When I Ran TSR Adventures In 5e D&D

My attempt to make the new school like the old school

So me and my friends played 5e from about 2015-2020. During that time I was also trying to get my group to try out the OSR every now and then, but it was just such a hard sell. They were already happy with a traditional fantasy game so why learn a new system? One of us DMed us through most of Skull & Shackles but doing the conversion work and keeping us on the adventure path was difficult so that campaign died after we claimed the rock but before we met the pirate council. Sometime in 2018 I pitched my group the idea of a level 1-20 game but we play through the classic D&D modules that we’d never touched. I’d entirely converted the Village of Hommlet and the Moathouse and was ready to go. Fortunately, I found a fan conversion of the whole temple so I was spared from doing that work. Halfway through the temple, I discovered Classic Modules Today and used those for most of the later adventures. Those saved me tons of work.

But that idea of the 1-20 campaign is what really got my friends into the game. They only kinda cared about playing the classic adventures. I didn’t run all the adventures on this list, but I essentially wanted to try out as many adventures as possible from this list. Someone on the Dragonsfoot forums basically asked Gary Gygax what his Greyhawk campaign would if he ran a level 1-20 campaign using only published modules.

Here’s what our campaign looked like:

The Village of Hommlet: This classic adventure is an awesome way to start a D&D campaign. It’s the classic “village and dungeon” combo. In my campaign, the PCs linked up with Elmo (I renamed him as Elmer to avoid constant Sesame Street jokes) and he was their constant source of rumors. They really didn’t dig much into the actual town, the secret druids, or ever find out about the evil dues who ran the general store. This adventure ended with them letting Lareth escape with his life (he was forced to swear to never return to Hommlet) and taking that giant crawfish back to Hommlet for a big crawfish boil. There were some remarks about the moathouse’s giant spiders and zombies and how the bandits could possibly live there. But that didn’t impact the fun at all. Even though some of these old modules can be hard to read (compared to more modern layouts) they still pack a lot of fun and are worth playing through.

Temple of Elemental Evil: This was obviously the adventure that took up the biggest section of the campaign. I think we spent around 4-5 months of weekly game nights going through the temple and the elemental nodes. My players were pretty exhaustive in their exploration. In the end, Lareth the Beautiful came back in a ritual that turned him into a drider (I wanted to foreshadow that Drow involvement) and the PCs journey to the different nodes to get all the things that they needed to destroy the Golden Skull. For rescuing the prince and destroying the cult, they were all given titles and the cleric was awarded lands once belonging to a knight who had been secretly assisting the cult. I’m keeping brief here because otherwise I’ll start getting long. If folks want more details on this (or other adventures/aspects of this campaign) then let me know in the comments below.

The Mistress of Sorrow: My players needed a break from dungeon crawling. Plus, I wanted my players to start messing around with domain level play. This adventure was later revised and updated for Ruination Pilgrimage. Check out this post for more on it.

The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth: This one was pretty much run as written. I absolutely love this module. The original release was impressive for the extra booklet that introduced a lot of new monsters that later made it’s way in hardback bestiaries. The module was originally a tournament module so the actual dungeon still bears some of those trappings. I believe this may be the first D&D adventure that had real procedure for overland travel. And the way it expressed overland travel was really helpful to me. It was the first time I ever felt like I did a good job at that style of adventuring. For more, go check out the episode of This Ol’ Dungeon where we talked a whole lot about this module. Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun didn’t quite excite me enough so I skipped that one.

Dungeonland: This is the only one of these adventures that I’d ever run before. This adventure is super silly and I love it. That said, the forest area and the royal court is super confusing in how its written. Both times that I’ve run it, I’ve just avoided the forest and just kinda done the royal court in a very ad-hoc kind of way. That said, my players did not vibe with this one. One in particular told me that he hated Alice in Wonderland stuff so that kinda threw a wrench into things. They basically murderhobo’d their way through here. After the trickery from the white rabbit, they threw him into a sack and basically interrogated him. If they didn’t like his answers, they’d swing him against a tree. I think they eventually started pouring oil on him and threatening to burn him alive. The adventure ended after they found the mock-dragon and solved its issue, then it offered to take them back to the entrance and then it basically made a reverse waterfall to get them out of here. I also planned to run The Land Beyond The Magic Mirror, but decided not to after how this one turned out. You really, really got to have player buy in for this adventure. The previous time I ran this adventure, I had folks excited about it and it was a ton of goofy fun. This was still fun, but in an entirely different way.

