One of the most useful tools you can have in your GM Library is a stack of adventure anthologies. You’ll never be scrambling for a side quest, one-shot, or something new and interesting with a few of these books close at hand.
These are also useful regardless of the RPG system you run. The basic plots, maps, NPCs and hooks can be forklifted directly into your preferred game with little to no alteration. As for the creatures or challenges within, and the rewards – those might take a little conversion – but an experienced GM might be able to do that on the fly.
Quickly speaking, don’t bother with systemic conversion. Just pick a stat block of the appropriate difficulty from your system, and then slap in whatever special ability the creature has. Start conservatively and ramp up if necessary. You don’t need to overthink it.
So to help you stock your library here are “eight” fantasy adventure anthologies we’ve found very useful.
Adventure A Week – Mini Dungeon Tome
We love the mini-dungeon series from these folks. You can grab them as one-offs, as a subscription, or even in collected tomes. Some have enhanced features for VTTs. There are dungeons for 5e, Pathfinder 1e and 2e, Starfinder…all levels are covered. No matter what your situation, they have something that fits. We’ve used them as side quests, interesting locations during travel, places to put McGuffins, you name it. Prep time is always cut way down with these.
Jeff Stevens Games – Adventures from the Pot Bellied Kobold
A great stack of mini-adventures with interesting little plots and drop-in NPCs. We love to use these to send the party out and about and to help them build ties to particular towns or NPCs. The stories are kept very flexible to best fit into your world.
Kobold Press – Prepared
These adventures are designed to be used in the Midgard setting from Kobold Press, but they are still generic enough that you can use them in your game too. They’re not full adventures, but more like fat encounters. As with many of these, we love to drop these on the party as they’re running around from place to place, to keep travel interesting. Don’t forget to use these to expand the lore of your world!
Sly Flourish – Fantastic Adventures
Ten lower-level adventures designed for quick use at the table from the master of quick-prep techniques. Many of these are great fits for use as mysteries and hooks in cities and towns – and for the party to build credit with NPCs they might need things from.
Top Table – Bounty & Treasure Hunt Adventures
You’ve probably heard of many of the above publishers, but this is a smaller outfit from the UK that puts out some really clever and interesting adventures. Great for job board postings (the bounty hunts) and it’s always fun to tempt your players with treasure they might keep or have to return to someone else. Short but punchy, guaranteed to entertain.
Trilemma Adventures – Trilemma Compendium
This set of adventures leans very far into the OSR and the weird. Most are really just odd, strange, or fantastic locations with high-strangeness going on, but of course, irresistible to a typical fantasy adventuring party. The isometric maps are top-notch and there’s no way in a million years we’d ever be able to come up with these plots/situations on our own. When we need something that’s way out there, bizarre, or creepy – we crack this book open. It just feels like everything in here is a haunted house – even if it’s not literally a haunted house. (Though some definitely are!!!)
TSR/WotC – Dungeon Magazine
Look, we’re not telling you to pirate anything. We don’t quite understand the legality of every single Dungeon Magazine being available on archive.org – but they’re definitely there and the site is definitely not The Pirate Bay. So we’re gonna recommend it. Dungeon Magazine is a WEALTH of great, good, (and sometimes) not so great adventures. Decades of quests, nearly 200 issues, are available to you from the dawn of AD&D through the end of 3rd edition. You’d be a fool not to consider them once in a while. If you want a search engine for them – Adventure Lookup has most of them cataloged so you can find some that are appropriate for your situation.
Nerdarchy – Out of the Box
This is a fun product from the fellas at Nerdarchy, one of the longer running YouTube channels we know of on the D&D topic. You can check out a decade of videos on the subject. If you like their vibe, this adventure book is full of funky locations, situations and mini-adventures they’ve written, just for you.
So there you go. Eight adventure anthologies (depending on how you count 200 issues of Dungeon magazine!) that contain hundreds, if not into the thousands, of quick adventures you can drop into your game with little-to-no prep. You don’t need to figure out plots, NPCs, weird monsters. You can run your game forever with these if you want, and never come up with an original dungeon or quest ever again (but we know you will do that too!). Check them out, and make life easier for yourself – we know you’re busy.
Featured Image – “Tense Moment” by Larry Elmore
Busy Wyvern 