D&D Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun

Written by Randy Kalista on 12/31/2025 for TTOP  

What This Book Is Trying to Do

When it comes to the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (5e) goes deep, not wide. That is until this Dungeon Master Expansion. Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun unfurls the edges of this age-old map, scrolling south, west, and east, far beyond the Sword Coast that hoarded the majority of this generation’s adventures.

In fact, we traveled to the Nine Hells before we got the deserts of Calimshan to the south. We traveled to Hither, Thither, and Yon in the Feywild before we got the fairy-laden Moonshae Isles to the west. We even traveled to Spelljammer, Planescape, and Dragonlance before we got any further east than, well, a one-shot megadungeon in Thay. That’s pretty far east. But you couldn’t build a campaign around it.

Suffice it to say, Adventures in Faerun unleashes 288 pages of the continent of Faerun. That’s over 50 (one-page) adventures, 52 (page or half-page) maps, 40 monsters, and seven magic items.

Forming a duology, Adventures in Faerun’s companion piece is Forgotten Realms: Heroes of Faerun, a Player Expansion. It’s a more slender 192 pages (which matches the page count in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, for comparison). Heroes of Faerun comes with eight subclasses, 18 backgrounds, 34 feats, 19 spells, three magic items, 12 items, and two monsters.

But for now, we’ll focus on the Dungeon Master Expansion, Adventures in Faerun.

The Forgotten Realms are not new to Dungeons & Dragons. They pre-date D&D by a decade, in a sense, as Ed Greenwood, who would grow up to become a fantasy writer and librarian, began building the Forgotten Realms for his own stories at the age of four in the 1960s. It wasn’t until 1986-87, however, before TSR would buy the rights from Ed Greenwood for $5,000 and publish the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set for D&D 1st Edition.

While some of the material presented in Adventures in Faerun is brand new, much of its lore is revised or expanded from what’s been written about it in every edition of D&D. Chapters on the Dalelands, Icewind Dale (unrelated), Calimshan, Moonshae Isles, and Baldur’s Gate (in particular) have existed in one capacity or another for decades. You can even find sections that are gently rearranged from 2015’s Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide—information about “mythals,” for example.

Adventure and Adventure Design

To truly get to know a place, however, you have to explore it on foot. And by “on foot” I mean “through adventures.” Which is why Adventures in Faerun is the best way to get the lore of the Forgotten Realms off the page and into your players’ roleplaying brains. Forty years’ worth of world-building across five editions of D&D is useless if it only ever exists on pages read by a Dungeon Master.

Which is why the 50+ adventure starters within these pages are such an excellent, usable resource: they get the lore off the page and interacting with your players. Each one gives you the situation, a hook, some specific encounters, and a conclusion. They all require fleshing out—and that’s the point. These adventure stubs exercise a DM’s creative juices, which is a deliberate move away from the years-long campaigns filling 5th Edition’s first 10 years of book shelves. This book’s modular half-page adventures are surprisingly effective, offering ready-to-run hooks that avoid the bloat of traditional adventure books.

This drag-and-drop adventure design focuses each module on one of five adventure types: deity, high magic, location, faction, or region. The first adventure in the book, for example, is for 1st level characters called The Curse on Humble Hill. It is a deity-focused adventure exploring an aspect of the Forgotten Realms god Chauntea. Skipping ahead, Restoring Freedale is an adventure for level 5 characters that looks at the titular Freedale in the Dalelands region. The Calimemnon Conspiracy is a location-based adventure in Calimshan to save the region from destruction. Featured in both the D&D: Honor Among Thieves movie and now here in Fury Grove, the Emerald Enclave is the basis for a faction-based adventure. And if you want to get into the Forgotten Realms’ high magic, a level 12 adventure, Mystery of Myth Rodarnum, will have you repair an ancient mythal.

Now, as a Dungeon Master, you’re given the room to leave those examples as standalone adventures, or to weave them into a longer campaign. There are about 45 more to choose from, ranging from level 1 to level 12 or so. It’s a shame they have nothing to take you up to level cap at 20th level, because this book’s companion, the Heroes of Faerun player expansion, is very ready to take players all the way up to level 20. But by level 12, you as a DM hopefully feel equipped enough to take your players higher. I truly think this Adventures in Faerun book should’ve tried harder, though.

