Tales from the Yawning Portal (Dungeons Dragons, 5th Edition) by Wizards of the Coast

Tales from the Yawning Portal (Dungeons Dragons, 5th Edition) Reviews

• 
  Michael

  I picked up Tales From the Yawning Portal alongside the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual for 5th Edition because I wanted to see familiar faces. Tales is seven classic adventures collected from previous rule sets, updated to modern conventions, and presented in a format that would allow them to be used, loosely, as a campaign to take your PCs from first level up through the mid-teens or thereabouts via 5E rules. I'm also a sucker for compilation modules because I find them fun to read, and they help me understand some of the mechanics, even if I currently find myself bereft of players to fold, spindle, and/or mutilate.
  
  In any case, that was my expectation at the time of purchase, and while I don't regret buying it, I feel it's severely lacking in several areas that keep it from being the product it so clearly wanted to be. In my opinion there are a few things you need to know before adding Yawning Portal to your shopping cart.
  
  Before I get into the problems, let's start with the good: if I were going to pick seven adventures to adapt and update to 5E rules, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better selection than the Wizards team did here. While its choices are heavily weighted towards the earlier days of module design, there's a reason those modules are beloved by the grognards of yesteryear--they kicked serious ass. Additionally, while each of these adventures was published for a specific setting, the Wizards design team offers up potential areas for placement in Dragonlance, Eberron, Forgotten Realms, and Greyhawk campaigns. The seven modules featured within Tales From the Yawning Portal are:
  
  - The Sunless Citadel by Bruce R. Cordell. This introductory-level module from Third Edition's early days at the turn of the century is, in my opinion, one of the best-written adventures for any rule set to teach players the ins and outs of adventuring and DM's the ins and outs of refereeing. The party is called on to investigate a ruin which fell into a crevasse during a disaster years ago. Regardless of race or class, there's something for any PC to contribute to this scenario; it's been a favorite ever since I acquired it. Characters who explore the Citadel thoroughly should find something that leads them on to the next branch of their journey into...
  
  - The Forge of Fury by Richard Baker. The second adventure published for Wizards of the Coast's Third Edition adventure path, it picks up where Sunless Citadel left off and propels the PCs into an ancient Dwarven stronghold, overrun by a horde of orcs. Despite falling to the orcish siege, rumors persist of fine blades and other dwarven artifacts yet undiscovered and unclaimed...rumors which should set the heart of any adventurer, and especially any dwarf, aflutter with the possibilities. Those who survive the descent beneath the mountain will emerge well-suited for a trip to...
  
  - The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan by Harold Johnson and Jeff Leason. Originally wrritten as a tournament module and, as such, it's significantly more dangerous than the previous entries. Not that Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury are cake walks (Forge especially will not hesitate to backhand you for looking at it funny), but they were written as individual segments meant to be overcome which led players further along the path. Tamoachan, by contrast, is a one-shot meant to test the mettle of a small group trapped in an awful place with no way out except forward. If your players all wind up dead at any point during a Yawning Portal campaign for reasons not directly related to their own stupidity, odds are good it's this module claiming their TPK (Total Party Kill) virginity. Tamoachan is the point in this particular campaign where rubber hits the road. Anyone besting the hidden shrine earns the honor of moving on to discover...
  
  - White Plume Mountain by Lawrence Schick. Originally written to impress Gary Gygax into giving him a job at TSR, Schick's 1979 adventure became one of the most memorable and best-loved AD&D modules in history. White Plume Mountain is a trap-laden crawl through a mad wizard's lair in the hollowed-out interior of an active volcano, where the PCs are on the lookout for three stolen weapons of immense power: Wave, Whelm, and Blackrazor. Assuming the PCs bring the weapons back to their original owners, they should be ready, after a period of carousing and recovery, to take on...
  
  - Dead in Thay by Scott Fitzgerald Gray. The newest adventure featured in Yawning Portal is a mere three years old, published in 2014, and written as a rules playtest for what would eventually become 5E, so it required the least amount of work in terms of conversion. Some changes, however, were mandated as it was the second of a three-part campaign set in the Sword Coast region of the Forgotten Realms, and like Tamoachan before, it was intended for large-scale playtest use as opposed to home campaign play. Gray claims to have written the adventure as a tribute to classic killer modules such as Tomb of Horrors, and dungeon crawls like the Ruins of Undermountain. It's easily the largest and most time-consuming adventure in the book, with over 100 encounter areas taking up nearly sixty of Yawning Portal's 248 pages. That's the bad news. The good news is PC's surviving the slog should be well equipped enough to handle...
  
