Which D&D adventures should you play? (2022)

i don't know how to start this i think that we're going to disagree a lot you're just starting you're just going you're just starting off with some opinions hello jacob i never say my name when i start these videos how do you guys know who i am i've done this for five years you know we've been doing this for five years really five years and i don't know how to start or end videos shopping weird okay okay okay just do it okay hi we're gonna do the thing that we did a little while ago where we're gonna look over all the adventures that have come out for dungeons and dragons to fish edition since uh forever and we're gonna tell you which ones we like and which ones we don't like i'm jacob and this is pregnant wife spencer i i made like a little like paper me too oh you made yours double-sided you you're smart but you also made a paper of like of like notes yeah i was just trying to be smart i didn't know you just copied me i i didn't copy you i your your notes are in times new roman no they're not all right they're not in times new roman mine's in silly and rail let's get out of here let's see paul allen's standing the adventure list ah stuff it so that's what we're doing today is we're gonna go through we're gonna rank them and we're gonna tell you what we think and you don't have to give a uh crap about what we say about these um but this is just our opinion when you're thinking about you're running a dd for the division adventure and you you want to know what which is the best well these are just our opinions and we're going to kind of tell you our feelings about everything that we've played in d and d uh but before we do that i want to give a shout out to our sponsor fables guys fables is a subscription service run by ghostfire gaming every month they upload a few adventures uh the current one i think is citadel of the unseen sun it's very cool it's got vampires it's got a grim hollow ask stuff because those the guys wrote gorham holla so uh if you want to go subscribe to it and get some cool adventures you get every month there's a link down in the description we're starting in chronological order with all the d d adventures the first one is lost mine's a fan delivery lost mine lost what there's one it's just one mine they'd only lost one mine they lost the one yeah so as we start off with our first adventure here i want to lay out some of the ground rules here um we don't know what we're talking about not only do we not know what we're talking about we're going purely off of our experience so maybe you've had a really good time running some of the adventures that we don't like but i'm going to try to explain to you we're both going to try to explain to you what we liked and what we didn't like about them especially because the perspective that spencer and i both have on these adventures are completely different i am uh mostly dm'ing a lot of these adventures and you've played in a lot of these adventures you'll get the perspective of like dungeon master but also uh players so have you played in any of these uh yeah i've played in a few okay um but like not all the way through and um yeah i have never completed a campaign no one only one marshalls yeah anyways for the last time lost mine mine of fandelberg i wrote that as a dungeon master lost mindset hand over is pretty boring it's very uncompelling it has no reason to do anything right you sort of start off the adventure as mercenaries and then you get attacked and that's your reason to adventure is goblins attacked you yeah figure out why and i feel like that for this being more marketed towards like newer players it isn't like super great at compelling them to go do the adventure it's just like well don't you want to find out why these goblins did this and honestly a lot of players are gonna be like i i guess i guess so like i don't know is that what i'm supposed to do you know this lost lost minor fan delver and also dragon of iceberg peak are meant to be uh starting adventures to lead into the other forgotten realms books yeah that makes sense because at least with ispire peak i know people who have done that and have tied it into not only their campaign but like cursive straw or yeah and then also in the front gives you rules to game by which i think are all very good that's good that's really good thanks for baby dms to know and to learn that's my pros actually is that it's really simple and it's really easy to run for dms yes um and i have to give it credit because it's it's fine it's okay for being like the first d uh adventure that they made really simple for new dm's to possibly run so i guess that's its saving grace but in my opinion there are just better adventures like this is fine because they did it first and it's simple and it's good it does what it says it's going to do but they're just better adventures that you could run it's not super interesting also this one is incredibly accessible it's like 20 bucks at target yep it comes with dice character sheets three main characters everything so like that works out yeah but the essentials kit is better the essentials kit in my opinion is better yeah yeah so i give uh lost minor fan delver a four out of ten i gave it a five out of ten oh it fell off the table it did uh next up we've got everybody's favorite uh tyranny of dragons this is the reprint of tyranny of dragons where they put horde of the dragon queen and rise of tiamat into one gigantic book have we played we played it one we've i've run it twice um i haven't run it all the way through i've heard that rise of tiamat gets a little good towards the end but i can't speak for it so i'm not going to i know this mostly by horde of the dragon queen which personally i find to be very over the top has very little choices little motivation and does that thing where it just goes hey players go do the thing and gives them no reason to care about it it starts off with like a dragon attacking a keep and the players need to care about a dragon attacking a keep but it gives them no reason to care about a dragon dragon attacking a keep and then they can't defeat the dragon attack in the keep so they just get to watch