 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie and I've been running official adventures through my Patreon for a few years now and it's gotten me up close and personal with the way that 5e likes to format its books. So instead of making individual videos for every book I've decided to do one video for all of the books so that you can have a single repository for all your needs and also be able to easily compare Jacob's version opinions to my chat ones. As always keep in mind that pretty much all of this is just my opinion so if you are not me feel free to play your games however you want. And really quick I'd like to give a brief shoutout to my new patrons this month and since it's Pride Month I'm gonna do it in the gay way. Luca Amber. You're gay. Eric Groen. You're really gay. Rock Button. Oh you're totally gay. Thank you all so much for being gay and giving me your gay money. For the rest of you who might also want to give me your gay money you'll be happy to know that I've updated my Patreon recently so you can get your normal shoutouts, early access to my videos and potentially playing a game ran by the ultimate gay lord me. Now back to your regularly scheduled gay. But with that out of the way let's begin. The Lost Mine of Fandelver. So starting things off with the starter set starter module. LaMop manages to be a perfectly middle of the road adventure that dissolves all the fluff of the bigger girthier books so that you can get right into the main selling points of 5e. You start by escorting a caravan, you investigate a minor scuffle site and you fight some goblins all very D&D. Looking back it's actually interesting to me how different the mindset was back then compared to where we are now. D&D crafted an era of medieval fantasy and earlier adventures emphasize the medieval while later adventures emphasize the fantasy. LaMop also makes a point of not overstaying its welcome so that you could potentially craft your own story afterwards and it's also the first to implement the adventurer's league faction system which you can take or leave at your own discretion. Overall, great adventure for new players. 4 out of 10. Horde of the Dragon Queen. I cannot in my infinite knowledge of infinite mouth noises that make up the infinite spectrum of language express enough how terrible this adventure is. And I refuse to spend another second trying. Go watch my video. 4 out of 10. Rise of Tiamat. The sequel to the worst adventure in existence and it doesn't get any better from there. To begin this adventure you get sat down in front of a huge council of characters who are both incredibly important and also not important at all. And they will tell you to go out into the world and accomplish various oddball quests that have nothing to do with each other outside of a dragon cult did it. As a player you get no interesting NPCs to speak of. You get generic fights in generic locations so if you like games where you can turn your brain off and still get the gist of what's happening then this is for you. For DMs, this book is a nightmare because it barely explains the places it sends the characters. It forces you to role play 10 fucking NPCs at once and it revolves around this weird council dating sim thing that implies that it will majorly impact the final battle of ancient cosmic destiny. But then you flip the page to where they describe the battle of ancient cosmic destiny and it basically just has a sticky note that says figure it out loser. Don't buy this book. 4 out of 10. Princess of the Apocalypse. Never played this, heard it's bad. 4 out of 10. Out of the Abyss. I only played a few sessions of this game and I never ran it. But what I got through was a pretty rad experience. You start out locked up in the Underdark with a bunch of colorful characters including one mushroom person that we named Belieptus and when he died in my campaign so did my will to continue. Curse of Strahd! Everybody thinks that this game is amazing and I am no exception. It does a lot of things really well and it sets the classic monster movie vibe really well with the notable exception that it tries a few times to make things scary by making them too tough to fight and that's not scary, that's just annoying. Like Strahd is scary and impossible to beat but he's not scary because he can't be beat. That said, I completely reject this adventure as a sandbox since it leads you down a very specific path of getting important NPC lady to her important NPC destination and only then does it offer a few alternate routes for you to follow. It says that you can start in Kresik but if you don't start in Barovia Village then you definitely feel like you're missing out on the intended experience. Overall, 4 out of 10. Storm King's Thunder. I'm running this right now and when it came out it was compared to Strahd for also being open world and also being good. The goodness is variable since it uses a very contrived plot point of wizard giant kidnaps you in his flying wizard tower declares that you are important for no reason while also being an exposition dump and then takes you to wherever it is that you would like to go. But the open world is actually what I have a problem with. If you are going to have a giant map with many different points of interest that your players are very likely to go to it is in your best interest to include things to do in those places. A good chunk of this book has you wandering aimlessly around the Sword Coast and half of the locations have an idea of a quest for you to do but half of them don't. And a few of them had the cheeky idea of saying, hey you know Fandalin, that town that's marked on the map, well it was in another adventure book so you can just buy that one if you want to know anything about this town. Thanks for buying this by the way. Don't get me wrong, this module is great for inventive DMs but I really hate it when the book outright tells me to do the heavy lifting because it was too lazy to be a book right now. Okay module, 4 out of 10. Tales from