Tier-Ranking D&D and RPG Campaigns

hey friends it's your pal Mike Shay from s flurish today we are going to do a tier ranking of all of the campaigns that I have run from 2014 to today we're going to go through all of the campaigns that I've run for not just fifth edition but also other RPGs that I've had over the past 10 years we're going to be ranking them on an S through F tier rate it's going to be a really good time but it's also going to be particularly valuable to you as a GM we're going to talk about that in a minute this is brought to you by the patrons of Sly flurish patrons get access to all kinds of exclusive Adventures access to the awesome lazy DM community over on Discord the patreon Q&A where you can ask me questions directly they get tons and tons of material to help you run your games and you help me put on shows like this to the patrons of s flourish thank you so much and for everyone else please check out my patreon you get a really awesome amount of stuff for a very low price it's really worthwhile I've been thinking about doing this show for a while and it's a little it originally a little bit self-serving like what value is it to you as a GM if I'm going through all the campaigns that I've run since 2014 especially if I'm switching from different campaign Styles different systems all kinds of things how is that actually valuable to you so I wanted to make sure that this is valuable to GMS and this is how we're going to do it my goal for this video is not to convince you how you should rank your own campaigns it is not to show you which campaigns you should run or which ones you shouldn't my goal for this video is is to help all of us come up with clear criteria that Define good campaigns and bad campaigns for us individually and then using those criteria to help guide which campaigns we're going to run in the future so my criteria for determining a good campaign from a bad Campaign which is often based on the material that I'm using to do it is not the same that as your criteria you get to decide what matters to you but hopefully this process of thinking about these and the conversations that we'll have during this video give you IDE is about how you would rank your previous campaigns to give you a list of criteria that you can use to define what campaigns you want to run in the future you're going to want to comment on this video or you're going to want to send me email on the podcast or something like that what I would love to hear about is the criteria that you define for your campaigns what are the criteria that you have found to be particularly useful for deciding what kind of campaigns you want to run when you buy a product and you open it up and you start reading you start reviewing it what are the things that you're personally looking for that help you decide whether or not this is going to be a good campaign or if you're thinking about a campaign and you're reading reviews and you're listening to podcasts and you're watching YouTube videos what are the things you're listening for to determine whether or not you're going to enjoy this particular campaign I think that's really valuable I think it could probably save us a lot of money if we're if we know what those criteria are and you're able to identify those criteria and then place them on a product and determine whether or not that product is going to meet it I think that that can really help that's what I really want to hear about so some ground rules for this one is this is covering the campaigns that I've run since 2014 to today so about 10 years worth of campaigns the campaigns are a mix of a bunch of different things they are hard cover published campaign Adventures many of them from Wizards of the Coast they are some of them are smaller Adventures or small campaigns that I've blown up into bigger campaigns some of them are Homebrew and some of them are using a lot of them are using fifth edition D and D but a lot of them are using other game systems as well so it's really not a totally fair comparison because we're going to be comparing some things among these that really don't fit like how do you compare running tomb of annihilation to running blades in the dark the one thing that matters though is it's you and your friends sitting around a table spending your time running a campaign so that's kind of where we we get the comparison of those rankings even though one of them is a short campaign one of them is longer one is fifth edition one is a totally different system we are still going to look at those and decide like how do we rank those among because the one variable that we have is time the one variable that matters for all these is the time that we're spending around the table hanging out with our friends playing a game and that time is Super valuable and we want to maximize the value of that time we want to make sure we're running something that we really love the rankings only reflect my view I am keeping in consideration what my players have said about it though so I I have talked to my players about this but I'm not balancing how the players felt about it how I felt about it it's really how I felt but I'm certainly taking player stuff into consideration and really in all of these campaigns I've run I've never really had a truly bad one we've definitely had some that were great and fantastic and we all loved and then we had some that people were like well it was fine I don't know that anybody regretted the time right I don't know that there's any of these where I've regretted having done it at all I've definitely regretted ones where I wish I could have I could have run something else and I ran this instead and I think it we would all had a better time if I ran something else so that's happened but I've never truly had a bad time so some of the things that I know about myself and how I like Adventures it's not like I haven't thought about this already I enjoy running Homebrew and heavily modified adventures in existing published settings I've done this a few times now I know that these tend to rank better for me than when I'm running a fully published adventure to me the value of a product really comes to how much work I have to do to make it work for me I don't mind doing that work I just don't want to have to do that work I don't want to look at an adventure and immediately say wow I'm definitely going to have to modify this because I don't like it I don't I that's not what I'm looking for a published product is supposed to make my life easier not make it harder I'm always happy to modify Adventures when I want to I'm not happy to modify them when I have to usually I'm able to Define what I'm not going to like in a published Adventure on like a quick skim read especially when I see the overall plotter structure of it I can usually tell yeah this plotter structure is not going to work well for me or I don't like these plot elements or something like that I'm usually able to define those pretty early many cases I wish I had listened to my gut and said you know what I'm going to pass on it but usually for the sake of popularity I ran it anyway and then sometimes it was a mistake and honestly I really wish Wizards of the Coast focused more on setting books and unpublished Adventures they have been doing a lot of published Adventures I've run some of them other ones I've read and immediately said yes that's not what I'm interested in and wizard seems to be very interested in making Big Adventures and not making campaign settings when they have published some of the best campaign settings I've ever read I love rafika I a lot of people really love Theos Eon rising from the last war is excellent van Ron's guide to Raven loft is excellent I want more books like that and those are a lot harder to screw up because I don't I get to build whatever