it happen and then are told to go deal with it it's just it's and the npcs have a little motivation has a lot of plot holes too it's just it's just not very good you can skip this one i was just gonna agree with you that i what we have played i don't remember i'm sure if you if you had the right group and the right dm it'd probably be pretty fun but i can't rank it because i don't remember what i have played of it yeah um you know what the pros are what team at cool yeah so two out of ten two out of ten i didn't give it a score because i think that's unfair i would give it a one out of ten but it gets at one point because t and that cool okay the next book is princes of the apocalypse yes i've never played or run princes of the apocalypse and we don't own the books and i don't plan on running it yep so i guess go watch david chappie's video or something the next book is out of the abyss um which we do own but couldn't find it i can't i don't know where it went i think i have all my books it would be really funny if it was just right yeah it's not i cannot find out of the abyss but i have run it multiple times and uh my cons for it are that it is complicated it is slow it has a huge character motivation drop off towards about the middle of the game um because the whole idea of out of the abyss is that you're trapped in the underdark and you're trying to find your way out that's the character motivation and it does one of my favorite things that a lot of really good d d adventure modules do is it puts you in what i call a trapped scenario where the players motivation is solely try to escape because they're trapped in this area and they are forced to explore this area in order to try to get out and um i think that that works really well with some dnd adventures and i think the the initial motivation that it has a really good hook the fact that you have to do a prison escape and then you get to explore the underdark is very very interesting but by the time you get like through grackle stug and then tomenzo branson it gets really boring and like the motivation falls off because the players think that they would have surfaced by now and by the time you surface it's like it becomes like a war this book is where my love for the underdark and demons came from but i do agree with you it was very complicated there's a lot for the dm to keep track of there's like what nine npcs the very beginning of the game it sucks for new dm's because the players are trapped in a prison and the game gives you like nine npcs to keep track of and it's it's very overwhelming i feel like all the npcs are really cool but having nine npcs and most tables are four plus players is a lot to keep track of i think if we played it now now that you have more dm experience i think we could do it and it would be fun because you would know okay i can take these npcs out or have them leave the party sooner yeah and the issue is that um like as you travel through the underdark the concept is really interesting the phase risks and the magic sort of affecting the underdark is really really cool the issue with out of the abyss is that the motivation becomes similar to that of tyranny of dragons where it goes demons are attacking don't you want to deal with that and the players are like i mean no i just want to leave is what i want to do like i was put here against my will i don't want to help these people a lot of the cities in the underdark are not very redeemable um at least to player eyes i actually one time ran it for a bunch of evil characters and even then it's not fun because there's nothing fun for evil characters to do because the part the game just expects you to be good and so it starts off so promising and then five sessions in it gets really boring so that that would just be my like i really like the mechanic that the of the drow chasing you down to the underdark that's really fun but i think the prison is also really cool the prison is cool yeah and mental brands and is really cool like it's all really cool in a bottle but like as a campaign it just doesn't work so and the demon lords are really cool yeah i like the dean of oregon uh zug it boys in that one a lot yeah she's very cool 5 10. i give it a 5 out of 10 as well look at him all right next up is curses specifically cursive straw revamped um they reprinted it to be better there's a big list of what they changed in it and it's great i love all the changes they made to curse of straw revamp christrad is probably one of the best fifth edition adventures um i know it's not for everybody is the thing i'm sure people are really tired of hearing of how good curse of straw is but it's just that curse of strod has created a formula that i think is really really good i will go over my cons first the dm has to often fill in a lot of crucial story blanks but i'll get to that in my pros for example the players can find rectavio and rectavio is actually rudolf and richton and if the party figures this out his quest with the tiger in vlocky is like resolved it says that he goes to his tower but then it doesn't detail what happens next because the tower is actually trapped and esmerelda is using it as sort of like a base which is where her wagon is so you don't really know what happens when he goes there um another example would be the abbot in st markovia he's constructed a flesh golem lady that he wants to marry off distraught because he thinks that that will work and he wants the party to go get a dress for him so the party can go get a dress and come back and give him the dress and the game just goes okay and and then you have to figure out what happens next i struggle with that as a dm personally because when i run a pre-written adventure i want the game to kind of tell me what happens but this is also a good thing because it leaves it open-ended what happens is sort of up to the dm into the players the game doesn't resolve it for you because they want it to be your unique end or climax to that small quest so while i'm like oh i have to figure this out it's also really good because it can make cursive struggle really unique for for your game and your players uh the death house sucks and the intro is a little