Tales From the Yawning Portal Review for Dungeon Masters

I recently picked up a copy of Tales from the Yawning Portal from my local library to have a physical copy to make some Dungeon Master Guides and this may be one of my favorite books for Dungeons and Dragons. I love it and I believe it's incredibly underrated. Part of the reason I think it doesn't get more recognition is that it's actually a collection of adventures from previous versions of the game, updated for fifth edition. It's sort of a “best of” compilation, with stuff from 1978 originally written by Gary Gygax stretching all the way through the decades to 2014 and playtest material that would lead to 5E.

White Plume Mountain, Against the Giants, Tomb of Horrors, there are some real classics in here. I'm a big fan of The Sunless Citadel and The Forge of Fury, which were designed as the first and second, introductory adventures for 3rd edition back in 2000. I'm going to do a full Dungeon Master walk through for those adventures soon, the way we did for the Lost Mine of Phandelver, I'm really looking forward to it, but in this one I wanted to do more of a quick overview on this book as a whole, and zoom in a little bit on the Introduction..

What really sets Tales from the Yawning Portal apart from your more standard D&D adventures that Wizards of the Coast publishes is that this is a series of modules spanning two or three levels each that you can pretty easily drag and drop into a larger campaign. The variety can really keep things interesting in a long campaign. We've got the site of an ancient elven dragon cult being fought over by goblins and kobolds while a druid is doing weird experiments with a vampiric tree in the basement. There's orcs and troglodytes occupying a lost dwarven stronghold where duergar avoid ghosts and devils. And that's just the first two adventurers. We've got demons and dragons, wizards and undead, all sorts of stuff. The fire giant king that's on the cover of the Player's Handbook, and the archlich on the cover of the Dungeon Master's Guide are in this book. The beholder on the Monster Manual actually isn't here, he's in Undermountain, which we'll circle back to in a bit.

These modules are really a great size for adventure content. While I am definitely drawn to the idea of epic, high concept campaigns that span levels and levels of interconnected stories, I find that in practice those typical published adventurers are a lot less flexible. Characters die, people's schedules change, players come and go, and that big ass campaign never gets a conclusion. Or it goes on break for long enough that people start to lose the thread and lose interest. I definitely have seen way more characters end up stuck in limbo somewhere in the middle of a mega campaign that will never reach an ending than I have long running, singular story arcs that actually finished. It's sad but true. And that's what makes these 2 to 3 level chunks of content perfect for me, and they're easy to adapt and fold into other content that I'm using or cooking up from scratch.

I also really like Ghosts of Saltmarsh for the same reason by the way. That is another 7 adventures that you can link up or easily separate out. They're also reworked and polished up versions of older modules from previous editions. But while those are all nautically themed, Tales from the Yawning Portal brings the dungeons. Now, we can argue about what makes a mega dungeon, and feel free to give your definition in the comments, but most of these places have over 100 keyed locations across multiple levels that will provide several sessions worth of adventure. And while most of the modules here have story connections to the world outside the dungeon, for the most part they're providing self-contained adventure locations that you can just kind of drag and drop anywhere into your game world. So if you're building a sandbox, and you want to sprinkle in some pretty serious (and deadly) toys, this is a great get.

If you wanted to give your players a ton of options, or run an open table and/or West Marches style campaign, you could very quickly get off the ground by grabbing the Starter Set, the Essentials Kit and just finding a spot for the Sunless Citadel in the Neverwinter Woods and the Forge of Fury in the foothills of the Sword Mountains. Or you could distribute all of that content across your own map with some homebrew stuff and you'd be good for a while. I know, I've done it, it's a lot of fun.

OK, so this is a very adaptable book, but let's dive in to the way they suggest to run it. I simultaneously love this fantasy tavern that gives the book its name and think it would be a potentially disastrous way to frame these adventures. Now, I am on record as saying that good Dungeons and Dragons adventures start in a tavern, and I have come across very few that are as interesting as the Yawning Portal. It gets it's name from the huge well it has been built around, which is actually the top of an ancient wizard tower that descends down into a definitely a mega megadungeon called Undermountain. Durnan, the owner of the tavern, is a retired adventurer who went down there and came back with vast wealth and apparent immortality. Now he charges one gold to “ride the rope” and get lowered down the well. If you survive, it costs another gold to get brought back up, though payment is required in advance and sent up to the tap room before you're lifted out.

There's all sorts of stories and interesting artifacts around this place from down there, and colorful characters fill the taproom advancing their agendas and taking bets on anyone brave enough or foolish enough to go into Undermountain. Now this is truly a fantastic set up in my mind, really, I think it's pretty brilliant. The only problem is it's a fantastic set up for Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which is a completely separate book which contains the 23 levels of Undermountain. Tales from the Yawning Portal assumes that your players are going to hang out in this tavern beside the entrance to this mythic dungeon and hear a story about some other place and opt to leave here, and the whole city of Waterdeep, and go have that adventure way over there. Then return to this tavern, maybe knock back a few more drinks and exchange some stories as other people go down the well, then set off somewhere else again. It's crazy..

Now I understand they needed something to tie all these ideas together, and as a literary device yeah OK, maybe it works. But I always say that writing an adventure is not writing a book, and I would strongly advice you to not use the first couple pages of this as written without making some modifications. If you're going to run Dungeon of the Mad Mage, awesome, it's worth checking out these first few pages to add a lot of flavor to the Yawning Portal, which is also in that one, but not quite as well developed. And you could absolutely lift and adapt this concept to set up a bar outside of some other dungeon location you're using. Again, it's a great idea in general, but if you're preparing to send your players to the Sunless Citadel or somewhere else in here, maybe don't start them right outside of a different adventure location.

Still, this an awesome book and likely to be one of the most useful for your collection if you're a Dungeon Master in my opinion. Like I said, I borrowed this copy for free from the library. If you want to purchase one I'm a big fan of supporting your local neighborhood game store, which I did the first time I got one of these, but if you're shopping online here’s an affiliate link that will get it to you quick and cheap. Up next we're going to really get into it with the first adventure in Tales from the Yawning Portal: The Sunless Citadel, which an adventure I really love, definitely looking forward to walking you through it. Until then, get out there, have fun, don't get drunk and go down any wells, be kind to yourself, be kind to each other.

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