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The 10 Greatest Dungeons & Dragons Adventures Since 1985

This list of the 10 greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventures since 1985, draws from ratings, reviews, and appraisals from D&D fans, and then uses my completely unscientific aggregation of opinions to rank the 10 entries. The list only includes adventures printed as stand-alone titles under the D&D or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons brands. For more on why I chose to rank adventures published after 1985, see Why Did So Many Classic Adventures Come From 7 Years of D&D’s 45-Year History?

10. The Gates of Firestorm Peak
The Gates of Firestorm Peak (1996) is a second-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure by Bruce Cordell for levels 5-8. The adventure that introduced the Far Realm to D&D starts as a well-crafted dungeon crawl, and then builds into an unsettling confrontation with Lovecraftian monstrosities. See the full review.

9. Tomb of Annihilation
Tomb of Annihilation (2017) is a fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure by Chris Perkins. Will Doyle, and Steve Winter for levels 1-11. Tomb of Annihilation mixes the dinosaurs and lost world of Isle of Dread, with the overgrown jungle ruins of Dwellers of the Forbidden City, with a deathtrap dungeon inspired by Tomb of Horrors. Every one of those influences appears on the Dungeon magazine’s 2004 list of 30 greatest adventures, and the mix plays better than any of them. See the full review.

8. Sunless Citadel
The Sunless Citadel (2000) is a third-edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure by Bruce Cordell for levels 1-3. As the introductory adventure to third edition, Sunless Citadel delivers the monsters, treasures, and even the dragon that new players expect from D&D, but the adventure serves much more than D&D comfort food. Start with a deeply evocative location: a castle dropped into a rift by some cataclysm. Add a lost dragon wyrmling, a tainted tree at the heart of the ruin, a fresh humanoid monster, and one of D&D’s most unforgettable characters, Meepo. See the full review.

7. Vault of the Dracolich
Vault of the Dracolich is a D&D Next adventure By Mike Shea, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, and Teos Abadia for level 4 characters. Vault of the Dracolich rates for its outstanding execution of a multi-table adventure. By design, a team of dungeon masters runs several tables of players who explore different parts of a dungeon at the same time. As the adventure runs, groups can interact, briefly gathering, exchanging resources and coordinating plans. The event ends with all the groups fighting a climactic battle. See the full review.

6. Madness at Gardmore Abbey
Madness at Gardmore Abbey (2011) is a fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure by James Wyatt with Creighton Broadhurst and Steve Townshend for levels 6-8. Madness at Gardmore Abbey combines the best qualities of fourth edition’s encounter design with a sandbox of adventure locations, villains, and a single powerful thread that binds them all together. That thread comes from the scattered cards of a Deck of Many Things, perhaps the most irresistible artifact in D&D. See the full review.

5. Dead Gods
Dead Gods (1997) is a second-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure by Monte Cook for levels 6-9.
Dead Gods boasts more than the best title of any D&D adventure, it features the most audacious storytelling. For example, in one chapter, players create temporary characters to play out past events. The adventure spans the planes, ending in a climax that brings the party to the astral plane where they battle atop the 4-mile-long corpse of the demon lord to stop the creature’s resurrection. See the full review.

4. Curse of Strahd
Curse of Strahd (2016) is a fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure for levels 1-10 by Chris Perkins with Adam Lee, Richard Whitters, and Jeremy Crawford. Curse of Strahd captures everything great about I6 Ravenloft and expands it into a full campaign. While Ravenloft mainly stayed in a castle, Curse of Strahd gives players the freedom to roam the cursed land of Barovia. Although Curse of Strahd features a strong design, the vampire Strahd and the fearful gloom of his domain make the adventure’s best parts. See the full review.

3. Lost Mine of Phandelver
Lost Mine of Phandelver (2014) is fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure by Richard Baker and Chris Perkins for levels 1-5.
The adventure that introduced fifth edition serves D&D’s expected and favorite ingredients. To longtime fans, the elements may be familiar, but superb execution makes the adventure a winner. After the first encounter, players experience samples of dungeon crawls, quests, and mini-adventures. The adventure provides enough clues to keep even new players from feeling lost. See the full review.

