Best Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Modules For Beginners

Many gamers first get into the hobby of tabletop roleplaying by picking up a copy of Dungeons & Dragons, the world’s most popular pen-and-paper fantasy RPG at present, but learning how to play – or be the Dungeon Master for – a session of D&D can be a tricky process for people unfamiliar with how tabletop RPGs work. Pre-written game modules created by Wizards of the Coast and other third-party game studios are a great way for D&D newcomers to slowly ease themselves into the game’s storytelling, exploration, combat and intrigue elements. The following D&D modules, with straightforward premises and pre-made NPCs/dungeon maps, are particularly useful scenarios for beginners (and good adventures in their own right).

Soon after the publication of the basic rules for the original Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax and other developers at the Tactical Studies Rules company started publishing dungeon modules such as the infamously lethal D&D Tomb of Horrors, The Keep On The Borderlands, Expedition To The Barrier Peaks, The Temple Of Elemental Evil, and so on. These pre-written scenarios gave aspiring Dungeon Masters with limited free time a list of characters, monsters, items, and perils to throw at their group of players while also demonstrating how they could eventually format, organize, and construct original campaigns and dungeon crawls. To this very day, many D&D DMs start out by running a premade module from Wizards of the Coast, then use their accumulated storytelling experience to design their own original fantasy worlds, characters and set-pieces.

To be friendly and accessible for roleplaying novices, a Dungeons & Dragons campaign module generally needs share the signature traits of the published scenarios listed below. First, it needs to have challenges Level 1 characters can overcome, letting novice gamers get used to the most basic abilities of their PCs before they level up. Second, it should give D&D players straightforward quests, missions, and goals to accomplish: rescue some prisoners, find treasure in a tomb, slay a monster terrorizing the community, and so on. Lastly, beginner-friendly D&D modules should give players multiple ways to overcome the challenges set before them, whether that involves slaying enemies though hack-and-slash violence, making skill checks to manipulate the world around them, using magic in a clever way, or simply employing old-school roleplaying and to triumph over adversity in a common-sense way.

D&D’s Lost Mine Of Phandelver Is Perfect For Beginners

The Lost Mine Of Phandelver adventure module, currently for sale on the D&D Beyond website, was very deliberately designed to be a good starting adventure for roleplaying novices and veterans trying out Dungeons & Dragons 5e for the first time. Both the PDF and physical adventure set come with five pre-generated characters, a list of monsters and magic items, dice tables for rolling up random encounters, and a set of well-drawn maps depicting the wilderness/dungeons around the village of Phandalin. The initial scenario in Lost Mine Of Phandelver pits Level 1 characters against raiding goblins, then throws more epic challenges at the players as their PCs level up and learn more about the mysterious Forge Of Spells.

Dragon Of Icespire Peak Is A Low-Level D&D Adventure For Beginners

Like Lost Mine Of Phandelver, the Dragon Of Icespire Peak D&D beginner campaign module also take place in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting and begins near the northern settlement of Phandalin. Designed for player characters of Levels 1 through 7, the main plot of Dragon Of Icespire Peak is centered around a tyrannical White Dragon named Cryovain who lairs in a desolate mountain fortress and periodically flies forth to wreak havoc on the countryside below. To reach a high enough level to properly confront Cryovain, players of this Dungeons & Dragons module will build metaphorical and literally experience by taking on side-quests from the Job Board in Phandalin’s village square, while also potentially purchasing nearby homesteads and forming strong relationships with local NPCs.

D&D’s Waterdeep: Dragon Heist Eases Beginners Into Progressive Complexity

The beginner-friendly D&D module Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, as the name suggests, takes place in the city of Waterdeep, a diverse, prosperous metropolis ruled over by a council of masked lords. A wandering scholar and storyteller named Volothamp “Volo” Geddarm hires a ragtag group of adventurers to complete a task of singular importance. They have to find and acquire a large hoard of dragon gold hidden somewhere in Waterdeep.

This straightforward quest marks the start of a Dungeons & Dragons module that eases new players into the RPG with a simple city-based dungeon crawl. It also introduces complicating factors such as feuding criminal factions, desperate nobles, and an over-worked city guard. It also has a series of hidden monsters who want the gold for themselves.

Monster Slayers: The Heroes Of Hesiod Is A Kid-Friendly D&D Adventure

Monster Slayers: The Heroes Of Hesiod is essentially a highly simplified version of D&D designed to introduce kids to tabletop RPGs, complete with cute hand-drawn graphics and a child-friendly plot. The setting of the game is the village of Hesiod, a remote community regularly attacked by monsters, and the pre-generated characters are all pre-teen heroes going through an initiation ceremony to see if they’ve got the know-how to fight back against hostile beasts and magical critters. Each character sheet contains a minimalistic listing of hit points, attack/weapon bonuses, and singular combat abilities to distinguish Dungeons & Dragons archetypes such as barbarian or shamans, while the campaign scenario consists of players fighting juvenile monsters released one by one into a combat arena.

The Keep On The Borderlands Makes A Classic Introduction To D&D

Written by D&D pioneer Gary Gygax and first published in 1979, The Keep On The Borderlands was one of the first adventure modules consciously designed to introduce gamers to the concept of a roleplaying games – specifically, to the rules and play-style of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. At the start of the module scenario, a group of low-level players would discover an abandoned keep in a hilly stretch of wilderness, using this old fortification as a home base for their expeditions into nearby caverns and swamps full of hostile lizardmen, mad hermits, and other chaotic creatures. Though very much an old-school “dungeon crawl” that focuses on exploration over plot, novice players of Dungeons & Dragons5e can still get a lot of fun out of The Keep On The Borderlands, recently reprinted by Goodman Games and ported over to the rules of D&D 5th Edition.

Source: Goodman Games

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