goofy i i think that the starting quest to take ease mark and irena to kretsk is just okay but the rest of it is so good because not only are you in a trapped scenario which is you need to get out of borovia which is immediately compelling to the players but it has really good character motivation to be there you could be anybody and you could be trapped in in brovia you don't have to make a dark gothic spooky character in order to be trapped in borovia like you can you can make weird stuff and it makes sense because you're from somewhere else and now you got trapped here one of my favorite game design things that curse of straw does is it shows and it doesn't tell when the game wants to tell the players information about borovia it doesn't give them like a wall of text it doesn't give them an npc who shows up and tells them everything often it happens before their eyes players feel more immersed in borovia without having them listen to like a lecture or something like that instead they get to see it happen the only time you're given a wall of text is if you find the tome of strawd but the cool thing is that the players will value a wall of text because they rarely ever get it yeah instead people don't know things they had to search for it and they had to look for it and so it's valuable information for them i think the only thing i would change about christrad is i would move the old bone grinder to gretzk it'd be on that side of the map that makes that makes sense and if you choose the alternate start where they start in kretsk on that side of the map i would keep it where it is because i think if they don't listen to the warnings of the people in the village of borovia they're gonna die because every time everyone hears oh don't go there don't go there as new players they go i'm going to go there and then someone's going to die or you're going to it's the only part of cursed straw that's like weirdly unbalanced it's a very very difficult fight and you are you are hinted to go there numerous times when you are in the village of borobia not only that but it's like really enticing its players to see a windmill off the distance not one to investigate curse of straw gives players amazing motivation and compels them to live in borovia and to make active change within it and when they make change it's reflected through the story the reason why so many people like cursive straw is because it respects the players i think all the npcs are also really interesting yeah the npc's are really and there's cool magic items gothic horror is rad it can still be a little goofy if you make it that's not all dark but you could make it dark if you wanted you could make it darker you could make it lighter indeed yeah 10 10 10 9 out of ten ten out of ten nine out of ten ten storm kings thunder storm king's thunder is in my opinion boring and slow and fails to provide crucial story uh has really crappy starting adventures the dm has to do almost all the work it is pretty much just a campaign setting and you need an entirely other book to run it properly the only things that i remember from playing this were character lead moments i don't remember why we were doing them or who told us to do them just that we went and did them and that it was kind of fun because we made it fun yes um but i i've heard a lot of people say to tie it in with tomb of annihilation and it makes it better so that's kind of what i did was i sort of used it as a way to give tomb you guys a little more motivation in tune but we didn't actually run storm king's son no we just took elements it was just tiny pieces of it because this adventure is very strange to me it's just like it starts off pretty good if you start at level three and the players are in a town and it gets attacked by giants like that's immediately pretty compelling but it's the tyranny of dragons thing all over again it's like don't you want to stop all the giants and it's like sort of i guess yes but i don't know anything more than i don't know anything more than that so let's go find more information and then so the players are given the entirety of the sword coast effectively well the savage frontier and it literally has all of these locations that the players can go to in just chapter three which is insane and they didn't put a ton of description into all of those places because they couldn't fit all of it so it's way too big and it just turns into just this really big campaign setting set in the forgotten realms i've never gotten to the end of it maybe the ending is really good for the most part this is just not what i enjoy out of a d d adventure i want a pretty concise tight narrative that my players can make choices in overall kind of affect this story and come to a really cool climax and uh this is none of that so i gave it a three out of ten i gave it a four just because it had goofy moments we have a few good memories from it yeah but it's mostly it we just kind of made our fun tales from the awning portal tales from the awning portal is an anthology adventure book it comes with seven adventures if you want to call them that far from older editions i think one of them is from dnd next so it's technically fifth edition they uh put in this book that are not really interconnected that you can just run whenever you want to which is cool that's a cool concept i think it makes it very easy to put them into your own game which is what you did yes all of the ones that i've played in were in your world somewhere yes and that's the idea behind this is it's not supposed to be this campaign it is explore seven deadly dungeons in this adventure supplement i mean that's the thing is that they're dungeon crawls they're big dungeon crawls and where they've been updated for fifth edition but nothing really interesting or cool has been added to make them really compelling they're just rooms with traps yeah i and monsters we did quite a few of them online and i remember it being fun but most of the game was slow because we had to figure out traps and then they were fun i guess if you want to play like a goofy meat grinder because that's kind of like how i see this book it's like yeah it's a big goofy meat grinder