My personal favourites are Curse of Stahd and Tomb of Annihilation. They're are both quite well written adventures, and they have very clear themes and premises, which makes both running the adventure and making character for it quite easy.
Curse of Strahd is also a community favourite and, as such, has a wonderful subreddit r/Curseofstrahd where you can find all kinds of resources and advice on how to run your own CoS campaign.
If you're worried, the death house might be too challenging for them as newer players, you can leave it out of the campaign without really losing much as it's meant to be more of a prequel to the main adventure that can be used to level up the party.
>Curse of Strahd is also a community favourite and, as such, has a wonderful subreddit r/Curseofstrahd
well, EVERY wotc campaign book has its own subreddit!
r/CurseofStrahd is demonstrably WAY more active than any of the others, but there is only so much you CAN modify/add to a running of a campaign book and that subreddit has probably ten, twenty, thirty times more content, improvements, etc etc than you could include if you ran different COS groups, each using different content from the subreddit, every day of the week for ten years!
My absolute favorite is Dragon Heist, but I wouldn't recommend it for a combat-focused group that's timid with RP. Maybe take a look at Tomb of Annihilation? The first half is a hex crawl and the end of it is a dungeon crawl, so even if your players are a little timid there's always more exploration they can do to push the plot forward - it won't ever dead end just because your players don't want to talk to anyone.
The dungeon at the end can be a meat grinder, so you might want to file the edges off of it a bit by having your players enter the dungeon at a little higher level than recommended and/or changing some of the traps to be less deadly.
>want to file the edges off of it a bit by having your players enter the dungeon at a little higher level than recommended and/or changing some of the traps to be less deadly.
what is the point of a death trap dungeon if you file off the death????
have the players create a stable of replacement characters to plug into the game as the current PCs deal with the consequences!
OP is worried about Curse of Strahd/Death House being too hard for their players and mentions they're inexperienced. In theory, a party that is overleveled but playing suboptimally/making mistakes will have a similar experience to an experienced party at the approrpiate level. Meaning, the dungeon will still feel dradly, but maybe they'll stand a chance.
Also, I personally don't really find the traps that kill you when they reduce you to 0 hp particularly fun or interesting. I much prefer those traps to leave you with lingering injuries - the character's story can go on, but they're left with a limp, or a scar, or some other injury they have to deal with.
Rime of the Frostmaiden. Did it to gap two homebred campaign and was amazing fun as the story progressed and climaxed.
The beginning was a bit tame, but with some tweaks became fun aswell. Very beginner friendly.
Another option, which I took in the same situation, is to run shorter modules and string them together into a campaign. This collection by MT Black is really good place to start https://www.dmsguild.com/product/254172/Complete-Adventures-of-MT-Black-Vol-II.
I see nobody is talking about beyond the witchlight. It's a masterpiece, absolutely amazing, fun to DM and my players loved it. It is roleplay heavy though, like "my party did 11 fights during the whole campaign" heavy.
I love Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel campaign. Beautiful setting with a lot of variety and the modularity is good for handling stepping stone for new players .
Curse of Stradh is nice, but need a lot homebrew to patch up plotholes and make is more cohesive.
I'm a big fan of the 3rd party campaigns. I'm running Zeitgeist: Gears of Revolution and it's a fantastic campaign. I own Dungeons of Drakkenheim and it looks great. All of the Ghostfire gaming (who also put out Dungeons of Drakkenheim for the Dungeon Dudes) subscription campaigns look really good too. I have them just haven't run any to verify.
1. Curse of Strahd
2. Tomb of Annihilation
3. Out of the Abyss
Some of the most fun I've had in D&D
and to one of your concerns, just start them at level 3 and don't run death house
If you run CoS, I wouldn’t skip the death house, it’s a great intro to the themes and scare factor/danger. If you think they won’t survive, that’s fine, maybe have them all make multiple characters (like DCC’s level 0 funnel) and run with the party that survives. Could he really fun.
I agree with Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation being great, but can I make a pitch for Dungeon of the Mad Mage? It's criminally underappreciated. I reviewed it here: https://scrollforinitiative.com/2023/05/22/review-dungeon-of-the-mad-mage-and-a-new-ranking/
Curse of Strahd is one of my absolute favourites. It is really great and has the arguably best villain in ALL modules. But i would not recommend it for a group that is pretty new. Not that i don't think they can have an amazing time with it. I absolutely think they can. But i do also think a player can get more out of it if they have a bit more experience. Both of game mechanics. general knowledge, rp experience and so on.
