I wanted to talk a little bit about my growing love of the various D&D 5e Anthology books that have come out lately.
The first of these that I can readily think about is Tales From the Yawning Portal, but there are a number of them. I think currently there are 5 "anthology" books available:
Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Tales From The Yawning Portal, Candlekeep Mysteries, Journeys Through The Radiant Citadel, and finally, Keys from the Golden Vault.
I've picked up or been gifted almost all of these and they fit my 5e DM style perfectly. I don't typically run a full setting (such as Princes of the Apocalypse). I do steal from them, but I don't like to just run through them as it feels like I spend more time fixing them to fit my playstyle and group than it is worth. Which is why Anthologies work so well for me - I already was taking scenes/specific adventures from various published adventures and tossing them into my world, but with my first Anthology purchase, Tales From The Yawning Portal, I was introduced to a product that was designed for my playstyle.
Yawning Portal is a fantastic little anthology that pulls in and updates seven adventures from prior editions of D&D, and they make it very easy to fit into just about any homebrew setting or location you'd like to place them in. I pulled one of the seven adventures into my Trothguard setting and was able to just plop the quest hook village and dungeon into an unused spot on my map without anyone knowing I'd even stolen it from an anthology (since they haven't played it). It's super easy to change a few Proper Nouns for various NPCs and Area Names and swap loot if it's necessary, and it saves you having to build an entire location.
In my current home game for example, I've been running them through parts of Candlekeep Mysteries, an anthology predominantly centered around books and the famous library of Candlekeep. This is super useful for me since one of the floating plot points for my world centers around powerful books, extradimensional spaces, and different planes... and thankfully a ton of the Candlekeep content is directly connected to those themes.
From the product description:
Candlekeep Mysteries is a collection of seventeen short, stand-alone D&D adventures designed for characters of levels 1 - 16. Each adventure begins with the discovery of a book, and each book is the key to a door behind which danger and glory await. These adventures can be run as one-shot games, plugged into an existing Forgotten Realms campaign, or adapted for other campaign settings. This book also includes a poster map of the library fortress and detailed descriptions of Candlekeep and its inhabitants.
The very first mission is "Joy of Extradimensional Spaces" where your characters find a powerful book that can take them to a modified pocket dimension where a mansion has been created by a powerful wizard, but they're not in control of the book and your characters get stuck in this extradimensional space and have to puzzle out how to leave.
It's a very simple little map, designed for a group of level 1 characters with enough content to reach level 2 by the time they leave.
Because of how open this is, I've added all kinds of stuff to the adventure, tying plot threads from the overall world events directly into this adventure while giving me a really nice little template to work from.
Some of my changes include:
- Adding a necessary NPC into the mansion (a researcher who had found the book before the party, and who is necessary to remove a curse that is affecting a villager from their first session).
- Changing the Study (M5 on the map) to have customized pictures that relate to my world's version of Fistandia - an archmage from a lost/locked section of the continent (Mach'Lithe on my map). It shows various scenes from the history of Trothguard that she was present for, threading her through the last about 4,000 years of my world's history. This allows me to directly connect her to things that affect the characters, and also lets me dangle a mystery: how the hell has she been alive for 4000+ years?
- Upgraded all the monsters (we started at level 2, with 5 players, so I added more constructs).
- Made the Faerie Dragons able to become a pet for the players (at least one of my crew really wanted pets and these are super fun so why not?).
I've done the same with Tales from the Yawning Portal, and I'm currently pre-planning an adventure that I'm going to pull from Keys from the Golden Vault and tweak for my sessions and setting. Being able to essentially copy, paste, and modify drop-in adventures has been wonderful for my ability to play and run D&D. I still create entirely custom adventures and settings, but I now sprinkle them in with customized anothology content and it's dramatically dropped my prep time.
I now never feel rushed to create totally custom adventures - I can build them out over the course of several weeks while my low-prep anthology content is being run through, which also lets me judge what kind of hooks to toss in so that there's a good chance the party will take the bait and go where I expect them to. I always keep a few lightly-tweaked missions in my back pocket too since you can never truly anticipate players taking every piece of bait... sometimes they just go off on a tangent you don't expect!
I'll post more solo TTRPGs in the coming days, so watch my bluesky page or follow me here to enjoy that!
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I think these books work a lot better than the adventure modules designed only to run as a single campaign. My DM style is to stitch together various modules and maps as I see fit for my own story.
Same! I really like the way I can pull these apart easily. I used to do that to the full adventures, and I stole my favorite starting for new players from Princes of the Apocalypse - modified the farm siege so it can work for LVL 1 or 2 players - but I really don't like running them as full campaigns.