Descent into the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, the first adventure from Wizards of the Coast’s DnD 50th Anniversary Play Series, is available to download for free from DnD Beyond. This DnD 5e dungeon crawl comes with an optional tournament scoring system, harkening back to the classic first edition module it’s based on.
Descent Into the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (Descent) is intended for a party of ninth-level adventurers. The titular caverns were once the lair of the Witch Queen Iggwilv, who had a nasty habit of allying with DnD demons, and though she’s (apparently) gone the caverns are littered with the fallout from her incautious magical meddling.
You can get the adventure for free from DnD Beyond provided you have an account with the service. The module comes with six pregenerated DnD character sheets offering a choice of DnD classes and DnD races for you to pick up and play with. Wizards of the Coasts estimates that it should take a single session of three to four hours to complete.
The module is part of the DnD 50th Anniversary Play Series, a series of adventures and play events that Wizards is promoting via Wizards Play Network stores. Wizards has also partnered with online game-finding service PlayGames, where you can find a variety of online DMs running the module via Roll20 and other virtual tabletop systems.
The module can be played as normal, or with optional ‘tournament scoring’. This sets a strict four hour time limit on the adventure, limits the party to a single short rest, and adds a score sheet that the DM will use to track the party’s performance. Stores and conventions that run the adventure as an organised play event may choose to offer prizes, and for everyone else there’s bragging rights.
Younger DnD players may not be familiar with this mode of play, but in the earliest days of the game, it was normal for groups of players to attend competitive DnD tournaments, where parties would each take on the same tournament dungeon module in a test of skill. These modules were often extremely hostile to the players – the famous (and famously lethal) Tomb of Horrors began life as a tournament module.
Gary Gygax wrote the original Lost Caverns of Tsojconth (spelling intentional) as a tournament adventure for the 1976 Wintercon V convention. In 1982 he expanded it into adventure module S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, the version that Descent is based on.
A longer version of the adventure will be released as part of the upcoming DnD book ‘Quests from the Infinite Staircase’. Check our guide to the DnD release schedule to find out when that’s coming, and what else is on the rundown for this year.