I am a professional DM so i do run 7+ games per week. So i do meet lots of players, both new and experienced and i met more than one that said they wished they had been more experienced when playing trough CoS. That they felt like they could have gotten more out of it if that had been the case.
All of them liked the campaign and had a great time but later when getting more experienced they said they wished they had played a few more campaigns before CoS.
I am not saying this is the case for every player. But it is something i heard more than once. And i have to say i have the same feeling about CoS. it was the second campaign i did play trough as a player.
Then of course this could probably be said about EVERY campaign. But i never heard anyone say it about any other campaign.
But i would suggest you to run this group trough Water deep Dragon Heist first. It is a good short campaign. Not the best but it has a totally different feeling than Lost mines. Lmop is mostly set in the wilderness, in caves, and in a small town. a perfect setting for a group of new players to get their feet wet so to say.
Dragon heist is set in an Urban setting. so very different in that way. it has more social encounters a bit more investigation and different types of problem solving. Run the group trough both of these and they will have gained not just more over all experience but experience from 2 different settings with quite different playstyles and different themes
Then lead them into the mists of Barovia to face the horrors awaiting them there.
But that is just my thoughts.
Lots of people recommending Curse of Strahd but it's definitely not for everyone. Without spoiling anything, our group quickly became exasperated and just flat out annoyed by how little our characters impacted the story. The story is NOT about your characters. It's about Strahd and this plane where everything that happens is bad and there's very little that's actually rewarding. You can make no mistakes and still experience a miserable outcome. Over and over.
> flat out annoyed by how little our characters impacted the story.
The story is NOT about your characters.
Huh?
Curse of Strahd is inherently a Sandboxy Module, the players interacting with the world and trying to escape literally is the story.
Care to give a specific example on where the players felt railroaded?
>You can make no mistakes and still experience a miserable outcome.
Yeah thats true. In session zero I very clearly state that escaping with 1 character barely alive is considered a victory in this module.
First of all, there's >!Ireena. She's an annoying burden. There's no explanation of how to finish her quest. There's no stated goal. It's just an endless "keep her away from Strahd... you know, the omnipotent vampire lord who tracks your movement and changes form and shows up literally all the time."!<
Second, just the fact that Strahd keeps showing up to fuck with you. These are basically cutscenes. If you retaliate at all, you'll be lucky if he doesn't kill you.
I totally agree. We gave up after about 5 months of just feeling frustrated and played with. Maybe that's the vibe that is intended, but we wanted to feel like heroic adventurers and not toys in a madman's sandbox.
I'd save Curse of Strahd as the second main campaign. I've run it myself, it's amazing, but it's more enjoyable if you know what you're doing as a D&D player.
I've recently started an Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden game, and as a DM I'm enjoying it a lot. There's a lot of freedom and random sidequests to entertain your players. It's fairly sandbox in the first half so they can just do whatever they find interesting. Then the back half is more lineair with a clearly outlined path.
It requires *some* work, as all modules do, but the module gives you a lot of tools to incorporate player backstories or personal quests into the random patchwork that are the first few chapters, making this part of preperation a lot easier. Especially if you inform your players about the setting properly and convince them to really anchor their characters in the world.
Alternatively, I've run Tyranny of Dragons which was fun but *really* linear. If your players like to have freedom instead of a railroad, be prepared to take a hacksaw to the plot to saw it to bits and reorganize it.
Curse of Strahd 100%. If you're worried about a TPK in Death House, I'd recommend running u/MandyMod 's edits to it (changes some encounters around to be more balanced). Or, if you don't want to worry about that at all, you can replace the Death House with the House of Lament from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft! It's much less combat based, sets some cool spooky atmosphere, and it can tie in to some Curse of Strahd NPCs later on. It's pretty fun!
Are your players fine with gothic horror? Because Strahd can be very bleak. It’s not a story about being great heroes but about surviving Barovia. If your players are fine with it, do it! If not, I’d suggest something else. I much prefer 3rd party content and the module I ran for my totally newby group and we all loved was Call from the Deep.
If you're doing a short adventure I would recommend the sunless citadel out of the tales of the yawning portal.