with no story and and nothing really to interconnect them if you just want to sit down and play a board game as dungeons and dragons then i guess this book would be perfect for you but it's not my thing i also it has the two of horrors in it and the tomb of horus is dumb it's on my shirt wow that's cool i uh i don't like dungeon crafts but the pros are has really cool magic items and really cool monsters oh yep tomb of annihilation this one's hard this is one of my favorites yeah no i i enjoyed playing in it but i think depending on the dm the game is very different because i've played through some of it with logan and some of it with you and the things that logan really held on to and ran with yeah i didn't enjoy okay not saying that it was bad overall it was still fun it's just when you ran it we were already a higher level i guess it was a little bit easier to just run through too yeah so that's actually my criticism of it as well the character hook isn't solid there's little reason to explore chult when you start the game you are told by an npc that a death curse is affecting the entire world and i specifically am dying from it and i want you to go figure it out and so you get dropped off in port nanzaru which is really a really cool city with really cool factions and dinosaur races and lots of stuff to explore i really like portland's art but you're just like okay so what do we do now we're supposed to go stop this death curse for this lady but that's why when we ran it i wanted to start it at a higher level so that it didn't feel very meat grindery and you guys had the ability to know what to do next and to go explore and that's my favorite part of tomb of annihilation it is genuinely has the most creative ideas for a d d adventure there is so many cool locations and interesting npcs in this adventure that like that alone should is enough to be like just running because it's real or at least read it because it's great inspiration for your dnd games um there are fun and pcs or interesting locations it also has really like good character choice and consequences yeah like the party and zaru could like just be destroyed or could flourish based on what your players do chult is alone just a really good sandbox to go exploring it's hard it's difficult because you have to make sure you're not getting like killed by insects and also there's a death curse which is uh once again plays into the consequences of this game if people die they can't be brought back and i love that that is like the setting of this adventure is that it's going to be hard it's going to be difficult and you're going to have to think really thoroughly about what you do i think that omu gets a little slow yeah i think that throughout the entire adventure you're going through like these really cool dungeon areas that are all unique and then when you get to omu it's kind of doing the same thing and it's a treasure hunt for puzzle pieces and you have to get the puzzle pieces into a wall and then if you get into the wall you get to go into the tomb of the night once you're in the tomb of the nine gods i feel like it picks back up again but going through this really cool jungle and doing all of these things to get to omu and then omu's kind of just really really slow you could take a few games the cool part is that if your players finish the adventure they could likely bring back all the people that were killed throughout the adventure which is a really really good resolution to this adventure the two of the nine gods is like the revamp of the tomb of horrors and i i as a dm found it very fun to run there's more than just traps there's npcs there's puzzles there's secrets there's lots of stuff to do in there and things for all types of characters you can be a barbarian a rogue or a warlock and you'll have fun in the tomb of the nine gods or maybe you'll throw corpses off into the center the dungeon have them all fall to the ground and aggro the gargoyles at the bottom who all come fight you and and maybe utpk almost tpk we didn't tv but we got really close i really like tomb of annihilation it's it's a good time um i think it has really creative ideas and also a cerrix cool yeah i agree yeah eight out of ten for me as well uh don't aggro the gargoyles don't aggro the gargoyles eight out of ten water deep dragon heist still even comparing to our previous review of all of the adventures before some of these guys had come out down here water dragonize is still my favorite adventure for fifth edition it is perfect for new dm's and experienced dms but i'm gonna go over my cons first because oh my notes the only thing i wish is that you could go through the entirety of the year with all of the villains acting as the villains at least as an option in case you wanted to do that because the cool part about water deep dragon heist is you pick the season that you want to play the game in and you get a different villain and kind of like a different story and you get to customize it to sort of be your own and i love that so much because it's so replayable and you could even take elements from the other seasons and run two villains if you wanted to which is really fun but uh the pros i gave it is that not only it's easy to run for new dms um it's it's it starts off with a pretty simple dungeon crawl that isn't too difficult for new dms and new players to run and figure out and a mystery which is immediately very compelling because of uh this takes place in urban adventure and i think that that's such a good introduction to dungeon of the dragons like you guys are just some dudes we're gonna go try to find another guy and you end up finding this like secret plot that relates to all the other villains later down the line i think it does this really good mix of being that sort of d d goofiness while also being really really serious and having the the ability to be dark compelling and even like really sad too at some points in time like this edition says really good writing in my opinion like the characters are really interesting and the villains are very very complex and nuanced and sometimes your players don't always make the right decisions and sometimes they have to choose and