structure around it that I want that's something I really wish that they had done all right let's stop talking about that let's start doing some rankings let's start talking about now these are not in any particular order they are like I think they're in order by like how I threw the files in for the icon so we're not going to be doing them starting from 2014 and going to 2024 it's going to be all throughout and we're starting with shadow of the Demon Lord so right away we're starting with a weird one shadow of the Demon Lord is an RPG by Rob Schwab I ran a short 11 session campaign in this I really enjoyed it my players really enjoyed it it is super dark so I think the one detriment that I will say is that because it is a super dark campaign that was something that I had to man during it but I love the system my players love the system my players today we did this like in 2017 or 2018 it was pretty soon after shadow of the Demon Lord came out so we had stopped playing fifth edition for a while we did a couple of other systems and then went back to fifth edition this was one of them and my players really liked it so I'm definitely going to rank this as an a tier I really liked it I'd say the only aspect to it is because it is a pretty Grim system that requires a little bit of management but an a tier is a really good tier and I really enjoyed it num Manera so I ran this a couple of years ago now and I really enjoyed the system a lot from a GM perspective it is a fantastic system I wish my players liked it more but a lot of the weird mechanics of numera on the player side made my some of my players never understood how things went and I'll give an example numera and the cipher system sells itself on this really simple idea that everything has a level from zero from one to 10 one being really easy and 10 being really hard if you want to know what difficulty class you have to roll on you multiply that tier by three so a a level five threat for example would have a DC of 15 that way you can make a monster with just a DC and on the GM side that's fantastic but then how the players decide what they're going to roll they have to use they have they have effort and they have Edge and they have these other things and an example was they can lower the tier that they're Rolling On by expending three points from one of their pools if they have Edge they get to Discount how often they do that so if they have an edge of one they can subtract one from the amount that they have to spend so instead of spending three points to lower it a tier which would take it from like a 15 to a 12 they only have to spend two so they're particularly good at it so they get to do it you can also do it multiple times but the second time you do it you get an automatic discount of one and this is what I'm talking about like there's all these like weird bits of like well e what's the difference between effort and Edge is a hard thing to explain then saying like well when you do it a second time you get another Auto automatic discount but you don't add your Edge and it gets really confusing so I had players where we played for months we played for like five or six months and they never understood how that worked it never really clicked with them the other one is when we hit really high levels the math kind of broke down now all that said the numera setting is fantastic and I look back at the story that we told there and I think myself and my players really really loved it but I'm going to probably put it into B or C I'm going to put into a b because I loved it so much my players were probably almost certainly put it lower than that but I thought the story was excellent and I thought from a GM standpoint I really really enjoyed running it now we have rhyme of the frost maiden and I am putting rhyme of the frost Maiden right down into the F tier I wish this is one of the few Adventures that I wish I had not run I and I unfortunately ran it twice for two different groups and this was the adventure that finally broke me of the idea that I should try to run Wizards of the Coast publ Adventures so that I can help other people run them that's something I had done for many years and two adventures in particular broke me of that habit and rhyme of the frost Maiden was one of them the other one is descent into aess which we'll come to the adventures just didn't work for me talk about an adventure that made me do a lot of work there's a lot of times where the story fell apart there was a lot of imbalance they throw like the monsters that they throw at you at level one or too hard there's too much material it's like 10 Towns and all the stuff that's going on in 10 Towns I just when I ran it I really didn't like it the frost ma in itself didn't make any sense there's like weird imbalances in the monsters that you face and the and and how difficult you think they should be so like you're facing a God and she's like cr10 it really just didn't make sense on a lot of levels it has a lot of weird stuff in it it's got like you know you you certainly have like you know trigger warnings for cannibalism but there's also like strange bouts of incest in it there's really just strange stuff it was a very weirdly written Adventure I didn't like it when I read it and then I ran it and realized I didn't like it when I ran it either now my players really liked it my players had a lot of fun with it they thought they there was a lot of story that they told they really enjoyed a lot what was going on and that was because I say I rewrote a lot of it I had to do a lot of work to get it there and you know what else I could have just done that as a Homebrew campaign instead I really didn't feel like I need it so anyway that that was an F maybe do a lot of work a lot of weird stuff I had to deal with very strange structure for the adventure you know I I I just I did not I did not dig while Beyond The Witch late on the other hand I really loved it is a more linear kind of Adventure and it had a couple of little odd bits with like and and my friend teos abadia talked about this that like it has weird bits with the backgrounds where like you know you're running the adventure they talked about this on mastering dungeons that the backgrounds that you get don't actually fit the structure of the adventure and this is a common problem with this is a common problem that I've seen with Wizards of the Coast Adventures where they try to give character options and the character options don't match the the story of the adventure that they're going to do this happens in spell Jammer it happens here it happens in a couple other ones where the backgrounds that they give you don't fit the theme of The Adventure that was actually very minor I really loved while I I'm trying to think is there anything that I really didn't like about it it does have sort of a bit of a surprise ending but I didn't feel like I had to modify it in order to suit it I did modify it heavily but I didn't feel like I had to I really liked it I'm going to put an S tier one of the things is like it's it seems harder to put an adventure up an S tier because we rank that so much higher but I think while be on the wi way it was an S tier Adventure I really really loved it blades in the dark I really want to love blades in the dark and I kind of didn't my players did love it a lot and I think the system is really interesting but it was shockingly complicated for what I would have considered a more story focused system it also just didn't fit the style of gaming that I do the way that I operate as a GM and the kind of things that I'm happy to do don't really fit with how blades worked but I found a lot of complexity with blades that made it hard for me to run and hard for me to get my hands around during prep and and you know whether or not I even should be doing