Tyranny of Dragons

Been alot of fun playing this campaign with Wayne Ingram and our motley crew of adventurers. It has politics, it's got intrigue, it's got dragons to maim. What more could anyone want in a story

This is my favorite long term campaign to run even though it takes some heavy lifting by the GM. It requires a good amount of coxing during session zero to get backstories that will pay off later in the campaign. I recommend GMs read the rules for the Council Sessions in chapter 9 and be open to substituting monsters with updated rules. I give players in this campaign the option to make major character changes up to level 5. The campaign is high on combat and roleplay. It also covers different genre from spy craft to court intrigue, with lots of fighting and opportunities for character twists. Watch out for the early TPKs on this one! I gave this 5 stars because I love a challenge

For players this can be a wonderful experience when done right. You travel up the expanse of the Sword Coast in pursuit of the Cult of the Dragon. one of the few campaigns published that goes into Tier 3 territory Tyranny of Dragons has an amazing premise. It is quit a commitment but well worth it. With the history of the Cult and their new campaign to hoist Dragons into their rightful position as overlords of all humanoids this Module brings in groups like the Order of the Gauntlet, Thayan Necromancers, and the rulers of Waterdeep!

Great ideas, terrible execution. Often players complain that there aren’t enough dragons in their Dungeons&Dragons game, not the case here. Not only that, you are set to face a goddess at the end. This is THE epic campaign, good versus evil! It has the greatest intro ever. The story start with bangs and ends with facing Tiamat But as written it is full of shortcomings. The DM has to do a lot of heavy lifting. Some chapters are boring, there is a lot of railroading, unnecessary deadly fights with non-important npcs, lack of guidance on the intrigue parts and plot holes. But all can be fixed to focus in the cool dragons and hateful villains

(Kind of Spoilers ahead) Have you ever wanted an entire campaign that's 90% random encounter tables? Did you ever read a room description naming important objects the players should interact with (traps, hidden enemies like a smothering rug) but also wished the maps DIDN'T show where these things were? Or perhaps a campaign that makes the weirdest assumptions of player behavior you've ever seen, making random minion enemies the players can 100% avoid and miss and have 0 reason to interact with or keep alive if they did get in combat (it is made explicitly clear they will fight the minion if they meet) being mission critical? Have you ever wanted your party to be told after a dramatic climax "by the way, you all are actually halfway across the world now" because the campaign just... needs them to be there and tells you, the DM, to just shove them over there with little to no context? Then Tyranny of Dragons is for you! Tyranny of Dragons was one of the first campaigns I ever ran, and it felt disjointed and awkward to move players through the story or to get anything done. Now, currently playing through the campaign again after 6 years of DM experience at the request of one of my friends, I can confidently say this campaign is one of the most botched, undercooked, Triple-A unfinished game upon release titles I've had the displeasure of reading. Everything mentioned earlier is almost verbatim from the book, and I've torn my hair out trying to find any motivation for the players to do some of the adventures when it's not really intuitive what they're meant to do, or just trying to figure out how the campaign wants me to guide the players towards the intended solution it clearly wants them to take, but without a TPK ("capturing the castle is the best outcome. If the players side with X to overtake the castle or do it themselves, the cult will fight tooth and nail to take it back."). No encounter guide, no statblocks, just "Oh yeah, this castle with literally hundreds of enemies, including but not limited to an adult dragon, an archmage, an archmage apprentice, and a legendary creature warrior? You figure out how to run that combat." I wouldn't recommend this campaign to anyone, because with the amount of effort, tinkering, and homebrewing it would take to make this campaign functional, you may as well be writing your own campaign at that point.

Tyranny of Dragons gets a bad rep for being undercooked and made during a time when the rules for 5th edition were still being written, as such there can be a lot of encounters feeling unbalanced, as well as certain plot points feeling unsatisfying with their conclusion. ToD however is the perfect framework for the DM that wishes to showcase all of the Swordcoast, and take their players on a grand, region-spanning quest that plays heavily into politics, and dealing with a shadowy cult every step of the way. With such a broad scope of an adventure "Defeat Tiamat and her cult", there are hundreds of ways to go about it, leaving so much room for homebrew content. Tying in character backstory is also a cinch with the entirety of Faerun at your disposal. For DMs that are willing to put in a LOT of extra work to make it good, ToD is the perfect adventure that will take parties years to complete, and by the end of it, will make them feel like they've truly left a mark on the world around them.