Sly Flourish's Fantastic Adventures for 5e: Ten short adventures for your fifth edition fantasy roleplaying game.

Very pleasing

These are some beautiful short adventures that, once you've read through them, you'll find lots of ways to drop into your campaign.  It has almost everything I like without too much extra: evocative locations, beautiful maps, three-dimensional dungeons, NPCs with real motivations, several possible outcomes, lights, psychos, Furbies, sunburnt drifters with soapsuds beards. The hooks are great despite even several uses of "save the town" motivation. The locations are memorable and do a decent job of exuding atmosphere.If you're not sure what you're getting or if you'll like it, the author has a preview with almost an entire adventure on their website.One of the biggest selling points is that these adventures are actually easy to run for a DM with a little experience.  Too many adventures are written as stories, with historical information that's difficult to convey to the player and buried plot details. These ones, however, are mostly free of extraneous details, and also have rumor/secret tables, good read-aloud text, and a good summary.There are several missing best practices that keep this from being exceptionally good.  One is keys to the map, without which the small unlabelled maps can be slightly confusing.  Another is that the dungeons and enemies can be a little static.  I'd prefer a development section to say things like "if players fight here, enemies may come in from adjacent rooms" Handouts for the PC's would have been a nice touch, like the handwritten map for Cult of Dusk.There's often no place in the intro, not even in the "secrets" section, to discover important secrets like what Rachel Whitesparrow hid underground or what the "kind old man" from a "peaceful religious order" is up to. For an adventure that's supposed to be easy to scan, I'm surprised they can't simply add a sentence to each rumor/secret explaining the full truth behind it.  A final note is that these adventures are decent in flexibility/railroading. Several of the dungeons are linear in layout, and especially in the Whitesparrow catacombs there are too many characters that "fight to the death and refuse to speak if captured or charmed". There's almost no interactive elements like monsters that emerge only when disturbed, random encounters, things to break, or containers to open. The author probably decided that additional options would bog down the adventure and make it more confusing to reference and run, and I like that simplicity. It does leave more up to the DM though as far as supporting creative and open-ended play.In summary, these are versatile, thematic, and generally easy to run.  Not as complex or detailed as some but that's both a weakness and a strength.  These are among my favorite adventures I've read recently but not necessarily the best of all.

the book does have the adventures as described, but while they are "quick", they dont have the stats for any of the "monsters" so you are still going to be doing some research as a DM to prep. I am disappointed that they snuck in the children's book with no explanation that i could find, and, while I can use it, I won't be in a hurry to purchase any more of that type ADDED: just saw from a different comment that these are basically printed as they are ordered, and since no other reviews mention the children's book, i am assuming this was just an error when they were printing it- at least that makes more sense-lol

I like this and will use it but one thing that could have been done better was the area and town maps. They were not really helpful (not put in a grid for distance and direction) nor were they interesting artistically. The adventures are easy to follow and broken into blocks that are clearly labled so the information is easy to find again. Having a bullet point list of clues and secrets for each adventure is very handy. I hope they make more products and possibly bring the price point down a bit.

I absolutely love the stories in this module. They offered some really great inspiration for the one-shot I’m about to run for my birthday. The book has enough info for a novice DM to run the thing without feeling adrift, but it also provides a lot of room for improvising or tangents.This collection is great for novice players, veteran players, and everyone in-between. I’m definitely going to get the other books by these folks.

The people behind d&d these days don't think narratives are important. Adventurers League quests completely lack them now. When I pay for a product I want narratives, that's what's most important to me. I bought Fantastic Adventures after reading the latest version of the Lazy Dungeon Master since I really liked it. The adventures are true to the DMing style presented in that book. Great Adventures! Thanks Michael Shea for an excellent product. Looking forward to more products like this one and to my next purchase of Fantastic Locations.

Some good seeds here. I like the ideas and plot hooks loose like this. My game group is just too undisciplined for adventures that are too linear with too many hoops to jump through.