prep so I'm I'm going to put it down in D tier I think it was really interesting I like the setting but I found it very dense for what I would consider to be and I guess what my expectation was for a lightweight RPG my players adored it my players loved it we did a short campaign only five or for six sessions in it so we didn't do a ton but my players really loved it they loved it more than I did and they this unlike num Manera they understood the mechanics more than I did so I'm I'm I'm being a little harsh by putting it in De D tier it could probably almost certainly be in C tier but I just you know it's one where like I I think that for me to get it to the place where I would want to run it I'd have to change a lot of it I'd have to change like the the whole like system of gangs it was like you had three different character sheets because you had your your gang sheet yeah your your sheet your gang sheet your headquarter sheet there's all these like different levels and tears and different phases of the game or the mechanics Chang it it felt very complicated to me curse of strad I adore curse of strad I love this adventure I ran it for two different groups I I think that curse of strad and there's a couple of Adventures on here that that fit this style has the exact kind of Adventure model I want which is what I refer to as a yam shaped Adventure model this is a term that my wife came up with and the yam shaped Adventure model is you have a clear start you have a clear area where the game begins then it widens out and you can do lots of different things in lots of different ways and there's lots of room for the campaign to go in lots of different directions lots of agency that the players have in guiding the future Direction and then it culminates back down into a big strong conclusion and curs of strot is definitely like that you start off with death house if you're using the Death House adventure and Death House gets a bunch of complaints I actually didn't find it very hard to do the death house because I started them at second level instead of first level and then it work great and after you get through death house then you sort of expand out into the lands of bar bovia they get to explore barovia there's lots of cool places they can go you can sort of because you roll on where those different items are that the characters need to pick up they can travel to lots of different places lots of room for the the politics and the different factions to to kind of change and operate but then it culminates back down into you going to Castle Raven Loft crawling through Castle Raven Loft and eventually facing strad I think it's the best adventure I love it I love this I love this adventure very much and so it's not hard for me to put it in s tier I think cursus strad is excellent descent into aess down in F tier so what happened with descent into aess oh what a mess I think I I from what I had heard the production of this adventure was a great big mess and some of it came from marketing where they I'm making some of this up some of this I had heard some of this I've heard from various podcasts and from kind of open conversations with people and and some of it I think I might be filling in the blanks with my own model in my head or what I think might have occurred when they started off making descent into aess they were just was just beginning to make balers Gate 3 and just about to announce balers Gate 3 this is many years ago well before the release of balers Gate 3 and they said we need to add balder's gate in there so they kind of shoehorned in a whole other section into this book that broke the whole structure about why you would be doing this and my understanding I actually have two friends who both worked heavily on this book and one of them had to rewrite all of the work of the other was directed to rewrite all of the work of the other because they changed so much of the adventure in order to support this marketing campaign of balers gate so balers gate descent into aess was heavily modified because they wanted to do marketing for balers gate to tie the connection between balers gate and balers Gate 3 by laran Studios and it wrecked the adventure in my opinion the other one is it has very strange when I talk about like a broken structure for an adventure things that just don't work very well there's no motivation for the characters to actually engage with the adventure and descent into aess instead there's a really excellent product written by Anthony Joyce and Justice Arman Justice Arman now works for Wizards of the Coast called fall of elel you can get on the DM's Guild and fall of elel is a much better introduction to descent into aess than the actual introduction to descent into aess and when I ran it the characters had no problem with that motivation the problem is the motivation changes and then when you get into hell and you're actually going through and following the adventure the morality of the characters comes into question and the big one there that like one of my players had a big problem with and we're like wow that that really is bad as Soul coins there's this whole idea that there's this currency in Hell of Soul coins and a soul coin contain the soul of a mortal entity and you can use them to drive a car so if you think about it taking an eternal soul and and destroying it is way worse than murder and you're doing it to drive a car a little bit of a distance that just made no sense my player was immediately like wait a minute why would we do that why any good that we're doing to try to save the people of elel is totally destroyed by us burning Soul coins so we change it into demon nicker in which you killed demons and you took their their precious bodly fluids and fed them into your car and that drove your car and that worked a lot better better it's things like that that we had to fix also the whole structure of the adventure the three tiers the three paths that you can follow are very each of them are like oh well you get a choice kind of but then they're very linear really didn't work out so I did not like the sent into Everest it was another one that I wish I had rent something else and they're probably my two lowest Adventures on this list Eon rising from the last war you're like hey Mike that's not an adventure that's a campaign setting yes I know but I run two Homebrew adventur two Homebrew long campaigns using Eon rising from the last war as my base and we had a ball and I absolutely loved it and this this is where I came to that idea of like you know running Homebrew adventures in published campaign settings I think are can work way better than trying to run big I think that us building our own campaigns means that we're going to get exactly what we want and we get all of the value of the material that we get in a large campaign setting which makes me wish Wizards of the Coast did more of that I really I really wish that there was more of that so I really loved Eon rising from the last war and I would definitely I would definitely recommend it again Empire of the ghouls I just finished my Empire of the ghouls campaign it was almost a two-year campaign I think it was 20 months that we played Empire of the ghouls it was an absolute blast I really loved it Empire of the ghouls the structure of it is actually kind of similar to storm King's Thunder it it's got chapters and each chapter is its own adventure but in those chapters is a lot of room for you to go some of the chapters are absolutely massive some of the chapters are relatively focused my own campaign pain Loosely followed the adventure but I changed a lot to fit what I needed but I felt like I had the support of the adventure and certainly the support of the rest of the material from midgard to be able to do that that said Empire of the ghouls has one problem