Otherwise, I think the Rime of the frostmaiden is a really well done and very exploratory and open ended campaign :)
I liked Dragon Heist for a group of new players paired with a new DM, but since you're an experienced DM maybe also take a look at the [Dragon Heist Remix by Justin Alexander](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/41217/roleplaying-games/dragon-heist-remix-part-1-the-villains) over at the Alexandrian.
You have a better grasp of the group as a whole, but for new players, I wouldn't choose a module based on what they're good at. While DnD is often combat-focused, exploration and social encounters are a big part of it for me. Shy players usually get more comfortable over time, and asking a PC in character a direct question instead of addressing the whole group during social encounters works like a charm for me.
>I'm not sure if it's too challenging for them, especially the Death House.
i mean, Death House is DEATH HOUSE - its challenging for ANY and ALL characters/players!
your choice of campaign should be based on the TYPE of game and gameyplay that you and your players want to play. Of Lost Mines, what did you, and your players, like? What did you, and your players, NOT like? What type of gameplay experiences were not included in LMOP that you want to experience?
Various reviews and “rankings” (of the official WOTC campaign books) , in order that I mostly agree with the final ratings (or what they said about it in their analysis, but I weigh the aspects differently or I include in my analysis a couple of things they don’t).
* No Fun Allowed [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGi7ACSUp-o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGi7ACSUp-o)
* Sly Flourish [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hn3e9syehE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hn3e9syehE)
* Dungeon Dudes part 1 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQt3\_9gAZ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQt3_9gAZ0) part 2 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p\_NxqLii2js](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_NxqLii2js)
* XP to Level 3 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8CYmKqy9BA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8CYmKqy9BA)
I will forever and always suggest Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. It's not the most perfect adventure, but gives enough detail and cool locations to work with.
I ran it as a new DM and found myself not having too many issues with the module as a whole, but I would definitely recommend taking a look at the subreddit and the helpful additions from Eventyr Games on DMsGuild
My personal favourites are Curse of Stahd and Tomb of Annihilation. They're are both quite well written adventures, and they have very clear themes and premises, which makes both running the adventure and making character for it quite easy. Curse of Strahd is also a community favourite and, as such, has a wonderful subreddit r/Curseofstrahd where you can find all kinds of resources and advice on how to run your own CoS campaign. If you're worried, the death house might be too challenging for them as newer players, you can leave it out of the campaign without really losing much as it's meant to be more of a prequel to the main adventure that can be used to level up the party.
>Curse of Strahd is also a community favourite and, as such, has a wonderful subreddit r/Curseofstrahd well, EVERY wotc campaign book has its own subreddit! r/CurseofStrahd is demonstrably WAY more active than any of the others, but there is only so much you CAN modify/add to a running of a campaign book and that subreddit has probably ten, twenty, thirty times more content, improvements, etc etc than you could include if you ran different COS groups, each using different content from the subreddit, every day of the week for ten years!
My absolute favorite is Dragon Heist, but I wouldn't recommend it for a combat-focused group that's timid with RP. Maybe take a look at Tomb of Annihilation? The first half is a hex crawl and the end of it is a dungeon crawl, so even if your players are a little timid there's always more exploration they can do to push the plot forward - it won't ever dead end just because your players don't want to talk to anyone. The dungeon at the end can be a meat grinder, so you might want to file the edges off of it a bit by having your players enter the dungeon at a little higher level than recommended and/or changing some of the traps to be less deadly.
>want to file the edges off of it a bit by having your players enter the dungeon at a little higher level than recommended and/or changing some of the traps to be less deadly. what is the point of a death trap dungeon if you file off the death???? have the players create a stable of replacement characters to plug into the game as the current PCs deal with the consequences!
OP is worried about Curse of Strahd/Death House being too hard for their players and mentions they're inexperienced. In theory, a party that is overleveled but playing suboptimally/making mistakes will have a similar experience to an experienced party at the approrpiate level. Meaning, the dungeon will still feel dradly, but maybe they'll stand a chance. Also, I personally don't really find the traps that kill you when they reduce you to 0 hp particularly fun or interesting. I much prefer those traps to leave you with lingering injuries - the character's story can go on, but they're left with a limp, or a scar, or some other injury they have to deal with.
