Verdict
While its gazetteers provide a useful intro to several possible campaign settings, Forgotten Realms: Adventures: In Faerûn doesn’t provide strong adventures to back them up. It seems to me Wizards of the Coast is so determined to demonstrate that adventure prep can be simple that it forgot to make sure the designs were actually appealing.
- Engaging, varied setting chapters
- Useful setting-based DM advice
- Unengaging adventure hooks
- Just not enough detail
In the wake of the 2024 rulebooks, Dungeons and Dragons seems to have adopted a new attitude to adventure design. This mantra aims to emphasize just how simple dungeon design can be. New adventure-based books like Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerûn have clearly been designed with this in mind, as they present hordes of adventure structures rather than pre-written one-shots.
With Adventures in Faerûn, Wizards of the Coast has certainly achieved its goal of showcasing simple adventures. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it forgot to make them interesting, too.
More specifically, Adventures in Faerûn is a setting-specific sourcebook whose primary content is adventure ideas. There are 51 pre-written adventure structures, many of which are presented as part of a gazetteer for one of Faerûn's most iconic locations: The Dalelands, Icewind Dale, Calimshan, The Moonshae Isles, and Baldur's Gate. One whole chapter is also dedicated to a pre-written mini-campaign, which is given more detail and is designed to be used in any of the above settings.
The setting chapters are genuinely interesting and useful reads. Thanks to careful guidance and minor mechanics, each location feels distinct and varied. Careful attention has been paid to the genres and topics that adventures might cover in each locale.
It's just the adventures themselves that leave me feeling let down.
Take, for example, Tears Fall, a level-five adventure from the book. The setup for this adventure is summarized in two sentences:
"Stars fall from the sky east of Waterdeep. Clergy in Waterdeep's House of the Moon divine these meteors are rare fragments from the Tears of Selûne. Ervina Tunnall (Medium Priest), a human priest from the House of the Moon, calls on the adventurers to recover the fallen Tears. She offers 500 GP for each Tear and gives the group a map of the Forlorn Hills, where the Tears fell."
You can invent your own reason why Ervina needs to outsource this task. Laziness, perhaps? Bureaucracy? There's no clear sense of urgency or danger for players to invest in, based on that description alone.
The rest of the adventure is structured around repeated Perception checks made by the party. Every day, everyone makes a Perception check. If the group hasn't collectively rolled 10 successes, they don't find the Tears that day. Instead, they face one of six random encounters. Rinse and repeat until the criteria is met, and then move onto the final encounter of the adventure.
Three of these encounters have essentially no relation to the adventure at hand. You tussle with a few Bugbears and Hill Giants who were minding their own business. You're assaulted at night by a Wraith that bears the mark of Shar - which is meant to foreshadow another encounter (provided the luck of the dice allow it to happen first).
The remaining 50% are more closely linked to the adventure. A friendly Young Copper Dragon will give you information that guarantees all your checks succeed on the next day (a practical measure to prevent players from rolling over and over and over). A Giant Owl "who can put the party on the right track if spoken to" seems to serve a similar purpose, but there is no indication what mechanical impact speaking to the Owl has.
Lastly, there's a rival group of Shar worshipers who are also searching for the Tears. The adventure doesn't give any hint at how you should resolve meeting them on the road, but presumably they're hostile to your party. In a more fleshed-out adventure, you might meet these rivals repeatedly on your race to the Tears. However, this random encounter is all that you see of them - they don't even show up when you find what you're looking for.
Instead, you're greeted by two guardians who will only allow "worthy folk" to take the Tears and must be convinced to hand them over. The only way that the adventure suggests getting them on your side is to give them one of said Tears (though, given how vastly your party outnumber them - and the fact a battlemap is provided - violent solutions are certainly implied).
I just spent 464 words summarizing this adventure for you. That's more words than Wizards of the Coast uses to explain the adventure itself.
If I had to describe Tears Fall with a single word, it would be 'functional'. There's nothing inherently broken about the design: my test run took exactly six days to find the Tears, meaning I experienced all the encounters and wasn't left wondering what to do.
Despite this, it's just so uninspiring. Exactly two words are used to describe the NPCs' personalities or motivations ("curious" for the Dragon, "territorial" for the Hill Giants). There's no inherent conflict for the party to face, just a check list of sights to see on their inevitable journey. It doesn't even really seem possible for the party to fail in what they set out to do - and if it is, that's because the DM has done the work of imagining it into the design's formless reality. There's no exciting set dressing, no climactic boss fight, no surprise twists of narrative, and no real reason to want to run this adventure.
Does it prove that a DM's session prep can be simple but still functional? Absolutely. Does it showcase the talent of the Dungeons and Dragons design team, encourage DMs to get creative with their encounter ideas, or offer the kind of value that would make me want to invest in a $60 book? Absolutely not.
Of course, Tears Fall is just one of 51 adventures in the book, and I can't deconstruct all of them here - but I think it's a representative example of what's on offer. While there are a small handful of compelling ideas among the adventure structures, the vast majority feel like campaign filler.
The chapter-long adventure, The Lost Library of Lethchauntos, is slightly more engaging, but that only serves to highlight the failings of the previous chapters further. The extended adventure follows a more familiar structure to readers of the previous 'edition-ish' books, and it showcases what Wizards of the Coast has always been good at: clear and approachable adventure formats that, while the contents of the adventure may be hit-and-miss, are structured in a way that makes it easy for DMs to pick up.
For years, I've complained that official Dungeons and Dragons adventures are too shallow. The most beloved campaign books, from Curse of Strahd to Wild Beyond the Witchlight, are revered because they have good ideas that have then been expanded and fixed by a dedicated community. The more mediocre products are flamed (especially by me) for failures of logic and lack of detail (the latter often causing the former).
In many cases, I forgive Wizards of the Coast for these sins, because there's only so much detail you can include in a 300-page campaign. That no longer applies when the book in question has so blatantly chosen quantity over quality. '50+ adventures' may sound great to the marketing department, but it was by no means necessary.
Adventures in Faerûn reminds me of an underwhelming Triple-A videogame: the kind that thinks 1,000 hours of content - where 999 of those are boring busywork and empty open world - is good value for money.
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