D&D Out of the Abyss

I splurged and picked up another D&D adventure book the other day, this one being Out of the Abyss. Out of the Abyss is basically all set within the Underdark (for those unfamiliar, the Underdark is an iconic D&D setting that is basically a whole other lair of the world beneath the surface - a vast network of caverns in which several other races and monsters live.)

Unlike the Curse of Strahd, which is very focused on a single quest - to defeat the Vampire and save his intended victim - Out of the Abyss looks to be a little more free-form. It does start off your party imprisoned and gives them a task of getting out of the Underdark, but it looks as if the avenues to do so are more open to players choosing the direction they want to go. Not to say Curse of Strahd is linear - there are tons of side-quests in that one that you can do in varying orders - but at least so far Out of the Abyss feels more useful as a group of smaller episodes that I would feel comfortable cannibalizing for my own homebrew campaign.

For instance, my setting has "The Great Deep," which is my equivalent of the Underdark, and while the players might not encounter the Demon Demogorgon in a Kuo-toa village on the shore of the Darklake, they could easily encounter an avatar of Shaliud the Great Leviathan at a similar location, with similar NPCs doing their thing.

One thing that's quite nice about this book is that there are a lot more generally-applicable monsters, not to mention stat blocks for demon lords like the aforementioned Demogorgon, giving me some good ideas of what an end-of-the-adventure final boss might look like. (I still kind of want them to fight a Tarrasque, but we'll have to see about that.)

Anyway, even if I do cannibalize this stuff, I also think I'd really like to run these adventures straight as well. Take a bit of the pressure off the DM role.