whoever it was that did make this module, had no idea what the CR of most or many monsters were, nor what most characters would be in terms of power at 1st level which is where the module takes off initially. Notice how for a long stretch of time, it was also the only adventure that went up to level 15 or so. Most of your other modules stop around level 10-12 or even lower sometimes with a few exceptions. They gave it their best shot to make the campaign work and were likely working under a beta and unfinished rule book guide to go off of.
Now, does that excuse some of the poor choices made in terms of the story? Absolutely not. Chapter 4 is a trainwreck of a railroad that feels more like Oregon Trail than D&D, but they likely didn't have enough knowledge on what hex crawling in D&D 5e would be like vs other editions. And there are a lot of tabletop games that make hex crawling work very well, just not 5e. The closest we got was Tomb.
As far as villains, Tiamat is iconic for D&D, I'd say even more than Vecna personally, at least before his name got thrown into Stranger Things or he became an antag in Critical Role. The villains made up for the campaign felt a bit one note, like Cyanwrath and some of the other cult leaders. But a good DM could make these characters work with very little tweaking. Point of a module though is to run it as is and have a good time, so that's still points off for this module. Overall, given what they had to go through with less than beta rules, and you can just omit or handwave the traveling in Chapter 4, I give Tyranny C tier, just because it is really cool fighting Tiamat, and you can make this adventure work. It just sadly takes more to make it work than most other modules.
a lotta elbow grease to get the fun train rolling here haha
Did you hit hoard of dragon queen ?
lumped that together in the tyranny of dragons!
i would love to see a tier list of the 5e settings books like ravenloft and odysseys of theros
The other books are certainly to come!
My understanding is that there are several bangers in those type of books, they just don’t sell/get reviewed often. The handful of Theros comments I’ve seen are all high praise. My understanding is the robot world one is considered fantastic. I thought ravenloft decent and interesting, and the most slept-on book I’ve personally read for 5e is Bigby’s Glory of the Giants. Then I of course really like the one book that had a bunch of PC monster races, but haven’t read the rest of it so can’t give full thoughts.
Damn... That thumbnail got me haha, how dare you put Strahd in D!
Haha d for dark!
Great job man, but i honestly disagree about RoTFM, i had a blast DMing it, altough i must admite it is a bit sandbox and i made a lot of changes, anyways, great vid
haha like i said, with changes its fantastic, but RAW, it has some highs and slightly more lows
@@NoFunAllowed i'd say , so much wated pontetial
My hot take is that RotFM is intentionally the closest to CoS style-wise. I think they were shooting to make a similar sandbox that is a campaign that doubles as an isolated setting. And a critique I see for layout in RotFM is actually worse in CoS. I’m a big fan of Rime’s story and setting, I consider it fantastic. I do rate it a little lower than CoS though because the villain is amazingly present in CoS and the world is more populated. I would put it in A or low S.
While I played most of the add on modules for Adventure league. I have not ran all the books but I am working on it. Books NOT Ran. Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Princes of Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, Quests of Infinite Staircase,
I am currently running Vecna Eve of Ruin.
Storm King needs the map printed large. And you will need to cross reference the side quests.
I actually prefer several of the Adventurers League content over the actual books haha
The ad copy and how they advertise the books have always been hinky.
Candlekeep had editing problems with their lore. They redid the lore and then could not keep their lore correct.
Spelljammer the Kiddie roller coaster at six flags. You don't even got to see the mouse.
Shattered need some editing. Some of Chapter 5 needed to be in Chapter 2.
5e catches a lot of negativity but there were some total bangers
absolutely!
Dude it’s nice to see you back on RUclips but why have you abandoned all the Discord channels you’re supposed to be moderating?
due to life, i couldnt touch both the channel and the discords. The only one I can even remotely moderate is my own which i'm running my public games through!
@@NoFunAllowedMaybe just pass the admin role onto others for the other Discord channels then? It’s understandable real life gets in the way!
No! Planescape sucks a lot! An adventure with nothing to say, Sigil empty like a bottle of beer drinked, planes without rules, planar door city without personality. Only good thing: the map of Sigil.
i do like that they encourage PC death though haha
There's new stuff on there now. Kobold press and mcdm
What about Chains of Asmodeus?
I gotta disagree with the Tyranny of Dragons. I know Hoard of the Dragon Queen is bad, but Rise of Tiamat can be really fun with just a few tweaks. I've runned RoT twice and both times my players had a ball, so I think a C or D tier would suit it better, in my opinion.
chains is wierd because it wasnt a hardcover release in stores, but it certainly added a lot!
glad somebody did this
I'm sad about Eve of Ruin being so low down - the plan was to run that after my current Curse of Strahd game. With the idea to let the players carry on with their characters, and reach level 20 one day. How's everyone else's experience with it? Any other suggestions perhaps? thanks in advance :)
My experience is that this is a rollercoaster. Your players have no agency, they just show up to "fan favorite" places, meet "fan favorite" npcs, and do what they are told. If you have players who like this structure, it works well. But if you have players who want to have more freedom, than it would require reworking some major plot points, allowing them a choice in when and where they go, and allow for a variance in the action!
@@NoFunAllowed I just started last week and No Fun is mostly correct. I am having trouble with the layout of Chapter 1 and 2. Players are already mentioning the Hand, eye and Head of Venca.
