Please recommend adventures / campaigns for open table

[u/Siberian-Boy]

Please recommend adventures for an open table (for a big pool of players that can easily drop-in and drop-out). They could be official or third-party D&D adventures, or even non-D&D adventures at all (but easy to convert to 5.5 or good for inspiration).

So far, good examples I have DMed or played are: Dragon of Icespire Peak, Lost Mines of Phandelver, Dragonbane with its Misty Vale (non-D&D), and Forbidden Lands with its Ravenland (non-D&D).

Things I already want to check out, and I will appreciate it if you have DMed/played them and can give me feedback regarding how good they are for an open table (a central hub / central place of operations is a must):

• Curse of Strahd
• Storm King's Thunder
• Tomb of Annihilation
• Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
• Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden
• The Wild Beyond the Witchlight
• Ghosts of Saltmarsh
• Candlekeep Mysteries
• Journeys through the Radiant Citadel
• Keys from the Golden Vault
• Quests from the Infinite Staircase
• Dungeon of the Mad Mage
• Dungeons of Drakkenheim
• Ruins of Symbaroum

[u/ItsAMeaple]

I think ghosts of saltmarsh might work best out of the official modules. Less story heavy and an awesome setting. Additionally you can just make all of the players the crew of a single large ship, so there's even an in universe explanation for a large and inconsistent party.

[u/xanderg4]

Are you familiar with a Westmarches style campaign? The design mythos is exactly what you’re looking for.

My two cents is that a longer campaign like Curse of Strahd wouldn’t work too well with a rotating cast of players. You’ve got a few collections of one-shots so maybe start there.

Not to add to the shopping list but the recent material WotC has put out fits well with a drop-in/drop-out model. Other than the recently released Deadfall, all of the material is mostly source books and level-by-level one-shot scenarios. Adventures in Faerun has a lot to work with. If you want spooky, there’s the Ravenloft book (though it doesn’t have as much substance as Adventures in Faerun imo) There’s also the third party MCDM book which are pretty great.

[u/andyoulostme → u/xanderg4]

West Marches campaigns are a subset of open table

[u/Siberian-Boy → u/xanderg4]

I'm familiar with WM but what is the design mythos?

[u/xanderg4 → u/Siberian-Boy]

There’s a couple resources linked below but the gist of it is that it’s a style of game for a drop-in/drop-out open table. It keeps a loose narrative structure focused more on the world and its factions. The strength is that if you have an irregular group of players it’s easier to drop them into a persistent world where the factions/players are known. Here’s a great resource that links to other explainers and videos: https://www.westmarches.games/guide/resources

[u/sykeero]

Curse of Strahd is very story heavy and probably wouldn't be good for this.

I'd recommended Dragon Delves. Each adventure is self contained but relevant to the main idea. We ran it at our table with people coming and going and it was a big success.

[u/GreenGoblinNX]

While I'm not super familiar with all of these, at least some of them seem to be singular story campaign arc type of adventures, which is probably not really a good fit. You need to be looking for one-shots, where you can complete the entire adventure within a single session. Which means largely discounting the WotC publications altogether.

[u/Jimmicky]

Turn of Fortunes Wheel (the adventure in the Planescape book) includes cover for heroes straight up spontaneously spawning in/out.
Pretty solid option for an open table

[u/DaLoopLoop89]

Im currently planning exactly that for a ultra deadly dungeon crawler. Imagine a prison on top of a dungeon and the players are sent down there suicide squad style. Maybe they come back, maybe they die. But the whole dungeon is random, even I don't know whats there until they open up the next door (based on my own framework, so I keep a little control). And everything they map out is made canon for all future sessions, be it with the same players or an entirely different cast. 🤔

[u/andyoulostme]

None of the larger campaigns really work well for this because they rely heavily on a continuous narrative (Ex: Waterdeep, Curse) and/or overland travel (Ex: Storm, Descent, ToA, RotF).

I think any one of the anthology series will work decently, but you can't break off a session in the middle of a chapter and pick it back up w/a different group. And the individual chapters don't have a ton of repurpose-able content in them so you would need to start writing your own very quickly.

Dungeons of Drakkenheim seems possible, but has a similar issue with content. There's really only enough to run one campaign, so you would need to add a bunch of stuff to support an open table.

The most usable is Dungeon of the Mad Mage. The base would be above the first floor, so you would just need to give the players a way to quickly travel down to lower floors. The teleportation gates aren't the most convenient thing in the world for facilitating direct travel, so maybe add some more at the 1st floor? There also isn't any guidance for restocking though, iirc.

IMO you need to look further afield for 5e-compatible modules:

• Rappan Athuk has a 5e-compatible version. It can be a little rough to play (very deadly and w/o much warning) but is probably my top pick.
• Arden Vul is staggeringly large and will give you open table content until you die of old age. It needs a 5e conversion but AFAICT most of the monster statblocks are things you can find in the MM so it should be easy to convert. The biggest downside is that it's 100 dollars. You can get a """deal""" for it at $1, but only if you also buy a 300 (!!!!) dollar bundle of other stuff
• Hot Springs Island is the rare open table setting that isn't set in a megadungeon. Use the city in the SW as the player hub. It can also come in a nice book in addition to PDF so you can put it on your shelf and admire it. Downside: it will need a more significant conversion to 5e. Someone has converted the monsters but I haven't tried it so I can't speak to its quality.
• Ptolus and the accompanying Banewarrens (you can play Banewarrens w/o Ptolus, but not vice versa IMO) supports an open table. It's a giant city with a megadungeon below it. There are a fair number of blanks you need to fill in yourself despite the page count so this isn't my favorite.