  - Against the Giants by Gary Gygax. Originally meant to be played as tournament modules, Yawning Portal presents The Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and Hall of the Fire Giant King as one mammoth compilation. The original adventure path later continued with the two-part D-series and culminated with a battle against Lolth in Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits, but characters who halt the giants' plans here earn the right to take on one of the deadliest adventures ever written in...
  
  - The Tomb of Horrors by Gary Gygax. How deadly is The Tomb of Horrors? Well, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is 'not likely to cause nightmares' and 10 is '"Why are you cutting off my face with a toenail clipping?!"', the titular Tomb would weigh in around...forty-seven (shorthand for: "I've flayed every inch of skin from your body, poured salt on your raw nerves, dissolved your eyeballs with acid, punctured your eardrums, removed your tongue, filled your mouth with diarrhea, stapled your lips closed, and superglued a cattle prod to your prostate...now I will begin to torture you.") You survive the Tomb by being smarter than one of the guys who literally created Dungeons & Dragons so, you know, good luck with that. Naturally it capstones the campaign: by the time you've done everything else between Yawning Portal's covers, there's nowhere else to go except into the mouth of madness. Surviving characters (ha!) get to retire with whatever's left of their bodies and sanity.
  
  So there you have it: seven classic adventures, one long path towards level counts of 15+, and all for less than $10 per adventure (and way less than that if you consider Against the Giants as three adventures as opposed to one). What's not to like?
  
  First, a simple observation: I find it hilarious there are no 4E modules in here. Not because I'm a fan of 4E (I'm not), but how sad is it there wasn't a single one awesome or memorable enough to make it here? However, on that note, I should also say I find it equal parts amusing and sad that there aren't any 2E adventures in here either, considering there were more adventures, modules, campaign settings, and supplements written for 2E than any other version. The change from 1E to 2E is nowhere near as drastic as from 2E to 3E, but it's still telling that out of all the ink spilled to give us Planescape, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Spelljammer, none of it was worthy enough for inclusion here.
  
  My second observation is that it's been a long time since I saw a professionally-produced product from Wizards of the Coast so obviously in need of another copy-editing pass. This is doubly inexcusable when you see mistakes introduced in this book which were not a part of the original texts. For the love of Pelor, is it that hard to run spellcheck? I don't expect perfection in this area, and I myself can hardly brag of being the best writer on the planet, but the mistakes begin on page 10 (literally 2 pages into the first adventure) with a random closed parentheses lacking its opener, and continue on from there with dropped letters, punctuation problems, and missing words. This wouldn't be such a big deal, but the cover price for this hardback is $50, and that makes me feel the proofreader should take a couple Melf's Minute Meteors to the scrotum in exchange.
  
  My third qualm is with the product title itself. "The Yawning Portal" is a specific tavern located in the city of Waterdeep within the Forgotten Realms. This wouldn't be a big deal except that only Dead in Thay is explicitly set in the Realms, and even then it takes place nowhere near Waterdeep. I understand the desire to use a particular tavern as a base of operations or meeting place where adventures can learn of new opportunities, but given most of the modules in here were originally set in Greyhawk, why not use "The Green Dragon Inn" for this purpose instead? "The Yawning Portal" contains an entrance to Undermountain, and while it's an interesting place, it has absolutely no connection to the scenarios presented within. If your players are familiar with past incarnations of D&D, introducing "The Yawning Portal" will make them think you're starting an Undermountain campaign, and there's little except DM fiat via railroading to keep them out of the depths. As presented, using "The Yawning Portal" complicates matters beyond the product's ability to deal with them. If you're the sort of DM willing to undertake a mass-conversion of Ruins of Undermountain to 5E, then you don't need Tales From the Yawning Portal. See the problem here?
  
  All those are relatively minor issues, easily overlooked nitpicks. My single greatest bone of contention with Yawning Portal involves presentation, because if you expect to use this one right off the shelf, you've got another thing coming. Yawning Portal is not friendly to new DMs, and while I understand the reason for this, it's still a sting for a $50 product. Put simply, Yawning Portal requires a lot of supplementary work before a DM can even think about running the first adventure.
  
  The main presentation issue is the maps. The original modules included maps either as separate inserts or printed them on the inside of a fold-out cover so the DM had easy access to them. Yawning Portal, however, is a single hardcover, not a series of modules, and all the maps are printed within the pages of the book, usually towards the beginning of the adventure, making them inconvenient to refer to during play. At the very least, you're going to need photocopies of those pages, and more than likely you'll want to enlarge them too, because some of them (Dead in Thay being the worst offender, with the entirety of it's 100+ area encounter map shrunk down to the size of a single 8.5"x11" page) are almost too small to use. In the past, Wizards has offered digital map supplements from their website to offset this problem, but a trip to Yawning Portal's product page on the WotC website offers only four preview PDFs of various parts of the book, and nothing else. It's no exaggeration to say DMs would be well-served picking up original copies of these modules just to get the maps, but of course that's adding on additional costs to an already expensive purchase. Yes you can buy a digital edition of the book off DRM services like Steam, which would allow use on a tablet so they could be enlarged as needed, but having the product in book format is more conducive to swiftly flipping pages. Maps are among the most important tools in a DM's kit, and it's a shame Wizards apparently didn't understand this.
  