the cool part is that because you're never higher than like level five in this adventure your players are often thinking as people and not as crazy overpowered gods who can summon meteors it's it's these down-to-earth humanizing choices that your players make in this game and the consequences are real and the story is very real and it's really good that's all i'm gonna say this this is really good i think that it could be very confusing at times yeah i think that's my only con for this list um i just i think that there's like the the three things you need to like collect to get into the vault was confusing and then the bit after the fireball i know we kind of struggled with like what's going on exactly so i think if you don't if the breadcrumbs aren't laid in the right way it's kind of hard to follow them the thing is that you have to communicate to your players that this adventure eventually becomes a treasure hunt where you are taking this stone that is effectively a key and you're trying to keep it away from the bad guys while you try to go find it yourself yeah just everything to do with the fireball we struggled with we didn't know what was going on and i don't know if it was just we were also playing three other games at the same time and it was just really jumbled together or yeah i've run it for different parties and i've had some parties figure out the fireball pretty easily i've had some people really struggle with it not know where to go and be like what do we do here and you kind of have to feed them a little bit of information at first but luckily with the fireball section the game does a really good job at being like okay if your party is struggling here's like three npcs that kind of just tell them where to go what they do they're just witnesses to what they saw and they can sort of figure it out from there it also has one of my favorite things that is in some of the other dd adventures which is a rival adventurers um what are they called the doom patrol the doom squad something like that the the tomb the tombs i don't think doom patrol that's that's gerard way the dungeon they're not the dungeon dudes the dungeon it's the dungeon dudes that's it they're so cool the doom raiders they're a group of five dudes who are like a rivaling adventuring party and there's more ways that you could incorporate them it does incorporate them a little bit into the story but yeah they have so much potential i think it'd be really fun to run water deep dragon heist and maybe they are also trying to get the stone of galore and you have to keep it not only of the villains hands but their hands as well but maybe they want it for the same reason the party does but they want all the glory for it so i i just i love that i think it just has so many really interesting ideas and uh another tiny thing that i think is really cool that they did with this book is that you could play this game with dice paper and a pencil and you could still run it but you could also run this game on like roll 20 or like a tv table with like beetle and grims and stuff and it would still be good on both sides this adventure lets the dm run the game however they want to do it for that i give it a 9 out of ten i think that this book also has uh two of the best villains in it the castle answers i love the castle not the castle answers are very good the thing is that jar lacks all xanathar and manchun are also i'm sure they are i've never i've never uh i don't look through the books just in case we ever play them again and i've heard great things but we ran through these genuinely the best villains in any dnd yes more than stress they're i i love them a lot yeah um i gave it nine out of ten coinciding with water deep dragon heist in case you hit level five and you've done an urban mystery campaign that had lots of serious themes and choices how about you delve down into the yawning portal and do a dungeon crawl where you're not gonna do any of that anymore and you're just going to hate yourself i honestly haven't played this i've read through it i i think we ran one game started it and like twice it's like again i know there's some people are going to be like i love this book it's super fun but we just don't this just isn't our d d cup of tea um this is like dungeon crosstalk two this is like a 320 page uh dungeon that has a lot of really cool themes in it and it's really interesting and super neat but why does this happen after dragon heist why did they relate these two these these are very different i have not played enough of it to give it a rating so um but i i don't really want to run it because i gave it a three out of ten um we did like a little lead up thing to that and then the second we got down into the dungeon i was like this isn't fun anymore because there's it's just like do a dungeon like that's the whole point of the game is you want to do a dungeon no i don't i'll do a half of a game in a dungeon yeah and then the next game i'd like to not be in the dungeon anymore speaking of dungeon crawls ghosts of salt marsh so if you looked at ghosts of salt marsh and were like oh my god a seafaring camp i've done a whole video about ghost of salt marsh i was in the bath and i talked about what i didn't like about this but to quickly go over again ghost of salt marsh and sort of our opinions of it and to review it purely just as an adventure this is not a seafaring adventure this is the yawning portal but they set it in a small town called salt marsh where all the adventures are sort of interconnected where you are trying to save salt marsh from a bunch of sahuigan and we've said over and over again that this book isn't seafaring it's underwater adventures is what it is it's diving and swim mechanics and uh it's a lot of dungeon crawls i never knew where we were going or what we were doing when you played this game because the motivation is all over the place yeah you're you're like called by the salt marsh council to go stop some smugglers and then it's all this secret conspiracy of like sahoo again who are trying to destroy salt marsh so you gotta go stop them and the final enemy which is the sixth chapter of this eight chapter book is the end to that