5.5 has not given us a big, lengthy adventure-campaign book. This is a bit of a surprise, given that 5.0 was chock full of them. Not even counting adventure anthologies or the short (or, in the case of Spelljammer and Planescape, longer) ones within setting books, you had Tyranny of Dragons (originally published as two adventures in a sequence,) Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, Tomb of Annihilation, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep (which I feel got less promotion, I guess because it was mainly coming out of what I think was not yet Darrington Press,) Dragonlance: Shadow fo the Dragon Queen, Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, and Vecna: Eve of Ruin.
So, not counting the "omnibus" re-release of Tyranny of Dragons, that's sixteen full-length adventures over a ten-year run.
5.5 hasn't gotten a single one.
Now, to be frank, this hasn't been much of a problem for me: I run my own homebrew campaigns, and the published adventures I've played in have generally gone so slow that it's taken years for us and rarely have I finished one (the only one I've actually finished was Descent into Avernus, when a friend was running it as part of Adventurer's League - we got close with Curse of Strahd).
I believe that this fall we're going to be getting the first big campaign, a Red Wizard-themed adventure, Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall.
5E firmly planted its flag in the Forgotten Realms, the setting that I think has been where most D&D content has taken place across its 52-year history. And don't get me wrong: the Forgotten Realms works great as a setting, and the consistency in using that setting has also created greater familiarity among players. Not only do we have all these published books, but in other media, like the Baldur's Gate CRPGs (as well as Neverwinter Nights) and the too-good-for-this-sinful-world Honor Among Thieves movie also take place in that setting.
Among those sixteen published adventures from 2014-2024, nine take place almost entirely in the Forgotten Realms setting, and that's not even counting Descent Into Avernus (about a third of which takes place in Baldur's Gate) or Vecna Eve of Ruin (which starts off in Neverwinter). Even Curse of Strahd kind of assumes that you're coming from the Forgotten Realms (though to say that it's not primarily a Ravenloft adventure would be absurd).
Now, it's interesting to me that after making a fairly big deal about presenting Greyhawk as a setting in the 2024 DMG, they're still returning to the Forgotten Realms with this first major campaign book.
To be frank: I don't really care very much about Greyhawk. There's not really a hook that, to me, makes me excited to play there instead of the Forgotten Realms. Yes, I know that it's the OG setting that Gary Gygax created, but nothing has convinced me that there are types of stories I could tell there that wouldn't work in Faerun.
But lots of settings are really cool!
Let's address the vampire in the room:
Curse of Strahd is, I think by a pretty wide margin, the most popular published adventure in 5E. I think others, like Tomb of Annihilation, are also popular and beloved, but Curse of Strahd is the one that I see people talk about having run multiple times (even having played most of it, I'd kind of be up for running it myself).
Why, then, have they not tried to do more Ravenloft adventures?
Curse of Strahd is an expansion/recreation of the original Ravenloft module, which I know also really transformed what a published adventure could be. I know that The House of Gryphon Hill was the second one, introducing the land of Mordent and I assume making the eponymous house the next legendary gothic dungeon. I don't know it was as popular as the first Ravenloft adventure, but it clearly must have been successful enough for them to expand out the Ravenloft setting.
There's an elegance to Ravenloft as a setting - the domains can be self-contained, and it's easy enough to motivate players to go for an eventual final boss fight, because that can allow the Mists to open up and allow escape.
To be sure, the tone of Ravenloft adventures is different - just the aesthetic of horror is not the same as classically heroic fantasy.
But clearly it's also something that a lot of players are into. Personally, I've always loved when my fantasy games go into spooky mode - from the Phantom Train in FFVI to dealing with the Scourge in the Plaguelands in World of Warcraft, I really vibe with Gothic Fantasy.
I think there would be a lot of enthusiasm for this.
And I also think that you could invigorate parts of the audience who are looking for something a little less conventional in terms of genre. I think, similarly, a big Eberron campaign could also be really exciting.
There was some fun in the 5.0 adventures seeing the continuity between them - stuff like Artus Cimber being mentioned in Storm King's Thunder and then showing up in Tomb of Annihilation - but I don't know of many groups that are just running each adventure after another (with the exception of my friends' actual play stream, Legacy of Fools!)
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