  Going further, you better hope you've got your copy of the Monster Manual handy, because there are no stat blocks in the text for any of the creatures encountered during the adventure. Oh sure, there are monster stats printed in the back of the book in one of the appendices, but they're presented in alphabetical and not chronological order, so there's no easy way to get a look at, say, everything appearing in The Sunless Citadel so you can familiarize yourself with them prior to running the module. Common enemies like skeletons and goblins don't even merit this attention. The free Dungeon Master's Basic Rules PDF you can download from the D&D portion of the Wizards of the Coast website contains stats for most of these creatures, but you're still boned without the MM as soon as the PCs find the Roper in Forge of Fury. If classic modules included stat blocks for their monsters with their encounters, why couldn't Yawning Portal do this? The same goes for magic items and other stuff: the info on these is confined to its own appendix instead of within the adventure where appropriate, making you flip hundreds of pages around every time somebody casts identify on a staff they just picked up.
  
  The conversion process suffered as well. Updating a module to a new set of rules requires more than just saying, "OK, there were three skeletons in the room in the original, so let's put three skeletons in the room and move on." Monsters and their abilities change just as much as characters do between editions, and as editions get newer, PCs get tougher. A group of five 1st-level PCs from 5E will waltz through an encounter meant to challenge a group of five 1st-level PCs from 1E, but the design team took no notice of this at all. One of the largest oversights (no pun intended) involves Against the Giants. In previous editions of D&D, Giants were all 'Large' creature types, 8'-12' or thereabouts depending on their race. In 5E, Giants got an upgrade: they're now 'Huge', meaning they require a 15'x15' space just to move around normally. The maps in Against the Giants, however, are drawn at a ratio of 1 square = 10 feet, meaning these giants have to stoop just to get around within the homes they built for themselves and combat is out of the question as there's no room to swing their weapons. This is an easy fix for the DM (just adjust the maps to 1 square = 15' or 20'), but I still want to know how this blunder made it through playtesting without at least one person going, "Wait, how big are Hill Giants again?".
  
  Finally--and this one annoyed me even more than the maps did--nearly all these adventures lost something in the anthologizing process. I totally understand cutting some content, and some of it isn't a big deal, but the one which really suffers for this is Tomb of Horrors. The original module contains a mountain of backstory and notes for the DM explaining the meaning behind riddles, placement of traps, how the Tomb itself was constructed, and other things of importance. By the time players reach this adventure, they should be high enough level to be able to contact other-planar beings, request divine guidance, buy information from a sage, and use other means to work their way through and around the various traps. One of the earliest encounter areas in the Tomb is a long poem where Acererak lays out, in riddle format, things the party must accomplish in order to successfully complete the adventure. The poem itself is reproduced verbatim from its original, but what's left out is the meaning behind its cryptic phrases. Gygax explained these in the original text and how they related to what the adventurers would eventually find, essentially translating them so the DM could understand their application and answer questions from PCs using legend lore spells or other divination methods to untangle the mess. All that is missing in this incarnation, meaning it falls on the DM to either read through the whole adventure and play Mad Libs with their notes to figure out which specific line refers to which specific encounter, or to buy an older edition of the module to get access to this important info. The original Tomb of Horrors also came with an illustration booklet to provide visual reference to the players at times during the adventure; these are completely absent here, which is a shame. The other adventures are lacking in this regard to various degrees as well, with Sunless Citadel probably the worst off after Tomb of Horrors for its lack of information on the town and NPCs of Oakhurst beyond a couple paragraphs of basic information about the town and half a dozen NPCs of importance. If you've the time, money, and inclination, I highly recommend grabbing the originals if you don't own them already, as you'll find them a huge help in running this giant campaign from start to finish by filling in gaps you wouldn't even know were there.
  