the Yawning Portal. This was the first compilation book and the gimmick was that they were all popular adventures from older editions. Because it's a compilation there's no through line of quality so it's kind of a crapshoot whether you'll have a rad time or a bad time. I personally thought that they were all kind of mediocre but their classic medieval fantasy adventures from an era where knights and nobles and rogues were the main selling point so maybe I'm just too hip and in with the times to appreciate them. Speaking on the Tomb of Horrors specifically, this dungeon is a blast if you turn off your assumptions about D&D and bring in 5 disposable characters because it's just a meat grinder that plays off of the same rage game sense as Cat Mario if you don't present it that way it sucks but I love it. This whole book gets a 4 out of 10. Tomb of Annihilation. Never played it but I got very passionate reviews about it being either amazing or the worst thing ever and there's no in between. 4 out of 10. Dragon Heist. I love this module for everything it isn't. When I play this game I break apart the whole replayability nonsense because who the hell is playing the same adventure twice? I include all the villains, all the faction missions, expand on the factions, tavern keeping, neighbor shops and I turn the whole thing into a slice of life anime where you're just a normal ass dude who works at a tavern in the dangerous and mystical world of fantasy land. That said, without all my tweaks the base game is lackluster. The majority of the story is a linear path that's fun the first time but there's no point in repeating because the only thing that changes are the monsters you fight and the order in which you go to certain places. There isn't even a heist, just a fetched quest with a dungeon at the end. I'm left thoroughly disappointed and if you were looking for a roaring 20s inspired social spy thriller set in a dazzling city of lights you're gonna have to swing into a different game. 4 out of 10. Dungeon of the Mad Mage. First of all, this is not a sequel to Dragon Heist, they have nothing to do with each other. Second of all, this is not just a combat simulator, every level of the Mad Mage has increasingly cool shit in it including opportunities to talk to some of the coolest NPC ideas I've seen in a long time. Don't get me wrong, it's still a punch fest but it's a punch fest where you can have some idle chatter before all hell breaks loose. 4 out of 10. Ghost of Salt Marsh. Compilation to More Wet Edition. This book not only gives you 7 liquid based adventures but it also details the town of Salt Marsh and gives you rules on how to drive a boat. Not that it will ever come in handy because none of these sea adventures actually take place on the sea. One of the adventures isn't even sea adjacent, it's just a lizard-vote cave with some pools of water in it. That said, the later adventures are pretty rad. I especially like The Isle of the Abbey as well as The Last Adventure because they evoke the feel of HP Lovecraft in their storytelling and I could not be more pleased. 4 out of 10. Descent into Avernus. I privated my old review of this adventure because I made it after just reading through the book and boy did I not get a good impression the first time. Having DM'd it thrice, I can tell you a few things that you might want to know before going into it. First, it is linear as fuck with only one instance of diverging paths in an otherwise basic scavenger hunt of go to this place and talk to this person but they need help from this person and this place so you go to that place and that person needs help and You don't play this game for the story. You play this game because you get to ride on scrap metal wall machines and blast heavy metal as you crash into the warlords of Avernus and their posseys. That is cool as shit and what the game lacks in a compelling narrative, it more than makes up for in motorbikes and diesel fuel. The other thing to note is that the Baldur's Gate section of this adventure is useless and you should never play it because it has just as much linear bad storytelling coupled with unbalanced fights in uninteresting locations that only serve to take time that you could be spending crashing a wrecking ball through an infernal watch tower and it has so very little to do with the plot that I completely removed it in my third playthrough and nobody noticed. I suggest that you do it too, 4 out of 10. Rhyme of the Frost Maiden I haven't ran this one but I am playing in it currently and while I haven't gotten out of 10 towns yet the whole experience so far has been deeply enjoyable. The isolationism that creeps in coupled with the long stretches on the ice sheets of the dale where anything could be lurking just underneath the snow has made this adventure feel, in a word, chilling. It's not a horror game per se but the unknowable terrors keep it in the creepy department and it makes me want to do a video in the future about how D&D manages to make games scary. 10 towns itself is well defined and I like the fact that you can start anywhere and then just go anywhere and each town has stuff to do when stuff to go to. It's a much better open world experience than Storm King's Thunder, keeping in mind that I'm still in the beginning of the section myself, I will give this a reduced score of 4 out of 10. Candlekeep Mysteries This one makes me upset. I haven't gotten the chance to play any of these adventures but I really want to. I love mysteries and I don't want to spoil everything if I end up getting the chance to play it so here I am foregoing my responsibility as an internet review person to maintain my ignorance of what might end up being my favorite book of them all. That said, for the alternate cover alone I give this a 4 out of 10. Buuuut then I'm about to do it. I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to leave a like, comment, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford more ratings than just 4 out of 10. But yeah, Davi out.