@@NoFunAllowed thanks so much! Will see what the players want after COS :) the missus is asking for Tomb of Annihilation, which we did start a while back, but due to a wonderful (NOT) thing here in South Africa called "load shedding", we had to stop it after about 10 sessions or so. But I'm pretty much prepped for it thanks to this channel! So if the players rather vote for that, I'm all for it!
Love the list, though I'm not tickled by the fact that I'm merging Princes and Eve of Ruin lol.
These two are not more than the sum of their parts. It's kind of funny that they have the opposite problems; Eve of Vecna is such a linear adventure that there's nothing to consider, but Princes doesn't have enough connective tissue to make it a cohesive adventure.
I like the tier list as a general assessment of "this is how much work you need to put in to make the adventure feel good/great". You need to put in a LOT of work to make Vecna great. CoS or Tomb are great from the get-go.
Haha good luck with that Frankenstein adventure!
@@NoFunAllowed thanks, i'll need it :D
Wow we couldn’t disagree more on most of these.
Storm Kings Thunder is poorly iundersted. Ive run most of these ans my players loved SKT the best because it does has epic scale.
Its a DMs adventure with cool set pieces aas yousaud then tools to connect all the pieces. No hand holding. Its fir a DM that loves having scope to designand customise.
Ghost of salt march placement is wild 💀
Haha I think it's a solid book!
Third party content and shouldn't be rated on this list. If you are going to rate third party content it will require a review of hundreds, or at the dozen most popular 3rd party modules. A VTT publishing content doesn't make it a WotC product. Humblewood, Acquisitions, Netherdeep, Drakkenheim, and others aren't WotC IP.
No Chains of Asmodeus?
chains is wierd because it wasnt a hardcover release in stores, but it certainly added a lot!
Rime of the Frost Maiden is a horribly written adventure as its 3 acts are basically 3 separate adventures that are loosely threaded together that make less sense with the culmination of the adventuring taking place in middle of the campaign. Any pre-written campaign adventure should not need a "BUT" requires a lot of work on the DM's part to make it functional. That should move it down to D tier alone.
Nooooo not my tyranny of dragons. 😂 all the way to the bottom. 😢
Putting OotA in B is criminal
Haha i love that first half, I don't enjoy that last half
@NoFunAllowed not even the demon fight 😢
But fair enough, different strokes for different folks
Interesting to hear. It’s ones of the few 5e adventures I don’t own but B is about what I see most tier lists place it at!
I wanted to listen but I kept hearing a screaming child so RIP. I'll give you a comment for engagement
That must have been a ghost haunting me haha
Yeah this is the lowest I’ve seen Icespire ranked 😮
Haha I'm just not a fan of lvl 1s being sent go fight a manticore
Dragon Heist should be F tier, I love urban adventures but this one is a disjointed mess.
I think owning a bar gives it major points haha
Second part of Ghost Marsh is just filler. Some of the most uninspired adventures and worst railroads are in the second half of that book.
Icewind Dale is just two seperate adventures smashed together, with no regards to story progression-which could have been fine if kept seperately but both parts detract from each other when run in successive order.
The same goes with Out of the Abyss as well, it should be run as 2 seperate mini campaigns with different characters for each part-and not as a single continuous campaign.
The same with Avernus as well, but it is probably THE worst piece of crap ever relased for not only 5e but for the entire D&D history. Both parts of that adventure suck so bad in a myriad of ways that it should be considered a crime against RPGs in general.
Elemental Evil was just too long, like 5x times longer than its worth.
The same with Storm King's Thunder; as it could have been a great short module for 3rd tier gameplay but was instead released as if it had an idea worth stretching over 11 levels.
Tyranny of Dragons is actually a great adventure if you'd start it at chapter 5 as a follow up to Phandelver.
Dragon Heist is just a sorry excuse of a railroad but could turn out excellent if run skilfully.
Undermountain, the ginormous mega-dungeon it is, has no place in the 5e playstyle-they just released it so people would shut up about high level adventures.
Otherwise agreed with all your assessments, especially the S-Tier ones.
Haha thank you thank you!
S-Tier - Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Tales from the Yawning Portal.
B-Tier - Curse of Strahd, Quests from the Infinite Staircase, Lost Mines of Phandelver
D-Tier - Everything else
Ghosts is S tier and Strahd is B tier? Yeah you must have a terrible DM if that’s the case.
@@AlexS-xh6ud CoS starts and ends well. The middle drags - we have the Sunblade but now need to do a bunch of quests just to be the right level to face Strahd! It's also too easy to wander into an area too high or low level for the party. A bit directionless.
GoS however was a fun series of classic adventures with a nautical theme. Set in Greyhawk it's easy to tie the adventures together for a fun campaign.
I realize this video was made just for engagement, so I guess it worked, but if I'm going to be bothered by this and not respond, I will feel robbed. This is an awful video and you clearly haven't run most of these. You could be a good DM, but you made a bad video that helps nobody. Your take on half these modules are first chapter at best.
There is no way i would put any adventure from Wizard of the Coast in S tier.
This dude a fruit
what's your favorite fruit?
Sadly these modules are mostly useless now given the new rules and I suppose how creatures are statted now.
when in doubt, stat the monster as a bear with 2 claw and 1 bite attack haha
"5E's cycle of content is ending" it's objectively not though. No new edition has been announced, the 2024 update isn't a new, separate thing. Everything released going forward until a new edition is announced and drops is still 5e content.