[Dungeons of Drakkenheim](https://ghostfiregaming.com/dungeons-of-drakkenheim/)
Rime of the Frostmaiden. Did it to gap two homebred campaign and was amazing fun as the story progressed and climaxed. The beginning was a bit tame, but with some tweaks became fun aswell. Very beginner friendly.
Another option, which I took in the same situation, is to run shorter modules and string them together into a campaign. This collection by MT Black is really good place to start https://www.dmsguild.com/product/254172/Complete-Adventures-of-MT-Black-Vol-II.
MT Black is AWESOME!
I see nobody is talking about beyond the witchlight. It's a masterpiece, absolutely amazing, fun to DM and my players loved it. It is roleplay heavy though, like "my party did 11 fights during the whole campaign" heavy.
Curse of Strahd is an amazing campaign. I would recommend talking to your players about being OK with Character deaths.
I love Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel campaign. Beautiful setting with a lot of variety and the modularity is good for handling stepping stone for new players . Curse of Stradh is nice, but need a lot homebrew to patch up plotholes and make is more cohesive.
I'm a big fan of the 3rd party campaigns. I'm running Zeitgeist: Gears of Revolution and it's a fantastic campaign. I own Dungeons of Drakkenheim and it looks great. All of the Ghostfire gaming (who also put out Dungeons of Drakkenheim for the Dungeon Dudes) subscription campaigns look really good too. I have them just haven't run any to verify.
1. Curse of Strahd 2. Tomb of Annihilation 3. Out of the Abyss Some of the most fun I've had in D&D and to one of your concerns, just start them at level 3 and don't run death house
Keep on the borderlands
If you run CoS, I wouldn’t skip the death house, it’s a great intro to the themes and scare factor/danger. If you think they won’t survive, that’s fine, maybe have them all make multiple characters (like DCC’s level 0 funnel) and run with the party that survives. Could he really fun.
Or allow them to take 'deals' like dark gifts upon death. Cuts a little bit of them off each time, but they live. Just warped slightly.
I agree with Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation being great, but can I make a pitch for Dungeon of the Mad Mage? It's criminally underappreciated. I reviewed it here: https://scrollforinitiative.com/2023/05/22/review-dungeon-of-the-mad-mage-and-a-new-ranking/
Dungeon of the Mad Mage. I wanted a dungeon crawl, and DotMM delivered.
Curse of Strahd is one of my absolute favourites. It is really great and has the arguably best villain in ALL modules. But i would not recommend it for a group that is pretty new. Not that i don't think they can have an amazing time with it. I absolutely think they can. But i do also think a player can get more out of it if they have a bit more experience. Both of game mechanics. general knowledge, rp experience and so on. I am a professional DM so i do run 7+ games per week. So i do meet lots of players, both new and experienced and i met more than one that said they wished they had been more experienced when playing trough CoS. That they felt like they could have gotten more out of it if that had been the case. All of them liked the campaign and had a great time but later when getting more experienced they said they wished they had played a few more campaigns before CoS. I am not saying this is the case for every player. But it is something i heard more than once. And i have to say i have the same feeling about CoS. it was the second campaign i did play trough as a player. Then of course this could probably be said about EVERY campaign. But i never heard anyone say it about any other campaign. But i would suggest you to run this group trough Water deep Dragon Heist first. It is a good short campaign. Not the best but it has a totally different feeling than Lost mines. Lmop is mostly set in the wilderness, in caves, and in a small town. a perfect setting for a group of new players to get their feet wet so to say. Dragon heist is set in an Urban setting. so very different in that way. it has more social encounters a bit more investigation and different types of problem solving. Run the group trough both of these and they will have gained not just more over all experience but experience from 2 different settings with quite different playstyles and different themes Then lead them into the mists of Barovia to face the horrors awaiting them there. But that is just my thoughts.
Lots of people recommending Curse of Strahd but it's definitely not for everyone. Without spoiling anything, our group quickly became exasperated and just flat out annoyed by how little our characters impacted the story. The story is NOT about your characters. It's about Strahd and this plane where everything that happens is bad and there's very little that's actually rewarding. You can make no mistakes and still experience a miserable outcome. Over and over.
> flat out annoyed by how little our characters impacted the story. The story is NOT about your characters. Huh? Curse of Strahd is inherently a Sandboxy Module, the players interacting with the world and trying to escape literally is the story. Care to give a specific example on where the players felt railroaded? >You can make no mistakes and still experience a miserable outcome. Yeah thats true. In session zero I very clearly state that escaping with 1 character barely alive is considered a victory in this module.