which is there's so much travel in it and it's kind of by Design because it's designed as sort of a travel log of midgard or certainly the center the center like from the north to the south of midgard but some there's one Adventure you travel like 2700 miles and it's like months of travel and then there's like you travel down you go in adventure and then you travel back again and figuring out how to keep the pace of the adventure going with all of that travel took me a fair bit of work I ended up capturing into things like the shadow roads and the cat slides and the red portals I had to come up with ways and reasons for the characters to be able to do that travel a little bit easier than they did so that did take some work however I really loved it so I'm still putting it in an a tier not s tier because of that travel problem but in an a tier ghost of salt marsh ghost of salt marsh is is kind of a campaign and kind of a set of Loosely tied Adventures built in the greyhawk setting of salt marsh and it includes a bunch of classic Adventures from all the way from first edition to I think through Third Edition that are Level appropriate so you can go from one to the other I ran this for two different groups as a campaign setting and I really loved it they was it was an excellent campaign setting it had a lot of fun Intrigue some of the design that they did with Ghost of salt marsh I really love for example they have sort of a gazeteer of the area around salt marsh which on its own can be an entire campaign setting it's actually it's only like 10 pages or so but it was so rich in the material that they put in those 10 pages that I felt like I could run a campaign I've actually used that as a model for ruins of the grindle route in the city of arches I love that style so much that how much campaign you can pack into a small amount of of area that I really saw it as a strength I didn't even scratch the surface of what I could have done running this adventure there is one of the adventures in this book that I use as an example of probably the worst published Adventure that I've ever run so I can't put it at the S tier CU it is not it is not even it's not exactly close to perfect because of that one Adventure that Adventure was Isle of the Abbey I just I felt like the structure it it was actually a good example of a really bad dungeon design but also like it taught me a lot about downward beats where like you go through this dungeon and you're just getting attacked by specters and shot by traps the whole time there's a lot of problems with that Adventure that makes it actually a really good example as a bad adventure aisle of the Abbey was not great but everything else in it I really enjoyed and I love the campaign I ran and I think there's a it's just a fantastic book with a lot of stuff in it and I really love the campaign that I ran so I'm putting it in a tier I think it it has a flaw but I really I really enjoyed it and a tier is really good these these are all a tier stuff is really good hord of the Dragon Queen hoard of the Dragon Queen was the second Adventurer I ran for fifth edition DND D next to Lost m fand Delver it is a very linear adventure and like Empire of the ghouls it also has a lot of travel it's got some it had some flaws in it because they didn't even have all the mechanics worked out for how monsters worked so there were some imbalances there but I did enjoy it I ran it for both of my groups I'm going to stick it in B tier because it took a little bit more work than I would hope to get it exactly where I wanted it I don't you know can you run it I mean I know people that have run it many many times and love it and and run it pretty much as it's written many many times so for other people could definitely be higher but I'm I'm I feel pretty good that my campaign there was was was a b tier B tier campaign dragons of ice Spire Peak dragons of ice Spire Peak is the I'm spoiling spoiler it's going in s tier Dragon of ice Spire Peak is the adventure that comes with the D and D Essentials box set which is a tremendous value for for d and d and dragon of ice SP Peak has one of the best adventure structures that I've ever seen some people don't like it because of how simple and straightforward it is the idea of going to a job board picking up jobs and going off is not the same as sort of the more Rich stories that you get with kind of story focused RPGs but I do believe that a lot of times the stories that happen are the stories that the characters bring to the table not necessarily what the adventure brings the style of it is really digestible Adventures the each of the adventures that are here because it's kind of a bunch of smaller Adventures tied together are two to four pages long so they're very easy to digest actually I'm going to take it down one notch to a tier and that's because the first Adventures that you run are deadly for first level characters there's something about these starter Adventures that make them really want to kill characters and I do feel like you the one thing that you have to do when you're running Dragon of ice SP Peak is be particularly careful at level one so I'm knocking it down from s tier to a tier because of that the killing first level characters sucks I don't I think it's a terrible way to start a D and D campaign I think it's terrible way to teach DMS is like hey everybody oh life needs to be hard and you should be killed come on people want to have an actual Adventure but I really love the style and structure it has a model in there that I use all the time myself now which is sort of the two of three model and the idea is you give three possible Adventure scenarios to the players they pick one you go on that one they come back and pick another one and you go on that one and when they come back the third one you take off the list and you come up with three more the nice thing about that structure is it's pretty efficient you're going to you know going to run more of them then you're not going to run but it gives players the option of choosing their favorite one choosing the next favorite and then you skip the third so I I like that structure a lot I think you can actually use it for a lot of different Adventures I'd love to see that structure used more often I use it myself a lot of times because it's a great way of giving agency to the players to decide what they want to do and also gives the option to remove remove an option that you clearly like they didn't choose it twice it's probably not that great and then come up with three new fresh ones I think that that structure works really well and that structure is in ice SP Peak ice SP Peak is excellent but that problem of killing first level characters is pretty rough the same problem kind of exists with lost Min of fand Delver lost minina found Del I also love I I I'm I'm actually think I might be knocking this down a level is this s tier is lost M of fand Delver s tier I'm gonna put it at s tier I think it's excellent I love lost Min of fand Delver you can actually get it for free now it's a it's free on D and D Beyond and I think that there's a PDF of it at least there's a PDF of the first chapter of it floating around that is also was free free freely released and it's really good my understanding however is that they expanded lost Min of fandel out into a campaign called fand Delver and below the shattered Obelisk which actually modified the original lost mind of fand Delver for the worst I didn't run it so I'm not ranking it here but I didn't even I bought it and I kind of wish I hadn't because it's just sitting on my shelf and all the reviews I read said yeah they actually made the whole thing worse and there's a lot of problems with it and a lot of issues but I'm going to put lost Min of fandel at s tier so many people run it the