  Ultimately I think Tales From the Yawning Portal is a very cool product. It's great to see Wizards bringing back classics like White Plume Mountain and Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, which haven't seen print in decades, joining newer beloved adventures like Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury from the 3E product line. But what should be an easy-to-use product for DMs looking for a quick way to start a 5E campaign is, unfortunately, lacking in areas of great importance. This is absolutely not a product for new DMs: the amount of work required to make Yawning Portal work for you instead of against you is absurd, especially for something this expensive. On the other hand, if you're a seasoned DM with a history of playing or running these adventures and you still own them but don't want to take (or can't spare) the time to convert them to 5E yourself, go ahead and drop the money on Yawning Portal. Supporting projects like this is a way to introduce old players to something new, and new players to something old. It's not perfect, but if you're a part of its target audience, you'll feel right at home. With that in mind, here's the rating breakdown for Tales From the Yawning Portal:
  
  - 4/10 for novice DMs looking to cut their teeth on a brand new campaign.
  - 6/10 for veteran DMs looking to get a handle on 5E.
  - 9/10 for buyers who already own the adventures and can thus draw on them to fill in story gaps, provide better maps for players and DMs alike, and supply helpful supplementary information.
• 
  Tony Calder

  This is a set of 7 adventures in which older adventures have been updated to the current rules. Some of these are classics, some are definitely not. The adventures increase in difficulty as the players progress through the book.
  
  The first two adventures in the book - The Sunless Citadel and The Forge of Fury - are updated from the 3.0 rules, and were the first two modules released in the original adventure path for that game. The Sunless Citadel is reasonable but not exceptional - it has some interesting challenges, both combat and non-combat, but it can drag on a bit. The Forge of Fury, however, is one of the two best adventures in this set. The dungeon is well put together and there are good reasons for the monsters to be where they are and act the way they do. This is more than a simple dungeon crawl and, if the players treat it as such, they may well not survive.
  
  The next offering is The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, the first of the 4 adventures updated from AD&D 1st ed - and the weakest of those 4. If I was going to choose an AD&D 1st ed adventure for low to mid level characters, I would have found a better one than this. The adventure is a straight dungeon crawl, but it's not all that interesting.
  
  The next adventure is White Plume Mountain, the second of the AD&D 1 adventures, and a much more enjoyable adventure. It was fun, and pretty lighthearted, when it first came out, and this conversion has kept that spirit.
  
  The next adventure, Dead in Thay, is the reason I have only given 4 stars instead on 5. Originally created for the playtest rules that eventually became D&D 5e, this module was designed to played by multiple groups all working towards a single goal at the same time. In this book, it's designed for a single party but not enough has been changed to take account of that. It became, when I ran it, a long and tedious dungeon crawl, with the module not really giving the players any clear idea of what it is they are supposed to be doing. Also, if the DM runs it as written, there is a good chance that the players will be overwhelmed well before they have a chance to complete their objectives.
  
  With the next adventure we go from the worst to the best - Against the Giants. This adventure formed the first 3 parts of the series of adventures that first introduced the drow and Lloth to the Dungeons & Dragons game - a series of adventures which has regularly been rated as one of the best ever D&D campaigns. The giant modules are tough and even strong, well-equipped parties of adventurers are going to have to find places to rest and use some planning and tactics in their assault on the giant strongholds or they will be overcome.
  
  The final adventure in the book - Tomb of Horrors - has a reputation for being the original "killer dungeon", a reputation which is not undeserved. The original AD&D 1 adventure was ridiculously hard and completely unfair and, more often than not, would result in the death of all the player characters. D&D 5e is not so savage on PCs, and this conversion has removed some of the arbitrariness of the original, but still remains an adventure which is likely to kill some characters.
  
  I was familiar with all of the original adventures except for Dead in Thay, having run them all on one or more occasions. I found each of the conversions to have done a good job at retaining the feel of the originals and this will be a good way to introduce a new era of D&D players to some of the classics that they missed out on.
  
• 
  Julian Meynell

  This book is a collection of 7 adventures covering about 30 years that have been updated to 5th edition rules. The main criticism that is made of this book is basically illegitimate. People tend to criticize this book as not making a coherent campaign like the other 5th edition campaign adventure books. The book really is just a collection of adventures, if you want a complete campaign you should buy any other 5th edition adventure book. In previous editions of D&D, the standard model is that a campaign would be a series of adventures that might be loosely connected or might be entirely unconnected. Campaigns were looser and episodic, and this book is a series of adventures that were written for that style of play and caters to DMs, such as myself, that do not want these mammoth, monolithic campaigns that lock you in for years at a time.
  
  Because these adventures are considered classics (allegedly), one would hope that the level of quality would be pretty high. In fact, it is quite mixed. This is because all the adventures are pure dungeon crawls. They start standing outside the dungeon and end at the last room. Any adventure that isn't 100% dungeon crawl, evidently was not consider. Furthermore, the adventures are meant to be playable at levels 1 to 15 as a continuous campaign. But even with these other dramatic limitations, these would not be the 7 best adventures they are instead a mixed bag. The best thing to do is to consider them in order. The adventures are very faithful in spirit and content to the original adventures.
  