If piecemealing together your players’ first three levels doesn’t excite you, there’s also a longer-form adventure compared to the earlier adventure stubs. It’s called The Lost Library of Lethchauntos. It runs about 11 pages and takes your players from level 1 to 3. After the conclusion, you’re shown how to customize this adventure. By default, The Lost Library of Lethchauntos takes place in the Dalelands. They make a few tweaks to the setting (e.g. Moonshae Isles, Baldur’s Gate), the monsters (e.g. Bullywugs instead of Goblin Warriors), and the circumstances in the library’s rooms (e.g. the creatures in the guard station are alert this time).

And just like that, you can stretch this adventure beyond its initial 1st through 3rd levels. Heck, the book even suggests that Lethchauntos built a total of five libraries. So, if this storyline feels like a thread your players enjoy following, by all means, Dungeon Master up the remaining batch of locations and encounters in Icewind Dale, Calimshan, Moonshae Isles, and Baldur’s Gate. More than anything, Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun – Dungeon Master Expansion is meant to equip DMs with the tools and the confidence to step away from campaign-length railroad adventures to something that requires more creative-muscle flexing.

Monsters, Magic, and Maps

There are perhaps only seven new magic items. But they are Forgotten Realms-flavored and high-powered, many of them legendary in status or even singular artifacts with no equal. One item is as common (though still uncommon in D&D parlance) as a Harper’s Pin. It seems intent on protecting the location and identity of the Harper agent. Whereas another item, the Crown of Horns, is one of the most frightening things I’ve ever read about, being centerpieced with a black diamond imbued with the essence of a dead deity. It comes with a full page of cursed powers, and urges the wearer to spread dread and destruction wherever possible. Enjoy your evil adventures with that one.

A not-too-shabby number of new monsters and boss NPCs populate the bestiary at the end of the book. Nearly every region has a Big Bad waiting for your players, naturally surrounded by other region-specific creatures. There’s Queen Forfallen with her rusted followers in the Moonshae Isles. Zlan’s body horror composition trudges to the cold dark of Icewind Dale, along with Deep Dragons. Biha Babir will ruin every wish you ever wish in Calimshan. Karas Chembryl is a malignant force in an already rough town, Baldur’s Gate. While Sammaster tops the Challenge Rating scale (at CR 22) and is tied to no region in particular.

It’s nice that each of these evil ones don’t have maxed out CRs. They can be slotted into various tiers as your players gain levels. Like all things found in D&D books, a little power-tweaking here and there is completely appropriate—whether you want your players to devour this boss completely, or if you’d rather see them sweat by knocking their hit points down to zero and calling for Death Saves.

Fresh artwork accompanies every single creature, character, region, mundane item, and magic item that can be found in these pages. Dungeons & Dragons may be mechanics-first in its construction. But publisher Wizards of the Coast doesn’t underestimate the power of a full-page spread. I’m incapable of finding fault with any of the art pieces found within these pages. There are a ton of maps. A ton. While I’d love for every one of them to be full-sized pullouts to play on with miniatures, not every D&D product can be the new Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set.

Region-by-Region Breakdown

Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerun strikes an excellent balance between lore and adventure for Dungeon Masters. It almost feels tedious to revisit Baldur’s Gate as one of the book’s major sections, because a Baldur’s Gate Gazetteer already exists in the Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus adventure, and that gazetteer has even been made free on D&D Beyond. I can imagine, however, that not every Dungeon Master owns Descent Into Avernus, and not every Dungeon Master wants to trawl D&D Beyond online when they have this shiny new book sitting in front of them.

Wizards of the Coast can only assume every DM has access to the Core Rulebooks—Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual. They cannot assume every DM has access to extraneous adventures and sourcebooks beyond that Core Rulebook trilogy. So, I get it. Still, it would’ve been nice to see an entirely different city get a gazetteer; a city that didn’t already have a level 1 through 12 adventure campaign tacked onto it and a multi-award-winning video game franchise.