reviews are so high I've run it many many times and I think it's an excellent adventure it's a little rough at first level you those initial goblins can definitely kill you if you just lower the goblin if you just lower the number of goblins a little bit and then get them to second level before they go into the caves everything works well my only other complaint is that the last major dungeon is really big with a lot of stuff going on and that can be kind of tricky to run but it's a very open-ended Adventure the idea that it's like a 64-page book but has tons and tons of options for running a first to fifth level Adventure in it I think is really good so I love I love lost mind of fand Delver and I think that uh I am going to uh put that as s tier out of the Abyss so I only ever ran half of out of the abyss and I only ran it once and I only ran it for one group I didn't have a lot of the problems that other people had I think that it is an underappreciated Adventure it it is the only Adventure that handles the capture of characters correctly which is just start them captured right just start them captured don't have a scene where they get captured because that just sucks but if you begin the campaign with them captured and maybe even let the players no you're going to begin this is how the scenario is going to begin you're captured by Dr in an outpost and that's where our adventure in the underd dark and you don't know how you got there that's where it's going to be let them know and that way they're not losing anything they're starting from a low point and working their way out I actually enjoyed it when I ran it that way there are other complaints like too many NPCs I never ran the second half but a lot of people said that like the second half was really rough I'm going to stick it in C I don't have any c tiers and we're going to put it in C tier because I don't think it's in I don't I don't think that it's terrible and I would I run it again I'd run the first half of it again because I really thought that was fun and I ran it for one group and we really had a good time with it there's a lot of cool stuff in there they tried to make it like Allison Wonderland was a model that I think Chris Perkins used when he was kind of writing it or when when he I think on it was the you know when they were writing the campaign draft of it that I think that's what they did and I really liked it um and I and I feel it did that it really made the underdark look like a cool place and if you look at the underdark in balers Gate 3 there's a big section where you're traveling through the underd dark a lot of the stuff that's going on in the underdark there feels similar to the kind of stuff that's happening in out of the Abyss so if you like that part of it you'll like that princes of the Apocalypse a lot of people didn't like it it's got a huge dungeon it took me running it three times to realize how to run it so that's not ideal I didn't feel like I had to change a ton but I did feel like I needed to understand it better I'm going to stick that in C tier as well I think it was fine and my I I my I don't think my players really liked it so you know I I wouldn't would I run it again I might run it again like if somebody was like I really wanted to like it I think I think it'd be okay it's not the end of the world it's not the worst Adventure I've ever run so I think it sits fairly in C tier and you know there's definitely better right but I think that there's more to like in it than most people give it so yeah so there there is that rise of Tiamat kind of along the same lines as horde of the Dragon Queen I don't think it is better or worse in my campaign I changed a lot of it some of it I did feel like I had to change like there's a weird maze hedge maze thing you know like hedge Maz is a 14th level seemed weird but I like the style a lot I'm going to stick that into C tier I feel like horde was slightly easier to run than rise of Tiamat was maybe because of the level and I felt like I had to change more than than I wanted to Scarlet Citadel so Scarlet Citadel I've run relatively recently this is another Cobalt press Adventure set in midgard I was running in parallel to Empire of the ghouls and I did not like it nearly as much as Empire of the ghouls and I'm going to stick Scarlet Citadel firmly in D tier and that is for a few reasons the two biggest reasons are that it has no real good motivation for the characters to go on any Adventures there it is kind of built to be like an old school dungeon delvie sort of campaign except there's no reason to go down there and there's no and and when you do go down there you get punched in the face like right away and The Logical conclusion which my players came to was why would we ever go there again so I had to make my own story about why they would go down there I had to I had to have a motivation for them to do it and and I and I had to I had to make that work in order for the campaign to work and that took a fair bit of work the other one is it is the most dense text dense RPG that I've had from like a major publisher in a long time it's so wordy and some of the rooms have descriptions that are like multiple pages long like there's I think there's like a couple of room descriptions that go on for two full Pages two full pages of text but even small rooms can sometimes have long areas of text it is really clearly so dense in the amount of material that it was very hard to parse it was very hard like I would I read it and I understood it and then I go back and forget what I had read and it's so hard to reference when you're running at the table that I would say it was definitely not a table very table usable Adventure now the quality of it is really high which is why it's not like a total F tier is that it the quality was really high the rooms were cool the the the design of it was really neat had lots of like verticality lots of ways that you could go up and down I really enjoyed it but and and my players liked it you know my players liked it a lot I don't know if it's the most memorable campaign we've ever run but we definitely liked it a lot and you know so that's that would knock it up to D tier but I the problem of the the density of the text and the lack of motivation really made that one a lot of work curse scroll this is my gloaming campaign Cur scroll one is by Kelsey Deon over at Arcane Library I'm running that now for my shadow dark game so here's where we start to get a little fuzzy because are we reviewing Shadow dark are we reviewing the gloaming where does that sit so I'm going to start by throwing it straight into a tier because I it's absolutely a tier the question is is it s tier or not the structure of the gloaming is awesome and I really love the idea of like a campaign setting in a small booklet this is like the opposite of of of scarlet Citadel that I was given a ton of material that I could use and change and manipulate any way I wanted it could be a short Adventure it could be a long adventure you can run it however you want I feel like it gave me all of the material I needed to let my imagination run wild with it in order to run the campaign and I'm loving it a lot so I I can't think of any reason not to make it an st s tier campaign I love this campaign my players love this campaign we're having a ball there's definitely some little L secrecies with Shadow dark which I talk about when I'm doing my shadow dark prep but none of that is like some of that is just me sort of learning the system some of it is just me getting used to it or some of is me just kind of letting go of some things that I'm probably hanging on to a little bit too tightly but I really loved it and and like when you consider like the cost and you consider not just the cost in money but the cost in the time for you to digest