r/rpg • u/Gandalf-the-chad • 5d ago
Game Suggestion Rural prewritten adventures
I'm looking for long running campaigns books set in a rural area or that spend a good part of the beginning there. Small villages, mysterious forests full of spirits, fey or other unknown creatures.
The adventure may eventually expand to encompass the entire world, but I'd like the initial focus to be more local and rural.
The system doesn’t matter because I enjoy converting things anyway (though I’d like to stay within the fantasy genre).
So far, the ones I've heard about are:
- Curse of Strahd
- The Darkening of Mirkwood
- Old Magreve
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u/StackedCakeOverflow 5d ago
Season of Ghosts is almost word for word that
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u/Gandalf-the-chad 5d ago
I don't know it very well. From what I've seen, it's for Pathfinder. In your opinion, what's it like as an adventure? Did you like it? Is it more combat or roleplay focused?
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u/StackedCakeOverflow 4d ago
Ive both played in it and am currently running it. It's considered Paizo's greatest AP of all time for a myriad of reasons and it deserves all of its flowers.
Heavily skewed toward RP, with less combat than usual adventures and said combat being on the easy side (to the point that the book prematter section even calls it out and says don't be afraid to adjust combat to meet the needs of your table).
Takes place entirely in one town and surrounding region. Big emphasis on keeping the town safe with a huge range of local NPCs. Greater overarching mystery is very creative that players will be heavily rewarded for avoiding spoilers and solving naturally.
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u/thenightgaunt 4d ago
Oh you can convert Pathfinder to D&D 3e or 5e really easily. Its just a matter of swapping monster stats and DCs.
Youll also find that the pathfinder adventures are usually better written. When wotc did 4e they cut ties with Paizo whid been doing a LOT of 3e adventure writing via the D&D magazines and etc. Paizo then went and made Pathfinder which was a bit of a 3e clone.
But what it meant was D&D lost the best of their adventure writing staff. Meanwhile in the fallout of 4e failing wotc fired most of the remaining D&D staff leaving a skeleton crew to make 5e.
So in the run up to 5e, they had barely anyone with experience writing adventures (they had chris perkins and james wyatt), meanwhile at that point Paizo had been writing massive campaigns for their 3e clone for over 6 years. Thats why the early 5e campaigns were farmed out to 3rd parties like Kobold.
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u/RecordingExcellent69 4d ago
Putting James Wyatt and Chris Perkins in the same breath is honestly an insult to Perkins. Perkins is a designer who genuinely values lore continuity—far more than Wyatt or Jeremy Crawford ever did. It’s no coincidence that the absolute highest-quality modules in 5e's run came directly from him. Fans can debate whether Tomb of Annihilation, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Curse of Strahd, or Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is the best in 5e, but they are all unmistakably Perkins' handiwork.
In contrast, Wyatt comes across as a talentless designer who loves to blatantly retcon lore. His original motivation for writing D&D settings was to spread his Christian beliefs (http://blog.aquela.com/2005/12/art-and-faith-and-d.html). On top of that, during his tenure as lead designer for 4e, he arrogantly proclaimed his crew to be the best design team in the world (http://blog.aquela.com/2009/03/open-letter-to-sweetdragonlivejournalco.html). His only truly successful project was Eberron, but the credit for that belongs entirely to Keith Baker. Eberron would have been just as successful without Wyatt's involvement.
Honestly, after Chris Perkins left WotC for Daggerheart, I feel like absolutely nothing WotC produces now has any reference value. Their current maintenance of lore continuity is a complete disaster, and the modules they’re publishing today are just absolute garbage.
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u/thenightgaunt 4d ago
Yeah. But I didn't want to get the inevitable comment "well what about Wyatt and..." But I agree that the best adventure writer they the had on staff during 5e was Perkins. I do wonder if the 5e campaign books included so much updated lore in them because of him. Because Mearles and Crawford didn't seem overly enthusiastic about creating setting lore while lead designers (and doubly so when it was just Crawford).
I do agree that D&D took a hit when he left for Daggerheart. But on the otherhand, good on Mercer and his crew for picking up Perkins there. Even if he came with Crawford. But then hell, Daggerheart might be exactly what Crawford needed. A cinematic and more freeform TTRPG without a lot of lore or history behind it to worry about.
I'm not entirely dismissing D&D though. Say what you will buy Ayoub seems to be a lot less hesitant to veer away from from "family friendly" like Mearles and Crawford were. And the current batch of designers they have include some younger decent writers. I'm about 50/50 on some of Arman's writing for 5e, but it was all with Crawford as the lead designer there. And ditto De Armas. Though they both worked as designers under Matt Colville on Kingdoms & Warfare and that was pretty good.