storyline you destroy the suhugan and you're done tamara's fate and the styes are not connected to salt marsh they take place on completely different areas of the world and i decided to run ghost of salt marsh within like the forgotten realms it was weird because like you guys were here for the entirety of the game and then like for the skies and for uh tamara's fate you to go like to cormier all the way over here it was dumb and i wanted to run them all together so it's weird that they are connected for like those first five and then they're not yeah i really wanted you to be able to use the ship mechanics they provided in the game and they just they just don't do that and overall the adventures are not very compelling they're kind of boring and a lot of them are dungeon crawls and they don't have super interesting npcs and it's just it's just mid like this is the most mid adventure book that they've made i would say the only thing i do like about it is if you ignore the fact that it was supposed to be a seafaring book tamarat's fate and salvage operation are really good stand-alone adventures that you could put into like your home brew campaign especially if you're running like a sea thieves open world seafaring game one of them you're like exploring an old forgotten ship and it gets attacked by a crack and at the end the players have to escape that one's really cool tamarat's fate is cool because there's this part where the party has to survive on an island while zombies are attacking yeah that that's that one that one was really fun so but the rest of them i mean don't go in the back door of a lizard folk cave otherwise they'll kill you yeah i think that what we thought it was was nothing that it was yeah like i don't know if it was the marketing or we just misunderstood what it was gonna be but i know like we had a player leave the leave the game because it wasn't what they thought it was going to be and i don't disagree with them i think that that's true yeah i think we made it fun and i mean that was my fault i should have just read the book before i ran it like that could have been solved in a session zero yeah well five out of ten i'm gonna also give it a five out of ten dragon of icebergs i have not run this i have not played in it you i did run it i have i have nothing on this this is all you i think you could run this for any person it would be fun why because it's great it's great for starting dms and it's not very complicated so you could run it for children i ran it for a group of six to sixth graders to like eighth grade range i think you could run it for lower um maybe change a few things if you don't want it to be too spooky 20 bucks a target you get dicey get character sheets you get like little flash cards for like initiative that's cool it's like a really great if you are interested in playing d d and you want to play like an officially published adventure from what i've seen this is like the perfect one it's easily accessible it's very easy to run and you can tie it into any of the other forgotten realms adventures or your own adventure if now that you've played something you're comfortable running something a little more complicated yep yep hell yeah dude sort of like the quest of nomicon oh you can't plug your own book in this it's kind of like you cannot know adventures i'm not good at making first to third level adventures and it'd be cool if there was like a book filled with first to third level adventures you could start your campaigns in with any sort of theme with customizable villains there's already a sponsor on this video you're right all right descend into averness this is where we're going to disagree because i love this book i just hate the baldur's gate party all right i agree with you i agree with you i've heard you you've gone through you've ranted several times about this book of course i've played maybe the first two chapters of this book twice from what you've told me and explained because you ran this for a group of other people and i didn't play in it you played all the way through you had always had really great things to say i think from what you've explained you would do now yep there's there's your lady she's the best one i know from what you explained that you do now where you would run either a revised dragon heist leading into this or you would just start an el torel i think i would enjoy it a lot more than the slog that is boulder skate yep the baldur's gate beginning opening is is way too hard sloggy and feels tacked on at the last second and barely plays into the rest of the adventure i don't know why they put it in this book i think it was a marketing thing that that that they did but i think that this adventure is personally my favorite when it comes to concepts and design this book has so many fun locations it has lots of choices there is a dungeon in this book that is like it's not top down it's sideways it's 2d later in the adventure there's a dream sequence where you learn zereal's backstory not from somebody telling you but because your characters live through it there's mad max vehicle fighting that you actually get to use ghost of salt marsh you actually get to use the vehicles in in this book you can go to the river sticks and there's like these bone devils who are like hey you want to help us scrape souls off the bottom of the sticks we'll pay you for it and it's like this is fun game that you get to do where you get to go deep sea diving in the in the river sticks and so i just feel like they they really popped off with the average section of this book it's it's very fun even if you don't want to run that portion of the adventure it has lots of really cool ideas that you could use for your campaigns so and also you can redeem serial which is one of my favorite character things ever is a villain that can be redeemed um and you also don't have to redeem her you can kick her ass and that's fine too and i love that so it gets an 8 out of 10. i gave it a 5. damn i swindle rhyme with a frost maiden beautiful oh my god i've been surprised by this book we haven't finished it yet no because it's enormous yeah but if you want to watch us play we're playing it on okay