it and to run it I think it could work really well could you take it and run a 5 campaign with it maybe like it probably take a little bit of work but really why would you why not run it using Shadow dark rules because Shadow dark rules are really straightforward easy to pick up if you know 5V you can know Shadow dark it's really a lot of fun so I see no reason that shadow that curse scroll won the gloaming my gloaming campaign is not an S tier campaign shadowed keep on the Borderlands is another really good example as a contrast to Scarlet Citadel shadowed keep on the Borderlands I was thinking about that today there's no way that's not an S tier campaign I love shatter keeping the Borderlands I'm running this for my third gaming group I have three gaming groups that I'm running we're going through shadowed keep now and just like the gloaming just like Cur scir won the gloaming it is a campaign that I've been able to expand however I want I added a lot of stuff that I wanted to the book gives you a lot of like hints almost like that idea of like giving you a hex crawl where the hex has something in it and then you blow that out into something much larger there's a lot of freedom and a lot of flexibility for me to love to to build out the shadowed keep campaign the way I wanted for my own campaign I really wish I had not bothered to set it in greyhawk because I don't know greyhawk that well and I don't think we're really tapping into that but I kind of wanted to have more of a campaign setting but raging swan has a campaign setting built around shadowed keep that you can use and the other interesting thing is how kryon over at raging Swan is continually developing shadowed keep adding new stuff I think later this year is going to be a new version of it that's going to be expanded even further but when we talk about table usability and this is a really good factor for me some something that I can easily use at my table easy to digest during prep easy to reference during play there's a product design that really matters and the product design of shadowed keep is excellent it's the it's Second To None I love it I'm very inspired by it as a fellow Creator I really I really really love it storm Kings thunder so storm Kings Thunder I I again I ran storm Kings Thunder for two different groups I really liked it I felt like the adventure didn't give me all of the things that I needed to really run it it was a really fun campaign like Empire of the ghouls it is a travel log of the sword Coast you go all the way up and down the sword Coast it has sort of a yam shaped design it starts off with a really good starter Adventure that I enjoyed a lot and then expands out but the expansion got so big and travel is so weird you get one of the quest is like oh travel to icewind Dale 2400 miles away to deliver a message so I felt like I had to do more work with storm Kings Thunder than I did for other Adventures I'm going to drop it into the C tier I think that's fair I liked it I don't know know that I recommend it over I certainly don't recommend it of these other ones on the list but if you really want like a big wides spanding Adventure it actually works better as a campaign setting than it does as an adventure so if you think of storm Kings Thunder as the GM side of the sword Coast adventurers guide then it actually works rather well that if you kind of ignore the giant storyline you you know you can use that as sort of a an overarching subplot but don't think of it like an adventure and think of it like a campaign setting then it's not so bad but as an adventure it needs a lot of work so I I definitely I think it's I'm going to put it in B tier I think it's I think it's fair to put that in B tier because I think it took uh a lot of work but it offered a lot of uh opportunity for really fun campaigns so one I want to talk about storm Kings Thunder and the sword Coast Adventures guide I think the sword Coast Adventures guide is an underappreciated book for one big reason it is a players book not a GM's book it is not a campaign Source book for the for the sword Cod it is a player Aid to tell them everything they need to know about the sword Coast it is written as an atlas from a player's perspective where Storm Kings Thunder is written as a as a c almost like a campaign setting for the same material which means those two books side by side one given to the player to read and one given for the GM to run the scenario actually works really well I think if you wanted to run storm Kings Thunder keeping that idea that the sword Coast adventurers guide is the Atlas that the characters that the players can read to understand the sword Coast it works tremendously better than if you try to assume that sword Coast Adventures got is a GM's campaign book because it isn't obviously hit the mark because lots of people don't like it tomb of annihilation I loved tomb of annihilation I ran that for two different groups as well the hex crawl was really fun however it's got a couple of things that you have to work with I'm going to put it in a tier because I like the structure so much I I'm actually I take that back I'm going to move it to B tier I'm going to lower a tier which surprises me but as I think about it now having having been abstracted from it for some time it it it has major components to it that require a little bit of work the the general Adventure plot doesn't make sense the way it's written which is hey all of the souls of people are not making their way to the afterlife like they should something is siphoning them up at a global scale let's get a bunch of level one characters to go solve this for us by sending them into the jungle now you can build your own to it and it works really well but then you get to the jungle and you get to Port nyanzaru and then there's fun things like riding in dinosaur races and getting off in other Adventures the souls are getting sucked away like what there's no good motivation to not go driving as hard as you can for the end conclusion this is something my friend teos talked about with tomb of annihilation is that like that that balance so there are ways to fix it and I have articles on S flish if you're running tomb of tombs tomb of annihilation it's not too hard to fix but you have to fix fix it or it doesn't work really well but the other reason that I'm knocking it from an a tier to a b tier is that the shift in the style of the adventure changes so radically that many of my players said I love the first half and I didn't like the second half that when when it turned into a mega Dungeon Crawl they didn't like it nearly as much as they did on the adventures that they had along the way and so I'm taking my players consideration into account where I I thought the dungeon was fun I really enjoyed it there were parts of it that I really liked there's some parts of it you got to work on a little bit to to make sure that they're totally fun but I know my players had a much less of a fun time with the big Dungeon Crawl at the end than I did with the than I did running it overall so I'm I'm G to knock that down to a to a b tier it does have a good yam shaped design which I really I really like but if you think of it B tier is pretty good my numer campaign I loved my hor of the Dragon Queen campaign I loved my Storm King Thunder campaigns I loved and two of annihilation I love so B tier and above they're all they're all pretty they're all pretty solid Water Deep Dragon Heist so Water Deep Dragon Heist is a short Adventure it's meant to only be like level 1 to five I ran this for two different groups as well I had a lot of fun modifying the structure of this adventure to fit in between hord of the Dragon Queen and Rise of tmat I love the idea that the the storyline from horde of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat had taken place in every time I ran anything else in the setting my players liked it a lot however the adventure does need a lot of work in particular there's a big chase scene that happens in the middle of the book that I you know I hated how it ran and I hated the idea that like oh there's this McGuffin that you have to pick up and there's a whole section in the book that says by the way if the players get a hold of the McGuffin too early here are ways that you can ensure that they can't keep a hold of the McGuffin that just sucks like that's just pure railroading right from from beginning to end but I really liked it I you know I say that but like I still really enjoyed the adventure a lot of people really liked it I just felt like it took more work I'm probably going to stick that in B tier I don't think that's C tier one other big problem with it from and you know it wasn't a problem for me which is why I'll probably keep it in B tier but it is a problem for a lot of us it's called water de Dragon Heist and there's no Heist I think it actually if you call it the dragons of water deep that would have been a much better title and I'll explain why the dragons of water deep is actually about gold not dragons because a gold dragon is a coin in Water Deep so you call dragons of water deep and you get a little Switcheroo where they think oh there's actual dragons in water deep and you're like no it's actually gold coins until you get to the end and then there's an actual Dragon so then you go back to no there is a dragon so I think it's a fun play on words if they called it if they had called it the dragons of water deep but instead they called the dragon Heist and there's no heists so that's kind of a bummer um but I'll put it in B tier I think it you know I think it was runable would I run it again is a good question and I don't know that I would run it again I think i' I think I've had my fil but I don't know if I'd run any of these that are in the B tier again so that's a consideration spell Jammer in particular the adventure light of zerxis light of zerxis is the adventure that's in Sp the spell Jammer box set I was very very disappointed by the spell Jammer box set because I thought it was their one chance to build a really good spell Jammer campaign setting similar to Ebron rising from the last war or Ravnica or Theos or another big setting book like that even something like van Ron's guy to Raven Loft I wanted a book like that and instead what I got was a monster book A book with some weird player options and a short Adventure I did run the adventure though and I really liked the adventure I thought it was excellent it does however suffer from a major problem that Wizards of the Coast Adventures have had as of late which is Major NPCs that you're working for who betray you I'm not going to name any other names but there two other Adventures where I read it and saw that they had that and said yep I'm not running either of those I don't know why somebody at Wizards of the Coast Who's involved in kind of Designing the themes of the these Adventures has trust issues because we have had three adventures in a row I think it's three adventures in a row where a major Quest NPC betrays you the issue with that is if two things can happen in this situation one is the characters figure out that they're going to be betrayed and then they change the entire course of the adventure and you're left with nothing because why would they do the thing if they find out that the person that they're working for is going to betray them that is a major issue if the players figure out early then it's bad but two is your players are never going to trust you again let's say they do trust the NPC and let's say you do go through the whole Adventure then you finish it out and each turn oh this whole time we were getting Hoodwinked now guess what your players are never going to trust you again so now you've broken in my opinion broken trust with the players now it's one thing to have surprise endings I'm not talking about having a surprise ending I'm not talking about information that the players don't know that they discover at the end I'm talking about information that would have changed how they would have done the adventure and particularly if it negates the whole purpose of the adventure that's not great in luckily in light of zerxis it is not hard to change that it is not hard to say hey this NPC who was going to betray the characters now is just conflicted and now might need to be convinced and I ran it that way and it worked really well otherwise I think the structure of light of zerxis is really good it is a linear Adventure but it really did capture fun spell jammery stuff I really liked it so I am probably going to stick that in oh do I dare put it in a tier let's put it in a tier and see what that looks like do I like it as much as Empire the ghouls no I did not do I like as much no so it's going to go to B tier B tier did I like it as much as tomb of annihilation yeah I liked it as much as Dragon Heist I don't know if I liked it as much as storm King's Thunder or Horde of the Dragon queen or you know what I am going to knock both Dragon Heist and light of zerxis down to C tier because I don't think that either of those two short Adventures stand up nearly as well in my mind as storm Kings Thunder tomb of annihilation hord of the Dragon queen or numera did for me I like those Adventures better so I'm going to move those down to C tier and I think that light of zerxis I'm kind of surprised cuz I really did like light of zerxis but I didn't like it as much as I like those other ones and see so that means that c tier is not like a you know not C tier is not a bad spot so you know I definitely think like a cut off you know a cut off would be that CD tier but I mean even then I think I'm probably being overly harsh on blades in the dark could blades be promoted I'm going to promote honestly if I promote blades in the dark to C tier I'm only doing so because it's an indie RPG that I really want to like so I'm going to stop myself from doing that because I really want to like blades in the dark and there are lots of aspects I do like I just found it really hard to run I bet you most people would have that in C tier at least C tier and probably higher so I'm going to keep it I I feel bad about it being in D tier but I I feel like that's me being as honest as I can so then we come to the last adventure that we're going to talk about today which is dragons of storm wreck Isle in the starter set I am putting that into s tier I love that Adventure it is a short Adventure it has you know three four really fun little things that you can do it doesn't kill your first level characters it has a builtin safety net to ensure that new DMS and new players aren't going to get just wiped out by the first set of zombies and then they they it gives room for the GM to screw up and and still recover I really think that that is a fantastic Adventure I like it a lot I think it's highly underrated I don't know many people talking about it I don't know many people running it but I really think that it is an excellent an excellent adventure I have no complaint I can't think of anything that I don't like with Dragons of storm wreck Isle it's a nice short easy to run and yet it has a lot of cool lore in it it's got lore about Forgotten Realms in it it's got lore about gods and minions it even has some room to kind of expand the adventures out in different areas if you want to so I really really liked dragons of storm wreck Isle I like it I think it is better than lost mind of fand Delver because well I know I'm going to keep it I'm G to keep lost mind of fandel there so you know I think it's as strong an adventure as we have so that is the last adventure so a quick summary particularly