2. Red Hand of Doom
Red Hand of Doom (2006) is a 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure by Richard Baker and James Jacobs for levels 6-12.
Red Hand of Doom starts with the fantasy trope of an army of evil sweeping the land, and then casts the characters as heroes working to slow the march. Their missions span the landscape and vary from diplomatic meetings to dungeon delves. Along the way, the adventure accounts for the players choices, successes, and failures. See the full review.

1. Night’s Dark Terror
Night’s Dark Terror (1986) is Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons adventure by Jim Bambra, Graeme Morris, and Phil Gallagher for levels 2-4. The adventure starts strong with a widely-imitated episode where the characters defend a freehold against a goblin attack. The events of the siege make the night of terror. After the first episode, the adventure’s scope expands. Players explore more than a wilderness, with eighteen locations, including a number of mini-dungeons, a ruined city, a riverside village, a frontier town, and a lost valley, while active villains oppose the characters. See the full review.

Red Hand of Doom (2006): Greatest D&D Adventures Since 1985—Number 2

Red Hand of Doom (2006) is a 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure by Richard Baker and James Jacobs for levels 6-12.

Red Hand of Doom pits the characters against an overwhelming horde of hobgoblins and monstrous allies loyal to Tiamat. In an interview promoting the adventure, Rich Baker describes the concept. “My initial vision was to make my best swing at a challenge that comes in countless fantasy novels: The Army of Evil is trying to conquer everything. A lot of adventures use the orc horde as a backdrop and motivation, but then make the heroes go off and do ‘standard’ dungeon-delving to find the McGuffin that will then defeat the horde. I wanted to create and adventure that cast the heroes in the role of ‘captains of good,’ doing things that directly affected the course of the war.”

While engaging, this plot could mire characters in a series of battles against more and tougher hobgoblins. Few players would enjoy such a grind, so the design sets the heroes in a variety of missions that span the threatened region.

“The heroes face crucial tests in rallying allies, helping the local rules to determine strategy, spying on the Red Hand horde and scouting its movements, and directly confronting the bad guys on the battlefield. Some of that involves old-fashioned dungeon-delving, but a lot of the adventure takes heroes back and forth across the landscape, doing a hundred different things to stop the Red Hand march,” James Jacobs explains. “The PCs will find themselves in small towns and sprawling cities at either end of the adventure, and in between they’ll visit pastoral valleys, tangled forests, rugged mountains, and monster-infested swamps.”

Red Hand of Doom avoids serving a programed series of encounters where any failure derails the plot. Reviewer Jukka Särkijärvi writes, “In Red Hand of Doom, it’s fully possible for the party to royally screw up. There are many options open for the player characters and the writer have accounted for all the likely scenarios.” The adventure creates a sense of urgency as player race to evacuate a town, or cut off an invading force, or break down a road block.

The adventure doesn’t defy every expectation. “The first parts of Red Hand of Doom are the combat-heaviest D&D material I’ve played through, and they never once got boring,” Särkijärvi writes. “Each combat had a clear reason for being there, interesting enemies, and some tactical depth.”

Instead of pitting players against tougher and tougher flavors of hobgoblin, the adventure swaps in undead, hell hounds, giants, and other creatures. “Whenever we had the chance, we mixed things up by adding non-humanoid foes,” James Jacobs says.

The designers wrote Red Hand of Doom after Wizards of the Coast released two massive dungeon crawls in City of the Spider Queen and Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. From those releases, Jacobs took a lesson: “Don’t succumb to the lure of the enormous dungeon. They may be fun to design, but dungeons with 100 rooms are a bear to adventure through. I tried to keep the dungeons in Red Hand of Doom fairly small and took pains to give each of them a unique theme, feel, and flavor.”

The book benefits from a series of designers’ notes. “These notes are intended not only to provide advice on how to run a particularly tough encounter, but to explain why we made some of the decisions we made,” Jacobs says.

The notes also help DMs run the adventure. “We decided to open up the design a bit and make an adventure that was friendlier and a little less work for the DM to run,” Baker says.

“In addition, they provide an insight into how adventures are designed, and should hopefully help DMs to design their own adventures.”

Ron Whitaker from the Escapist describes Red Hand of Doom this way: “The party can use guerilla tactics, spy on the advancing horde, venture into a lich’s lair to deprive the horde of its undead minions, and finally take on the horde itself, with the preparatory actions coming back to aid or haunt them. It’s a superb adventure, and one that any D&D fan should play.”

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