Like most DMs, especially grown-ass adults that have jobs, there's only so much time to prep. If you even HINT that the weekly game is going bi-weekly that table full of serial killers in waiting might decide to start on you! So maybe you reach for help in the form of a published module.
I may or may not have mentioned that I'm running Tyranny of Dragons. Thematically, it fits my setting, and I've always wanted to use Tiamat as a big-bad. Hoard of the Dragon Queen wasn't bad - Rise of Tiamat SUCKS. Put a pin in that, I'll be going into detail later.
So far, all the modern modules (2014+) I've looked at, has been a bloated mess with one exception: Tales from the Yawning Portal - which sounds like a BOREDOM INDUCED title that had to get its Misbegotten Realms pecker trails all over modules that had nothing to do with Faerun. The only reason the bloat is minimal is that it's a reprint of far better modules with minimal work done to bring them up to 5th edition.
It still manages to shoe-horn some bullshit about a bar built over a dungeon, with an immortal bartender, since the Realms is all about cherry-picking and mashing together better ideas until they suck.
As mentioned previously, I feel modules should be MODULAR. I don't give two shits if Ed Greenwood wrote the module and wants me to give me the guided tour of Elminsters shoe room; I better be able to make it into the home of some other Gandalf rip-off easily, or I could have just written the adventure myself.
Since I'm working within a time limit, I use them. I'll touch on some of what I've done, and will be doing, with various modules. I'm going to start with an easy one - easy because for my particular campaign, it required minimal changes: Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan.
I've always loved Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Aztec-ish old-one death gawds, step pyramids, funky Indiana Jones-esque traps HELL YES!
First problem: No way the party would detour far enough south in the campaign wurld to get to a jungle.
Ok. Hmmmm. I do a quick review of my setting notes - the wood elves were the original nomadic dwellers in the region, became decadent and civilized (they so often come together), and over two centuries got thrown down by the high elves and their newly-created dragonborn footsoldiers.
Sweet. I see an angle already. Wood elves like woods. Evil blood-demanding gawds love blood and sacrifices, and tell their grugach worshipers, 'build us a pyramid'. The grugach do, and with proper sacrifices the jungle starts to grow out from the pyramid. Soon I have pointy-eared blood-priests spreading fear and jungle in my wurld history.
This gives me the option of slapping these bad-boys down in other terrain, with hints of the former green glory... and suspicion and fear when they find one in a thriving jungle - because that means the blood is flowing!
Great! So from here, I ditch the 'fell in a hole' start and make it a bizarre hidden snake tunnel mosaic connected to a nearby tomb, leading to room #1. A little bit of care describing the murals as pointy-eared assholes, instead of round-eared assholes, toss in a series of murals of the dragonborn as footsoldiers to the high elves (which was, at the time, a secret) and voila! It fits into my campaign and actually adds cool stuff for when the adventure is over.
The older modules tend to be better about this than the new stuff; and I'm sure that's by design - WoTC (rhymes with Naz... er, Yahtzee) wants you to pay for Ed Greenwood's Platinum Pornhub subscription, so buy The Sword Coast to find out more!
Fuck WoTC for not reprinting the original handouts by the way. Some of the new art is GREAT... but impossible to use without work. Get the original (even if its just for the handouts) at Drive-thru RPG ($4.99 at the time of this post) and if you're willing to do the conversion work, skip the WoTC reprint. The maps are shit in the scan; but there are nice options online.
Alright, that's it for now. Next time, I'll take a look White Plume Mountain and how it's tied into my game wurld now.
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