The fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons will be remembered as one of the most successful in the game’s history. Spurred by a flexible rules-light system, a renewed focus on storytelling, and the mainstream success of actual play shows like Critical Role and Netflix’s hit Stranger Things, 5e catapulted D&D into new peaks of popularity. To me, however, the real secret behind 5e’s success is in an aspect of the game that doesn’t often get the spotlight: the adventures.
In a video interview with Chris Perkins, the former D&D creative director currently working at Darrington Press to develop Daggerheart campaign settings, he shared important insight into the conceptual work behind 5e’s most important products.
Rime of the Frostmaiden, a 2020 adventure that Perkins authored, has a very peculiar structure where every chapter serves a different purpose. Chapter 1 focuses on Ten Towns, a loose aggregation of settlements, and is more quest-driven. Chapter 2 expands the adventure’s scope, presenting a series of locations scattered throughout the Icewind Dale region, free for the players to explore. Chapter 3, Sunblight, focuses on one large dungeon. Chapter 4 focuses on one cleverly designed battle against a specific boss-like monster, perhaps the most original part of the book. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are “endgame content,” presenting players with a series of high-level challenges they can tackle after completing the main quest. Perkins confirmed to Polygon that the design goal was to have every chapter cater to a different type of player and their needs.
“We weren’t presenting a sourcebook on Icewind Dale where we just described the locations and then left the DM to come up with the story,” Perkins said. “We were trying to create a new kind of campaign setting that is written like an adventure. So you’re learning everything you need to learn about Ten Towns and Icewind Dale by going on the adventure.” He added that, together with former D&D Game Director Jeremy Crawford, he was trying to rethink how the team defined campaign settings, which typically just described a region and the people living within it. How could they improve how a sourcebook delivers that information?
“In this day and age, a lot of DMs don’t have the time to take a campaign setting book and build their own campaign around it,” Perkins said. Instead, they presented this campaign setting as an adventure, almost akin to a walking tour where characters experience the world firsthand. And so, in Rime of the Frostmaiden, players are presented with reasons to visit each town where they interact with the inhabitants and the quests presented to them. In that way, the setting naturally comes to life through the unique problems that each town is dealing with and how the players interact with them.
But because this is a long campaign, it couldn’t present the same style of adventure throughout the entire book. “Every DM who picks up this campaign is going to be drawn to certain types of play or encounter design,” Perkins said. “The Sunblight fortress, for example, was designed for particular DMs and players who like dungeon crawl experiences. Everybody can find their style of play within this one adventure campaign.”
However, variety isn’t the thing that Rime of the Frostmaiden has going for it. This module stands as a testament to what made 5e great. I love traditional campaign settings, but Perkins and his team really evolved the original concept of an adventure module for D&D with this. Adventure modules were often short, self-contained stories with a “railroad” approach that focuses on linear exploration and combat. 5e’s “adventure-campaigns” evolved that model by making it more similar to what every D&D player dreams of: a long campaign. Before that shift, long-form play often required an experienced DM with the time and confidence to build an entire world from scratch. Adventures like Rime of the Frostmaiden, Curse of Strahd, and Storm King’s Thunder lowered that barrier, making sprawling, months-long campaigns far more accessible. In the process, they also established a template that became central to 5e’s success.
Perkins confirmed that he, Crawford, and the rest of their team were sensitive to the fact that DMs might be intimidated by a campaign or not have sufficient time to do the work needed to bring it to life. “These forays, Rime of the Frostmaiden, Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, etc., were all attempts to save the DM time and create stories and spaces for them to make it their own,” Perkins said. “That meant that each of these adventures had to have lots of dimensions and multifaceted stories just to arm the DM with ideas, inspiration, and tools they could use to create whatever campaign experience in this space that they wanted.”
Unfortunately, given the current slate of D&D, it’s unclear when or if this type of book might appear in the future, and it’s a big design loss. In Frostmaiden’s second chapter, “Icewind Dale,” the players set off out into the wider area outside of Ten Towns and are presented with 14 “places of interest.” Perkins didn’t just include “14 quests” or “14 short adventures,” but instead focused on the places first. “Once we got the locations, then the quests were written, and we came up with the reason why the players had to go there,” Perkins said. “The locations come first, and then the reasons to go there and the things to do there come second.” This stands in stark contrast to the dull standard of mini-adventures presented in recent D&D products, a mere sequence of tasks to complete and monsters to kill.
Long adventures may no longer be the standard, but books like Rime of the Frostmaiden remain a crowning achievement of Perkins’ time at the helm. He traces this approach back to his beginnings. “I’m very fortunate, because I came up through adventure design,” he said. “When I started playing D&D, the first thing that sparked my imagination were the short adventures that TSR published for D&D back in the day, and then later Dungeon Magazine, which I absorbed. I have been immersed in adventures for so long that by the time that the fifth edition came around, and I was in charge of delivering adventure content, I had years and years of experience.”
An important lesson he learned is that DMs want to find something inspiring that they can plunder and make their own. “My guiding principle has always been: design something that I, as a DM, could plunder and make my own, and that guided me through the fifth edition era,” he said. “It is my hope, not only for the good of D&D, but for the good of D&D players everywhere, that these big campaign adventures can start up again, if there are people creating them who really have a sense of what DMs need and want.”
Perkins pointed out that while adventures traditionally don’t sell as well as player-focused books or campaign settings, they’re really important because they demonstrate to players and DMs alike how the game works: all the pieces of the game are embedded in an adventure. “Adventures drive the game: they are the fuel that propels the engine,” he said. “It was an honor and a privilege to be able to work on all the fifth edition campaign adventures. And I hope we never see the end of them.”