Adventures in Dungeons & Dragons are the small chapters that make campaigns whole. To understand the ins and outs of adventures, the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide offers five examples for you to put to use, with very simple guidelines that allow for near immediate play.
You are free to change many details of these adventures so they fit your campaign, making them excellent starting points. We are ranking these adventures based on the mechanics they offer for the level required, but they are all easily adaptable to whatever you need, since you just need to change a few monsters to change the level of the quest.
5
Boreal Ball
Social Adventure For Level Seven Characters
The Boreal Ball is one of those rare social adventures where fights are rare and conversations are plenty. The party is invited to a ball in the Feywild, where they can dance and mingle with the other guests, earning a reward if they manage to make a good overall impression. There is a built-in encounter with hobgoblins in the middle of the ball, but other than that, this is a mostly low-stakes adventure as long as the players don’t start any fights. As such, it feels like it lacks any relevance or urgency, something needed for a party of level seven characters.
Fortunately, adding stakes to the adventure is easy enough. The characters might need something from the baron of the Boreal Ball, like a charm or a blessing for a future fight, so they need to put their best foot forward during the dances to gain an edge in their upcoming trials.
4
The Winged God
Dungeon Adventure For Level Three Characters
The Winged God is a great adventure for curious players but not so much for single-minded ones who refuse to look deeper into details. It starts simply enough as an escort mission for a merchant since there have been too many kobold attacks lately. If the players investigate these kobold attacks, they can follow them to their lair, where the real adventure begins: facing a red dragon wyrmling and kicking it out of the cave.
The problem is, a lot of players would just ignore the kobolds and continue escorting the merchant to safety. There is a failsafe for this: a total of twelve kobolds would stop the party before the end of the road, asking them for help directly. At that point, it begs the question of why such a large group of kobolds doesn’t just deal with the baby dragon themselves.
3
The Fouled Stream
Beginner Adventure For Level One Characters
Not many players like starting their campaigns at level one, even though it is the real starting point for all characters. You don’t need to spend longer than a single session at this level, and it will help you understand all of your mechanics and spells before dealing with more complicated matters. To get you through that session, The Fouled Stream is perfect, with a lot of encounters and just a little bit of socializing to break up the pacing. They can even find peaceful solutions to their problems, like healing a poisoned bear instead of killing it.
The set-up is simple: a strange fungus is polluting a river, and the villagers send adventurers to find out how to deal with it. While the players can destroy the fungus and clean the water, the source of the fungus is not explained, leaving it up to the DM if they want to use it as a future plot hook.
2
Miner Difficulties
Dungeon Adventure For Level Two Characters
Miner Difficulties works as a great followup to The Fouled Stream, having a similar theme and letting players level up after completing it. A mining expedition uncovers a tunnel into the Underdark, letting a hook horror inside the mine, which starts terrorizing the workers. The best part of the adventure is the random table of encounters, where the players have a chance of finding the hook horror nearly immediately or never finding it at all.
To keep things fresh, you should remove duplicate encounters until only the hook horror remains. Just like the bear in The Fouled Stream, players can deal with the hook horror peacefully; it is just an animal, after all. If they unblock the tunnel to the Underdark, the hook horror leaves through there and leaves the players be, letting them gain extra experience for finishing the adventure this way.
1
Horns Of The Beast
Traveling Adventure For Level Five Characters
The most elaborate adventure by far is Horns of the Beast, taking players through a long journey through the Amedio jungle. Players will need to get to the jungle by boat, traverse its dense foliage and hidden dangers, until they find the dungeon hiding the artifact they seek.
They are being led by a secretly evil merchant, a follower of the cambion Iuz. By changing a few key details, you can make this adventure be key in your own story, either by changing who the evil patron of the merchant is, or the nature of the artifact they seek.
The adventure ends with the players holding the Horns of the Beast, a jagged crown made from demonic horns. It has a fantastic adventure hook built in, since to destroy it, you need to throw it in the River Oceanus, a body of water from the upper planes.
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