I fully encourage you to jump into the comments and tell me I missed your fave off the list.

The Sunless Citadel

It’s a classic for a reason. The Sunless Citadel is an introductory dungeon crawl from 3rd edition D&D. It’s a classic dungeon crawl harkening back to the origins of the game, with enough meat for veteran players to sink their teeth into and plenty of hooks to open up the game for future adventures. If you want to see what good dungeons look like, you could do much worse than to start here.

Pick up The Sunless Citadel here.

The Village of Hommlet

Old school players talk about Keep On The Borderlands a lot but Hommlet comes up less often, and that’s a shame. It’s a really good starter sandbox. Lots of people will look at it and say “there’s no adventure here” and they’re both right and wrong. The adventure comes organically out of how the players interact with the world, from the threads they pull on and the NPCs they engage with. There’s enough here to keep you playing for years without ever leaving Hommlet.

Grab it here.

Sailors On The Starless Sea

Harley Stroh’s Sailors On The Starless Sea is a masterclass in dungeon design and the ur-funnel. Written for the DCC RPG but easily adaptable to any dungeon game, it’s a true classic that makes a real mess of low level characters in fun and hilarious ways. If you’ve never experienced the pure unbridled chaos of a good funnel, bring this to the table ASAP.

Buy it here

Witchburner

Witchburner is the kind of adventure that lingers in your mind long after you’ve moved on from it. There are no monsters to kill or dungeons to explore here. There’s just a community in peril, adventurers who refuse to fully grasp the situation, and reckoning with the consequences of your own actions. It’s about the things people will do for power and the decisions that players will make when they think they know everything.

Burn a witch here.

Wet Grandpa

Wet Grandpa is unlike any adventure you’ve ever seen. It’s dark and scary, delicate and tragic, and will entirely change the way you think about fantasy roleplaying games. It’s one of the weirdest adventures you will ever read or run in your life but there’s nothing like it. I don’t even want to tell you what it’s about because I don’t want to spoil it. Pick it up, read it, run it.

Get wet here.

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If you liked the things on this list you should buy them and run them. And if you like me, consider leaving a tip on Ko-Fi.

Imagine there was an introduction to this listicle and that you really liked it.

Artefact

Artefact by Jack Harrison is a game about developing the history of a magic item over the course of generations. Ideal for solo play but also a ton of fun when played with others. A friend and I have had an ongoing game in a shared Google Doc for the past couple of years where we occasionally drop in and write a bit more about a magic pair of sandals with an incredibly bloody past.

The original zine is gorgeous but it’s now also available in what Jack calls a “beak zine” format that’s super portable and ideal for pulling out at conventions.

Pick up Artefact here.

The Vast In The Dark

The Vast In The Dark by Charles Ferguson-Avery is a setting/adventure zine about exploring weird alien megastructures and seeing what strange things you find down in the darkness. It’s sold as being compatible with fifth edition but you can use it with any system you want as it’s entirely system agnostic. It contains really simple but powerful procedures for generating a hex map of the world and then detailing the dungeons that it contains, and you could get years worth of play out of this one zine.

Pick up The Vast In The Dark here.

The Vanilla Game

Jared Sinclair’s The Vanilla Game is my favourite rules-light version of D&D. It’s clearly the product of how Jared actually plays the game rather than something “designed” and as a result it’s super streamlined and easy to run. The spells and monsters are a delight (especially the vampire). I’ve run this a bunch of times and always had a blast with it. And the best part is that the entire text of the game is available for free at vanillagame.carrd.co

Keep an eye out for the print version at Spear Witch.

Have You Heard About The Beast?

Have You Heard About The Beast by Sealed Library is a tavern storytelling game. You and a group of friends, seasoned adventurers and spinners of bullshit all, sit around a table and tell increasingly tall tales about a monster you heard Our Kev met once on a dark night somewhere. You each build on the others’ stories, one-upping each other until you finally get drunk and brazen enough to head off into the night and actually fight the damn thing you invented.

Pick it up here.

Thousand Thousand Islands

Words can’t adequately describe Thousand Thousand Islands by Zedeck Siew and Mun Kao. It’s part setting book, part adventure, part daydream. It’s some of the best writing you’ll find in RPGs, detailing a weird patchwork reality for you and your group to get thoroughly lost in.

Find out more here.

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If you liked the things on this list you should support the creators and buy them. And if you like me, consider leaving a tip on Ko-Fi.