every other saturday at 6 p.m pacific standard time and it's really surprised me i thought it wasn't gonna be that good and it is very very good my favorite game that i'm playing in right now yeah i i didn't i thought the opening was too over the top and there was way too many quests after we started playing it i started to realize how great the game design is that you can start in any of the 10 towns of your choice and pick the starting quest that your players go on in this book and then you open up the rest of the world yeah i think that this game has a lot going on but still manages to be like very cohesive like everything connects to each other very well yeah and all of the ten towns are very unique and i just love everything i soon dale for the most part is this adventure where the entirety of the ten towns and the the ice window is just cursed in perpetual darkness called it's called the everlasting rhyme and it's because oral the god of winter has just went i wanted to be cold now and it's dark and it's cold and i don't care i'm a god and she's a really good villain she's different than all the other villains she's not like xerial where she can be redeemed she's not like strad where she's ever present instead she's this mystical distant being that embodies winter and that is really really interesting the only thing i would change about this book is i think that sunbite is too hard for the level that you're supposed to do it agreed sunblite to me is the weakest part of this adventuring eventually you your players once they get about to like third to fifth level they are motivated to go to this duragar fortress called sunblight where the durga are building a giant metal dragon that is going to destroy the 10 towns so they can take it over and i love that this adventure goes okay we're going to give you 10 possible starting quests you can't do all of them you can do a few of them and then a dragon is going to show up and destroy a bunch of the ten towns rendering some of those quests gone you can never do them maybe the party kills the charlene dragon before it attacks or maybe they don't and all the ten tons are destroyed the charlene dragon aspect of sunblite is one of the coolest things they've done in a recent adventure and i love love it but sunblite the fortress filled with a million duragar that you're supposed to do at like level four is really really hard and there's not a whole lot of motivation to go there because they don't even know about the charter and dragon unless they force it out on one of the durgr that they find out so it's more just i'm just going here for curiosity oh no there's a dragon leaving i think the coolest part is um the last chapter um which you don't know about yet but i'll just go over my notes here my cons same as salt marsh not really advertised as what it was it was advertised something else this is not really a horror book it gets there's some things in it that are horror themed yeah but it's really goofy some of the most interesting locations are in here a lot of the locations have really really good game design one of my favorite i don't want to spoil it for in case anybody's going to play it but the black cabin is one of my favorite things in any d book it is so cool just because of its game design yeah it is very very interesting and the lost spire of netherreal the fact that it's like upside down and like in the snow that's so so cool really interesting i really like that a lot of the opening quests are challenging because it forces low-level players to use their brains and not rely on their abilities sometimes you can just complete some of these quests without killing everything there's ways that you can think about how to to um to solve your situations in this game and i really like that this is this is one of the few books that does levels one through three really well um i give this one a nine out of ten i also give it a nine out of ten we'll see when we finish it though maybe i'll feel differently about when we finish it but so far i really like ice window next up is candle keep mysteries i have not run um all of this book i've run a little bit of this book i've run two adventures out of it and i've read about half of them i really like candle keep mysteries it has really interesting really cool mysteries for d d games which i think are a really hard thing to pull off for d d mysteries require a lot of breadcrumbs and you have to help your players out a lot and this book does a really good job at letting players figure it out themselves there's not just one way that they have to do it you know and if there is one way they have to do it it's pretty simple and pretty straightforward and the players get to feel really good about figuring it out you got to play in the first adventure festandia's mansion and um i thought it was really clever and really interesting the players are trapped in a magnificent mansion they have to find a way out and it's very compelling great story hook and also all the adventures are kind of interconnected which i think is fun and i think mysteries are the hardest thing to do in a d game and they do them very well so if you're wanting to add a mystery into your game you're not very confident i think you could go through because there's how many in here there's quite a few in there and you could find one that would fit your game maybe two or three that would fit your game and just sprinkle with them throughout and yeah you could just take one if you wanted to because there's one for all every level up to 15. and um you could take one or you could run the entire book as a campaign which is why it's very cool it's not just one writer writing every single one they have a lot of different people who wrote in this book and it keeps it very fresh and very interesting and you get a lot of really cool concepts and themes with all of the mysteries so i give it an 8 out of 10. i gave it a 6 out of 10 but only because i didn't play very many of them yeah well beyond the witch light haven't played in it but we will but we will and then i'll let you know how i feel about it strict haven curriculum of chaos haven't really played in it i i we didn't run the the