What this book also does is advance the Forgotten Realms’ timeline by a decade. In other words, even though we have another Baldur’s Gate gazetteer here, 10 years’ worth of evolution has taken place in that riverside city, and throughout the rest of the realms, of course. Theming-wise, Baldur’s Gate provides a gritty urban fantasy setting. When the local police force is made up of a corrupt and glorified militia, there’s a lot of room for Baldur’s Gate to show its seedy underbelly, where anything and everything can appear, or disappear, for a price. You’ll love this city’s nightlife if you’re ready to explore the evil behind the evil, and unmasking crime syndicates that are wearing more masks.

The Moonshae Isles are a stunning mix of ecological fantasy (a la Fern Gully), seagoing adventures (a la Hook of Peter Pan fame), and fairy tales (from Grimm’s to Disney’s). The heir apparent just wants to ride her windskiff and party with faerie dragons. The Rusting gives this island paradise a metallurgical taint. And the unexpected Viking-like colonies give the place a fighting Irish flair.

You might’ve already caught Little Calimshan on the outskirts of Baldur’s Gate. But now the real Calimshan is here, complete with genie-built cities in the sky, a city of wonders that leans into magepunk mechanical creations, and good old-fashioned desert adventures for all your sphinx-riddling, mummy-cursed needs. If you need to pit your players up against starvation and thirst, amidst a backdrop of socio-political warfare among the genie courts, then Calimshan is your brass lantern.

Along with Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale is another revisited location, covered thoroughly in the Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frost Maiden campaign, and briefly covered in the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. Again, Wizards of the Coast cannot assume you have either of those books, which is probably why it’s rehashed here. I personally haven’t taken my players through Rime of the Frost Maiden, so I know little of the Underdark homelands trod by author R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’Urden, nor do I know the beacons of civilization above known as Ten Towns. One day I hope to introduce this cold and barren land’s frozen body-horror stylings to my table.

Which brings us to the Dalelands. Not going to lie: On the surface, the Dalelands sounds too vanilla-fantasy, especially after 10 years of the Sword Coast already. But the high magic here has some of the highest concentrations of high magic on the mainland. The knights here are dragon-riding knights. And the region’s megadungeon is a massive elven ruin that had its sister city from the Shadowfell rip it right through the middle. Yes, the Dalelands are classic fantasy adventure—which does make them the easiest stepping stone for your players outside of the Sword Coast. But unspeakable things are crawling out of an ancient forest planted in the heart of the Dalelands. And that aboveground megadungeon, Myth Drannor, is, by definition, made up of the stuff of legend. The more I read, the more I fall in love with the place.

How a Dungeon Master Actually Uses This Book

This isn’t a campaign you read cover-to-cover and then run for your players. It’s a toolbox. It encourages a workflow that is very different from the level 1 to 12 hardcovers that defined most of 5th Edition. This book wants you to build your game the way the Forgotten Realms were originally built: region by region, hook by hook, session by session. Each region gives you a relatively quick primer on tone, threats, factions, and geography. Then it hands you a stack of adventure stubs that put that lore into action. This book empowers a Dungeon Master to improvise and adapt, building outward from whatever your players latch onto.

The modular design keeps you from getting stuck in a single region’s rut, and it doesn’t demand an inch‑by‑inch hex crawl across the map. You can certainly do it that way. But it’s a big map. And a travel montage backed by a soaring orchestral soundtrack sounds perfect. An Emerald Enclave hook in the Moonshae Isles could lead you toward a Calimshan-based follow-up, which could spiral into a Baldur’s Gate mystery. That mystery could ride up the river to the Dalelands and then spin you off into a claustrophobic winter up in Icewind Dale just in time for the Midwinter holiday in the month of Hammer, where you can earn a total party kill from the weather alone.

This is the workflow D&D 2024 keeps nudging DMs toward: shorter prep, modular content, and a world that grows outward from the tabletop rather than spirals down from a 200-page campaign plot. Adventures in Faerun isn’t a lore dump for the DM’s eyes only. It shows a DM how to turn that lore dump into a springboard of adventure.

The Verdict

Geographically, D&D 5th Edition started small—and stayed small. At least as far as the Forgotten Realms campaign setting is concerned. This Dungeon Master Expansion cures your Sword Coast blues by stretching out the map from sea to shining sea. And gives Dungeon Masters enough lore and adventure hooks to run the next several years of D&D by themselves.