Tomb of Horrors: This was a good adventure to follow up such silliness. A deadly dungeon crawl that is a puzzle to solve. I used the 5e version from Tales From The Yawning Portal. Don’t do that. As written, many of the threats have been totally neutered. Poison that was once save or die is now just “ save or take a bit of damage and you have disadvantage for a while”. Also, the PCs can just cast Feast of Heroes and make themselves immune to poison. And Paladins and other classes often have auras that give bonuses to saving throws. My players were very smart about how they went through here… for the most part.

But those extra 5e PC abilities and the poor conversion really took the teeth away from the moments that still could have had real impact. I suggest changing the poison to something else, like disintegration rays that also have an exhaustion effect. I’m not kidding. I improv’d that coming out of a treasure chest near the end and, even though the avoided the trap, it inspired fear in a way that “more lame poison” would not have. Also don’t use the standard stat block for Acerak that is suggested. If you do, he’s not going to be a threat. Try going with the old way where only magic items and spells have effects and it works different from normal damage.

Steading of the Hill Giant Chief: I pretty much ran this as written and the players had a pretty great time. They managed to sneak around the complex, keeping fights quick and quiet. Or at least for most of the time. They eventually freed all the orcs and had a big blowout fight with the remaining hill giants. However, those orcs later became bandits in the area. It was a pretty good time, but I think it felt a little bland to my players after all the different adventures they’d been on before.

Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl: So as written, this adventure seemed like it was going to take way longer than what I thought would be good. So I redid the maps and removed a good chunk of the areas. Session 1 ended with the Remhoraz fight, but ice giants were using pheromone bags and throwing them at the PCs so that the Remhoraz would target them. The halfling got swallowed, nearly died, but actually delivered the killing blow from inside. It was awesome. The second session ended with a big fight that included the Jarl and a white dragon. However, one of the PCs spent 90% of the time suffering from dragon fear so he couldn’t really do anything. Kinda stopped liking that mechanic after it ruined the fight for that player. But overall a great adventure.

Hall of the Fire Giant King: This one was also done mostly as written. I found it really odd that the fight with the Fire King is basically the first thing to happen, but it was a good change of pace from the previous adventures. By this time, the PCs were tiring of fighting giants. G1-3 took about 6-8 game nights to run though. But there was a good mix of fire giants with unique weapons and many of the combats took place in interesting rooms. They also got to free various prisoners, finding the eldritch temple (where one of the PCs went mad), got a little scared by the Rakshasa (who appears as human but really didn’t act like one), and had to pay tribute to a dragon so that they didn’t have to fight it. Then they discovered the Drow’s involvement and the course of the campaign changed once again.

Elzemon & The Blood Drinking Box: At this point, I was doing more reading into the higher level modules on Gary’s list and realized that most of them were not going to work for my group. Mordenkain’s Fantastic Adventure was a little to “funhouse” for my group’s preferences so I was better off skipping it. Things went pretty hard into the homebrew territory. I used this level-1 DCC adventure for level-13 5e characters, but reframed the adventure to take place inside someone’s dream. The group needed a change of pace from dungeon crawling.

Basically the PCs were committing corporate espionage “Inception style” for the halfling mafia. In exchange, the mafia would help out with their growing wine business that arose from the Cleric’s lands. The mafia would also use wine shipments to smuggle various things but the PCs never found out about that (they never even tried to investigate this). The PCs were given knowledge of how to actually enter the Underdark and rumors of possible ways that they could impact Lolth’s strength at home.

D1-2/Q/ Dungeon of the Mad Mage/ Journey to the Center of Aereth: These adventures contain a lot of hexcrawling in the underdark. I didn’t feel like I’d effectively run that type of game and also didn’t think that my group was interested in that type of game. So I basically made it into a point crawl. I also incorporated a ton of material from DCC’s Journey to the Center of Aereth with a side trek through level 14 of 5e’s Mad Mage so that they could fight a bunch of Mindflayers.

