The first adventure book and first D&D book to come out after the 2024 core rulebook revamp, Dragon Delves is an anthology of adventures - ten of them that each revolve around a dragon of the ten classic varieties.
I've now read the first two adventures, and it's certainly a bit of a departure from the adventures of previous books.
While D&D adventures always take longer than you might expect, I genuinely think that these could truly be completed in only a session or two, which is kind of refreshing.
The format of the adventure presentation is also a little different: while you still get room-by-room descriptions keyed to dungeon maps, each adventure starts off with a quick summary of major plot points, the stat blocks involved (the book contains no new stat blocks - it only uses the ones from the 2025 Monster Manual,) and a list of important NPCs.
I think the intent here is to present the important information so that a DM can leap into running these adventures with little prep.
Naturally, low-level D&D can churn through a fair amount of combat quickly (though players are also going to need rests between fights more often,) so I'll be curious to see how the pacing goes with the higher-level adventures.
The first adventure, Death at Sunset, can span levels 1 and 2 (though you can just skip ahead to the second half pretty easily,) where the party investigates an ailing grove of redwood trees that mark the site where a powerful green dragon fell. With the forest once again succumbing to poisonous corruption and villagers going missing, it seems that some related threat is rising.
Ultimately, the "dungeons" here are essentially large rooms, first the grove of redwoods and second the cavern beneath the grove. While dungeon-crawl enthusiasts might find that underwhelming, it's actually far closer to the kind of "one session" environments I tend to design and run. Even if these areas do have multiple encounters within them, the physical space is very compact.
Granted, this means it might become difficult to justify holding monsters in other "rooms" from joining the fray given that they might only be 30 feet away, but in all but one case, the monsters aren't really allies (and in that case, DMs are instructed to have the nearby monsters jump into the fight.
The second adventure, Baker's Doesn't, is similarly a quick quest - the party finds a candy shop burning down, and this leads them to investigate a cottage made of candy deep in the woods that is the lair of an evil green hag (a male hag, demonstrating how they've updated previously female-only monsters).
The cottage is a bit more of a true mini-dungeon than the green dragon's cavern, but I also think that you could get through this pretty quickly, depending on your players.
I'll be curious as I read on as to how the higher-level adventures feel. The last one is for 12th level characters, and as one ascends in levels, the complexity of the game grows. Still, so far it seems like the pacing of the book's adventures means you won't be stuck on any for more than a few sessions (the first two each claim to be doable in two sessions).
Funnily enough, we don't have any announcement of a grand adventure book in the vein of Storm King's Thunder or Rime of the Frostmaiden among any of the announced publications. I wonder if they're planning to skew more toward shorter modules. I love a grand adventure book, but at the same time, I've only once ever made it all the way through one (though fingers crossed we get through Wild Beyond the Witchlight - we're a ways into Yon at this point).
Mainly, I feel that the adventures as presented so far are closer to the kind of thing I prepare for my own campaigns, and I actually feel very confident I could run these adventures with ease.
If my impressions change with the other adventures, I'll probably make another post. But still, I think this is worth picking up if only to see a different style of adventure than what we've gotten in 5E prior to this.
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