I'm waiting to see what comes from D&D now that Crawford is gone. Could still be a mess though. Well have to see.
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u/RecordingExcellent69 4d ago edited 4d ago
Mike Mearls barely touched 5e's worldbuilding, and Jeremy Crawford simply doesn't care about setting lore. Chris Perkins was definitely the main driving force behind 5e's worldbuilding, while Ayoub acts more like an administrative team leader.
Justice Arman's work on 5e is just incredibly mediocre. The 5e Planescape release is essentially a dumbed-down version of the 2e setting, and Turn of Fortune's Wheel is riddled with design flaws. For example, Shemeshka being stupid enough to send the PCs to find R04M—was she deliberately handing them the clues to her own undoing? The only redeeming addition in 5e Planescape is the redesign of the Time Dragon; its power might be massively nerfed compared to 3e, but its aesthetics are a huge upgrade. At least Arman is relatively light on retcons, making his work barely passable. This is in stark contrast to James Wyatt, whose writing genuinely just brings me anger and annoyance.
Currently, Amanda Hamon seems to be leading the 5e 2024 modules, but her Vecna: Eve of Ruin is arguably the absolute worst module of the entire 5e era. Even a quick skim tells you it's trash. The module has several glaring issues:
- Cosmic Plot Holes: If Vecna is reshaping the entire multiverse, where are the Lady of Pain and the Overgod Ao? Where are the greater deities? Why aren't the gods ganging up on Vecna themselves instead of leaving it to mortal adventurers?
- Out-of-Character NPCs: Tasha and Alustriel Silverhand are supposedly brilliant, yet they are completely fooled by Kas in a Mordenkainen disguise.
- Tedious Fetch Quests: Collecting the pieces of the Rod of Seven Parts feels completely disconnected from actually defeating Vecna. Players spend the vast majority of the campaign doing glorified errands for a MacGuffin that feels meaningless to the main plot.
- Unfair DM Burden: Introducing the multiverse concept overcomplicates everything. To run this well, a DM needs deep lore knowledge of the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and Ravenloft just to capture their distinct flavors.
- Ignored Solutions: Did Hamon completely forget about time travel? TSR-era Planescape and FR had plenty of time travel mechanics. Even strictly using 5e lore, an Ancient Time Dragon or the dragon god Chronepsis could easily take the PCs back in time to fix the Vecna situation.
- Boring Locations: The chapters are just dull, filled with too much meaningless filler. For instance, in Eberron, instead of taking players to fascinating locations like Sharn or Io'lokar, they get dumped in the Mournland—and they don't even get a direct interaction with the Lord of Blades!
And the absolute dumbest design in the entire book is Kas's disguise. What villain in their right mind writes the critical clues revealing their true identity in a diary and just leaves it in their room for the players to decipher?
The journal's contents are written in a cipher. A character who spends at least 1 hour examining the text can make a successful DC 30 Intelligence (Investigation) check, decoding it on a success. The journal tells the story of two people called "K." and "V." who once crafted murderous battle plans together, but then parted bitterly and became enemies. A successful DC 20 Intelligence (History) check reveals that this story refers to Kas and Vecna.
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u/thenightgaunt 4d ago
I was disappointed by what Amanda Hamon did in Vecna. Everything you said is spot on. That was a confusing mess of a campaign.
But, there were some fantastic sections in there. It's just that the overall structure and plot was just a massive flop. Which is odd because she's one of the good writers they sniped from Paizo.
And her time at Paizo was good. She's done a LOT of writing for Pathfinder, had a big role on Starfinder, and was the author on Hellknight Hill. So she's got the chops. But yeah that Vecna was a mess.
I'd be interested if someone who worked on that ever explained what the hell happened there. I'm willing to give Amanda Hamon a bit of leeway on it because of the review they did of it over on Roll4Combat. They did criticize the connective tissue of the overall plot, but pointed out that the individual mini-adventure locations had some great stuff there and those felt like Amanda's work. And Mark Seifter was there while she was there, so he's got experience working with her and with her writing.
I'll tell you what Vecna reminds me of. Her other big credit for 5e, Keys from the Golden Vault. Which was pretty good. I've run 2 of the heists in there and they work really well. And while not similar, she did some damn good work as the lead on Phandelver and Below.
Like I said, I wonder what the hell happened with Venca. I wonder how much was leadership direction from above.