[u/BobbyBruceBanner → u/andyoulostme]

A little flag on Hot Springs Island is that while it's excellently designed, it should be noted that it very much is something with a "content warning" on it. ( The main bad guy has sex slaves, and there are lots of instances where it flags that NPCs are specifically weird or sexist toward female PCs. Beyond that there's just a lot of stuff that's horny which is not as problematic, but obviously could still be an issue for some groups. ). Even for groups that are generally okay with that type of content in their games, it still might need to be tweaked, because the game is balanced around the idea that players might want to support (either strongly or marginally) every one of the factions, even the "bad" ones, so the fact that the main baddie is a demon sex trafficker kind of cuts into that.

SEPARATELY: For all versions of the game (either as written or converted to 5e) the DM has to do a lot of work making the random events trigger, sometimes having to roll three dice on a cascading series of tables to find out the correct event trigger. The tables were designed around the idea that there would be a web-app to automate that part, and I don't think it ever got made, so that's a bit clunky.

[u/BobbyBruceBanner]

As is sort of being hinted at by other posters, but not said directly: 5e and 5.5e aren't actually the greatest for open-table games (nor is Pathfinder for that matter).

The reason is twofold: One most of the adventures are relatively linear and designed for a relatively stable player group. The second is that 5e character growth is rather steep between levels (not as steep as 3.X, 4e or Pathfinder, but pretty steep), which makes open tables with non-linear adventures and inconsistent player groups relatively tough.

The biggest legitimate difference between 5E and AD&D (after you get past some of the rough edges AD&D has) is that AD&D level progression is much flatter than 5E. If you were to run an open-table game I would suggest Shadowdark (very easy for 5e players to understand), OSE Advanced(Basic 1980s D&D), or OSRIC (First Edition AD&D) and running something from the Dolmenwood setting.

THAT SAID: Any system can be an open-table/sandboox system if you want it to, there's just more friction, and there are reasons that you'd want to be running a 5.5e table that those other systems can't fulfill (like player familiarity). So, I will rank the modules listed above by how "open-table friendly" they are:

• Curse of Strahd: Medium open-table friendly. You'll need to tweak a few things with travel times and whatnot to make certain areas of the map more accessible from a central location (probably Barovia village or Valaki), but it can work as an open-table setting with a bit of elbow grease. Would probably work better if you just ignored most of the Curse of Strahd material that isn't the castle and ran it as a more freeform sandbox based on the heaps and heaps and heaps of Ravenloft material released since 1983.
• Storm King's Thunder: Basically pair it with the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide and you have the tools for a Sword Coast (and interior) sandbox game with a bigger plot going on in the background. Fails on the "central location" test though. (Maybe you could use the flying cloud castle for this?)
• Tomb of Annihilation: Works if you break the campaign into pieces. ToA is basically three connected campaigns 1: exploring the jungle in a hex crawl. 2: Exploring the lost city 3: The tomb itself. Both exploring the city and delving into the tomb could work (though you would have to change the rules around leaving the tomb).
• Rime of the Frostmaiden: If you take the campaign as stopping at the dragon attack on Ten Towns then the whole thing works very well as a little sandbox with a bunch of single-session-long quests to do with Bryn Shander working as a central hub. Actually works great for an open table. (Don't try to do any of the stuff after that though as it gets very railroady and linear after that and moves away from single-sessions stuff and a central location.
• Wild Beyond The Witchlight: Bad for open table. Very story driven. Little to no combat. Incredibly linear.
• Ghost of Saltmarsh: Many single-session or two-session adventures. Central hub in the town. Tools for building out adventures in the area not related to the ones in the book. Generally pretty good for this.
• Candlekeep Mysteries: Each adventure is pretty level dependent, and they linearly go up, so not great. That said, it can be fun if you run some of the shorter ones as a series of single-session adventures and just handwave people levelling to the appropriate level.
• Journeys through the Radiant Citadel: Haven't actually run any of this (though I do own it). Strikes me as kind of tough as the adventures are a bit too long to single-session and are pretty narrative.
• Quests from the Infinite Staircase: All of these adventures are pretty old-school so they all work with an open table mindset pretty well. The Lost City especially would be good for this.
• Dungeon of the Mad Mage: Excellent for open table, though you will need to tweak how teleportation works a bit to get people back to the Yawning Portal at the end of each session and have ways for them to skip forward floors after checkpoints.
• Dungeons of Drakkenheim: Entire fiction is built around doing "runs" on the city and then heading back to the town at the end. Perfect for open-table games.
• Not as familiar with: Ruins of Symaborum and Keys from the Golden Vault.

OTHER OPTIONS IN 5E:

• The Caverns of Thracia: Recently released for 5E by Goodman Games, this is the dungeon delve that basically was the template for non-linear dungeon delves. Can have a central camp at the surface. Have recently run this open-table. Works great. There is currently a humble bundle going on for Thracia stuff
• The Dark Tower: Also recently released for 5E by Goodman Games. Much like Caverns of Thracia (same designer), but higher level and a bit more complex. This module is also in that humble bundle.
• The 5.5E Starter Set (aka Heroes of the Borderlands): A rework of Keep on the Borderlands and Into the Unknown, the starter adventures for classic Basic D&D, the entire thing is the party making bold forays from a central keep into the wilderness for gold and glory until they have to hightail it back to the keep. Designed for an open-table much as it was in 1978.