Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the Grendleroot

Ruins of the Grendleroot is a book of ten easy-to-prep and easy-to-run adventures for the fifth edition of the world's most popular fantasy roleplaying game. Designed for characters of 1st to 5th level, these adventures take place in the caverns, chambers, tunnels, and ruins of Blackclaw Mountain, within which lurks a strange otherworldly sentience known as the Grendleroot.

Across these ten adventures, your characters will

• cure the corruption of an old tower destined to bring daylight to the cavern of Shadowreach;
• rescue a lost child who answers the call of a dying god;
• seek out the source of a plague of gnome zombies;
• travel to the Forest of Iron to stop the priest who would destroy the Grendleroot—and the entire mountain surrounding it;
• protect Deepdelver's Enclave from marauding warbands of orcs and hobgoblins;
• find the beast lurking in abolethic ruins that promises salvation in return for fresh meat;
• seal up a damaged cell in a forgotten monastery, which contains a being so dangerous that even its thoughts can kill;
• save a war hero from the elven assassins who hunt her down;
• discover the secret to quieting the restless Grendleroot from a slumbering vampire archmage; and
• travel to the Black Cathedral, discover the origin of the mysterious Caretakers, and stop a mage attempting to capture the power of the Grendleroot for herself.

Grendleroot is stunning, easy to digest, and most important of all, easy to run. Sly is a master of removing the fat from adventures and focusing on what matters, so you can go from book to table in 30 minutes or less—as any Lazy Dungeon Master should.

- Justice Arman

Ruins of the Grendleroot focuses on the sense of mystery and wonder that comes from exploring ancient ruins and lost chambers. The central hub of these adventures, Deepdelver's Enclave, is a frontier outpost overlooking the ruined city of Shadowreach, set deep within the mountain. In Deepdelver's Enclave, adventurers and explorers recount tales of their explorations, trade treasure and artifacts, and enjoy their shared love of uncovering the mysteries of the mountain.

Along with the chapter detailing Deepdelver's Enclave and the ten adventures the book contains a history of Blackclaw Mountain, a toolkit to run your own adventures within the mountain, and a campaign description to take your 5th level adventures all the way to 20th.

You can run each of the ten adventures in this book as single-session games of roughly two to four hours each, or they can be tied together as part of a larger campaign. Five of the adventures form a five-session mini campaign that focuses on the strange consciousness lying at the center of the mysterious mountain.

Each of these ten adventures is designed to get you up and running quickly and to help you integrate them into your own campaign. If you're familiar with the format of the book Sly Flourish's Fantastic Adventures and the concepts in the book Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the setup of these adventures will be familiar to you. Even if you aren't, you'll find the design of these adventures intuitive and straightforward. In this book, you'll find inspirational artwork, beautiful maps, fantastic locations, short readable summaries of places and events, evocative keywords to spark your own imagination, flexible read-aloud text, and piles of ideas to fuel your own stories.

Tighten your boots, strap on your blade, and venture into the ancient shadowed caverns of Blackclaw Mountain. Fantastic adventures await!