If you have been watching Matt Colville’s Running the Game YouTube videos for anytime you will have seen episode 7 – Your Town (video embedded further down in the post).
In the video he talks about using a town from an existing adventure like Phandalin in the Lost Mines of Phandelver.
He then goes on to talk about the three he uses, Hommlet, Orlane, and Milborne from classic D&D adventures.
Now if you have been playing D&D for a very long time you may own the adventures these towns appear in.
However if you don’t (like me) you could go to eBay and pay eBay prices for original copies.
Or you can look on DriveThruRPG get a good quality scan as a pdf for less than £5, and/or (if an option) get a physical copy at a very reasonable price. Which will definitely be cheaper than the eBay prices.
I finally got round to adding copies of The Village of Hommlet, and Against the Cult of the Reptile God, to add Hommlet and Orlane as resources to use.
DriveThruRPG do a good job printing, the copies are stapled together magazine style. Being print on demand the turn around is pretty quick too. These took about a week.
I’m a big fan of the repurposing of existing adventures to save work in my own campaign.
I’ve used maps from Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and Lost Mines of Phandelver in my current campaign.
These two classics join others I have in my “library” of classics to call upon.
There is a copy of the dungeon map from the Keep on the Borderlands in my DM folder incase I need an unplanned dungeon during a session (read here for why).
The Mastering Dungeons podcast did a series of episodes on updating old adventures to 5e. They (along with Seth Skorkowsky) have looked at the Isle of Dread, which I have as the heavy Goodman Press printing, and a copy of the original.
Sadly I’ve had to settle for just the pdf for the classic adventure Pharaoh! It be cool to get a physical copy but not at eBay prices. But it’s more the maps I was interested in. At least with the pdf I can print these out.
It’s worth listening to the Mastering Dungeons series as it will give you ideas for updating old adventures for use in your own campaign, or you might think that sounds cool I’ll get it for the maps.
Old adventures are a great resource to raid for ideas, maps, even adventures to run. Yeah they might require a bit of work to use in 5e, but I think they are worth it.