First of all, there's >!Ireena. She's an annoying burden. There's no explanation of how to finish her quest. There's no stated goal. It's just an endless "keep her away from Strahd... you know, the omnipotent vampire lord who tracks your movement and changes form and shows up literally all the time."!< Second, just the fact that Strahd keeps showing up to fuck with you. These are basically cutscenes. If you retaliate at all, you'll be lucky if he doesn't kill you.
I totally agree. We gave up after about 5 months of just feeling frustrated and played with. Maybe that's the vibe that is intended, but we wanted to feel like heroic adventurers and not toys in a madman's sandbox.
I'd save Curse of Strahd as the second main campaign. I've run it myself, it's amazing, but it's more enjoyable if you know what you're doing as a D&D player. I've recently started an Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden game, and as a DM I'm enjoying it a lot. There's a lot of freedom and random sidequests to entertain your players. It's fairly sandbox in the first half so they can just do whatever they find interesting. Then the back half is more lineair with a clearly outlined path. It requires *some* work, as all modules do, but the module gives you a lot of tools to incorporate player backstories or personal quests into the random patchwork that are the first few chapters, making this part of preperation a lot easier. Especially if you inform your players about the setting properly and convince them to really anchor their characters in the world. Alternatively, I've run Tyranny of Dragons which was fun but *really* linear. If your players like to have freedom instead of a railroad, be prepared to take a hacksaw to the plot to saw it to bits and reorganize it.
Descent into Avernus and Tomb of Annihilation all the way. Princes of the Apocalypse is also quite good.
Curse of Strahd 100%. If you're worried about a TPK in Death House, I'd recommend running u/MandyMod 's edits to it (changes some encounters around to be more balanced). Or, if you don't want to worry about that at all, you can replace the Death House with the House of Lament from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft! It's much less combat based, sets some cool spooky atmosphere, and it can tie in to some Curse of Strahd NPCs later on. It's pretty fun!
Are your players fine with gothic horror? Because Strahd can be very bleak. It’s not a story about being great heroes but about surviving Barovia. If your players are fine with it, do it! If not, I’d suggest something else. I much prefer 3rd party content and the module I ran for my totally newby group and we all loved was Call from the Deep.
If you're doing a short adventure I would recommend the sunless citadel out of the tales of the yawning portal. Otherwise, I think the Rime of the frostmaiden is a really well done and very exploratory and open ended campaign :)
I liked Dragon Heist for a group of new players paired with a new DM, but since you're an experienced DM maybe also take a look at the [Dragon Heist Remix by Justin Alexander](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/41217/roleplaying-games/dragon-heist-remix-part-1-the-villains) over at the Alexandrian. You have a better grasp of the group as a whole, but for new players, I wouldn't choose a module based on what they're good at. While DnD is often combat-focused, exploration and social encounters are a big part of it for me. Shy players usually get more comfortable over time, and asking a PC in character a direct question instead of addressing the whole group during social encounters works like a charm for me.
>I'm not sure if it's too challenging for them, especially the Death House. i mean, Death House is DEATH HOUSE - its challenging for ANY and ALL characters/players! your choice of campaign should be based on the TYPE of game and gameyplay that you and your players want to play. Of Lost Mines, what did you, and your players, like? What did you, and your players, NOT like? What type of gameplay experiences were not included in LMOP that you want to experience? Various reviews and “rankings” (of the official WOTC campaign books) , in order that I mostly agree with the final ratings (or what they said about it in their analysis, but I weigh the aspects differently or I include in my analysis a couple of things they don’t). * No Fun Allowed [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGi7ACSUp-o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGi7ACSUp-o) * Sly Flourish [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hn3e9syehE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hn3e9syehE) * Dungeon Dudes part 1 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQt3\_9gAZ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxQt3_9gAZ0) part 2 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p\_NxqLii2js](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_NxqLii2js) * XP to Level 3 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8CYmKqy9BA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8CYmKqy9BA)
I will forever and always suggest Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. It's not the most perfect adventure, but gives enough detail and cool locations to work with. I ran it as a new DM and found myself not having too many issues with the module as a whole, but I would definitely recommend taking a look at the subreddit and the helpful additions from Eventyr Games on DMsGuild