Challenging pre-made campaign for veteran players but easy on new GMs

Question

I just decided to start GMing. I have never done it before, but I have played lots of RPGs as a player. The group I have is a min/maxing group who knows what to do and I want to give them something to bite on but at the same time not making it too hard for me. Things I would like to have in the campaign is traps, secret passages, hard bosses and puzzles/riddles. It is ok if they die. :)

Anyone who have a ready and done campaign? I have atleast 13 DnD 4e books so it could be in a book or on a pdf. Help me making a good experience for my friends on my first try.

Sorry about the writing, but english is not my native language.

Answer 1

I would suggest the Tomb of Horrors because it's known for being a tough super-adventure. I have veteran friends who played it and they're still talking about it. The only problem they found was that maps are getting big at some point and it was impossible to play on their big table. I don't have any personal experience DMing or even playing this adventure in 4E but I've only heard good things about it.

Answer 2

There is a series of adventures that together constitute an entire campaign. These adventures take the characters from 1st lvl all the way to lvl 30 there are 9 adventures total. The adventures are

H1.Keep on the Shadowfell.

H2.Thunderspire Labrythine

H3.Pyramid of Shadows

P1.King of the Trollhaunt Warrens

P2.Demon Queen's Enclave

P3.Assualt on Nightwyrm Fortress

E1.Death's Reach

E2.Kingdom of the Ghouls

E3.Prince of Undeath

These adventures are a lot of fun and are easy to run and they're pretty tough to complete. The campaign begins in the Nentir vale, the area presented in the back of the 4E Dungeon Masters Guide.

All the adventures are available at Amazon.com and Im sure you can find them in PDF form. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

You are going about this the wrong way.

Find an adventure that looks interesting to you and run it for your friends. As you get more comfortable and skilled with gamemastering, ramp up the challenge as desired. The Dungeon Master's Guide contains advice on building encounters that you can use to buff up the scripted encounters.

From experience, H1 and H2 are kind of brutal. H1 is also freely downloadable from Wizards' website.

Answer 4

The original "Keep on the Shadowfell" adventure is known to have some really tough spots in it to challenge a group. WOTC rewrote it and started giving it away for free at the following URL:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/h1.pdf

This adventure isn't for everyone. In particular, the dungeon can be quite big and can slow folks down. I'd consider streamlining the dungeon to suit the pace you want at your game. Here's an article I wrote on running Keep on the Shadowfell:

http://slyflourish.com/three_tips_for_keep_on_the_shadowfell.html

You might consider some other suggestions to keep your group challenged without making life too hard for yourself:

• Use monsters from the Monster Vault sourcebook. It contains the most balanced set of monsters published since release. Monsters in this book run well and offer a good challenge.
• Stick to level 1. Level 1 provides the best challenge in the game. Going from level 1 to level 3 during Keep on the Shadowfell should give your group a good feeling for the game while still being easy to run.
• If you go higher than level 1, use Inherent Bonuses (see the DMG2, the Dark Sun Campaign Sourcebook, or the Character Builder for info on this). Inherent Bonuses takes away the burden of insuring you're giving out enough magic items to balance PC's attack, defense, damage scores.
• If you can get your players to agree with it, try sticking to classes and races published in and since the Heroes of the Fallen Kingdoms and Heroes of the Forgotten Lands books. These classes ended up far more balanced than the original 4e classes, especially the ones in the core PhB. At level 1, this isn't a necessity but as you get closer to Paragon, things get pretty crazy with core classes.

Here are a few of my articles that discuss these topics:

http://slyflourish.com/five_tips_for_new_dungeon_masters.html http://slyflourish.com/modular_4e.html http://slyflourish.com/limiting_4e_source_material.html http://slyflourish.com/inherent_bonuses_and_random_loot.html

I hope this helps!

Mike