  
  The Sunless Citadel:
  
  The book claims that the Sunless Citadel is widely recognized as an excellent introduction to D&D and indeed it is. It was the first adventure published for 3rd edition and everyone ran it. It is a good and very ingenious and memorable dungeon and has more intrinsic plot and story than the other adventures in the book. I ran it twice, back in the day, and it is really very good.
  
  
  The Forge of Fury
  
  This was the second adventure in the same series as Sunless Citadel. Everyone ran it too and it is for nostalgic reasons it is in this book. I ran it, but have no memory of going through it. It's got some good moments, but it is mostly forgettable and is the second worst adventure in the book.
  
  
  The Hidden Shrine of Tamochan
  
  Is a decent very early adventure that draws on Aztec and Mayan influences. I do not think of it as one of the true classics of that era. I never owned it but I have not heard other players talk about it much. It's fine though and feels different. I am not totally sure why anyone would consider it among the great adventures, but it appears to be worth running.
  
  
  White Plume Mountain.
  
  White Plume Mountain is my favorite dungeon crawl ever. I ran it once and then ran the 3rd edition sequel Return to White Plume Mountain. To me, it is just the ultimate mad wizard builds a funhouse dungeon. It's the reason I bought the book, because I knew i would run it and the rest was gravy. It is a very short adventure. I prefer my adventures on the short side, especially dungeon crawls and it is the perfect length for me. I can't really express, why I like it so much I just do.
  
  
  Dead in Thay
  
  This adventure should not be in this book. It was the test adventure for play testing for 5th edition and will not pass the test of time. It is the longest adventure in the book and they could have included two genuine classics for the same space. Each individual room is OK, but it is very 5th edition in that the challenges seem worse than they actually are. The other adventures in this book are perilous, this one is about the illusion of peril.
  
  But the biggest problem is that this adventure has the worst maps of any adventure that I have read in the forty years that I have been playing D&D! They are microscopic. In the adventure, you must know what is on an individual square and they are about 2 millimetres across. The map is broken up into bits in subsequent maps, but these are not zoomed in on, or only slightly magnified. Without finding alternatives on line, the adventure is unplayable.
  
  
  Against the Giants
  
  This is a series of three assaults on giant complexes and was a part of a series of adventures culminating in Queen of the Demonweb Pits. They are in many ways, more assaults on heavily fortified facilities, than they are traditional dungeon crawls. These are classics for a reason and are very memorable and even though they helped establish what a dungeon crawl is they are quite unusual.
  
  
  Tomb Of Horrors
  
  This is the adventure that had to be included no matter what. It is the most famous adventure in the history of Dungeons and Dragons by a long way. Although, perhaps infamous is a better word to describe it. It was written at a time when the game was far more deadly than it is today. Tomb of Horrors at that time was famous for being massively more dangerous. It is also very very unfair. It revels in its unfairness. Should you run it? If the players know what they are getting into then maybe.
  
  Overall, the book is good, except for Dead in Thay. Boo to that one.
• 
  Edward Taylor

  ** spoiler alert ** Qualifier: I have been playing RPGs since the early '80s, starting out with the original D&D Grey Box, and working my way up and beyond D&D 5th Edition, so I can say I am a little biased towards the older versions vs. the retreads which Wizards of the Coast (I will refer to them as WotC for the rest of my reviews) had many.
  
  Tales from the Yawning Portal is meant to provide players and DM alike with updated (not revised, just updated) 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition games, including many classics that launched many a great franchise creature, most notably the dark elf "drow", which would be the start of R.A. Salvatore's bread and butter and put him high in the D&D pantheon of writers and content creators.
  
  From the original (called 1st edition) we have Against the Giants: 3 tales of a large-scale war against many different clans of giants but not including the full Drow series that concludes it and honestly deserves a book of its own. Tomb of Horrors (the original "meat-grinder" dungeon - see my long and involved review here:
  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, which is a jungle-themed adventure in the Mayan sense with a lot of Indiana Jones traps and cursed items, and White Plume Mountain, which is a reverse "heist" game where you need to steal back magic items from a very well thought out, if not hilariously incongruous dungeon under the titular mountain. This is also coincidently the first reported naming of the dread Draco-lich Dragotha, who is a bad guy for another time (and great campaign called "the Age of Worms") and all updated for the 5th edition and set in the Forgotten Realms instead of Greyhawk (a world WotC did not own)
  with the lame "please refer to this generic thing in XYZ book" (especially WPM) seen in all 5th edition books.
  
  They skip the 2nd edition entirely, which is not terrible considering that 2nd edition was just an updated version of the original 1st edition to make some sense of the rules (bell curve removed, which oddly helped me in math in high school. Actually all of D&D did, but that is for another time)
  and nothing really different.
  