pre-written adventure that's in strix haven i took elements of it and we did a two shot within strict saving tonight and i kind of customized it to be my own thing and we had a lot of fun with it i also i made like a 20 minute video talking about why i like this book so if you want to go see everything that i feel about strict saving go watch my strix haven is better than you think video because i freaking love strix haven i like how it's designed i i like the world building a lot i love the one shots that we did and the entire group that we played with is really excited for when we actually play this as a campaign yeah we're going to run it on our knight i also love that all of the uh npcs that you can become friends or enemies with in this book i love that as a concept for the book yeah also all of them are magic cards and it was fun going through our stroke saving stuff and being like oh she's that's the character she's in this if she's in this book um i like that uh becoming friends or enemies with people has consequences and like uh rewards um and they're all really this book has a focus on slice of life with too many too many source books are focused on the grand lore of the world and this book focuses on the people you interact with the classes that you go to and your day-to-day routine and how that becomes your adventure and that's really cool seven out of ten uh i give it an eight out of ten just because i like it so much critical role call the nether deep whoa haven't played it neither have i haven't ran it it just came out it's red red a little bit it's very pretty seems neat i like that they took the rival mechanic that i talked about within uh dragon heist and made it a pretty big portion of this game i think having a rival adventuring party is really fun and a cool concept but i cannot say anything about this book because i i really don't know what what it what it is so i'm not gonna write it yeah well geez that's all the freaking d d pre-written adventures yeah if only there was like a book that had really good first to third level adventures that could lead into some of them or maybe just as one shots in case you didn't want to move into some of the campaigns some kind that could be of any theme um if only yeah if only if only that existed um well thanks everybody for listening to us talk about d d books for this long the last time we did this was a little while ago and it's kind of fun to refresh these i wonder if some of our opinions changed i don't know maybe they're all the same i think uh cursive straw is still up here and that's all that matters water deep dragon heist is better than christmas it's not oh my goodness yes it is no yes it is i think this is how we ended the last video no that i'm sure that we've had different opinions and our minds have grown and we've matured as we've gotten older christian is still the best it's not it just isn't descended average is actually probably better than curse of strod that maybe they're about the same maybe maybe rhyming the frost meeting but haven't finished you can agree on where i'm the frostman being uh asked here yeah yeah all right cool but you know what's s-plus just shut up just shut up watch no more cursive straw being talked about in this video well yeah i'm pushing the end button what are you going to do about that i'm going to just keep telling you about christoph straud after the video ends name one thing in cursive straw that's better than dragon heist oh let's see top 10 things that are better in cursive straw than did you did you end the video no i want to what's your answer what's my answer yeah you can't put me on the spot like this i can okay that's because there is none well because it's because i'm right no uh the villains and watery dragon knights are better uh okay cast lanterns are better than straw but that doesn't mean that overall uh there's better rewards at the end um the boss fights castle if you play your cards right well it seems a little more complicated than water deep dragon heist you are you are you you get a manner in water deep dragon heist um a castle's better than a manor you're saving an entire volos and what are you dragon heist mordenkainen is in uh he's like i'm a deer and i don't want to do anything he's like give me money to find his best friend who's probably his lover that's true stroud's gay a little bit yep yeah this is difficult it's true this is better there's a there's there's so much there's so much dragon house is a is a better story no it's not it just is it's not it is you are you are saving an entire at least at least none of the villains and dragon heist are simps what are you talking about what yeah no no none of the villains and dragon heights are simps straw is so i i told you already cast lanterns are better villain than yeah but overall curse of straw is a better book it's sad it's sad all the time dragon high school run the castle run the castle and you will be depressed multitude that's true that's true but i will just be depressed at the end and i'll have to make a difficult choice you don't have to kill kids you don't have to kill kids and chris straub that yeah you don't have any kids you can save more children in christ than you can in water that's what you're rating curses dropped by it crystal straw is better do i have to kill children or children yes all right all right let's rank all the adventures based on how many children you get to save number two rhyme with the frostman and those incest kids number three okay we're going

Channel: XP to Level 3

Views: 535,438

Keywords: dnd, dungeons, and, dragons, d&d, dungeons and dragon, how to, roleplay, play, class, barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, rogue, sorcerer, wizard, warlock, character, ideas, curse of strahd, roll20, fantasy grounds, storm kings thunder, Tomb of Annihilation, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Out of the Abyss, Tales from the Yawning Portal, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Dragon of Icespire Peak, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus

Id: e8CYmKqy9BA

Length: 46min 50sec (2810 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 01 2022