The PCs were journeying through the underdark to try to find a way to disrupt Lolth’s authority. The idea was that if there is unrest at home, that she will be unable to send her forces outwards. They PCs found an Drow military research center, rescued a Drow priest of a rival god, and then lead a raid on a major Drow city. During the raid, they freed a large number of mostly Drow slaves and they slew an avatar of Lolth. For the Lolth avatar, I used a giant spider monster god thing from the Peterson’s Cthulhu Mythos for 5e. So there was still the hints of Q1, but Lolth’s giant robo-spider ship was simply turned into an avatar aspect of her.

Colossus Arise: So back in the Halls of the Fire King, the PCs had named a cloud giant named Corona. I named her after the stellar phenomena. Not the beer. But of course her name got recontextualized not too long after that… I wanted to end the campaign with some spelljamming so I had her come back on behalf and offer her ship to the PCs. She’d been sent by Mordenkainen, who also just contacted the PCs. To space they will go! Well, not quite yet. Cause I off-handedly described the cover art for Colossus Arise as something that’s happening out in the Duchy of Geoff and they immediately went “I want to go do that!”

I’d kinda skimmed the adventure at some point prior, but just barely. So I ran a level-8 DCC adventure for a level-16 D&D 5e game with literally zero prep. It was a little rough, but still really awesome. After the PCs ended the module, they decided that they were going to keep the skeleton of the headless giant. As they already had connections with caravans via their wine business they were able to easily transport it back to their HQ. Of course, they didn’t want to transport rotting meat so they paid displaced villagers to strip the bones. There may have been some reports of people eating the undead titan meat and strange cults forming. That never really got resolved. After the bones were transported to the PC’s HQ, they were stored in the caves dug out from the nearby rock quarry. The warforged wizard had somewhat vague plans but he thought gilding the 100 foot tall skeleton in silver seemed cool so made that happen. More about that later.

The 998th Conclave of Wizards: So this is an odd DCC module. It’s half-adventure, half-setting. And the setting is a wizard space-city with robot-cops. If you break the law, you get put in a tiny cube. And someone can buy your cube and thus have you as a servant for the rest of your sentence. As written, it’s supposed to be an investigation about who killed one of the important wizards in the city.

However, I changed it to be an investigation focusing on cosmic wizards who escaped from a planet quarantined for its degenerate usage of magic. Yup, they were wizards from Athas. Most of my players were also in my old Dark Sun campaign so I thought this would be a cool callback. Also, as players, they’d know how bad defiling magic could be if other worlds started doing it. Most of the investigation was rather silly, as they hired a guide who was basically the most useless wizard ever. My group had a habit of adopting/hiring any PCs that showed the slightest capability. So this guy was basically an elf past his prime. He was fat, divorced, homeless, and let children practice their spells on him in exchange for food (he favored sloppy joes). Anyway, the PCs found out that the Athasian wizards had passed through, gathered some very esoteric materials, and planar traveled to another planet. While here, the PCs did some shopping. The warforged wizard wanted a head for his giant skeleton and bought the corpse of a beholder (and essentially had it mailed back home). They also made friends with a fish-man who basically used a diving suit to walk on land. He was intrigued by the warforged wizard’s idea of making a mech skeleton and decided to help out with that.

The Star Wound of Abaddon: Yup, a level-3 DCC adventure for level-18 5e characters. And it was a good time. When the PCs arrive, the Athasian wizards have already completed a defiling spell that killed basically the entire planet, and left. The PCs went through this adventure, mostly as written. I just put a stellar gateway at the end so that the PCs could finish hunting down the Athasian wizards. By the way, this is an excellent adventure.

The Finale Session - Magic Mecha vs Arch Lich Dragon: I knew that I had to wrap things up quick. I told the players to just level their PCs up to level-20. We’d been doing milestone leveling all along and things had been going at a really accelerated pace since the end of the G1-3. The final boss was the stats of an arch lich and an ancient red dragon combined to represent the concept of a level-30 dragon from Dark Sun. I took the best parts of each of those creatures and just smushed them together, then gave it 30d30+330 hp and had it use a d30 for all its attacks. It took a whole 4-hour session to kill this thing. That probably seems like too much but it was actually really awesome.