My style is a creative one and my young adult son wanted an adventure ran for his birthday. I had a few days notice and bought this PDF. After the adventure several of the group said it was the best game they had ever played! This is the way to go.

Well designed and produced volume of short adventures for fantasy role playing games. The layout is clear, easy to read and follow, the illustrations are very good, the maps adequate for purpose.These 10 adventures all pull off an impressive double success-intricate, involving plots coupled with enough gaps and incompleteness to allow customisation. A rosta of NPCs (some recurring in more than one adventure),clues to plant, hooks to introduce the action and a selection of suggested follow ups are all included for every entry. This in itself is impressive. That the adventures are all very playable and interesting is even more laudable.The village of Whitesparrow is the setting for the ten adventures, and it is given a brief overview. So much nefarious activity seems to be centred here that making Whitesparrow a town or small city might seem more sensible.My favourite entries are "The Gleam in the King's Eye" and " The Well of the Black Sun" which feature memorable , unusual locations and enjoyable, entertaining challenges.Nominally designed for use with 5th edition D&D, actually, there are few stats or rules and this resource could be utilised for most RPGs-"The Well of the Black Sun" would make a good Call of Cthulhu adventure.

This is the worst book ive ever brought. The adventures in this book are unusable, mostly because the maps are not labeled so you have no idea what locations are where and as its location based that destroys the useability of these "adventures".Each adventure, is just a list of notes for an adventure, but not an actual adventure written out. You get a list of npcs, a list of secrets, then "start", then a list of locations. The "start" entry is the only bit which is an actual adventure piece, it sets the first scene just like a wotc published adventure but thats it, after that you just get a list of locations and unuseable maps that arent having the labels of the locations on them, and its almost impossible to work out what is supposed to go where.If you are looking for a book of loose ideas, and poor notes about possible adventures you have to make yourself, then this book is for you.If you want a book of adventures that you can run as a DM, this book offers you nothing.

I've never DM'ed before, and me and a friend both ran one of the adventures from this in parallel - it has detailed instructions and is also very easy to riff off (even providing some suggestions for how you might customise the adventure if you were so inclined). My friend and I ended up running the same adventure in two very different ways (her PC's never even got into a fight, whereas mine finished with an all out blazing battle). Haven't read the other 9 yet, as I'm hoping to play in some of them, but overall a very satisfying and easy-to-run experience.

These are some, if not the best linked adventures I have found. I have been able to drop them into my own home brew world with home brew rules straight out of the book. You are given everything you need and leaves out all the stuff you dont need. The balance is perfect. All the adventures can be used for moderately low magic setting to full on magic. This is better than all the other campaign books I have bought. Highly recommended.

As a fairly inexperienced DM, this product is exactly what I have been looking for! Not being the most creative soul in the world, one of the hardest parts of my role is creating original and engaging storylines for my new players to explore. I can spend days stressing over composing new material that I think my players will enjoy, when really all I want to do is have fun rolling some dice with my friends. This book allows me to do that. The mysteries are intriguing, the characters are complex and the setting is dynamic and unique.My only suggestion for any sequels the author might have planned is as follows: some groups prefer a one-shot style where they sit down and play through a stand-alone, episodic adventure every week. If this describes your group, then this is perfect. However, some players are more engaged when an overarching narrative is present to string these seemingly isolated quests together, such as an enigmatic, villainous mastermind who pulls the strings from behind the scenes, or a countdown to an ominous, catastrophic event that threatens the entire vale (of course, these are things you can integrate yourself, but I feel an authorial suggestion wouldn't go amiss). The book could benefit from an optional super-narrative. Also, the inclusion of one or two classical, funhouse-style dungeon crawls would be nice, but I understand that's just my personal taste.In conclusion, I absolutely recommend this product for up-and-coming Game Masters who lack the time and energy necessary to write convoluted, unfolding adventures of their own, and who just want to 'pick up and play' and enjoy an evening of nerdy, orc-slaying, fantasy fun with their friends!