what sort of adventure is it? epic quest? fantastical murder mystery? old-fashioned dungeon crawl?
Hey! I’ll give you a rundown of official D&D modules, though others covered most things already
Going through the wiki list
B series:
B2 the Keep on the Borderlands is a well regarded classic and for good reason, It has a reasonable scope, a lot of room for a GM to put their own flavor on things, and the caves of chaos that form the main part of the module feel much more like a living breathing place than any dungeon ecosystems did up to that point. A good starting point for any group.
B10 Night’s Dark Terror is probably outside the scope of what you want, but it is worth perusing nonetheless. It is one of the best ‘tutorial modules’ that teaches the novice GM how a D&D campaign should function and what it should look like.
G series, A series, D series
Individually, none of the early modules stand out, but they’re nostalgically remembered because they had a slow burn build up over the course of a dozen adventures to a peak of narrative complexity in 1e module design.
I6 Ravenloft
The original release. Much is said about the influence of Hammer Horror on Castlevania but the fact that official castlevania art literally traced over art from Ravenloft should tell you how influential it was. It’s the original ‘medieval hammer horror adventure series’
N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God (!!!)
THIS is definitely the official module you want to run if you are new to the game. It has a mystery, evil cults, a lot of npcs, and antagonists that actually pursue the players instead of waiting for the players to show up at their doorstep. It’s short, sweet, and pretty much perfect as an introduction to running D&D. I like it and I don’t even like running modules.
U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh
It’s a scooby doo episode. It gets by on the relative novelty of doing this kind of genre pastiche so early in Dungeons and Dragons history. I have a lot of criticisms of the design of it, but it is the first ‘haunted house’ type adventure.
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EX1 and 2—Dungeonland and The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror—are two I’ve been dying to run for years. They’re adaptions kid Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass aimed at high level characters. One day I’ll get a party there.
Wait a minute… this sounds suspiciously like how our campaign started…
Actually coincidence! I didn’t read the module until after we started, as an effort to fully appreciate the history of D&D module writing
It’s a pleasant coincidence, though, because it at least tells me that my adventure felt like a real D&D adventure
mork borg looks sick
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Roll20 text chat sidebar allows for hilarious shitposting during the D&D session
What are the Roll20 protips? We’re going online from this week & I’m looking forward to not having to remind people where to find their initiative bonus or attack/damage rolls
You’ll have to remind people for like 1 or 2 sessions
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IMHO just let them use their regular character sheets Roll20’s UI kinda sucks for anything other than moving your token around a virtual map
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Makes sense, I just logged in to fill in a sheet and managed to cover the map with scribbles from me attempting to scroll and then even more from me trying to click on the scribbles to delete them
Hey, anyone want to give me advice on how to DM. I feel like a good remote game with a few of my besties would be great, but none of us are the conscientious planner types and thus we don’t really have a DM option. I’m considering trying to get the skill.
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Easy, just listen to our podcast and do it like @Tulpa
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If you want to start super basic to figure out if you like it. Throw together a short very old school dungeon. Some rooms with some interesting sounding low level monsters. Make it as complex as you’re comfortable but don’t be afraid to stay really simple.
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My Ranger has multiclassed into a War Domain Cleric (for reasons) and learned the Mending cantrip. My DM has always allowed me to automatically recover half of my spent arrows after combat barring extenuating circumstances, reasoning that the other half are either broken or lost. But since I learned mending he agreed with my take that some of those broken arrows might be reparable, and so now I regain half + WIS modifier arrows instead.
Status report complete.
(One neat bit for the min-maxers out in the crowd – using the revised ranger rules and the bonus action attacks granted by War Domain cleric class feature, sometimes I start combat with three attacks that have advantage and this combined with the sharpshooter feat lets me absolutely light up some enemies in my first combat turn)
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We discovered last night that at level 15 BJ can hit stuff fairly reliably for 50-60 damage per turn, which ain’t shit compared to the spell slots you can burn if you’re a caster but still, it feels nice to delete enemies
Also today on this very rarely used college friend text chain I recommended NoRA to a friend who is using his quarantine to play a shitload of Truck Simulator and listen to audiobooks, and I had to explain why rangers are bad. I did so by tracing the history of class development in D&D and linking it to Tolkien inspiration. Tulpa I hope you are proud.
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Avoid long exposition. Supposedly Wizards of the Coast did research that shows players find it hard to pay attention to more than 3 sentences at a time. So instead of describing a fresco in detail when the characters enter a room, you just say “there’s a faded fresco”, and then describe it in more detail if the players ask about it.
Never describe how characters feel, how they react, etc. In general I think anything that takes away player agency is bad, but sometimes you kind of need to do it to move the game on.
Don’t fall into describing things just with game terms and mechanics. As a player i want to hear things which let me imagine the situation better. This is in tension with the two points above.
I haven’t DM’d since i was a child so these are just things that occur to me as a player and blog reader.
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Ok what about
Wait no hear me out
What if a mimic
Guys
What if a mimic, but when you open it instead of a mouth it is an ass
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what if an ass
but when you open it instead of an anus it is a chest full of gold and magical artifacts??
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