Campaign suggestions for a new DM and new PCs

Question

I'm new to D&D, in general. I've been a PC in a dozen or so campaigns and I've DM'd four campaigns, which I wrote. I've decided that it would improve my DM'ing writing/running abilities if I ran a pre-made campaign, and I'm looking for suggestions.

Specifically, what I'm looking for is a short, simple campaign that I can find online (preferably for free, though I'm willing to buy it). I'm in Alaska, in a little town where there is no store at which I can buy books, mags, etc.

I'd like the game to be something I could run with 3-6 PCs. Here's the key thing: I plan to run this campaign online (again, because of the lack of interest in RPGs in my small town), in a turn-based setting (specifically RPoL.net).

Ideally, I'd like to find a "crawl" or something similar. It could be something that allowed for the opportunity to expand into a lengthier story under the right circumstances, or something that could just as easily be a one-off series of encounters.

Anyway, if you know of something that meets these criteria, please let me know. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Oh, and yes, I'm aware of:

http://www.dungeonmastering.com/campaigns-adventures/83-free-dd-adventures

But I worry that if it's too easy to find. Players can just look up what I'm doing, what's coming next, or how to solve a certain situation. So, I'm looking for something a little harder to find.

Answer 1

In addition to the free adventures listed on http://www.dungeonmastering.com/campaigns-adventures/83-free-dd-adventures

• Tracy Hurley collected a bunch of free adventures & encounters at http://www.sarahdarkmagic.com/rpg/availability/downloadable-delve

• Baldman Games publishes the Ashes of Athas Dark Sun living campaign and the modules for that are free, though I believe that they ask (require?) you to report session details in to them. Details are at http://www.baldmangames.com/aoamain

• Likewise, the Living Forgotten Realms campaign at http://www.livingforgottenrealms.com/ has a ton of modules you can download.

• Obsidian Crane was writing up encounters from his campaign on his blog at http://dailyencounter.net/tag/encounter/

• The 4e Home Encounters project http://4ehomeencounters.com/ (site seems dead now) produced the first few encounters in an adventure before petering out. The Online DM at http://onlinedungeonmaster.com/tag/4e-home-encounters/ looks like he ran some sessions online so may still have the assets.

If you're really concerned about your players reading up on the adventure, I would recommend finding an adventure you like and then re-skinning it.

Change up some names and perhaps also the races of the monsters, and you get the benefit of using someone else's work, while making it much less recognizable.

Answer 2

What about the Chaos Scar adventures or the Scales of War Adventure path? Both need a DDI subscription, but you could buy 1 month of DDI and download 'em all at once. If you're planning on running them using an online map tool, you can download the artwork/maps for each issue of Dungeon magazine too.

Editing to add another idea: if you don't want to dive into a campaign right away, you could order a copy of Dungeon Delves from Amazon. It's full of one-off delves that you could also be used to kick-off a campaign once you've found something you like. Again, with a DDI subscription you can download the artwork and maps for this book too.

Answer 3

You could try my Blackmarsh setting, the download is free. I set one published adventure in it the Ruins of Ramat.

Blackmarsh is setup as a hex crawl with two dozen or so locales keyed to a specific. Each locale is described in a paragraph or two which can be expanded by the referee into a full adventures. There is also a small city, Blackmarsh, included. So even if the players have it they won't know how you flesh it out. There are several meta plot I built into Blackmarsh that you could add detail for a full campaign.

Blackmarsh is also completely under the Open Game License so people are free to publish (commercially, or non-commercially) whatever they create for their campaigns.