  3rd edition added "The Sunless Citadel" and "Forge of Fury", which were both used to serve as introduction modules for the 3rd edition rules. It goes from 1st through 6th level and can be run as one large event (more on that later) to get the players ready for the rest of the tales.
  
  5th edition caps off the stories with "Dead in Thay", which is a portion of a larger story online at D&D Beyond called "Dreams of the Red Wizards" which is hailed as "Dead in Thay is a tribute to Tomb of Horrors, The Ruins of Undermountain, and other killer dungeons. The monsters, traps, and hazards in the adventure create a deadly challenge." on their site. This is funny since all of the adventures before are of the same ilk: trap filled dungeons meant to challenge even the most experienced players.
  
  You are meant to run these as a full campaign with the party movinf from 1st to 20th level in a slow progression of grinding. If you have played any (or in my case, all but DiT) of these, stick with the originals. If you want to run them as individuals, this should be the same case but if you want to run the character blender (my version of the meat-grinder) of the full gamet, then this has all you need to do so with minimal suppliments (PHB, DM, and MM) to do so.
  
  It only gets 3 stars due to nostalgia of playing these games again later in my life but again, it's just a rehash of older work with a high price tag associated.
• 
  Rick

  Classic dungeons crawls get the 5E treatment. Wonderful!
• 
  Nat

  The adventures are all spread out and unrelated, but lots of good content to steal.
• 
  Daniel A.

  One of the essential problems with pre-published adventures for roleplaying games in general and for Dungeons & Dragons in particular is that they're not as "good" as anything an individual Dungeon Master can come up with, or at least they lead the Player Characters down a set path without much opportunity for deviation. Yes, the so-called "classic" adventures have a reputation for being better along these lines than many others, particularly those from 4th Edition (I know that when I ran
  Keep on the Shadowfell, my PCs certainly commented along those lines), but even those adventures aren't perfect and have their detractors. But considering that 5th Edition is considered by many—myself included—to be the best edition so far, as well as one that adeptly incorporated all previous editions very nicely, the pre-published adventures would likewise potentially be better than one might expect. And indeed,
  Tales from the Yawning Portal, mostly adapted by classic D&D writer
  Kim Mohan and by more current writer
  Mike Mearls, is very much the "ultimate" 5th Edition D&D adventure, and very much a culmination of all other 5th Edition materials that
  Wizards of the Coast has published to date.
  
  More particularly, Tales from the Yawning Portal is an adaptation into 5th Edition of several of the all-time classic adventures from D&D's 40-plus-year history, most of which Dragon magazine ranked as among the thirty greatest adventures of all time for D&D's 30th anniversary in about 2005. (Among these are classic
  Gary Gygax adventures such as
  Against the Giants and the granddaddy of them all,
  Tomb of Horrors, as well as adventures of more recent vintage such as
  The Forge of Fury, from 3rd Edition.) And one of the chief factors making Tales from the Yawning Portal so good—and effective—is that it adapts these excellent adventures, in a matter befitting "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", to a mechanic that is arguably the best D&D has ever seen. (The aforementioned Against the Giants and another adventure,
  Lawrence Schick's
  White Plume Mountain, are presented almost verbatim.)
  
  In general, if one is prepared to use "canned" RPG adventures—and for me, I find "canned" adventures more easily accommodate PCs' drifting in and out when Life intervenes—then careful selection is key. So Tales from the Yawning Portal is an excellent addition to any gamer's adventuring library.
  
• 
  Jennifer

  I was tempted to give this four stars just based on how beautiful the book is, especially the maps. The downside of seven adventures drawn from different editions and settings of the D & D game is that there isn't much of a plot through-line to it. A good choice for the dungeon master or player that longs for a good old fashioned dungeon crawl.
• 
  Chris Jackson

  This book is very informative and gives small adventures that can be slotted into larger campaigns, or give inspiration for small adventures, or played as a campaign all of it's own. Like all of the 5e books I have read, I loved this one and will continue to read as many of them as I can, and hopefully invest in previous editions to see how they work too
• 
  James

  I really like the classic modules and the maps are very well done. My only problem is that it is organized poorly and the creatures have no stat blocks associated with them so you always need to refer to the monster manual or create them yourself if they are unique characters or monsters.
• 
  Kurt Vosper

  A wonderful book detailing some of the greatest adventures from the history of D&D, including one of my faves -- Against the Giants. Great source for the new 5e an a great starter point for new and old DM's.
• 
  Brian