We used miniatures for this fight. The dude whose house we played at had a red dragon that he’d recently painted (at this time, we were each running every other week and he was doing Red Hand of Doom) and a Gundam of comparable size. I drew a star (Yag, the one mentioned in Star Wound), a few asteroids, the corpses of dead gods/ their avatars or heralds, and lines that represented range bands of the star’s gravitational force. The PCs piloted their titanic sized mecha made from the bones of a titan and the head of a beholder. The beholder skull had 2 pilots seats, plus separate control mechanisms for the arms and the legs. The pilot seats would allow a PC to cast spells at size appropriate ranges for the kind of creature that they were in. The arms allowed PCs to use more typical martial powers. And the leg controls allowed movement/ special maneuvers and the usage of “power-ups”. When the mech was attacked, the pilots could choose to absorb the damage or allow the mech to take it. But if the mech took too much damage, it’d explode and they’d all die. And PC could use an action to switch seats if they wanted to.

It required a maneuver plus normal movement to move a range band away form the star, but it was easy to get close. But you took radiation damage if you were in the closest range band. The floating asteroids could block line of site or be used as thrown weapons. And the corpses gods, avatars, and heralds could be used as weird power-ups, armor, or weapons. I generated these on the fly by using The Lesser Key to the Celestial Legion. In no time at all, the PCs’ silver skeleton mech melded with a dead vine herald (gaining armor) and was using a pillar of eyes as a baseball bat. I pulled a punch one time, refusing to use the Power Word Death spell. I should have killed the wizard. But all survived, it was an awesome combat and they all got to narrate what their PCs did after the end of the campaign. Most notably, the warforged wizard used the green star of Yag to further align the divine magic conduits to the world of Athas, returning all gods to the setting of Dark Sun while simultaneously cutting off all arcane magic. Then he traveled to the planet, not caring about the dangers of space as a robot. That said, once he reaches a planet with no arcane magic, he was going to die. But he didn’t think that far ahead. I gave a little narration of what happened to various side characters and basically described a new adventuring party forming to set out on their own adventures. It was a really satisfying way to end it for everyone involved.

Did 5e support “classic” style adventures?

No, not really. But we still had lots of fun The 5e skill system eliminated a lot of the “player skill” side of things. The lack of gold-for-XP means that you have to greatly reduce treasure amounts, but you’re likely to still gives them loads of gold that they have no good use for. So you have to create an ad-hoc domain level system since 5e doesn’t really support that either. Add in things like death saving throws, passive perception (and items/ skill expertise that make that worse), and you end up making a lot of house rules. HP bloat also means that combats take much longer and players act with less caution, which changes the pacing/ context of classic adventures too.

How’d I do those high level conversions?

I almost always just made it up in the moment. I knew the abilities of the PCs and what to target. I used magic crossbows that made you make a death save even if you had remaining hp, spells that cause exhaustion, and would roll 2d10+10 damage (or however much I felt like in the moment) because I felt like that seemed like a decent amount of damage. The trick was just knowing what would be appropriate amount of threat for whatever situation the PCs had gotten themselves into. So all art, no science.

Why did I choose those adventures for high-level?

I took at look at the A-series. I really didn’t think those would be interesting to my players and I didn’t get that excited about them. Tournament style modules were just not a good fit. Besides, the pace of leveling in 5e and my group’s playstyle didn’t really feel like it was going work with that. The higher level modules like Isle of the Ape just didn’t appear to be a great adventure in my eyes. That one’s got an overload of backstory, too many restrictions on high level spells on the island, and a “gotcha” factor that I just didn’t like. The Necropolis was another dungeon crawl and didn’t feel bombastic enough to be a finale.

That said, I was rushing the end of the campaign. It was early 2020 and folks were starting to talk about Covid and my son was about to be born. I think the campaign ended maybe a week or two before both those things happened. And that was the last time that I touched 5e! These days, I say the following about running 5e, “I don’t how the sausage is made cause I made the sausage. I don’t want to eat any more sausage.” I’ve tried out plenty of other games since then but it’s primarily been DCC. But it wasn’t long before I was contributing to the Gongfarmer’s Almanac and started Dragon Peak Publishing soon enough after that. I hope y’all have enjoyed me rambling on about my gaming history. It’s been good to write it all down even if its just for posterity’s sake.

What’s the highest level you ever ended a campaign at? Did you take a break after running a big long campaign or need to switch the type of game that you played?

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The Conquest of Chaos

A levels 0-5 campaign path for Dungeon Crawl Classics! Six adventures inspired by the classic GDQ series take the PCs from humble beginning to fighting the primal forces of chaos and saving their world from certain doom!