for our friends on listening on a podcast s tier r s tier includes wild Beyond The Witch light curse of strad eon RIS from the last war lost Min of fand Delver curse scroll one the gloaming from Shadow dark shadowed keep on the Borderlands by raging Swan and the starter set Adventure dragons of storm wreck Isle uh for D and D that is my S tier those seven Adventures those seven campaigns are my top tier campaigns what's pretty great is I have more s tiers than any other tier right that means I have a lot of ones that I like and that means I've run a lot of ones I like a tier includes shadow of the Demon Lord uh Empire of the ghouls ghost of salt marsh and dragon of ice Spire Peak those are also really really good with only usually just like one small flaw are the only reasons why those really aren't in s tier B tier includes new Monera my my new Monera campaign that Iran and num Manera overall horde of the Dragon Queen storm King's Thunder and tomb of annihilation there's an interesting thing there about sort of the open-ended Adventures that are there again b b tiers have a little bit more flaws than I would say the a tiers have a little bit more that you have to do in order to get it to the right place that's kind of the line that you have to draw is where do you actually have to do a fair amount of work that's where things get to get to to to to change C tier includes a lot of older Adventures out of the Abyss princes of the Apocalypse the rise of Tiamat Water Deep Dragon Heist and light of zerxis so those last two are a little bit more modern but the first three are like some of the I think they're the first three Adventures that came out for fifth edition so that's kind of interesting they required more work or I felt like I had to modify the campaign pretty significantly in order to get it to a place that I liked it or they had like kind of a major flaw like I would say light of zerxis did D tier includes my blades in the dark campaign again I feel bad about it because I feel like other people have a lot more fun with blades than I did so don't take my point there to to damn it so my D tier includes Blades of the dark and Scarlet Citadel and then we have my f tier the ones where I really regret having tried them at all and really wish I had instead spent my time on something else and that would be rhyme of the frost maiden and descent into aess two relatively recent Adventures I don't know if they're that recent a couple years old now that both in my mind required way more work to get into a state that made them a fun adventure for myself and the group than the money and the time and energy that I spent digesting those campaigns so those are the bottom of my list so what did I learn from this and I I'm very curious I want to know more importantly what you learned from this what are some of the criteria that you use to help you define what good Adventures are I think by looking at this list we can generally tell that I like having lightweight campaign settings that let me expand them out in lots of different directions and I feel like most of the ones in like the SN tier let me do that shadow of the Demon Lord I built my own wild beond the witch light I built my own curist strad was you know I didn't really build my own but I've let it certainly run in a lot of different areas Eon all of those that that clearly is my criteria I want an adventure structure or a campaign structure with lots of open stuff that lets me build it out in ways that I want to build it out in order to make it really custom made for my group and for my my ideals I also want ones that are written really well and very easy for me to digest and very easy for me to reference and pick up a lot of these are short right like I think of the Seven 8 nine 10 11 of the 11 Adventures that are in my SN a tier a lot of them one two three four five six of them are all short adventures and and then a couple of them are campaign settings more so than longer Adventures so clearly like don't throw if you know what criteria for me is is it a big mey adventure big complicated mey adventure with lots and lots of words that really is sort of like a linear storytelling kind of thing then I'm not really that interested so for me the design of the product matters a lot one thing I will say because you can also look and say shadowed keep on the Borderlands who's developed by one person for Raging Swan and Cur scroll one also developed by one person is an indie1 is standing up there at the same tier as curse of strad the most popular Adventure I think probably of all time and everon rising from the last war and that's because production value doesn't matter that much to me as long as the product design is really really good in fact a lot of these have very high production value Scarlet Citadel really high production value descent into aess and rhyme of the frost man and excellent production value they look like really excellent books artwork is fantastic the maps are fantastic and they're at the bottom of the list and the reason why is that production quality doesn't matter near as much to me as product design and by product design I mean a design of a product that's built for me to be able to build the kind of stories and Adventures that I want to be able to build with my friends around the table that is a clear criteria that I can see coming out of this list uh the more the heavier the story is that usually the lower it is on the list there's a couple odd ones out like Empire the ghouls has a pretty heavy story while be on the witchlight has a pretty heavy story both of those I felt like I had a lot of room to run so giving me the room to run really works so what that tells tells me is I'm going to be far happier with more focused campaign settings than I will be on big story focused campaign Adventures I now kind of know that about myself and that helps me out but I want to know what you know about it I want to know what kind of criteria you use to determine whether an adventure is good and how are you going to use that to decide whether you should buy a product in the future or what kind of campaigns you're going to run for your group that I'm really interested in hearing about that so please leave leave a comment send me an email you know talk about it on the S flourish Discord server all that kind of stuff that you can do thank you so much for this I really hope you had fun I had fun I've been looking forward to doing this for a long time if you enjoyed this show and you want more stuff like this from me please consider subscribing to the sly flurish newsletter it is absolutely free to sign up you get an adventure generator for signing up and you get a weekly email that has all has an RPG related article in it plus links to all of the other work that I do there's no reason not to sign up it's absolutely worth it you can also support me directly on patreon patrons get to support me directly with all of this work they get to they help fund all the work that I do they also get access to a whole bunch of tools to help them run all of their different kind of RPGs tools accessories exclusive Adventures previews of work all that kind of stuff and they can join the lazy DM community over in the sly flish Discord server it's a fantastic Community We Love We Chat there all week long really really love it so please check all those out thank you so much have a great day and get out there and play an RPG

Channel: Sly Flourish – The Lazy Dungeon Master

Views: 22,125

Keywords: d&d prep, d&d tips, dm advice, dm tips, dnd prep, dungeon master advice, dungeon master tips, lazy dm, lazy dm prep, lazy dungeon master, return of the lazy dungeon master, sly flourish, D&D prep, dm prep, prep time

Id: RzssBOo0b_A

Length: 53min 49sec (3229 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024