  A mish-mash of stuff.
• 
  Nicole Westen

  3.5
• 
  Nathan Albright

  It's easy to see why this book exists.  There are some books where the purpose of their existence is puzzling and has to be explained, but here, even if the premise of the book is more than a bit shaky and the adventures included as part of a suite don't all coalesce together, the reason why this book exists is very easy to understand.  There are a lot of old and classic D&D quests that needed to be updated for the 5th edition, and there was an easy way of loosely connecting them together for players.  And so this book was the result.  As far as cash grabs go, this is not a bad tone.  The book honors the history of all of the quests that are inside of it, and the quests themselves are timeless classics that have stood the test of time.  If the concept that ties them together is somewhat weak, and it is, there are certainly worse things that a party can do than play some dangerous quests that force the party to think of diplomatic ways of solving problems and which emphasize cleverness as much as brute strength in achieving one's goals.
  
  This book is slightly more than 200 pages long and it is divided into seven chapters (for the seven quests) along with other material.  The book begins with a short introduction that uses the Yawning Portal as the bridge between these generally disparate quests.  After that the book contains the Sunless Citadel quest (1), with tips on its locations and how to run the adventure.  This leads into the Forge of Fury (2), a quest that has some hooks for characters as well as the aftermath of the quest.  After that there is the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (3), with some advice on how to run the quest.  A similar approach is taken to White Plume Mountain (4), along with some advice on how one can escape from the dungeon.  After that considerably more information is included about the lengthy and detailed quest Dead In Thay (5), which offers a lot of areas for a very long grind.  After that there is a giant-themed mission, Against The Giants, which includes three different enemies (6).  The final quest included is the classic Tomb of Horrors with its large amount of traps and small amount of actual enemies (7).  The rest of the book consists of supplementary materials like magic items (i), creatures (ii), and maps.
  
  In looking at these particular quests, even if I don't think that the quests as a whole are all that impressive, nor the unifying idea of the Yawning Portal bar itself as the place where the stories are connected, there are definitely some quests here that I think would be fun as one-off quests for a party that could use a particular type of challenge.  When reading a book like this, that is all that is needed for a quest to be interesting.  Given the fact that this book has genuine historical appeal in tying together quests that have gone back a long way, this book is also easy to appreciate on those grounds.  This book would have been far easier to dislike had the book sought to present these particular quests as being new when they were not, but honestly honoring the past while trying to re-work it into present game mechanics is something that I can understand and appreciate and even respect.  And if you have a love of old quests, even in a somewhat ramshackle format, it is likely that you will find a lot to appreciate here.  The only people who won't are those who have no interest in classic quests or who just like to do hack and slash quests.
• 
  Pádraic

  An anthology of older dungeons reprinted and updated to 5th edition. And, like my beloved Ghosts of Saltmarsh, the book has the advantage of having the entire history of the game to draw on, meaning it can pick and choose the best of the bunch. Whether I vibe with them, of course, is another matter entirely. Also props for the map design here, some of them are really pretty, and lots of them have really clear aesthetics. Most of them need and deserve fold-outs, though.
  
  Sunless Citadel: a rare dungeon that seems actually balanced for lower-level characters. It encourages roleplay between the various factions and clashing personalities down below, following in the trail of previous adventurers. Apparently this was the Lost Mine of Phandelver of its day, functioning as an introduction for both new players and new DMs, and indeed this would be very easy to slot into Phandelver, or could function as its own beginning.
  
  Forge of Fury: oh this is pretty cool actually. A sort of doubling down and extension of the above adventure. There's a rope bridge that gets cut while you're on it, a mix of intelligent dungeon denizens, fast-moving water that'll sweep you into unexpected places, duergar and ghosts and a succubus and a dragon. I'd remove the troglodytes for personal taste, but apart from that this is a Good Dungeon.
  
  Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan: this one's boring. Despite the Aztec flavour, it's mostly just a series of traps with nothing else to offer and not any personality to make up for it. It'd be tempting to insert this into Tomb of Annihilation, given the matching aesthetics, but you'd be better off just doing a palette swap for, well, any better dungeon than this one.
  
  White Plume Mountain: this is great? A rotating corridor, a sphinx, a frictionless room, unstable platforms, a collapsing chamber under a boiling lake, a terraced aquarium reverse ziggurat?? Fantastic dungeon design, and much shorter than I was expecting for some reason. If you only run one thing in the book, make it this one.
  
  Dead in Thay: not bad. Ridiculously overstuffed with stuff (107 keyed rooms!), and it's a living environment that would take a lot of work to keep track of, I think--though the more I consider it, the more feasible it seems. A dungeon so epic it's basically a mini-campaign of its own. Also a surprising amount of occupants willing to talk and make deals, for a price. I dunno that I'd want to run this, but playing it could be great fun. Quality ooze content too.
  