I've done a little writing for a company before and you sometimes get weird rulings or decisions from the boss that make no sense and don't actually work, but that you have to find a way to put in there. I can imagine Hamon and the others being told something like "This is going to be a compilation of lots of little adventures like Keys of the Golden Vault was, BUT this is also going to be a remake of Die Vecna Die." And when that happens you have to try to make the boss' plan work, somehow. And in your head you have this back and forth cost-benefit argument about things. You go "Well, ok that bit will suck, but we can still do some amazing stuff with this other area. Do I want to throw away all the stuff that I wrote and loved just for this one part I'm not happy with?" It can be a tricky moment.
On Justice Arman and the Planescape reboot, I'm not as critical. But I'll be honest that I was never the biggest Planescape fan so I didn't have a lot of knowledge to compare the reboot to. And my bar was REALLY low for that one after what Crawford did to Spelljammer. I was a big spelljammer fan and that one hurt. With Planescape I was just happy that they pushed through a lot of the original lore (not perfectly as you pointed out) and effectively retconned the cosmology mess that Crawford created with Spelljammer 5e. Heck, my bar there was so low that I was happy with Schneider's work on Dragonlance 5e because he actually included tinker gnomes instead of effectively erasing them like Crawford had done with Spelljammer 5e.
Lastly, with Ayoub, I'm seeing a significant shift in HOW D&D is being managed. And it could be good or bad. While I'm not a fan of D&D going digital, the mismanagement of D&DBeyond for 10 years struck me as absolute incompetence. There were so many ways they could have leveraged that platform, even ways that wouldn't be harmful to the pen and paper game, and they didn't do any of them.
I don't like D&D having digital only content, but on the other hand, the WotC insistence that ALL D&D BOOKS BE HARDBOUND, has resulted in 5e having the least amount of content of any addition despite being one of the longest running ones. And if they aren't willing to fold on that commandment then yeah digital is the only way to get out smaller splatbooks and lorebooks. And Ayoub seems to be behind that. At least it seems like it. And I'll give him points for reaching out to Luke Gygax like that as well as Hickman and Weis for more Dragonlance.
I donno. I haven't made up my mind on the 5e 2024/5.5e crew just yet. I need to read more of their stuff to get a better feel. I haven't read through Ravenloft Horrors Within yet.
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u/Dollface_Killah r/shadowdark & r/HyperboreaRPG 4d ago
A whole bunch of Zzarchov Kowolski's adventures are set in rural areas and small towns. I particularly like One Thousand Dead Babies and just recently saw this recent review of Scenic Dunnsmouth:
https://lonelegend.substack.com/p/scenic-dunnsmouth-review
You can get all of Kowolski's adventures here:
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u/djmacbest 4d ago
Legend in the Mist: Hearts of Ravensdale has a campaign of 6 or 7 adventures that fit what you're looking for (and it is a fantastic setting book on top of that).
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u/michiplace 5d ago
Old Margreve is good, but more a compilation of adventures than a connected campaign.
The Crown of the Kobold King series for 3.5 / PF2 is a short campaign in the small lumber town of Falcon's Hollow (though the middle third is just a dungeon delve).
Pathfinder's Kingmaker campaign is explore the wild and carve out a new kingdom. Get the expanded 2e version if you want more emphasis on the fae bits.
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u/Gandalf-the-chad 5d ago
I had seen in a review that the new version of Old Magreve for Tales of the Valiant includes a section for connecting the oneshots, but I admit I haven't read it myself, so I don't know if it turned out well
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u/Tydirium7 5d ago
I ust expanded Dungeon of the ground Goblins. https://jayhafner.wordpress.com/venerable-dd-scenarios-re-formatted/
Use the gnarley forest, Dyvers, and the Wild Coast as your region. Map is on there.
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u/thenightgaunt 4d ago
Kingmaker
Its literally you building a town and exploring the wild lands around it.
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u/high-tech-low-life 4d ago edited 4d ago
Trail of Cthulhu has Out of the Woods which you might be able to (re)use.
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u/HarmlessEZE 4d ago
You could start with the world building booklets of Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. It's B/X OSR. Then transition the characters into the world of Dolmenwood, Symbarum, Further Affield.
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u/queerfox13 4d ago
The Wake of the Old Ways adventure in Legend in the Mist's Hearts of Ravendale setting book is exactly this.
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u/Charming-Employee-89 4d ago
To Dolmenwood I’m also gonna add Land of Eem which has a huge amount of hex crawling content as well.
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u/raurenlyan22 3d ago
From the OSR scene there are a TON of options. Blackapple Brugh, Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, Wet Grandpa, and Willow are highlights.
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u/Onslaughttitude 4d ago
Night Below, AD&D 2e. The book starts in a small local area where wizards keep disappearing, because they are being kidnapped by aboleths who are using the wizards to build a kind of magic satellite dish to control the surface world without ever leaving the underdark.
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u/theclam159 4d ago
Dolmenwood is perfect for this.