  Against the Giants: actually three dungeons. And, it turns out, the inspiration for some of the stuff from Storm King's Thunder. However, like that 5e adventure, this is full of rooms that are themselves full of nothing particularly interesting. It is in fact giants all the way down.
  
  Tomb of Horrors: the legend itself. Having read Tomb of Annihilation, I knew the sort of thing I was in for here, but was surprised at the smaller size and the linearity and the constant instakill mechanics. They sure don't make 'em like this any more! Which is good, really. I understand why this exists, and I can sort of respect it as an intellectual exercise, but as either a player or a DM I never want to be anywhere near it.
• 
  Douglas Cosby

  This review only covers the Tomb Of Horrors section -- The classic D&D module where everybody dies: so many traps, so many secret doors. Tomb Of Horrors has been updated for 5e as part of the Tales of the Yawning Portal collection. The artwork got a redo, much for the worse -- as usual, anytime older D&D art is redone to look fancy and new, it only makes me appreciate the original art more. No real changes to the module as far as I can tell: it is still a bastard of an adventure, and the players should be told that several of the party will likely die since there are numerous traps that cause instant death with no saving throw. The only real way to make it through this campaign with no deaths is to get lucky enough to avoid the traps and bad areas altogether. Many people dislike the insta-death aspect of TOH, but I have always enjoyed it given the proper warning to the players. Note: I just ran TOH all online using Roll20 and Discord and it was a blast; and believe it or not, none of the characters permanently died. Oh there were plenty of zero hit point situations, but with plenty of Resurrection and Cure Wounds options on hand, they all made it.
• 
  Mathias Mahieu

  This book succesfully reimagines multiple classic dungeons for 5th edition play.
  I mainly used it for the Tomb of Horrors dungeon, which sticks really close to the original Gary Gygax murder machine. A lot of traps have been modified so there are less one-hit kills, but that doesn´t stop this crypt from remaining an unforgiving deathtrap for players who come in swinging.
  Three downsides I´ve came across while prepping/running the Tomb:
  1.The text is filled with errors, from basic spelling faults to poetic riddles being butchered, it´s a mess.
  2. This doesn´t include the original tournament handouts! These drawing not only give players a 70s/80s visual representation of the dungeon and it´s man riddles, but also have some much needed clues hidden inside them. It´s a shame these weren´t included (or redrawn).
  3. The text isn´t always very clear what to do next / where to go next, even for the DM. The secret tunnel in the unescapable prison for example, is not clearly explained. I had to google how to go about explaining that area.
  
  All that said, the crew and I had a blast so I´m sure I´ll use more dungeons from the book in future plays.
• 
  Mouse

  A great mix of deadly dungeon adventures from 1st ed and 3rd ed, strangely there’s no 2nd or 4th ed.
  
  The Yawning Portal tavern really has nothing to do with these adventures and was originally for those going to adventure in the Undermountain. It definitely feels like it was just tossed in here. And it’s a bit sad that’s there’s just the smallest of blurbs about the famed Durnan.
  
  I do have some mixed feelings here as I’m a big fan of Greyhawk and it bugs me to see many of these Greyhawk goodies being swept into Forgotten Realms.
  
  If you run these adventures in Greyhawk then they all lineup pretty good and your characters can bounce around the Flanaess.
  
  There’s no denying that these dungeon crawls are absolutely some of the best D&D has to offer!
  
  
  #BringbackGreyhawk
• 
  b

  I’ll admit I vastly prefer the non-dungeon kinda narrative potential that D&D 5e offers, but I can see how this could be a really useful road map built to level characters sufficiently under the xp system. Dead in Thay is my favourite offering, though the tomb of horrors is kind of cool. I like the idea of updating old modules for 5e, and the maps and encounter tables are thorough and very usable. Not my kind of D&D experience, but worth it for folks who desire the rails / the crawl.
• 
  Andrea O'Brien

  I really liked reading Tales. I have run one of these adventures before I think that they are well organized and interesting.
  Reading through the book this time I really loved the little tidbits about when the campaign was originally published. I hadn't realized that Acererak was one of the originally D&D baddies (I probably should have) but those little sidebars were great!
  The dungeons in Tales have a lot of versatility and I can see them being used in my own campaign at different points!
• 
  Steven

  Good single story adventures or things to bring in to a campaign. Will require extra work to make fit narratively into a campaign but overall good for ideas.
• 
  Doug

  Some great adventures, I'm posting here because DM prep seems to take up all my reading time now.
• 
  Teresa

  Playing these entire dungeons through sounds boring, but lifting occasional rooms into other stories sounds fun.
• 
  Michael Swanson

  A fine adaptation of some classics.